“Microsoft Corp will unveil a new name for its best-known product on Tuesday when it offers the first official glimpse of its latest Windows operating system,” Bill Rigby reports for Reuters. “The project, known for the past few years as ‘Threshold’ inside the software company and ‘Windows 9’ outside it, will likely get an entirely new brand, or just be called Windows, analysts said, ahead of its full release early next year.”
It “represents a desire to erase the ill will generated by Windows 8, an ambitious attempt to redesign Windows with tablet users in mind, which ended up annoying and confusing the core market of customers who use mice and keyboards. ‘Windows 8 was not a shining moment for Microsoft,’ said Michael Silver, an analyst at tech research firm Gartner. ‘Probably the biggest issue that lingers is the negative brand equity in the name,'” Rigby reports. “Judging by recent leaks online, which Microsoft has not tried to discredit, the start-button menu will come back in the next Windows, with an option of tacking on tiles if preferred. But the problem of users having to toggle between the modern interface and the old-style desktop – for instance to use the full version of Excel spreadsheet software – has yet to be solved.”
“The choice of wording and venue are key to a humbler, lower-profile Microsoft under Nadella, who is keen to rebuild respect in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley as it moves away from the PC and to play a bigger part in the mobile computing world fashioned by Apple Inc,” Rigby reports. “Nadella is resigned to the fact that sales of PCs have leveled off, and with it sales of Windows. With the explosion of smartphones and tablets, Windows now powers only 14 percent of computing devices sold last year, according to Gartner.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Sales of PCs, personal computing devices, have not leveled off. Sales of Windows-based PCs have declined. Apple is selling more OS X-powered Macs and iOS-powered iPhone and iPad computing devices than ever. With Apple+IBM, things are going to get much worse for Microsoft, regardless of what Microsoft calls their latest OS mess.
As we have always said, even as many short-sightedly waved (and continue to wave) the white flag, the war is not over. And, yes, we shall prevail… No company is invincible. Not even Microsoft. – MacDailyNews Take, January 10, 2005
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