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With many of their new products, Microsoft seems to finally have viable offerings. The dangerous thing for Microsoft's competition is that previous iterations of Microsoft products stunk so you had to go to the competition by default. That is not the case anymore so expect to see much thinner margins for Apple, Google and others in the future.

Azure including their Virtual Machines are a great competitor to Amazon AWS and EC2. I've used both.

Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are a great competitor to Google Apps. I've used both.

Windows Phone 8 is a great competitor to iPhone. I had iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, iPhone 4s and now a Nokia Lumia 928.

Windows Surface Pro (i.e. not RT) is a great competitor to iPad. It really is a desktop/laptop replacement unlike the iPad and again, I've owned both.

Windows 8 had several issues out of the gate. I use it every day and spent the 10 minutes necessary to learn the new interface to get used to it. Many people aren't willing to do that. Vista had even more problems, and Microsoft still came roaring back with a very successful Windows 7. Microsoft is hoping Windows 8.1 does the same thing for Windows 8.

In all of this, the customers win. Expect cheaper prices with increased competition - example being how Amazon just lowered their EC2 pricing by as much as 80%.

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I get that you're a Windows Dev and obviously try to put in the effort to find the good things in Microsoft's current product line - but you also need to see the reality here. Microsoft definitely does not have viable offerings.

Win8 is hated/feared more than Vista was.

The new xbox is probably the most panned product announcement I've ever seen.

Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are not competitors to Google Apps, they're poor competitors to Office and Exchange.

Windows Phone has been a dismal failure in terms of actual customer traction - especially outside USA. Numerous product placements are making this more of a joke than anything - (everyone laughs when a hacker in Burn Notice pulls out a Windows Phone).

Surface Pro is not even in the same market segment as an iPad - Surface Pro competes with laptops and the Mac Air, not with the iPad. You can't use them for the same tasks.

Azure is in no way a competitor to AWS/EC2 - it's more a competitor to Digital Ocean in terms of scale, and Digital Ocean is outperforming it completely.

I get that you've used the Windows stuff and the competition and find the Windows stuff better for you - that's likely because of how familiar you are with the Windows environment and Windows announcements. However, most people off the street are completely confused by it. You need to try and view the situation objectively if you want to understand why the MS share price is diving and all your customers are hopping ship.

Win8 is hated/feared more than Vista was.

This is revisionist thinking and shows your own bias that you accuse me of.

You have a review of every single Microsoft product. I have to ask - what is your experience with Office 365, Hosted Exchange and Azure?

What tasks can you do with an iPad and not with Surface and vice-versa?

Flagship Windows Phone 8 (i.e. Lumia 920 or Lumia 928) is better than an iPhone. I've owned 3 iPhones - how many Windows Phone 8 flagship devices have you owned?

> What tasks can you do with an iPad and not with Surface and vice-versa?

Surface RT is just the worst form factor for use in bed; the iPad is 10 times easier to hold in portrait or landscape, not to mention the high res screen looks much better than the Surface for close up in-bed viewing (RT again, I don't have a Pro). The Surface seems to be useful for Office when on a table where the keyboard can be used, but that is not part of my usage habits.

I see how Surface is cool, but the iPad still provides a better experience for my personal use cases. Haven't tried the Pro, but I already carry a laptop around for coding.

> Flagship Windows Phone 8 (i.e. Lumia 920 or Lumia 928) is better than an iPhone.

My 920 lacks apps :( Even Facebook and Skype are missing from the market my phone is locked too. I keep an old iPhone 4 (bought in the same region, ironically) in my bag for apps. Otherwise, the 920 is a wonderful phone.

My 920 lacks apps :( Even Facebook and Skype are missing from the market my phone is locked too.

What market is that? My 928 has both Skype and Facebook installed on it from the Windows Store. I'm guessing you're outside the U.S. but I'm curious just where you are and why you don't have access to the standard apps in the Windows Store.

China. They came locked, weirdly enough, this is just the Nokias, the HTC phones can be set to any market the user wishes.

I don't believe it is revisionist thinking as the data backs it up very objectively. http://www.zdnet.com/windows-8-continues-to-fail-7000016222/

I, like nearly everyone on the planet, have never owned a flagship windows phone. I have no reason to own one. It doesn't matter if it is better than an iPhone or not - nobody buys them because nobody wants a windows phone. It's probably just a branding issue at this point, but branding is very important.

