Apple Can Finish What Microsoft’s Sinofsky Started | Hacker News Reader

Apple Can Finish What Microsoft’s Sinofsky Started

mondaynote.com

74 pointsphaet0n64 comments

It's worth pointing out that you should take Gassée's views with a grain of salt. Gassée is a former Apple exec who led the Mac team, thus I'd imagine that he still has a significant amount invested in Apple (although there is a question of whether that investment is psychological or financial).

Ultimately, I think Gassée is taking the easy way out on this. It's far too easy to jump on the "Windows 8 sucks" bandwagon with the likes of people like Dvorak (who has never wrongly predicted the demise of a tech product). Far more difficult is to examine the reasons why Windows 8 is unpopular. I think a lot of the reason why Windows 8 is unpopular is simply because it's different. Was Sinofsky unfairly scapegoated for problems at Microsoft? I suspect so. Will this give Apple a chance to "finish what Sinofsky started"? I think Apple has its own set of problems to deal with that have nothing to do with what Sinofsky did at Microsoft. Thus, I think linking Sinofsky's departure to Apple is a disingenuous marketing plug.

Gassée is a former Apple exec who led the Mac team

Wasn't he fired from Apple?

edit: A quick wiki lookup indicates that he was "forced out" at Apple. The article also reminded me of the issues he had when Apple made some changes to Macs in the late 90's that made it difficult to dual-boot BeOS which caused difficulties for Gassée (nevermind the whole issue of Amelio choosing to acuire NeXT over Be).

I think there is just as much reason for Gassée to hold a grudge against Apple as to be "invested" in Apple.

(of course his argument may be wrong/right on other grounds, but I don't think it's certain that any allegiance to Apple really plays into the argument at this point)

I'm sure he left for "personal reasons" :-) But more seriously yes he left in 1990 per Wikipedia. I disliked his marketing claims of 'firsts' for Apple things that were shipping on the Amiga but certainly respected what he tried to achieve with BeOS.

Well, either way you look at it, it's hard to imagine that Gassée is unbiased and objective. That doesn't mean he's wrong, but it does mean that you need to read it differently. Rather than accept the text as objective reality, you should view it as a perspective on reality that a former Apple executive who was forced to resign is willing to say publicly about Apple's relationship to the firing of Steven Sinofsky at Microsoft (while conveniently not mentioning Apple's firing of Scott Forstall). That is an incredibly shaky foundation to build an opinion on, is it not?

@meanJim: You've been hall-banned for almost a year... Just thought you need to know!

> meanJim 7 minutes ago | link [dead] [-] [collapse whole thread]

> He gives a quick little mention "We’ll give a quick but deep hat tip to its ferocious and now deposed champion, Scott Forstall, and leave the discussion of his own exit for a future Monday Note."

I have yet to encounter an unbiased and objective commentator. I think he's wrong about this, but not because of his history with Apple. Actually I think your whole mindset here is totally backwards. You don't need a reason to not listen to someone on some topic, you just need to not have a reason to listen to them. I don't know why we should think Gassee has any particular insight into Microsoft today.

> "Far more difficult is to examine the reasons why Windows 8 is unpopular. I think a lot of the reason why Windows 8 is unpopular is simply because it's different."

I think we have a pretty good idea by now why windows 8 is going to fail in the marketplace. Usability professionals have already chimed in.

Oh. Well if "usability professionals" have offered opinions, it must be settled, right? They are the authorities on OS business models.

You say, "take with a grain of salt". I'd say, "enjoy the seasoning provided by Gassee's decades of relevant industry experience".

I will give you one thing: euphemism is an artform. :-)

Or "enjoy the chocolate from my fudge factory!"

He was also the founder of Be, which was trampled by Microsoft's anti-competitive monopolistic practices.

Really? What evidence do you have regarding tramping of BeOS specifically?

I thought that BeOS was interesting, but not compelling enough to make a switch to (much like the NeXT stuff).

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking for (obviously I have no new evidence of ancient history), but I'm generally referring to this type of thing: http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

I don't think Microsoft ever addressed BeOS specifically, but pretty much everything they did to ensure no PC manufacturer has any financial incentive to install anything but DOS or Windows on their PCs was as effective against BeOS as it was against OS/2, DR-DOS, DesqView etc...

Be alleged in a lawsuit[0] that ms settled without admitting wrongdoing for US ~$23 million that Hitachi, Compaq and others vacated agreements in place to ship pcs preloaded in dualboot configurations with BeOS and Windows due to ms anger and resulting anticompetitive threats.

