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Windows 8 Plans Leaked: Numerous Details Revealed
- jcapote 16y agoIt's so telling that a slide like this is needed somewhere at MSFT: http://msftkitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/All-Eyes-on-Apple.png http://msftkitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/All-Eyes-o...
- TeHCrAzY 16y agoIt looks like this slide isn't intended for internal Microsoft use, so likely they are trying to get across the intentions/direction of focus to the audience.
- aaronbrethorst 16y agoFTA: "Of note, these slides were apparently leaked or inadvertently released after being given to one Derek Goode at HP. Likewise, many of the discussions throughout the slides address HP."
- contextfree 16y agoMore specifically, I think they are trying to convince Dell/HP that they can build an Apple-like brand without leaving the Windows ecosystem (e.g. in favor of buying/building their own OS, e.g. via Palm). That's what the hardware-manufacturer-branded app stores are also about.
- sjs 16y agoWhat's funny is that further down the page they present Push Button Reset, for when your Windows installation deteriorates to the point of being unusably slow. Instead of fixing their OS they decide to burden the user with re-installing the system and then all of their apps. I would face-palm if I weren't laughing so hard. I wonder if they did any market research on that feature. Every time I tell someone non-techincal that they should re-install Windows to fix their problems the answer is almost invariably either "You can do that?" or "No, that sounds hard." I guess it makes the local/family geek's job easier when we have to help someone out though. If it's 100% reliable. In any case piling more hacks and bloat on top of the OS is not the way to mimic Apple. To be fair they would probably need a much bigger reset than the one in 2006 to fix such deep problems.
- yurisagalov 16y agoOK, let's be fair here for a second. If you read Apple's support docs you will quite often run into documents that advocate backing your files to time machine and doing a complete reinstall of OSX. I don't even need to search too hard. A few weeks ago I wanted to install bootcamp but found out that the bootcamp helper refused to partition my drive because it couldn't find a contiguous 30gb slot on my 80gb free drive. Oh! I could just defrag, I thought to myself... but not so fast, Yuri, Apple does not support defragging because Apple knows best. What do they recommend? "Another option is to back up your important files, erase the hard disk, then reinstall Mac OS X and your backed up files." (source: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375 http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375) Anyway, personally, I think the push button reset is a natural progression from the System Restore Points, which are great.
- tfh 16y ago> couldn't find a contiguous 30gb slot on my 80gb free drive I had the same problem last year and I used iDefrag to solve it. http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php
- thought_alarm 16y ago>not so fast, Yuri, Apple does not support defragging because Apple knows best. Well, they designed and implemented the system, so they should know best. And they do support defragmentation. Read that page again: "In this case, you might benefit from defragmentation, which can be performed with some third-party disk utilities". The reality is that few users ever have to worry about fragmentation of their HFS+ drives. And if you are concerned about fragmentation, I suggest 'hfsdebug', a free command-line tool.
- tvon 16y agoNot to get all tangental, but these are reasons why something like iOS is the probable future of consumer computing. There is so much crap that people deal with on a day to day basis with computers that they should never even have to know about.
- sjs 16y ago
- Silhouette 16y agoI thought it was telling that many of the slides are full of the same kind of meaningless waffle you see in management or sales/marketing presentations at other big companies. I'm actually a little surprised at that. For all its past transgressions, Microsoft does have a reputation for hiring smart technical people, and in recent years a lot of the technology it has produced has been respectable again. I somehow assumed the people running the show would be of the same calibre, with clear ideas and well structured plans for realising them, but that doesn't appear to be the case if whoever wrote the presentation(s) used here is representative.
- lmkg 16y agoThis isn't a technical spec, it's a pitch deck to be delivered to managers/execs at another company. They're talking to their audience.
- avar 16y agoIt looks even worse when viewed in that light. Is "we're going to try to rip Apple off, badly" really the pitch they're giving HP and their other OEM's?
- wvenable 16y agoMaybe they are answering the exact question the OEM's are asking: "How can we be more like Apple?"
- kenjackson 16y agoExcept there are almost no Apple features listed in this deck. The only thing they really copy from Apple is to create brand loyalty. I'm not sure any company in the world would argue against trying to get the brand loyalty that Apple has.
- encoderer 16y agoOy. I'm _so_ sick of people talking of one software company "copying" another as if it's a bad thing. Look around in the rest of the world mate. Look at the checkout lines at Target! They're exactly like Walmart! Which are exactly like Safeway! Look at the layout of every grocery store you've ever been in. Look at each boutique in the shopping mall. All the same! When people say "intuitive" they mean "familiar." They may not realize it, but that's what "intuitive" _actually_ means. You've got an e-commerce site? You should liberally borrow/steal from Amazon's checkout process. You've got an OS? Take from Apple who've been setting a baseline for OS usability. Christ. "X is copying Y" is about as inane as it gets to me.