Irrelevant to the mobile phone market itself, but I would personally never buy a locked down windows phone as I enjoy hacking my phone to do strange things / connect to strange devices - and windows phone just doesn't offer that. I was previously very involved with windows mobile which was gloriously open and far more hacker friendly than windows phone. It's a pity MS discontinued it, the HTC Universal was one nice piece of hardware.

Win8 is bollocks and has very low Enterprise adoption rates. I'm not a consumer guy so I can't speak there, but I don't think it's performing at all well in Business.

Office 365 is a decent product, I don't have any issues with it except for the marketing strategy (I disagree with cutting off the channel).

We run hosted exchange through intermedia at my office and other than some occasional issues with syncing, we don't have problems. It's certainly a bigger headache than Google Apps, but it's what we started on and it's not enough of a pain to get us to switch.

I have not used Azure personally, but have friends who operate fairly significant infrastructures on there. They've no complaints about the DC (except for the ridiculous SSL incident) but more about things like provisioning times and support responses. This is hearsay though so take it with a grain of salt.

You can do everything you can do on an iPad on a Surface, but the surface is visually unappealing, priced too high and not user-friendly. Those things matter a lot more than they used to; Microsoft needs to understand that the facts on the ground for product development have changed.

The Lumia 920 is not better than the iPhone, I don't know what criteria you could possibly be using to come to that conclusion. That's pure fanboyism, IMHO; I mean they faked the photos for the launch of the phone!? It doesn't get much worse than that.

I have a background in wireless and have used almost every version of the Windows Handset family. I can tell you that the process manager used to be the problem, along with the user experience, but today the issues are cultural as much as they are usability. Microsoft has a culture of adding options to menus and throwing in the kitchen sink; there's no product development because everyone is operating their own Fiefdom. Very similar to the culture at AT&T.

I really don't get the windows 8 hate. Yes, metro isn't for everyone, but it can be disabled. Aside from that, boot time is incredibly fast, memory and power consumption are light, and the UI overall seems incredibly well polished. Now if they would just include a decent terminal I might consider using it.

It's a genuinely good operating system. I use 7, 8 and OSX every day. I prefer OSX(largely because I have access to a great terminal, familiar shell commands and lots of great developer tools :)), but the rabid hate displayed for 8 is completely out of line with reality. It's faster, more efficient and gives you better management tools. A lot of the hate seems to derive from some weird belief that you need to use Metro if you use Windows 8, which is simply not the case.

The only thing you 'need' to use is the Start Screen, but that should be a rarity since you should have the majority of your familiar programs down on the bar. Moreover, even when you need to use it, you use it the same way you do in 7. Just hit the windows key and type away!

My one complaint would be that the settings are a bit of a mess. There was clearly a rush to make things accessible from both the Desktop and Metro side of things, and as a result the settings can be kind of odd to find/navigate.

> but it can be disabled

If it could really be disabled (and the disabling was supported by Microsoft instead of in spite of them) I'd agree with you, but it actually can't. Or at least Microsoft has gone obnoxiously far out of their way to ensure you will continually invoke it by accident, even if you tried to turn it off.

For example even after installing classic shell, random videos and photos still open the metro UI - full screen in all its glory. I also often end up falsely triggering the multitasking gesture (swipe from left=>right across trackpad). And the wifi-control panel has been turned into a brain damaged metro simpleton. And in 8.1, searching my start menu is going to return Bing results even if I was only looking for a file on my computer. My documents are going up to SkyDrive by default even though that might violate my privacy, cause me to break the law in certain industries that are regulated, cost me bandwidth or just plain be against my wishes.

If I had one word for this Windows release it would be "disrespectful". Because Microsoft has put all their own needs ahead of my own. In their selfish desire to promote their own products they have essentially become the bloatware that infected all their PCs and used to be the fault of the OEMs.

Don't forget skydrive looking at and deleting private files.

I second all of these conclusions and have a few anecdotes of my own to add.

WinXP is still the dominant Enterprise Operating system (crazy I know).

Exchange email is seen as a relic of a time gone by for new companies and something that admins usually hate in large companies. Outsource it (and I'll note that the largest reseller of Exchange, Intermedia, doesn't sell Office365).

