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Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

I found this announcement frustrating to read because it contains little useful content. Almost all of it is about how supposedly awesome Windows 8 is and how well it's doing. The relevant part could have been summed up as: there's a free upgrade coming out sometime later this year called Windows 8.1.

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This sums up my experience with MS in general; conversations driven by marketing and nothing else. For many other tech companies it's a much lower marketing:info ratio. Google is fairly good about it, and Mozilla is pretty good, while Apple is just as bad as MS.

I think MS is as bad as Apple. They learned/copied a lot from Apple over the last year when it comes to marketing. Including the highly annoying "No comment".

Parent and grandparent claims look false. Apple generally doesn't make announcements unless they have a real demo, or often until the product is ready to go. What we're talking about here OTOH is Microsoft providing a product (update) announcement without much substantial, soemthing MS is well known for. The stark differences between their current approaches have been extensively documented, for example:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/922B4392-850C-4CA6-92...

I disagree about the Apple part. If Apple tells you something, they will generally tell you what you will get, but not how it works.

Microsoft, in this example, tells you neither. The three items of information are "it's Windows 8.1", "it's a free update", and "we will tell you more" (that third one is counting liberally)

With Apple, this would either be a new OS X release that gets a page showing its new end user features, or it would be an update that simply showed up in System Update.

Yes good point, for announcements Apple typically won't divulge a whole lot, but it's strategically important to drive the message (i.e. key features/capabilities), and then saving the rest for later. At least that's my observation, and I can't fault them on that basis.

Maybe you're talking to the wrong people at Microsoft. My conversations with MS are usually focused on architecture and how I can use their products to better solve my specific problems. Ask to talk to a developer evangelist for starters.

Announced at some no-name conference which just happens to be the day before Google I/O. This is just a marketing attempt to get their name in the news when the wave of Google stuff comes out. They like to do this for Apple too, though I never quite understand the point.

Stay classy Microsoft.

To be fair, Apple (and I'm sure Google) does this too. There is no doubt in my mind that Apple is going to announce a milestone of it's own tomorrow[0], a day that just happens to be the day of the Google I/O keynote.

[0] https://www.apple.com/itunes/50-billion-app-countdown/

Apple has done this before announcements (software updates usually) but not regarding iTunes app sales milestones. I'm of the mind that it is a coincidence.

Google's done the same as well after Apple events such as them announcing they would drop h.264 for Chrome which never came to fruition.

I fully agree and I couldn't help but add this as the summary of the post (http://i.imgur.com/Wcw43l4.png) using tldr.io

Thanks, i didn't know tldr.io

The public relations drone(s) who wrote this and thought it would be a good way of announcing the point release is fucking terrible at their job.

> how awesome Windows 8 is and how well it's doing

Ironically, if that were the case, it wouldn't need an update.

It's not at all unusual for awesome, successful software to be updated.

Not contradicting your point, but such updates would likely tend not to be in great demand.

Recently encountered an interesting article on topic—Sorry, PC Industry: You’ve Apparently Managed to Perfect the PC (http://techland.time.com/2013/04/11/sorry-pc-industry-youve-...)

MS always does this. Windows XP had three or four major updates (service packs). Mac OS X is on v10.8 (i.e. they've updated version 10 8 times). Do you expect them to release it and never release another version of Windows?

Windows service packs were free updates, OSX dot versions are paid.and usually.change everything...

I know, I was making the point that all software gets updated regardless if it's good or bad.

MS had planned to make the update before Win 8 was released

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