[JorgeA]

Paul Thurrott's take on the 21% decline in PC sales year-over-year since the launch of Windows 8 (and a 24% drop in portable computer sales).

Quote

I opined over the weekend that Microsoft’s mobile strategy is correct, by which I mean that the self-proclaimed “devices and services” company is wise to try and take its Windows user base of 1.3 billion people forward to this new system. (The alternative was to try and sell a separate mobile platform, which I’ll call Metro, to compete with the iPad and its ilk.) What’s unclear is whether the implementation of this strategy—Windows 8 and Windows RT—will prove successful with users. So far, it doesn’t appear to have moved the needle very much.

And he's still blaming the book's cover for its failure to become a best-seller:

Quote

Frankly, I keep coming back to the same culprit that Microsoft has: PC makers are to blame. Not only have these slow-moving firms not delivered the promised collection of new devices, but the few models they’ve delivered have shown up in insufficient volume to meet demand. This behavior more than justifies Microsoft’s decision this year to enter the PC market with its own Surface devices, I think. PC makers have been screwing up the Windows ecosystem for years.

This argument does not and cannot get Win8 off the hook: the decline in PC sales has accelerated since Windows 8 came out. And as we know, orders for the Surface have been scaled back. So there appears to be NO segment of the market (desktops, laptops, tablets) where any kind of success is occurring that could be credited to Windows 8.

My ongoing localized, anecdotal observations jibe with these general trends: despite it being the Christmas shopping season, the computing departments (including tablets) at a variety of stores are looking like ghost towns.

--JorgeA

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

There's nothing to stop them from just totaling up all the activations is there?

All the home users must activate, on Microsoft servers no less. Corporate has their own servers but no-one is gonna tell me that Microsoft has no means to audit them directly.

Still playing games with numbers in the computerized activation-era says something.

The truth is that there is a bean counter at Redmond who has these numbers and hand delivers them to Ballmer. Why doesn't a sycophant like Thurrott or Bott simply ask him directly. The answer is that they are also in on it.

Meanwhile we'll just have to look at a worse method, website page request statistics ( worse for Microsoft because not all legitimately activated Windows 8 installations will be connected to the internet ). That's Karma again.

[JorgeA]

The scoop on Windows 8 is starting to get out to the professional communities:

Quote

In the last newsletter, writing about Windows 8 before having an actual look at it, I opined this:

Just this morning a reader asked for advice on whether a new computer that he is about to order should have Windows 7 or Windows 8. Unless you have a specific reason to run Windows 8 on a computer (such as clients who want you to test software on Windows 8 or you just REALLY want to use the touch-screen interface), I would strongly advise you to hold off. Windows 7 is reliable, and the programs that we use are typically optimized for it.

I have to say that I had a pretty good hunch there -- I'd say the same thing now after having put Windows 8 through its paces, but now I'd repeat it a bit more strongly.

--JorgeA

[CoffeeFiend]

JorgeA, on 04 December 2012 - 10:41 AM, said:

despite it being the Christmas shopping season, the computing departments (including tablets) at a variety of stores are looking like ghost towns.

It all depends on where you are located, which store you go to, etc. The apple store was full when I bought my iPad, and there were lots of people at Best Buy when I went to buy a cover for my iPad a couple days ago. The thing I don't see is people buying anything that runs Windows 8. I've seen more people buying Android tablets (and even Blackberry Playbook tablets) than Win8 tablets.

CharlotteTheHarlot, on 04 December 2012 - 03:05 PM, said:

There's nothing to stop them from just totaling up all the activations is there?

But those numbers wouldn't look good so there's no reason to publish them. Especially when being dishonest easily makes you look good!

It's nice to see Paul Thurott acknowledge NPD's numbers (that 40M licenses number is completely bogus) but his conclusion is pretty strange to say the least. That same PC hardware has always sold well, it's not like they started producing junk overnight, and those same OEMs are saying there's no demand for Win8, and all of a sudden, with the release of win8 (which gets a LOT of bad reviews) sales go down. Most people want the same old desktops or laptops they know well, and ideally with a real desktop OS on it. I now have a Mac Mini *and* an iPad, and it's not because the hardware ASUS/Dell/HP/Acer/Lenovo and others sell, it's because of the OS that runs on it. That's also why Surface tablets don't sell. MS is failing MUCH harder than any of the other OEMs at making a product that sells (much like with their phones) and yet they blame them all for not knowing what the market wants... Yes, everybody else is the problem Mr Ballmer! If Windows keeps going that way then it's over for me. I'll gladly pay more for Apple hardware not to have Win8 or anything resembling that. I'll update my Windows 7 PCs one last time to ensure they last a few more years and that'll be the end of it. I even have a couple co-workers who expressed a similar opinion (their next PCs will be Macs).