The first windows phone I had was Windows Mobile 4.0. The flipphone handsets that came out during 6.0 were good, but every one of their gigantic, flagship, Halo devices, was terrible. HTC had some of the most badass, feature-packed phones ever, and the Operating system killed them. It's just a pile of bloat, the same way WinPhone7 and WinPhone8 appear to be. Look at the work they've done with Nokia where they basically paid Nokia billions of dollars in marketing money to attempt to promote WinPho8 and ended up hemmoraging marketshare in the transition from Symbian (Elop's "Burning Platform" memo should go down as the worst corporate writing ever, and it's not lost on me that he came from $MSFT).

I won't even dignify the surface with commentary. It was an unmitigated disaster that everyone saw coming.

Azure is only large because of promo usage. It's not competitive even with Digital Ocean in terms of scale (my personal opinion, I have no facts to back this up except anecdotes I can't publish). There's a lot of empty instances in Azure land.

Microsoft is making a lot of obvious errors. They continue to be unable to remove FUD and the Cruft of age. If they go down this path, the inertia will eventually kill them; it might take 20 years, but Microsoft is already becoming a place that finds it hard to recruit. I would argue that without their ridiculous abuse of the H1B program they would not be able to remain competitive.

In short, there's a lot of stuff to fix. The bright spot for Microsoft, as always, is licensing, but that's an ugly, ugly business.

My $.02.

To be fair, Windows XP use is moving to Windows 7 - just so people can have 4GB or 8GB of memory on their work PC.

Not Windows 8, but Windows 7.

This is precisely what fueled my employer (19,000 employees) to do a mass update of Windows XP to Windows 7. We'll probably skip 8 like we did Vista and go to 8.1 or more likely 9.

The 3 GB of usable memory you're limited to with 32-bit Windows XP is very restrictive.

WinXP is still the dominant Enterprise Operating system (crazy I know).

Source? Everything I see states that Windows 7 is the dominant Windows operating system in the Enterprise.

HTC had some of the most badass, feature-packed phones ever, and the Operating system killed them. It's just a pile of bloat, the same way WinPhone7 and WinPhone8 appear to be.

This is just silly. You bring up Windows Mobile 4.0, then 6.0. Then you lump Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 in with them. Tell me - which WP8 phone have you owned? Because you're replying to a thread I started in which I said everything before WP8 stunk. So if you haven't used WP8, there isn't much point to your comment.

I won't even dignify the surface with commentary. It was an unmitigated disaster that everyone saw coming.

Surface Pro is doing well. Surface RT is what is not doing well - as you said, it's a solution looking for a problem.

There's a lot of empty instances in Azure land.

Where do you get these stats?

and it's not lost on me that he came from $MSFT

And it's not lost on me that you use a 90s-era style anti-Microsoft inclusion of a $ when mentioning them. Do you at least realize how biased you are or do you lack introspection?

You think Windows is great. I don't.

You think you can tell me my comment is worthless despite the many years I've spent deeply entrenched in Microsoft culture. The past has relevance.

Well is relative with respect to the Surface Pro, but I won't waste my keystrokes attacking its sales figures.

As I mentioned in another comment I've got a lot of folks who run big stuff on Azure and I can tell you that almost all of their instance time is comped. Take that for what it's worth, I don't run in Azure and don't plan to run in Azure, but I can appreciate your comments here.

The $MSFT comes from StockTweets. I'm not biased, I am a student of the industry. If you ask me to critique Apple, I'd have a number of things to say. Microsoft isn't all negative, they still make a ton of money, but calling the Kettle black isn't a crime. WP8 is not a dominant operating system. Azure is not a dominant cloud infrastructure. Surface is not a dominant tablet.

We can debate semantics, but we can both agree that Microsoft has a lot of work to do. I believe it's in the product, and, if I understand you correctly, you believe it's in the branding/marketing. Chances are we're both partially correct.

Does that make sense?

> WP8 is not a dominant operating system. Azure is not a dominant cloud infrastructure. Surface is not a dominant tablet.

The closest claim that was made to any of these was that WP8, Azure, and Surface Pro are "viable offerings" in their markets. Not that they're dominant. You even give an example of "folks who run big stuff on Azure" -- how is that not proof that Azure at least provides competition in the cloud services market?

It's a monopoly game with a power-law distribution. If you're not playing for first place, eventually Amazon's Zero margin business will subsume all of the smaller players.

