Displaying items by tag: Windows

As of late Valve has been running experiments with their successful source engine on Linux. Although it runs well in a Windows environment a relatively large gain has been seen using Linux. Valve used a system with an i7 3930k CPU, a beefy Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 and a healthy dose of 32gb RAM to top off the test rig. The two operating systems of choice were Windows 7 64 bit (SP 1) against Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit. Valve mentions in their new Linux Blog that although they did use a 32 bit version of Ubuntu they will switch to a 64 bit version for future testing.

So Windows 8 has gone gold and has been shipped to all of Microsoft’s OEM partners so that they all can make the October 26th release date. This is supposed to be a good thing for Microsoft and their partners, but for some reason we just are not hearing the same type of excitement we did with Windows 7 or even Windows Vista. Before the Windows 7 launch we heard from many OEMs and vendors who were excited about the launch of the new OS, it fixed many issues that Vista had and was much faster to boot. This time we are getting responses like “we are not commenting on our Windows 8 plans” or another very generic statement.

Microsoft is working very hard to make a fresh start of things. After announcing that they were doing away with their Zune player and eventually their music service (both of which were arguably better than their Apple counter parts, but Microsoft failed to market them properly) they are now moving in on Hotmail. Today they launched their replacement for the Hotmail service called Outlook.com. This is not the first time that Microsoft has tried to rebrand Hotmail though and might not be the last. Before they tried to change Hotmail into Windows Live mail (which failed) as a way to remove the old outlook express application from Windows and provide it as a service to those that wanted it (in a bundle with a bunch of other Microsoft apps).  Still Hotmail survived and continued to be one of the most popular free webmail services in the market.

Going as far back as the initial Build release of Windows 8 we picked up a change in Microsoft’s business plans and their push in the market. It was not a subtle shift as some will have you think. It was the type of shift that borders on the desperate. It is like seeing someone that knows they have run out of time grasping at anything to make something stick. At that time we knew that something had to change and it brought back a conversation I had with a couple of investors while waiting in line for an nVidia press conferences at CES in 2011. The conversation was about modular components and how manufacturers could create an independent revenue stream by allowing for modular upgrades and online services.  For some reason we ended up talking about Azure and how it had become something of a failure for what Microsoft had wanted it to be.

One byproduct of the ongoing legal battle between Apple and anyone that makes a competing phone is that software developers are going to work out ways to do things better. This does not take away the fact that Apple’s insistence that they invented everything is not hurting consumers, but there will come a time when their pattern will only hurt them. One very cool thing that has popped up because of some of the search issues is a brand new search feature from Google. It is capable of taking your handwriting and converting it to a text based search string.

Nokia is laboring under some false expectations with their Lumia phones and the upcoming release of Windows Phone 8. It seems that despite the lack of market share and a dubious demand for Windows Phone in general they feel that building exclusive deals with carriers is the way to go. We find this very odd considering that the numbers they have now are only due to the proliferation of Windows Phone 7 based Lumias in the market. If they were restricted to single carriers in every market they would not have the 10.9 million units shipped that they have now.

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.

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).

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.

There are a few laws that govern a modern market. One of the most basic is the law of supply and demand. If there is a short supply and a high demand prices will tend to go up. This is because the people that want these products are willing to pay more to get them. Apple is a master of this and calculates their launches to take advantage of this. On the other side of this coin is plentiful supply and low demand. Here, well you can imagine that people will do whatever they can to clear inventory.