[JorgeA]

CoffeeFiend, on 09 December 2012 - 12:47 AM, said:

JorgeA, on 04 December 2012 - 10:41 AM, said:

despite it being the Christmas shopping season, the computing departments (including tablets) at a variety of stores are looking like ghost towns.

It all depends on where you are located, which store you go to, etc. The apple store was full when I bought my iPad, and there were lots of people at Best Buy when I went to buy a cover for my iPad a couple days ago. The thing I don't see is people buying anything that runs Windows 8. I've seen more people buying Android tablets (and even Blackberry Playbook tablets) than Win8 tablets.

I believe it, that especially Apple products are selling better. If memory serves, Mac sales haven't dropped as steeply as Windows PC sales.

The area where we live wasn't hit by the recession as badly as many others, but lately any computer store i visit is like people forgot it existed. Yesterday I got another coupon for $100 off on any Windows 8 PC (not just for specific models). Used to be they'd send out one of these big discount coupons every six months or so, but this is the second one for Win8 systems in 2-3 weeks.

--JorgeA

[CoffeeFiend]

JorgeA, on 09 December 2012 - 10:12 AM, said:

I believe it, that especially Apple products are selling better. If memory serves, Mac sales haven't dropped as steeply as Windows PC sales.

I don't see that changing anytime soon either. Sure, MS is trying to copy Apple harder than ever, but they're screwing up everything big time, and only copying the bad stuff seemingly...

Just one out of thousands of possible examples:

On the Apple side:

On all iDevices, you have music you can sync with iTunes (v11 is fantastic BTW), which has a great interface, it has great "smart" playlists and such. It works seamlessly with their store. All your iDevices and PCs sync together and it just works, and there's tons of cool accessories for all of them. And the Remote app is incredible! From my iPad, I can remotely control iTunes just like if I was sitting at the PC, but from anywhere. You get all the categories (by artist, by album, etc), the artwork and everything. it's *really* slick and you can do everything easily (skip songs, seek, change volume, pause, etc) and it even works with the Apple TV (there's also AirPlay for that). There's even keyboard search and easy gestures. It all feels 10+ years ahead of everything MS has.

On the MS side:

They come up with PlaysForSure, except that it's anything but that. They abandon it (something MS loves to do!) for the Zune. The Zune is released too late in a well established and changing market, and without any advantages. It's a big failure and MS abandons it (oh, surprise!), along with their new Zune desktop app which was their best music player (another let down). WMP isn't really getting any meaningful updates (even losing features, like DVD playback -- even if you have the codecs!), outside of those annoying "buy in store" links in explorer. It's pretty limited in many ways. Virtually all 3rd party video players are FAR better, and when it comes to audio, it doesn't even sync with the most popular player (the iPod) which makes it kinda useless. It's pushing their own proprietary formats (WMV/WMA/VC1) which kinda suck (that's one thing they should abandon already) compared to the standard formats that work everywhere. Library sharing is a pain (doesn't work quite like you'd want it to, much like say, homegroups) and library management isn't much better (the album info search is particularly dumb). They support DLNA but it's too complicated for the average user, most devices kinda suck (especially compared to slick Apple devices), etc. MCE sucks hard especially when it comes to DVR usage (things like willingly disabling ATSC support in Canada -- thanks MS!), it's not really improving much, and with Win8 not only it's not updated AT ALL from the Win7 version but they also wanted you to pay extra for it, along with dropping support for playing good old fashioned DVDs. Oh, and MCE remotes: they've been out since the WinXP era but they feel kinda clunky, they're really not that useful and pretty much useless outside of MCE. It's nothing like having a remote with a touch screen LCD with a well designed user interface.

For some strange reason, one is making money hand over fist, whereas the other is quickly becoming irrelevant and failing to sell any devices (mp3 players, phones and tablets)

[jaclaz]

CoffeeFiend, on 09 December 2012 - 12:39 PM, said:

Just one out of thousands of possible examples:

With all due respect (and trying to bring back the discussion on "productive tools" and "content creation" as opposed to "content consumption") what do you do to make a living?

• listen to music ?
  