I articulated this point in a blog post for our site[0] in which I describe a phenomenon I call Bezos' Law. Essentially, the cost of cloud computing in general (currently driven by AWS) is cut in half roughly every 18 months. This is like Moore's law, except it's driven by market conditions instead of technical innovation. The endgame of Bezos' Law is 0, but everyone else will get out well before then (once it ceases being a profitable business). Since AWS will be the largest player in cloud infrastructure, it will eventually shift from being a profit center for other organizations and will become a cost center. After that it becomes a matter of time.

IMHO, this is also the plan for Amazon's Commerce business long-term and is why the market provides them with such a ridiculous P/E ratio.

So does Azure provide competition? Maybe. I think most of the people on Azure are on there because Microsoft is comping the time (pure conjecture based on the kinds of numbers they put forward). The endgame, from my perspective, is that everyone gets choked out by Amazon with time unless someone upends them, and that's why I think the position of "providing competition" isn't going to materially move the needle for a company like Microsoft. Not now and not long term. They've called Azure a billion dollar business, but only when counting comped hours.

Lots of conjecture, I definitely put myself out there for some flaming, but that's how you learn whether your positions can stand on their own merits. Let me know what your thoughts are :).

To be clear, in spite of everything I've said today, I am long-term bullish on Microsoft. I just think Ballmer isn't making smart decisions right now.

[0]http://blog.2600hz.com/post/55614383443/bezos-law

> You even give an example of "folks who run big stuff on Azure" -- how is that not proof that Azure at least provides competition in the cloud services market?

Well, it offers competition in a niche; it's largely price-competitive with AWS for Windows instances, but not for other OSes.

He said Windows 7 was the dominant Enterprise Windows operating system, not 8. And this is correct, 7 is the domant enterprise windows deployment, XP having been recently retired in most Fortune 500 companies. Ask around any IT dept and you'll learn this first hand.

> As I mentioned in another comment I've got a lot of folks who run big stuff on Azure and I can tell you that almost all of their instance time is comped.

That has been my impression, yep. I know a few people using it, but I don't think any of them are actually paying for it.

Source? Everything I see states that Windows 7 is the dominant Windows operating system in the Enterprise.

Try looking at reports not authored by the Microsoft marketing department.

Surface Pro is doing well.

Seriously. Whatever they're paying you, is it worth your dignity?

My corporate laptop was WinXP, scheduled for upgrade to Win7 in 2015, until I made a stink and got Win7. WinXP is dominant where I work, anecdote of one plus the corp.

> Everything I see states that Windows 7 is the dominant Windows operating system in the Enterprise.

That seems improbable. Windows 7 only passed Windows XP in global usage under a year ago, and while reliable figures are hard to come by, most polls show in the region of 60% XP usage for the enterprise sector.

Azure has $1B in revenue [0]. Are you seriously telling me that DigitalOcean is that large?

I think I'm going to need a citation if you want me to believe that.

[0]. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-29/microsoft-azure-sal...

Digital Ocean is worth 15.6 billion so ut's not exactly a small company. Edit nm wrong company.

Posting a new made-up number is the opposite of a citation. Just FYI.

Also, I'm going to be straight with you... There's not one bit of me that believes that number.

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/s...

Market Cap: 15.6B

That number is in Korean Won.

That's the wrong company and those numbers aren't in USD (On the order 10-15 million USD market cap).

051160:KOSDAQ. Wake up dude.

Rackspace is worth about $6bn, so I doubt some new startup with a tiny market share is worth more than twice Rackspace.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RAX

You are misreading the punchline of that Article. It says $1B in Sales, not $1B in revenue. There's nothing in that article that says that's revenue, only sales. There's also nothing in that article that says it doesn't include comped hours.

Believe me, if Azure had $1B in revenue, Microsoft would not be quiet about it. The keyword "Sales" is there for a reason.

*Edit: "Microsoft’s $1 billion sales figure includes Azure, as well as software provided to partners to create related Windows cloud services, Anderson said in an interview." from the article. This is definitely not just instance time they're talking about.

Excuse the ignorance, but what am I missing here? Don't all sales qualify as revenue?

Edit: quote from the article: > “I expect them to double annually from here,” Staten said of Microsoft’s Azure revenue.

Seems to at least imply sales and revenue are interchangeable in this context.

You know what. I read that Bloomberg article multiple times and I've never seen it anywhere else on the Internet. As I googled to make sure I wasn't making a grave error, the term "Azure $1B Revenue" has quite a few hits.