Be was pretty much a shell company by the time the lawsuit was filed and resolved.

[0] http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Microsoft+Pays+$23m+to+Settle+...

The other problem is saying "Windows 8 sucks" is wrong making the whole article one big marketing gimmick.

If you use 8 after using 7 along with Android tablets and iPads for a while, you'll perceive it as a huge improvement. If you come from a Mac or Linux background with iPads and Android tablets, you'll find it unbearable (a bit less than 7, but, still, a horrible experience). If you come from a straight XP-Vista-7 sequence with little non-deskop experience, Windows 8 will feel like a mixed bag.

What data do you have showing that Windows 8 is actually unpopular in terms of sales volume, given that it's only been in market for three weeks?

If it were a huge success, Microsoft would be exhaustively celebrating the fact, showing the sales numbers everywhere. The lack of numbers is a bad sign.

Windows 8 seems to working for well for Nokia - http://www.smartcompany.com.au/information-technology/052980...

Paul Thurrott has said Win8 sales are below Microsoft's internal targets. http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57551433-75/windows-8-sale...

Cool, unverifiable rumor from a single anonymous source. Sounds credible to me.

Gassee is the only executive I know who will actually try something before talking about it. It's evident that he reports on his personal experience with products and software before writing about those. He walked to the Stanford shopping center store to buy a copy (I did too and got similar experience.) See his previous post on iOS maps with hands-on feedback. I like his witty somewhat cynical (French?) writing style too. It reminds me of 'Mac the Knife' column on MacWeek (Gassee's period at Apple). It makes me smile.

One of the best reactions to the Sinofsky departure I've seen has been from Jim Fallows at the Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/the-wh...

It really doesn't matter how well Surface RT does. Windows 8, even if it's another Vista, will sell a stupendous number. This will cause a tide a W8 apps that will be RT compatible, dramatically raising its viability. RT sucks now because it's a V1 and because Surface Pro's not out yet. When Surface Pro gets penetration RT's time will come.

It's classic microsoft, to translate their monopoly in PC OS into tablet marketshare.

I'm not convinced Surface Pro is going to be a hit. I think it will be too close to "laptop" to convince people to purchase it over an ultrabook. With its Intel processor, it will be faster, but heavier, hotter and will likely have worse battery life.

I think the decision process will then be "is the touch screen and a little less weight worth giving up the performance of a real laptop?" And (as much as I love my tablet), I think the answer to that won't be a resounding "yes".

Do you honestly think one of the largest players in this market (and arguably, the smartest) would release a tablet that's heavier, hotter, and with worse battery life than an Ultrabook? Have you even looked at the specifications of the Surface Pro?

Microsoft knows exactly what they're doing. And I agree, due to it's similarity to a conventional laptop, they won't sell as much as they could. That being said, the Surface Pro is a bad-ass piece of machinery, and probably going to be hard to beat any time soon.

Aside from those points, I agree with what you said. From my perspective though, who in their right mind wouldn't want a tablet with a dual-core hyperthreaded Core i5 with 4GB of RAM and a beautiful 1080p screen?

I think the patent post probably meant hotter with worse battery life than other tablets.

I would want a tablet with a core i5, 4gb ram and a 1080 screen, IF it still feels light, runs cool, and battery lasts as long as an iPad.

No way the battery's going to last as long as an iPad...

Do you honestly think one of the largest players in this market (and arguably, the smartest) would release a tablet that's heavier, hotter, and with worse battery life than an Ultrabook?

How exactly do you figure that Microsoft is one of the largest players in the tablet market? PC market, yes, but they're a late new comer to the modern tablet world.

Now as far as asking whether they would release a tablet that runs hot and has poor battery life -- I don't know, would they release a tablet that suffers from 5+ second delays while typing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTtf_BgFS08 ?

I see the confusion. When I said heavier, hotter, and worse battery life, I meant as compared to the current Surface. I would expect Surface Pro to land somewhere right in the middle of Surface and an ultrabook. People already ask the question, "Is a tablet worth the tradeoff?" In this case, the positives will be less than they are now.

I'd have to agree with this assessment. I'm not sure where they got the idea from that people actually want to do work on these machines. I actually like the surface with metro UI purely as a tablet - the snap in keyboard is super convenient but I struggle to think of enough use cases where I would have it snapped in for more than 5 minutes - let alone fire up word or excel.

Yeah, this looks to be the most probable course of action to me, and the doom and gloom that is raining down from the rafters seems a little premature.