• watch movies ?

MS had till now an almost complete monopoly on "business users", the news are still the same, instead of bettering the experience of their "real" user base, they try to pursue the "leisure" one (which is a perfectly fair attempt) the issue at hand is that in order to do so they are managing to alienate what they already have (besides failing in "stealing" users from "the other part").

jaclaz

[CoffeeFiend]

jaclaz, on 09 December 2012 - 01:00 PM, said:

With all due respect (and trying to bring back the discussion on "productive tools" and "content creation" as opposed to "content consumption") what do you do to make a living?

Oh, when it comes to work, we're totally locked-in to Windows, in more ways than I can count. But for the foreseeable future that'll be Windows 7. Virtually every piece of software we use (or even write) is Windows-only, and for the most part there are no suitable replacements for these apps (aside from Adobe apps and MS Office, both of which also run on the Mac)

jaclaz, on 09 December 2012 - 01:00 PM, said:

MS had till now an almost complete monopoly on "business users"

I think it's close enough that we can say complete.

[JorgeA]

CoffeeFiend, on 09 December 2012 - 12:39 PM, said:

On the MS side:

They come up with PlaysForSure, except that it's anything but that. They abandon it (something MS loves to do!) for the Zune. The Zune is released too late in a well established and changing market, and without any advantages. It's a big failure and MS abandons it (oh, surprise!), along with their new Zune desktop app which was their best music player (another let down). WMP isn't really getting any meaningful updates (even losing features, like DVD playback -- even if you have the codecs!), outside of those annoying "buy in store" links in explorer. It's pretty limited in many ways. Virtually all 3rd party video players are FAR better, and when it comes to audio, it doesn't even sync with the most popular player (the iPod) which makes it kinda useless. It's pushing their own proprietary formats (WMV/WMA/VC1) which kinda suck (that's one thing they should abandon already) compared to the standard formats that work everywhere. Library sharing is a pain (doesn't work quite like you'd want it to, much like say, homegroups) and library management isn't much better (the album info search is particularly dumb). They support DLNA but it's too complicated for the average user, most devices kinda suck (especially compared to slick Apple devices), etc. MCE sucks hard especially when it comes to DVR usage (things like willingly disabling ATSC support in Canada -- thanks MS!), it's not really improving much, and with Win8 not only it's not updated AT ALL from the Win7 version but they also wanted you to pay extra for it, along with dropping support for playing good old fashioned DVDs. Oh, and MCE remotes: they've been out since the WinXP era but they feel kinda clunky, they're really not that useful and pretty much useless outside of MCE. It's nothing like having a remote with a touch screen LCD with a well designed user interface.

For some strange reason, one is making money hand over fist, whereas the other is quickly becoming irrelevant and failing to sell any devices (mp3 players, phones and tablets)

Yup.

I concur with every case you mentioned that I know something about (had never even heard of PlaysForSure!), with one quibble. We do like Windows Media Center. I know that it's crippled for use in Canada, which s*cks, but in the U.S. once you get past the complexities of CableCARD setup it's a pretty nifty system, IMHO. It's replaced the cable company DVR completely in our family room, with 6 times the storage (and no practical limit if we want to keep expanding it). I can even offload recorded programs to outside storage and burn DVDs of them, both of which are impossible with the DVR. So we're definitely happy with that part of Microsoft's offerings.

If only they hadn't neglected WMC for so long and (apparently) decided to let it die on the vine in favor of its one hardware success, the XBox. So despite (and even because of) our like of WMC, MS is still on the hook for its frustrating product decisions.

--JorgeA

[jaclaz]

OT (but not much).
A quick question:
How much would you expect to have available for storage, additional apps, etc. on a 32 GB Surface?


Seemingly the new, lean, RT OS (and the MS Office that you cannot use for work unless you buy a separate license for it) is not as lean as I was imaging:
http://www.digitaltr...rosoft-surface/
http://www.microsoft...-disk-space-faq

But the Note:

Quote

Note By default, Office apps save documents in the cloud on SkyDrive.

surely helps a lot.

Being one of those days where my understanding of English is somewhat lacking, this sentence:
http://www.microsoft...e/en-AU/storage

Quote

Even with this powerful operating system and suite of core Microsoft apps, you'll still have space to add content and store personal files

sounds to me as being condescending and/or presumptuous.