I must gracefully admit my error here. It's possible that they're counting comped time on the system as revenue, but it's much more unlikely if they're using the term revenue in public.

Edit: The only leg I have to stand on is the comment about the cost of software being included in Azure revenue. That's smelly accounting IMHO, but maybe I'm missing a detail.

I work at MSFT in the Azure division. I have no idea about the specifics of accounting terminology, but from what I hear internally I can say that we're quite pleased with both the absolute numbers and the projected growth. It's understandable that our cloud isn't as prominent in the minds of the HN crowd as some of the other well-known ones, but we actually do have the kind of customer base to make the public numbers credible.

Thanks very much for the contribution to the discussion. I appreciate the insight.

When they talk about software being counted as part of the billing do you have any idea what they might mean? I believe it was described as software to build applications in Azure.

You may have heard about the reorganization the other day, I think we're now called "Server and Cloud". Perhaps they may be referring to systems such as Azure Active Directory and Message Service Bus? There's a lot more going on than a simple PaaS VM and web hosting. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh967619.aspx http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/services/messaging/

Dude, sales is revenue. Maybe you're thinking of net earnings or profit?

Thanks for this comment. For a moment, I didn't understand basic economics terms.

I see many mid-size and larger companies deploying O365. They do it because it's familiar to their IT, it fits in with their existing policy systems, and it works well with their existing MS Office workflows (office web apps, and sharepoint in the cloud). In some cases, I know Google tried to win their business too.

Try google search autocompletion of "google apps vs" and the first result is office 365.

Whether O365 can "win" is another question, but it's definitely a credible competitor.

(Not to be an MS apologist -- we've tried Azure and had to hightail back to EC2, they screw up many other things, but O365 fits a purpose for many companies well)

> Try google search autocompletion of "google apps vs" and the first result is office 365.

"electric refrigerator vs." will get you autocompletes about propane refrigerators. This shouldn't be taken as evidence that propane refrigerators are taking off... propane refrigerators are merely the only sensible thing that could be compared to electric refrigerators. They are the only competitor of note, as uncommon as they are.

Or to put it more directly, what could "google apps vs" possibly autocomplete to other than Office 365 stuff? It is the only logical autocomplete.

That's a lot of blanket statements states as if they were the truth.

>Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are not competitors to Google Apps, they're poor competitors to Office and Exchange.

Uhh, why not?

>Azure is in no way a competitor to AWS/EC2 - it's more a competitor to Digital Ocean in terms of scale, and Digital Ocean is outperforming it completely.

Again, reference?

>You need to try and view the situation objectively if you want to understand why the MS share price is diving

Share price is diving? As compared to what? If you read the "article" you can see that the share price was ~28 just three months ago and today it closed at more than $31.

> ..and all your customers are hopping ship.

I am completely lost with the extreme hyperbole here.

Share price is diving? As compared to what?

Well for starters let's compare MSFT to AAPL. Here's a chart comparing them over the last 12 months:

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=MSFT+Interactive#symbol=m...

If that link works correctly, any unbiased party will clearly acknowledge that in the past year Microsoft is up 15.5% (including today's slide) while Apple is down 30.0%.

So - the question becomes - precisely whose share price is diving? The clear answer is Apple, while Microsoft has done little but gone up over the last 12 months.

That's because AAPL had something to lose. At their peak they were worth three DELLs more than MSFT.

Interesting.

At its peak, how much bigger was MSFT than Apple?

Hint: Lots.

We're only concerned with recent history here, though, aren't we?

Everything I needed to know about Steve Ballmer -- and Microsoft's future -- I learned when he laughed at the iPhone on national TV.

I wouldn't bother arguing some people are in the Microsoft camp as a matter of religion. I work in a Microsoft shop and it's depressing how awful the offerings are and how helpless you become when you depend on something that's broken and have no power to correct it, fix it, or work around it. It's actually caused me to search for work outside of my day job just so that I can work with technology that's actually well-documented, workable, and supported by real, organic communities.

This!

The amount of brick walls I hit is horrible to say the least.

Windows by day, Linux by night.

Tables are turning though. First our cache layer with memcache on CentOS, then our SMTP servers, then our dev servers and repository, now a minor subsystem...

> Win8 is hated/feared more than Vista was.

Not from what I have seen. Vista was hated with intensity, while Win8 is simply 'not necessary yet'/'not better enough to make me upgrade from Win7'.

