Displaying items by tag: Windows 8

It seems that Gabe Newell formerly from Microsoft and also of Valve fame is not a fan of the direction that Microsoft is taking. In a recent interview he was quoted as saying; “I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.” This is something that we have been saying for a while now and for apparently some of the same reasons that Newell has; Microsoft’s recent moves to the cloud (forcing the use of Microsoft services) and also with locking out and competing with OEMs and partners. These decisions on the part of Steve Ballmer are the way to ruin the open platform that the PC was for gamers.

Gamers there is great news for you! According to Microsoft your text will now render up to 336% faster than in Windows 7! This means that if you are playing a text based game you are going to get blazing fast performance.  Although not related to gamers the announcement that Windows 8 now renders text faster than Windows 7 due to DirectWrite has been used to create headlines that read Windows 8 Smokes Windows 7. Unfortunately Microsoft is only talking about 2D graphic and the user interface. Microsoft has also done something that is very disingenuous; they used percentages instead of raw numbers.

Although we have been saying this for months we are glad to finally see someone else pick on the fact that Microsoft has forgotten their most important market segment. We are talking about businesses and the enterprise. When we first saw Windows 8 and its MetroUI we were not a fan at all, this is because our first interaction with it was on a desktop PC where the keyboard and mouse controls were awkward and cumbersome. When we put the initial build (the original release from the build conference) onto our Asus EEE Slate EP121 we had a little better luck, but many of the touch and gesture controls were not working and we had to abandon the attempt and go back to Windows 7.

Yesterday was the day that many companies reported their earnings for the 2nd quarter of their fiscal year. We saw reports from AMD, Intel, Nokia and Microsoft. Both AMD and Intel posted profits (even if they were not as good as they expected). But neither Microsoft nor Nokia showed a profit for Q2. For Nokia this is actually not anything new as they have not really had a good year so far. Microsoft, on the other hand has never posted a loss since they have been a publicly traded company (which was in 1986).

Marketing is a fickle thing and one that can come back to bite a company when they are least expecting it. What has happened is that the marketing people working now are forgetting that the market has a much longer memory than they used to and, of course, the Internet never forgets.  This is what Microsoft is facing right now as they try to compete with Apple in slim and ultrabooks (as well as regular notebooks and other products).  For years they have portrayed Apple as flashy and overpriced using materials that increase the manufacturing costs without any real benefit to the consumer. Now, however Microsoft is finding itself being bitten by those same marketing campaigns as they work to raise consumer and enterprise interest in Windows 8 (all flavors).

Microsoft is in a bit of trouble over their decision to grant users in the EU the right to choose their browser upon the installation of the Windows operating system. Now I know you are thinking that they have already been in trouble for this before, so why are we bringing it up again? Well the issue is that with the launch of Windows 7 Service Pack 1… Microsoft just stopped allowing for the browser election. Yup, any new system shipped with Windows 7 SP1 would boot up just like the good old days (for Microsoft). Well the European Union would like to talk to them about it.

Today is the day that Microsoft is allegedly going to release Office 15 to the world (although most are galling it Office 2013 now). The rumors started to surface when it was announced that Microsoft would be holding an invite only press event today (July 16 2012) in San Francisco. Just like the debut of the Surface Tablet Microsoft is keeping quiet about the actual news they are going to give out at the event today so they could be announcing almost anything including their own phone, but we think that is unlikely. We know that Microsoft intends to include Office 15 with Windows RT so it is probably much more likely we are going to see something on their new productivity suite.

For home theater enthusiasts there is some good news today as we have found out that XBMC is working on a Media Center for use with the Android operating system. Many sites are reporting this as a “leak”, but as the information comes straight from XBMC’s own page we are going to call it a sneak peak. Ever since the first few Android based media players popped up on the market we have noted a rather large gap in what they offer. While most of them do have access to a limited form of the internet and you can access pictures and other items from your own network, the UI is clunky and not really suited for a home theater environment.

Microsoft just cannot get out of their own way in making some very bad decisions over the past few months. First they have pushed an OS on the public and OEMs that does not make all that much sense based on real consumer feedback. Next they dove headlong into the market with their own unsustainable product in the form of the Surface tablet. Finally they stabbed their partners in the back by offering an update to Windows 8 Professional for $40 including installs of XP, Vista, Windows 7 and even the Release Preview of Windows 8. Microsoft has been pushing the claim that Windows 8 will be compatible with existing hardware as well in an attempt to bring even more people to the new OS. All of this is going to seriously impact partner sales and has caused more than one company to rethink their Windows 8 plans.

So Microsoft finally pushed out a patch that kills of the sidebar and its “offending” gadgets. The news is everywhere as if this is a new story or that the ability of a third party developer to include malicious code is something new as well. The problem is that this is nothing new at all. Microsoft has always had warnings about the dangers of downloading sidebar gadgets since they first appeared in Windows Vista. However, it was always at the user’s own risk if they chose to download and install these and the XML exploit that they talk about is generally mitigated with any type of decent security (like MS Security Essentials).