The declared size of 8 Gb for an Office suite with limited functionalities (besides limited licensed use) is anyway an offence to the art of programming .
I would like you to take note how:
http://office.micros...X103210361.aspx

Quote

What Office Home & Student 2013 features are unavailable in Office Home & Student 2013 RT?
Macros, Add-Ins, Forms, and Custom Programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)

In other versions of Office you or a software developer can use tools such as Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to write and run macros and other custom programs in Office. VBA is not available for the applications in Office Home & Student 2013 RT.

To use macros, add-ins, forms with custom code, or other custom programs in Office documents, you need a version of Office other than Office Home & Student 2013 RT on a computer or tablet not powered by Windows RT. Other versions of Office cannot be installed on Windows RT devices. For example, Office Home & Student 2013 and Office Professional 2013 support these features but cannot be installed on Windows RT devices.

If you already use macros, add-ins, InfoPath forms with custom programs, or other custom programs in your PC or Mac version of Office, you will not be able to use them in Office Home & Student 2013 RT.

Having Excel without Macros/Add-ins , what would be next, power drills with no chuck but a fixed 6 mm steel drill bit, adjustable wrenches fixed to 13 mm?

jaclaz

[JorgeA]

jaclaz, on 10 December 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:

Being one of those days where my understanding of English is somewhat lacking, this sentence:
http://www.microsoft...e/en-AU/storage

Quote

Even with this powerful operating system and suite of core Microsoft apps, you'll still have space to add content and store personal files

sounds to me as being condescending and/or presumptuous.

You read the sentence correctly. It's like one of those hybrid automobiles that has the big electric battery in the rear taking up most of the trunk space, and the auto manufacturer telling you that "you'll still have space for your groceries, handyman projects, or Christmas presents."

Basically, this is how they're pitching the situation:

You'll still have storage space!*
(*) Just not as much space as you might expect.

jaclaz, on 10 December 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:

Having Excel without Macros/Add-ins , what would be next, power drills with no chuck but a fixed 6 mm steel drill bit, adjustable wrenches fixed to 13 mm?

An excellent analogy, IMHO.

--JorgeA

[Joseph_sw]

jaclaz, on 10 December 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:

http://office.micros...X103210361.aspx

Quote

If you already use macros, add-ins, InfoPath forms with custom programs, or other custom programs in your PC or Mac version of Office, you will not be able to use them in Office Home & Student 2013 RT.

Having Excel without Macros/Add-ins , what would be next, power drills with no chuck but a fixed 6 mm steel drill bit, adjustable wrenches fixed to 13 mm?

jaclaz

somehow i got this feeling that MS would said the crippled Office-suit decision were based on (dubious) 'telemetry' result.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

NeoWin article that actually points out two examples of Microsoft playing fast and loose with the facts. It concerns a new video that Redmond has launched and is aimed at developers to convince them to write apps for Windows 8 ...

"Generation App" video makes a case for making Windows 8 apps ( NeoWin 2012-12-10 )

This is the NeoWin author John Callaham writing and the quoted Microsoft claims are in bold ...

Quote

The video also stops at two points to throw out some stats that are interesting. One says, "Over the last 2 years, more Windows licenses have been sold than Android, iOS, and Macs combined." That's certainly true, but those licenses were almost all for Windows 7, not Windows 8, and there's no way to really predict how many of those older Windows 7 PCs will be upgraded to Windows 8.

The second stat that's thrown out is also a bit iffy: "A worldwide app store with over 1 billion potential users!" The word "potential" is the key one. Again, there's no way that all the Windows users in the world will ditch their older OS for Windows 8. In fact, it could take years for Windows 8 to be installed on a majority of PCs.

This is exactly why everything they say, particularly the recently discussed bogus "sales" figures, must be taken with a grain pound of salt. Truth is no longer an option.

[jaclaz]

Isn't it fun how everyone sees the relevant parts differently?

From the same link:

Quote

The effort comes in the form of a new YouTube video that shows a number of already released third-party apps in action, including the Kayak travel booking service, the Howstuffworks.com app, the Major League Soccer app and more.

It's years I have been waiting for such an app , a dedicated app for booking travels or read simple explanations on how thing works, a sensationally new paradigm shift......

In the old times we called those "bookmarks" .

jaclaz

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

True story about How Stuff Works ... Years ago when we were still in the dial-up modem era I downloaded a lot of their excellent pages and compiled them into a nice CHM with all the flash videos embedded and working. Came out nice and it was essentially a working app in itself. Those pages were a real pain to load in a browser when clicking on links, but locally it was instantaneous. All the HTML and CSS needed to be tweaked of course, but it was simple work. Now we have promoted this ( I won't call it programming ) webslinging HTML+CSS into glorified Windows 8 apps.