About the Surface Pro vs Mac Air vs iPad: I expect to be able to use a dockable 2014 Ubuntu Tablet for all the tasks I could do with any of these in 2013.

I am a forum/news-site technology massive lurker and i can guarantee to you that win8 is much much more hated that vista was and for obvious reasons: w8 is a totally new interface proposition while vista was just an "upgrade" over the xp ui, but still looks familiar.

>Win8 is hated/feared more than Vista was.

True and obvious among techies but not sure about the average joe.

>The new xbox is probably the most panned product announcement I've ever seen.

They really f#ed up on that one (not the concept but the way it was presented) and it got worse when Sony decided to throw in a few blows while they were still down.

>Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are not competitors to Google Apps, they're poor competitors to Office and Exchange.

Agree it wasn't the best Idea to go cloud. They just made it easy for their existing consumers to compare the pros and cons between them and Google's offering.

>Windows Phone has been a dismal failure in terms of actual customer traction - especially outside USA.

What? If anything Windows Phone and Nokia is growing exceptionally in the emerging markets specifically India and Africa.

>Surface Pro is not even in the same market segment as an iPad.

Yes it is. Surface Pro is a great mix of device. I already have a laptop/utrabook but wanted a tablet when travelling. The options were Ipad, Nexus 10 or Surface pro. I ended up choosing Surface pro because it offers everything I need in a tablet while letting me use my work apps on the go. Git, Visual Studio, Photoshop, you name it, if it installs on your laptop, it installs on the Surface. Can't emphasize how productive it has been ever since I got it.

> >Win8 is hated/feared more than Vista was.

> True and obvious among techies but not sure about the average joe.

I've actually noticed the opposite. Techies seem to largely think "eh, interesting but I'm not interested" while regular consumers nearly pass out ranting about it. That's my take-away from talking with coworkers/peers, and my extended family.

The sales figures probably bear this out.. it isn't techies avoiding Windows 8 that is causing those poor numbers.

> What? If anything Windows Phone and Nokia is growing exceptionally in the emerging markets specifically India and Africa.

Do people like it though? I'm in the EU and everyone, including me, who has Windows phones really despise them. Not only techies; one of my friends threw hers into the toilet because she couldn't bear that crap anymore. Which is stupid ofcourse, but it shows how deep the hatred goes. The thing just really doesn't work on many levels. We make apps for it because clients ask us too, but I would never use that thing in it's current form for anything other than that. I have done for a few months and it was a joke. So with aggressive marketing (which I see all around me here) they manage to sell a lot of these phones, but do people actually like them? I haven't seen anyone happy with it except a few people here on HN. I don't really understand how that works, but everyone who I meet in real life really hates it.

Surface I don't know; lot of people here on HN seem to like it. I tried it in the shop and the keyboard was annoying the crap out of me after about 5 seconds. I'm used to Apple chiclet keyboards now and I type blind and fast; it seemed to really not function that well doing that. Maybe I need more than 5 seconds, but the first impression was that it was a toy. And only a tablet is worthless as I need to write code.

> What? If anything Windows Phone and Nokia is growing exceptionally in the emerging markets specifically India and Africa.

Well, Windows Phone is. Nokia is declining in those markets; it's simply cannibalising its existing large Symbian market there with WP.

Well, the market and the customers don't seem to agree on all of this:

The market share of Windows Phone 8 is extremely small and doesn't seem to pick up.

The PC market is shrinking extremely and many analysts now point to Windows 8 as one of the reasons behind that. You can point to a 10 minute learning curve and while I agree that the new Windows interface is not hard to learn I still think it's an extremely bad user experience. The standard apps are just so incredibly bad (e.g. the mail app, the photo app, the video app, even the store itself) that I'm not using them at all. I spend 99.9% of my time on the old Windows desktop.

The market share of the Surface again is extremely small and I don't see any indications of it growing.

I totally agree that competition is good for the customer (and might potentially be bad for competitors), but so far that doesn't help Microsoft.

The key point I was trying to make was:

With many of their new products, Microsoft seems to finally have viable offerings.

Your statement of:

Well, the market and the customers don't seem to agree on all of this

Seems to miss that point. Just to be more clear - it was only in the last few weeks that Verizon had a flagship Windows Phone 8 device available (Nokia Lumia 928). Has the market really had time to absorb that Verizon now has a Windows Phone 8 device that can compete with the iPhone? I don't think it has. As a former iPhone user, I was personally responsible for at least a dozen people buying iPhones. Now as a Windows Phone 8 user for the past couple weeks, I am responsible for someone returning their iPhone 5 to get a Lumia 928 and there are three additional people in my office who are now going to get a Lumia instead of the iPhone 5 they were planning on when they are next eligible for an upgrade.