In the same way that Vista was a disaster due to its changes and incompatibilities, Windows 8 is a version 1. And in the same way that, by the time Windows 7 had come out, the industry had adapted, new drivers had been written, C# was a standard, etc, etc, when Windows 9 comes out 2-3 years from now RT apps will be widespread, Windows tablet hardware will be a couple of generations refined, and Office will probably work with Metro.

And there will be glowing reviews talking about what an achievement Windows 9 is, how it is the best OS Microsoft has released in years, and how it completely wipes out the colossal disappointment that was Windows 8, ignoring of course that Windows 8 like Vista before it provided the foundation upon which the new system is built.

Will Microsoft be around forever? Who knows, but a company this large, only a few years removed from the success that was Windows 7, is going to get at least a few more kicks at the can.

also: people will have come to terms with the new UI, and touchscreens will be standard on laptops

The question is: by the time they get version 2 out, will the rest of the industry have moved on?

If they miss an inflection point, they could be in deep trouble.

If Windows 8 flops the most likely outcome will be people just staying on whatever version of Windows they have now. That's pretty much what happened when Vista flopped. And honestly, seeing as how Windows 7 only overtook XP in terms of popularity around September of this year (despite being a hit), there seems to be no real rush in the industry for OS upgrades to begin with.

Let's say it takes them another 2 years to release the "good" version. What happens if over the next 18 months more and more people learn they don't need full computers and happily adopt iPads and Android?

At that point their sales are declining as people move off desktops, and they face the much higher bar of having to convince people not only to buy computers with their new OS but drop their investment in other platforms (such as apps purchased).

At some point they won't be able to count on their market still being there by the time they have an OS people want.

I see, I was primarily commenting on their situation in the PC world. Things get a bit blurry depending on whether you look at tablets and PCs as being in one market or two, and a bit more so when thinking about which category to place some of the hybrid Windows 8 devices into.

So to clarify, my opinion is that they're probably pretty safe as far as maintaining their position in the PC world even if Windows 8 bombs as a PC OS. Losing entrance into the tablet world for two extra years on the other hand is a lot worse since it would be very difficult to get those two years worth of tablet buyers to switch to their platform after having already bought into another during that time.

How the second part actually plays out in the real world is really hard to predict since a lot of it will be based on the hardware that runs the OS. For example, I personally think Windows 8 is a pretty poor Desktop OS, but I'd definitely consider it when buying a tablet. So my problem isn't so much the OS but their current flagship device; the Surface RT looks to have too many deal breakers for me and I don't think I have a need for the Pro version.

I think there's a window for developers to move en-masse to a new OS. It's a shame that at just the same time as developers are finally waking up to the fact that OSX and Windows are both moving in a worrying direction, there's no clear champion with mainstream (dev) appeal in the linux/bsd firmament either.

As long as Word/Excel are seen as required by business and consumers, Windows will always be with us, and that's where the serious money will be for developers and Providers of Enterprise Excess.

It's frustrating to me, because most of the Word documents I see do not need or use the vast caverns of Word utility. I'm guessing 90% (probably 99%) or more of docs I see and produce could be satisfied with text, or rtf at most. We spend hundreds of dollars individually on Office and get locked into Windows because we might someday need to do a mail merge.

Similar for Excel. Excel is an excellent product that most people don't need. Most of what we produce with Excel could be done with csv and a basic presentation layer. For the serious stuff, we would have been better off with SQL databases and presentation products decoupled from the database.

His chronology is wrong; Windows 8 was planned as a "reimagining" from the start of the project in mid-2009. It was never intended to be an incremental update.

You know, Win 8 and OSX are both moving towards a merged mobile/desktop OS, while Ubuntu and Android are going to stay quite separate. I think it might actually work out to Ubuntu's benefit over time to just stick with the desktop.

Meanwhile, Windows 8 sold 4 million upgrades in four days. And surpassed Android in web traffic in just 10 days. So much for the post-PC world.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/30/3576512/windows-8-upgrade...

http://www.techspot.com/news/50745-statcounter-data-says-win...

> surpassed Android in web traffic in just 10 days

The fact of the matter is, there's a huge number of people who aren't aware you can browse the web on a smartphone (Android or iOS), or just don't use the feature very often. I know a lot of people who spend pretty much all their time on their phone inside the Facebook app, some games, and the SMS app. Many of them were very surprised to learn that there was a full-featured browser available on their phones.

Perhaps, but a core premise of the post-PC world is that people will be increasingly using tablets and smartphones to surf. I doubt that many Windows RT/8(which is supposed to be not selling) tablets have been sold, so it must be PCs(which are supposedly dying off) a few of which were upgraded overtaking the biggest mobile OS in a matter of days. And it must be consumer PCs too, since enterprises aren't deploying Windows 8 in any large number.

