The Microsoft Surface Isn’t Rosy
chasingperfection.co.uk
chasingperfection.co.uk
This is just like the "omg - the desktop is gone and all we are left with is Metro!". Um yes... unless you "show desktop" and move on with your life...
And the "purpose of the surface pro"? How about "a tablet for those who need to be productive in a windows environment"?
The surface pro seems to be a weird use case. It's going to come in at a price point where you could get a mid range Windows 7 laptop and an ipad mini or Nexus 7 for the same price and the combination of these 2 devices is probably more useful.
Isn't this a best practice for UI overhauls? Whenever Google changes Gmail that's exactly how they handle it.
How is that any worse than the current status quo of every Windows product ever sold? I'd say it would be harder to walk mom through deleting the restore files when she calls and says her tablet won't hold all her movies and music.
Let's just face it, MS made a very stupid decision. I could see this happening during the Vista era, but SSDs have been mainstream for YEARS now. Windows should have a smaller footprint and holy hell, should not have a 12-18gb cab file to restore from on limited storage.
Enthusiasts spend way too much time making Windows SSD friendly. We need to delete superseded update from winsxs, shrink the default massive page file, delete the hibernate file on machines that don't need it, manually stop superfetch/defrag even though windows is supposed to do this on its own, etc.
>And the "purpose of the surface pro"?
In the age of affordable ultrabooks, who knows. Essentially you're buying an ultrabook without a keyboard and with a super tiny screen.
That said, I love the RT product and if the RT tablet was $299 it would sell like hotcakes. Especially if the 'desktop mode' didn't exist. MS should never have bothered with the Pro line and instead should have made a proper android and ios competitor.
You can just tell her to buy an SD card and insert it in the computer. Unlike iOS, Windows actually supports disk expansion.
P.S. Disclosure: I work for Microsoft.
What for?
MS competitive advantage is backwards compatibility with an EXTREMELY HUGE catalog of Windows apps. Nothing more. Anything else doesn't matter.
A 'proper RT tablet' would throw away that competitive advantage and sell as well as the Windows Phone 7.
In fact, the mere existence of an 'RT runtime Store' practically throws away that competitive advantage. Specially now that Steam is expanding from selling games to sell some Windows applications.
What is the right way to me: sell Windows (7 is good enough) computers, with good hardware (competitive with Apple laptops) and with a Full Windows App Store. Not RT Store, Full Windows API applications Store.
I should be able to buy Office, Autocad, Adobe Acrobat, etc from there. Now that would have been huge. The first week would have been a financial success for WinRar, Sublime Text, Ditto, and lots of other programs people use everyday.
When do you think hardware vendors should start specifying available disk space as part of their SKU? When it's less than 10%? 20%? Should this value include pre-installed applications?
Defending Microsoft in that brainwashed-looking way serves neither you nor them.
But integrated products (ones that do BOTH X and Y) are necessarily inferior at being the best X or the best Y. A designer must make trade offs in order to make the integration work. In the realm of software, the trade offs can be quite small, and so the integrated whole is quite good. But in a hardware device, integration imposes critical constraints that make integration across functions quite painful; limited screen size, battery life, memory and storage, etc. Perhaps the most insidious is overall UI complexity. Making a device for keyboard and mouse is quite different than making a device with a great touch experience. Having both (and even adding legacy Windows UI) is very challenging.
Microsoft should not have released a "turd" if they could not achieve a great experience within the design constraints. I think most people believe this first attempt has serious flaws and compromises.
Because Apple has shown the world what a great experience a tablet can provide, I think users are unwilling to compromise just so they can occasionally connect a keyboard and mouse to it, or run legacy applications. I'd rather carry two devices than use one (inferior) product.
One thing that could be impacting sales is that you have to go to a Microsoft Store (brick-and-mortar) or online there to purchase it. There is no try-before-you-buy experience unless you're lucky to live close to one of those stores.
As for the storage space what I've noticed is that I need just enough space locally to have certain files available to me. So local storage for me is basically a cache where I keep most of my documents in the cloud.
I really like the edge swiping. I miss it on other devices where menus and such are wasting my screen space all the time.
One thing I don't like is the "swipe from left to change apps". There's a setting to adjust that, though, so the left swipe pulls up the app switcher instead.
I didn't know about that setting. Thanks, I'll have to check that out!
One other thing that I do like is the ability to show more than one app on the screen at the same time as appropriate. So you can see your music app in the left 25% of the screen while you type up a document or surf the web. Really underrated.
This should have been the article's title, just so readers know what the author plans to say. Not to argue for or against the position, just for maximum candor.
Though I should note that I've loved them Metro UI since I saw it on the Windows phone.
This is the issue MS have, not some cries of false advertising of free space. No one is buying them, no one is seeing them. A guy I work with commented that he's not seen one despite it been months after the RT launch. He quite liked it, just not the price tag.
57.1 - 32 - 16 = 9.1; 9.1 / 16 = 0.56875; 16GB iPad has 9.1GB free space? That's 56%.
My 16GB iPhone 5 has 13.4GB free. That's 83%.
13.4 + 16 + 32 = 61.4; 61.4 / 64 = 0.959375; 64GB iPhone 5 has 61.4GB free space? That's 95%.
Edit: These calculations are not accurate. Read replies.
My guess is that iOS reserves more space on the larger devices for its own internal use.
If you're going to compare it like that then compare it with the 64 GB iPad, and then you get the free space to be almost 3x larger than on the 64 GB Surface (95% vs ~35%).
For a start, the larger the disk, the more is used for formatting and is lost due to the difference in how manufacturers specify sizes, so you can't just add/subtract storage amounts, you need to scale.
Also, different combinations of processor, cellular modem, etc, will require different parts of the operating system, and Apple differentiates between these in the distributions it provides. It's not a massive difference, but it is something.
Finally, on Mac OS, the operating system reserves some space for a memory dump if the device loses power so that it can resume where it left off. This means if you have 8GB of RAM, you will always have 8GB of disk space reserved (search for sleepimage). I don't know for sure, but iOS may do something similar.
I don't know how much is the shipped apps. But i'd hazard a guess it is really close to 50%.
That's 13.3GB, or 83%.
For example if MS loses enough ground with Windows in the consumer / small business space and begin to cede the enterprise desktop too does it make sense for them to continue development of Windows as a pure server platform?
Or will we start to see ports of stuff like Exchange,Active Directory,VS,SQL Server to other platforms?
It also wouldn't surprise me if they decided to take all product consulting in-house and become much more of a consulting company with products as a useful sideline - a bit like IBM.
Maybe. Some of that stuff doesn't make sense to port. For example, the value proposition of Visual Studio to Microsoft is not that it makes them particularly a lot of money, it's that it encourages its users to produce software that only runs on Microsoft's platforms. Obviously nobody is going to run Visual Studio on Linux if it can't produce Linux binaries, but it doesn't make any sense from Microsoft's perspective to allow that, so likely Visual Studio will never run on any other platforms.
And really the rest of it kind of suffers the same issues. Is Active Directory still worth it when the client devices are non-Windows? Probably not, unless they make enough integration modifications to the client OS that it would amount to producing their own Linux distribution. (That'll be the day.)
I guess I could see the case for selling Exchange Server for RHEL if they produced a Gnome, KDE or Android version of Outlook to go along with it. Even that seems like an ecosystem thing though: People install Exchange because they already have Windows and Outlook and Active Directory and Exchange relies heavily on all of them. If the starting point is Android or iOS and gmail, does that still happen?
As relevant as they are today.
This is worth considering - I would guess Amazon is VERY PROUD of their sales numbers, but it's just "none of your damn business".