The PC market is shrinking extremely and many analysts now point to Windows 8 as one of the reasons behind that.

...and Windows ME was a failure, Windows Vista was a failure and Windows 8 is proving to be less than stellar. Let's see how it is when Windows 8.1 is released generally and people have time to react to Haswell processors having been released. There are also a lot of people that bought iPads thinking it would fully replace their PC that are now sorely disappointed.

The market share of the Surface again is extremely small and I don't see any indications of it growing.

Surface Pro is selling well. Don't judge it by Surface RT which was a desperate attempt at increasing market share to get more Windows 8-style applications developed.

Do you think your experiences are typical? I get that MS does have some good offerings but at the same time I think the average consumer's perception isn't as good as it could be.

> Let's see how it is when Windows 8.1 is released generally and people have time to react to Haswell processors having been released.

I'll be interested if the consumers even notice - is the average consumer clued up enough to understand the significant of a point release or what a new processor adds? In my (somewhat pompous) view, Apple's success is its focus on selling the consumer things they can understand the need for, not numbers. I see MS is taking this approach with the new Win8 marketing but it'll be interesting to see if they can pull it off with 8.1

is the average consumer clued up enough to understand the significant of a point release or what a new processor adds?

Haswell is significant because of the substantially lower power it requires which translates into significantly longer battery life. Consumers will notice that.

You might be unfamiliar with Intel's Tick-Tock strategy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock) but it does mean real world benefits to consumers that they will notice.

To be honest, it does only change the start screen a little and add the start button, though even that helps especially in RDP/VMs.

and don't forget: DR now provided by the NSA.

And MS is still (a bit more quietly) trying to kill off Open Source in general, and the GPL in particular.

And MS is still trying to control your data by locking it up in non-standard (don't start saying it's a standard if even MS doesn't follow it) in proprietary products.

And MS is still running embrace, extend, extinguish on every competing technology.

Here's the funny thing. We have here a shining example of why Microsoft is becoming irrelevant.

You're making the case that Windows ME sucked, Vista sucked, 7 was good, and 8 sucks.

You're absolutely missing the bigger picture, which is this: nobody cares about operating systems anymore. Everyone, I think, finally gets that the function of the operating system is to get out of the way of the application that the user is running. iOS and Android are perfect examples of this. Everyone who argues about operating systems now talks about contextual menu this, flat button style that, driver update this, without realizing that the typical primary use of a computer these days-- desktop, laptop, tablet, whatever-- has nothing to do with the operating system and everything to do with HTML and JSON.

You talk about how a lot of people bought iPads thinking that it would fully replace their PC, and now they're disappointed. I would argue that, based upon the rate at which mobile web traffic is increasing, those people are anything but disappointed.

I have serious doubts that there will be a Windows 9. There will simply be no market for it. No kid today is asking their parents for a Windows Phone or a Surface. None. When those kids grow up, Microsoft will simply stop existing save for the Xbox.

You had me until you mentioned HTML and JSON...

I think native applications still have advantages, no matter the platform. Specially for games.

Yes-- but those native applications are using JSON as their data transport back to whatever servers.

But they're not, they're using binary packed protocols, /maybe/ BSON.

The thing is, the web is most valuable to me when there are stable parseable formats that I can push into my native infrastructure(voice and UNIX commands with clear, standalone graphics output), there isn't room for "apps" in my world, even if they're "webapps".

The reason I don't use webapps, is that using them for my essential tasks would cost me hours of time per week in waiting for buffer-bloated connections to deliver my miniscule control packets to finally update the view I'm looking at; One can spend several seconds waiting, where I could spend one framedraw waiting for the same result locally.

I have serious doubts that there will be a Windows 9. There will simply be no market for it.

This one statement about Windows 9 speaks volumes as to your viewpoint. This statement is so colossally and obviously incorrect that it actually brings into question your every opinion on this topic.

Here's the thing - Microsoft has been working on Windows 9 since November of 2012. Here's just one citation on that:

http://www.windows9update.com/2012/11/windows-9-development-...

