Friday, May 31, 2013

Windows 8 Plus: Peeking behind the curtain, or maybe not...

Technology gurus are becoming a dime a dozen, and everyone has his own take on what's happening. ZD Net's Simon Bisson is no exception, and he looks at the tea leaves and then offers an opinion which I think is off the mark. His take on all that is that Microsoft is following a continuing long-term plan here to make the evolution of software development and its matching services an ongoing continual development process. Maybe he's right, or maybe he's full of it right up to his untrimmed and ample hair.

For a while recently, Microsoft seemed to be under the spell of a corporate mogul who might not always have been right, but was damned well never wrong, or at least so he said. He ramrodded Windows 8 through the system hell bent on forcing everyone to buy and use the goddamned thing whether we had the hardware for it or not, and whether we had any desire or need for that hardware at any time in the foreseeable future. Type 'A' personalities are like that. Brilliant, but often out of synch with the rest of us, or just plain full of shit. Windows 8 was supposed to grab market share from Apple's dominant position in the mobiles market - but it came a couple of years too late, and without enough bang for the buck - so the hotshot who shoved it down our throats had to go. And now Microsoft is left with the considerable task of picking up the pieces and trying to save a little face after allowing itself to be bamboozled by bullshit instead of being baffled by brains.

Windows 8 fills a need we don't have for an operating system we haven't got the right hardware to run smoothly, and which most of us don't really need anyway.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with Windows 7, and less than 20% of us are using mobile hardware that could conceivably make the most of Windows 8, so it naturally fell flat on its ass in the marketplace, which is still dominated by the desktop market. The vast majority of us use desktops, either by choice at home or by request at work, and Windows 8 is not a desktop system. It can never become as good on a desktop as a system like Windows 7 which has been designed from the ground up for use in a desktop environment, and which is still your best bet for that application. And desktops aren't going away any time soon, because the enterprise community can't afford to simply write off that size of an investment just for the hell of it. They understandably want to get their money's worth from it first. And many of them believe that if it works, let's not fix it. And all the bullshit in the world isn't going to change that. 

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