Hacker News Reader

Comment by thetrb | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com