It's been speculated for a while that Windows 9 would be released in 2014. Did you not hear that Microsoft is more rapidly releasing operating systems going forward? In fact I've seen roadmap documents for both Windows 9 and Windows 10 and know that they have R&D departments working on features for both concurrently.

And this brings me to my main point... You know nothing about Microsoft of today. In your entire resume, you list one Microsoft technology - SQL Server. Can you just admit that you're completely ignorant about what they offer today? Your arguments are a mix of 1996 to 2011 rants and product complaints based on things you've heard and not experienced. It's intellectual dishonesty to be so critical of a company and their products when you have not used modern versions of what they offer.

Windows has a 92+% operating system market share as of July of 2013. The next release of Windows is going to be released in the next 12-18 months. So let me ask you - your honest opinion is that Windows market share will go from a virtual monopoly to low enough where Microsoft will just give up on operating systems and not release the next version? I refuse to believe that someone who can log into a computer can actually believe such a ridiculous thing as that.

I made a joke once to my boss that the day is coming very quickly when a kid is going to enter the workforce, and on her first day she'll ask, "why does the company that makes the Xbox also make spreadsheet software?"

The reality today is that Microsoft does not have the engineering talent that they used to have, and their design talent has been completely drained. They simply are not a 21st century software company anymore. The marketplace perception of Microsoft now is that they are a dinosaur that also makes a gaming console. Period.

They may very well have a functional competitor to EC2, but I cannot think of one serious company that is choosing Azure over AWS, or Rackspace, or even Digital Ocean or Heroku. The Azure Case Studies page is an absolute joke, a mockery of what you would expect from a behemoth as Microsoft. The simple fact is that Amazon completely owns the market that Microsoft is trying to break into. (This is especially funny given the years 1992-1996)

They may very well have a functional competitor to Google Docs/Drive/Apps/whatever it's called now, but again, Google is totally dominating that market (crappy updates to Gmail aside). Microsoft is stuck on the outside looking in, and anyone who is starting a company, given the choice between Office 365 and Google Apps, they aren't picking Office anymore.

Windows Phone is a joke and I'm not going to devote any more words to it.

Windows 8 isn't even worth any discussion.

The reality is, is that as kids in college today enter the workforce with their Android or iPhone, and Gmail/Gdrive, and knowledge of AWS, the need for Microsoft (which you have to admit, MS has been coasting on for probably 15-20 years now) is evaporating. If all Microsoft ever tries to do now is play catchup to Amazon, Google, and Apple, they're won't necessarily be squashed, but they'll just become irrelevant.

Office, Office, Office. While I would much, much prefer to be writing my data analytic reports in Markdown/LaTeX and formatting them beautifully, the need for people (sales people, damn you sales!) to quickly steal slides and put them in their own presentations requires me to use Powerpoint.

Given that i hate Apple much more than I hate Microsoft (because seriously, Apple are much more dangerous) I'm stuck on Windows (until I write some kind of Markdown/LaTeX to power point converter (unfortunately, I also have a thesis to finish, so that's a while away yet) for work, where the first thing I install is Cygwin (and the thing I miss most is easy X-forwarding) and yet I can't switch.

Additionally, Excel is a fine product for quick and dirty analysis, while being a nightmare for any kind of continued development, so I end up using that.

Please don't mention Impress and Calc, I use them but Impress just doesn't interoperate well enough with powerpoint to make it useful, and Calc is good (regex search) but not as polished as Excel.

Its so unbelievably depressing that I'm stuck with this on the desktop, but that's the power of network effects for you.

For another example, see Facebook.

Too bad they're selling all your data to the government, and using what they haven't yet sold to sell more crap to you.

Agreed. After 10 minutes I was fine with using Windows 8 and don't see what the big deal is among people who are technical. With someone like my mom or sister i could see it being a bit more of an issue.

> Azure including their Virtual Machines are a great competitor to Amazon AWS and EC2. I've used both.

They may be for running Windows servers, but they're certainly not price-competitive for running Linux servers in most cases.

> Expect cheaper prices with increased competition - example being how Amazon just lowered their EC2 pricing by as much as 80%.

I suspect that's more to do with Google's EC2 clone, which is actually price-competitive with AWS. Also, that reduction was just on dedicated instances, which pretty much nobody uses; they largely exist for things like PCI compliance.

Your own experience (or mine) is not a good way to measure the potential of those products. It's all about the average consumers, what they like or not...

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