> Perhaps, but a core premise of the post-PC world is that people will be increasingly using tablets and smartphones to surf.

That's a weakly formulated definition. Post-PC is really the new use cases opened up by mobile form factors. Of course it's going to start by evolving from the way we used PCs. But anyone who's surfed on a smartphone out in public will realize that it's something to do "in a pinch" or it's good because some access is better than no access at all. How we end up using mobile in 7 years will be more different from now than how we used the web in 1998 was different from 2005.

overtaking the biggest mobile OS

You're mixing up evidence here. Android has the largest share of mobile units, but the comparison being made is web traffic. Android's share of mobile web traffic share is not the largest, being only a third that of iOS. In other words: you're overlooking most mobile web traffic to reach your conclusion.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....

"And it must be consumer PCs too, since enterprises aren't deploying Windows 8 in any large number."

Former Microsoftie as of August - this is not true. We had already sold tens of millions of Windows 8 licenses prior to 10/26 as part of our Enterprise Agreement (EA) process with big enterprises. Ballmer mentioned this onstage during his //BUILD keynote too.

Yep, and recoiledsnake's article actually backs this up, since Windows 8 web traffic was already quite high before the 10/26 launch date (according to that statcounter graph, at least).

And then there are people like me.

I know that there's a full-featured browser available on my phone, I also know that however great and fast my phone is, browsing the web on a device with a screen of about 4 inches in size with no mouse or keyboard always kinda sucks. Even the absolute best mobile websites are barely adequate user experiences, IMO, and thus I use native apps on my phone whenever possible.

Or these statistics are just complete bunk, as the notorious browser statistics. Do any of them really claim any kind of precision for the emerging markets, India and China?

4 million is nothing considering windows market share. They beat mountain lion by 1 million and mountain lion is a minor upgrade compared to windows 8. Compare it to windows 7 and windows 8 is a big loser.

"In July 2009, in only eight hours, pre-orders of Windows 7 at amazon.co.uk surpassed the demand which Windows Vista had had in its first 17 weeks.[72] It became the highest-grossing pre-order in Amazon's history, surpassing sales of the previous record holder, the seventh Harry Potter book.[73] After 36 hours, 64-bit versions of Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate editions sold out in Japan.[74] Two weeks after its release its market share had surpassed that of Snow Leopard, released two months previously as the most recent update to Apple's Mac OS X operating system.[75][76] "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Mountain_Lion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7

Personally I tried Windows 8 when I was tasked to upgrade all the customer service machines at my company. So terrible we ended up switching over to Apple machines. Would have went Chromebooks but got vetoed since some employees need MS Office. Only our finance people are on PCs now because they don't want to relearn the Excel hotkeys.

"4 million is nothing considering windows market share."

This 4 million number is equal to the number of individual consumers who bought a shrink-wrapped Windows 8 UPGRADE box. It was announced 4 days after the launch of the platform on the 26th.

Its not even number #1 on Amazon's bestsellers list, windows 7 is.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Software-Operating-System...

Maybe because Amazon prices windows 8 pro upgrade at $66.99 while you can get it from Microsoft Store for $40?!

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-8-Pro-Upgrade/dp/B00...

[2]http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9232961/Microsoft_sta...

I find the idea that some software "sold out" very funny.

Gotta love artificial scarcity.

I think most consumers don't do much due diligence when upgrading/moving, they just go with what's new when they buy a PC. If where they're at is really bad, they might bother to upgrade.

Windows 7 had the advantage of coming after Vista. Vista sucked. People knew it sucked. Apple made funny commercials making fun of it (the MIB security dude). People wanted to leave it.

Windows 8 may or may not be good, but Windows 7 is good and a lot of people must be disinterested simply because they're fine at Windows 7.

Windows 7 is this year's Windows XP.

N.B. - For anyone wanting to look at their site's Win 8 traffic stats in Google Analytics, it's being listed as NT. The user agent substring is "Windows NT 6.2".

So, we use reviews from 4 months before the stable release to then dovetail into a completely disjoint "apple can do it better" rant that somehow involves Snap and iCloud? What? Seriously, I'm just in awe that this is on the front page.

I read it more as "Apple has an opportunity to do it better". He points out 2 areas of weakness that Apple still needs to overcome in order to do it better- usability of multitasking (Windows does it with Snap), and cloud syncing (Apple's iCloud offering leaves something to be desired). Both seem me like relevant things to point out.

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