So I must be the world's first Windows 8 app developer!

[jaclaz]

CharlotteTheHarlot, on 11 December 2012 - 05:48 AM, said:

So I must be the world's first Windows 8 app developer!

BUT, unlike on the Surface, you had local storage available to keep that huge compilation locally....

A good idea could be to have several (cheaper) Surfaces, each one with 16 Gb of storage total, somehow (like by writing good, lean code) reduce the space occupied by Office to have the Howstuffworks stored locally, another one for the writings by William Shakespeare, another one with pictures of all the paintings by Picasso .... no , wait, these latter already exist, they are called books ....

jaclaz

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

jaclaz, on 11 December 2012 - 06:11 AM, said:

... another one for the writings by William Shakespeare, another one with pictures of all the paintings by Picasso .... no , wait, these latter already exist, they are called books ....

Funny you should mention that. I actually did the same thing with Picasso ( and another for Dali ). They are static though, no flash, just bitmaps. And they are big. Never had the urge to touch Shakespeare though.

Yeah, CHM is a nice container format ( lossless too ), it's only real shortcoming is that the contents are scrambled so there is no useful information to latch onto via a brute-force find or search utility. Even a ZIP file will cough up filenames and other hints ( unless it is encrypted I think ).

PRE-EMPTIVE DISCLAIMER: no, I would never distribute things like this! These were more of a learning experience in localizing files, editing HTML+CSS, embedding multimedia, etc.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Apropos of alleged sales numbers vs website usage statistics ...

Surface makes a small blip on the web traffic radar ( NeoWin 2012-12-11 )

Quote

In a nut shell, the Surface took .13% of the web traffic generated from the ad impressions across the Chitika network while Android took .91% of the market; Chitika states the sample base was in the tens of millions.

That is a decimal point there in that 0.13 % or less than one seventh of one percent. Yeah, it doesn't mean much now. And there is no doubt that Windows 8 ( of which Surface represents only a subset ) itself will chart eventually. I mean how can it not? The user market is much larger now than six years ago, and they are literally forcing it into the world through the OEM channels ( again ). Plus, now we have billions of phones also. The real question is whether it will get as high as Vista did ( I believe it was 20% at it's peak ) before the bottom drops out once and for all.

http://en.wikipedia....OS_market_share ... 2012-12-12 ... Windows 7 = 41.35% ... Windows XP = 21.29% ... Windows 8 = 0.32%

I wonder if it will ever even pass Windows XP. We should check back periodically and compare the current numbers to this snapshot December 12, 2012. ... Hey! 12-12-12 using two-digit years! This annual number anomaly must be important to somebody out there. ...

This post has been edited by CharlotteTheHarlot: 12 December 2012 - 04:57 AM

[jaclaz]

As I see it there are great possibiltiies that the millions of people that bought the Surface at the time of the "share" data collection had either:

• spent all their money buying the thingy and cannot afford to pay an ISP for connection
  
• used it to play Simon
  
• had yet to understand how to go online
  
• only and exclusively connected to the Microsoft Apps store and to networks not connected with the Chitika one

in other words it is a bit too early for those web traffic results to represent *anything*:
http://insights.chit...-market-update/

Quote

To quantify this latest study on the market as a whole, Chitika Insights examined a sample of tens of millions of tablet impressions from the Chitika Ad network. This study was drawn from a date range of November 12th to November 18th 2012, and only includes traffic from the U.S. and Canada. This week was chosen in order to eliminate any Black Friday-related traffic spikes which could skew the results.

and it is very possible that the Chitika network (WHO? ) and it's customers offer contents that appeal the iPad and Android users but not the Surface ones, we have a "study" conducted by a non-independent firm, citing senselessly and vaguely "a sample of millions of tablet impressions", limited to 6 (six) days just two weeks after the Surface launch.

Those reports, without the exact methodology used are m00t by themselves, additionally they were made at a time there was possibly NO meaningful number of surfaces sold.
So they are absolutely meaningless.

jaclaz

[jaclaz]

Still on the OT/Tablet/Surface theme, the good MS guys seemingly lost a very good occasion to have a rather influential testimonial/endorsement:
http://www.theverge....xvi-first-tweet
http://newsfeed.time...oly-milestones/

jaclaz