Month: December 2013

This one's gonna leave a mark:

"Then came Windows 8. It was truly awful at a fundamental level that Windows 8.1, 9, or 10 can't fix unless Microsoft destroys their faltering mobile ambitions once and for all. They won't. Keep in mind that is a fundamental design choice that is the very basis of the OS design, not a few features that need polishing. Apps won't come until the user base comes up and IDC has backed up SemiAccurate's long-held view that this isn't going to happen. Note the lack of a qualifier like soon, 2017′s numbers are not close to enough even if IDC's rosy picture pans out. And in light of this, Microsoft forced current and potential customers, pick a tablet OS, us or them, the choice of a real OS has been completely removed by executive fiat.

Stop for a second and ponder the magnitude of this stupidity, the sheer negligence that has to be rife among Microsoft managers and senior executives to allow this. They knew what they were doing and did it anyway, Microsoft knows what users want and made the conscious choice to not only offer something different but to also deny customers the possibility of getting what they needed to work. Every objective third-party said it would be a disaster but Microsoft carried on. On top of this Microsoft gave users another choice, abandon your current Android/iOS apps, music, movies, knowledge, social links, and devices and come to our OS that doesn't have any apps, music, movies, inherent knowledge, social links, or devices instead.

Worse yet by forcing the new miserable and counter-intuitive UI on people and not allowing legacy Apps on the new store or on WART/Windows Phone, they quite effectively told people you can't take anything from your current Windows software catalog and knowledge base with you either. Developers had to recode their entire software base for something that had a vanishingly small marketshare and make something incompatible with the billions of PCs currently in use. For some reason they didn't. Buyers would have to abandon much of what they had bought for Windows 7 and earlier, some software, some media, habits, and many devices that worked for them and that they liked for something that didn't have apps, didn't work well, and was truly unpleasant to use. For some reason buyers are not flocking to Windows any more, just the opposite.

It all comes down to Microsoft. The company is so blindingly mismanaged that it is almost impossible to describe in mere words. Microsoft painted themselves in to a corner knowingly. When it was clear that the Windows 8 master plan had unquestionably failed they simply kept going because the situation they engineered meant all other options were far worse. None of these options can succeed, it is just a quest of how bad the outcome will be and how soon it will happen. The company has knowingly destroyed their rock solid desktop monopoly to chase a dream in a way that had absolutely no chance of succeeding. They had to know this before they started, they may be myopic, single-minded, and stubborn but they aren't stupid. That said they have still failed."