Windows 8, finally a flop?

Article first published as Windows 8, Finally a Flop? on Technorati.

"We can call it now, Windows 8 is a flop" Said the unofficial "President of the Internet" Leo Laporte on his Sunday This Week in Tech podcast.

 

Citing the generally frigid reception by consumers to the latest Windows operating system, most pundits will point to the radical change to a touch centric interface.  The question that hasn't been asked is: is it really a case of outright rejection of the Windows 8 Modern (Metro) interface or just bad timing.

It's no secret that sales of Desktop PC's have been declining over the past few years and the rise of portable devices like the IPAD and the Smartphone have largely been responsible for it. 

After all, if you just need to get your email and do some web browsing even the cheapest tablet will do. It's also no coincidence that most tablets also happen to occupy the same price point as entry level PC's with the added convenience of portability.

So it's no mystery that Microsoft went all in on an interface that favored touch.  As much as the pundits may hate to admit it, the days of the desktop are numbered.  The popularity of tablets has shown that.  Still, is it reasonable to expect anyone to compose a novel on an  IPAD or an ASUS tablet?  Of course not but that's a temporary condition. 

What's surprising is that the tech pundits, those champions of all things new and techie don't see it.  Forgive me if I sound like a futurist but I don't think it's a stretch that gestures, predictive keyboards and voice will be the primary input devices by the end of the next decade. 

That's the future Microsoft was betting on.  Unfortunately, OEM's weren't exactly on  board with Windows 8's new interface and released hardware that couldn't leverage the touch based UI. 

Corporations, long the bulk of Windows sales, had deferred upgrade cycles and many had only recently deployed Windows 7.  To corporate IT departments there was no compelling reason to put their users through another round of upgrades so soon.  Doubly so when you consider the learning curve of the Windows 8 UI without a touch screen.  Pairing Windows 8 and traditional PC hardware was just never going to fly in cubicleland.

If you want to say Windows 8 is a flop you'd be justified to blame it on the new UI but not because it's necessarily a bad design.  OEM's had been warning Microsoft since the spring of 2012 that they wouldn't have hardware ready to take advantage of the new touch UI.  When October came around most chose to release hardware meant for Windows 7.  That resulted in making Windows  8 seem more cumbersome than revolutionary and virtually guaranteed its failure.

 The Band-Aid solution  from many OEM's was to  graft a third party extension that returned the Start Menu to the Windows 8 desktop.  If that's not an option for you the open source Classic Shell and Stardock's Start8 can offer the same functionality.  None of these options are supported by Microsoft by the way.

You can also blame Microsoft for muddying the message. 

If you want to see the purest representation of what Microsoft was after with Windows 8 look no further than the Surface RT.  Trouble is, RT isn't Windows 8.  RT has more in common with Windows phone than Windows 8 but to consumers it looks the same. 

That leaves them confused and ultimately frustrated when they find out they can't run Windows applications on something that looks like Windows.  Worse, Microsoft has done little to correct the bad perception.  Even amongst howls to either bring back the beloved "Start Menu" or allow booting directly to the desktop instead of into the tiles (as was possible in the consumer preview) Microsoft has turned a deaf ear.

Until now, that is.  There's a rumor that the next update to Windows 8 due in August and called Windows Blue (or Windows 8.1) may allow booting directly to the desktop and see the return of the Start Button (but not the Start Menu).  At this point, however, it's still just rumor. 

In the end if Windows 8 has failed it had little to do with the operating system itself.  This was not another Vista as many blogs decried in the months leading up to the launch of Windows 8.   in fact most pundits  now admit that it's actually a faster and more secure OS than its predecessor.  Rather it seems to have more to do with OEM's resistant to change and a mixed message from Microsoft.

Perhaps Windows 8 will only find vindication through the lens of history.

The new revenue stream

Originally published on Technorati as "The New Revenue Stream."

Remember way back before the Iphone or the I anything for that matter?  Those were the days when we went out and bought a piece of technology and whatever else we needed for it and Boom! we were pretty much done.  When we wore it out we went and bought a new one.

Getting a cell phone was a pretty simple proposition.  You picked the device and how many minutes you thought you'd need and paid your bill every month.  Now you'd be hard pressed to find a phone without features you'll never use but are charged for anyway.  Not to mention overage charges for data or unlimited plans that really aren't unlimited either cutting you off or degrading your service over a preset limit.

Everything's a subscription now.  Seems like you never stop paying.  Services like Netflix started it.  Used to be you'd pay a small subscription fee and get your choice of DVD's every month.  What made them successful was the elimination of late fees and the highway robbery of the chain video rental stores.  Now it's streaming movies at 8 bucks a month to any device that can use the service.  Even if you don't use it.

Yes, it's wonderful that you can go to Itunes and just buy the song you like for 99 cents and leave the rest of the selections on the curb .  Of course you've bought a lesser quality version of the song for roughly the same price as the same song on CD but hey, it's in your Itunes now, so long as you don't lose your password...

You can even subscribe to Microsoft Office 365 to essentially "rent" the use of office applications.  Too bad if you miss that monthly payment and want to open your Word document.

I can go to carbonite.com and back up my computer to the cloud automatically, for a fee of course.  That fee goes up if I have more than one computer and/or external device to back up by the way.

Gee, used to be I got a backup program with my operating system or I could get a better one and that was it.  I didn't have to subscribe to anything.

Buy an IPAD or an Iphone and you're not likely to have much fun with it unless you visit the app store which generally involves a purchase or subscription depending on what you choose from it.  Oh, and don't forget that 2 year contract and/or ridiculous initial cost of the device.

Let's not forget that our workplaces will have limits on our bandwidth and most ISP's impose bandwidth limits on how much data you can use per month.

Too bad if you were backing up you Terabyte Hard drive to Carbonite...

The point is that more and more products seem to be introduced whose very design is to work with this subscription model.  Product features tend to be stripped down for the sake of it.  Even the latest version of Windows dumped their email client in favor of the useless free Windows Live suite or online applications such as Hotmail or Gmail.

 I wonder when they'll dump notepad...

Yes it's true that application suites were prohibitively expensive but if you didn't need to be on the cutting edge you could always find a deal on the previous version.  You didn't have to keep paying for it either.   It seems we've been led to believe that the a la' carte model lowers the barriers of entry to productivity and recreational apps but the truth is that we're just spreading out our buying patterns. 

With every app you buy you end up on another mailing list.  There's also this false ubiquity that anything in the cloud is secure and accessible.  Yes, it may be so long as you pay the subscription.  Let's also hope they don't go out of business taking your data with them.  Read the Terms of Service,  if they're gone, so's your data...

There's nothing wrong with making applications more accessible but to rely on the subscription model and the cloud exclusively  is dangerous.  I'd hate, for example, to lose the ability to update my resume if I had to cancel my office 365 subscription after losing my job. 

I sometimes chafe when I hear some pundit advocating how the cloud should be our primary data repository.  Really?  You have that much faith in a web page with an e-commerce portal to secure your data? 

I can't accept that a commercial entity has my best interests at heart thus I have no faith in the assumption that they do.  Yet when I look around I see a consumer mindset that accepts the premise as reasonable. 

Whatever happened to Caveat Emptor?  I guess they don't teach that in schools anymore...