- mr_justin 16y agoAccording to one of these slides, "humans" is short for "mainstream consumers". http://msftkitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Windows-8-Consumer-Target-Audiences.png http://msftkitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Windows-8-...
- drewcrawford 16y agoI giggled at the "Why Humans Matter" on the right: 1. Substantial in size
- nopassrecover 16y agoErghh meant to upvote this. Stupid little unchangeable close arrows on a touch interface...
- drewcrawford 16y agoGranted, it's not terribly insightful.
- nopassrecover 16y agoTrue, but it didn't deserve a downvote either
- koeselitz 16y agoClearly, the close arrows don't matter as much as the humans do.
- WiseWeasel 16y agoStupid fingers and their substantial size...
- KevBurnsJr 16y agoIf their strategy for Windows 8 is to continue treating me like an idiot, I'm probably going to switch to Linux.
- erlanger 16y agoThe eMac is back!
- jraines 16y agoI wonder if they will call it Windows 8, given that Windows 7 is a homophone for "Windows Heaven" and Windows 8 is thisclose to "Windows Hate". Just my personal tinfoil hat marketing conspiracy theory. edit: removed unnecessary potshot.
- lazugod 16y agoChange Windows 8's name. Not that big of a deal.
- chrisbolt 16y agoWindows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, ...? Could they be more inconsistent?
- josefresco 16y agoiPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 .... naming means nothing, every company gets wooed by slick marketers and pro naming people who mess up any consistency.
- jraines 16y agoYeah, that was the gist of what I said.
- sgk284 16y agoI work on the Windows team and was front row at the big Win8 planning meeting. It was good fun with Steve Ballmer shouting right in front of me (I'd never experienced that before... he's amazing at getting a crowd going). I can't say much... but these slides are laughable (and if real, designed for some other company's execs/marketers) I joined Microsoft this past September having never been a Windows person. I've done most of my professional development on linux, and you can pry my macbook pro from my cold dead hands. With that in mind, Win8 is looking awesome and it's something that I want to use right now. Microsoft is really getting their shit together. Win8, if it's even a fraction of what is planned, is going to change things permanently. This is a good thing considering Steve Jobs seems to have given up on the desktop as of this most recent WWDC.
- jbrennan 16y agoThe thing about Windows is they don't really have to do very much and they'll still sell a boat load of copies. Windows 7 has sold tens of millions of copies. I would consider that a resounding success in such a short period of time. But the fact is, attention is quickly shifting away from desktop operating systems. So while it will be do doubt successful, I still wonder when Microsoft is going to step up their game on the mobile front.
- sgk284 16y agoWhile that's all true (one minor correction, 150 million Win7 licenses have been sold). If you haven't taken a look at Win7 mobile, you might want to. It's a pretty decent and novel approach to mobile UI. Microsoft has stepped up it's UI efforts in the past year or so. You're starting to see this in most of their products. They finally got a kick in the nuts after resting on their laurels for too long. Win8 shouldn't disappoint.
- huhtenberg 16y agoHaving looked through the slide deck I can't help but to draw the parallels with similar plans for Vista. "It will have this, it will have that, 3rd and 4th" and in the end all that left was the protected media path and the windows-tab gimmick. Perhaps MS has changed, but frankly given the history and considering its size and the amount of office politicking involved I find it fairly hard to believe.
- grandalf 16y agoThe one feature that would make me consider using windows again is if it supported bash as a first class shell option and had a built in x server.
- mey 16y agotake a look at powershell, seriously, when i move to a linux desktop in the near future at work, my default shell will most likely be http://pash.sourceforge.net/ http://pash.sourceforge.net/
- rroy1590 16y agoso.. you want a unix operating system?
- iamelgringo 16y agoPowershell, isn't bash, but it's pretty kick ass. Instead of piping text from one command to the other, you pipe entire objects back and forth. A lot of bash commands are aliased to Powershell commandlets out of the box. And, as of Powershell 2.0, you have remote scripting similar to SSH. I choose to do Python Web development on Windows, and I spend my whole day on the PS command line, and I'm really pleased. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell
- mhw 16y ago> And, as of Powershell 2.0, you have remote scripting similar to SSH. What, instead of actually using the ubiquitous, widely installed SSH? Some things don't seem to change.
- code_duck 16y agoThat's my problem with PowerShell. No matter how good it may be, I don't really feel like relearning everything just to accomplish the same things, only on Windows instead.
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