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Daring Fireball says Microsoft has given up on competing on quality

post #1 of 23
7/30/09 at 7:29pm
Thread Starter 
John Gruber unloads: daringfireball.net/2009/07/microsofts_long_slow_decline

Basically Microsoft's entire marketing effort these days revolves around pointing out how much cheaper Windows PCs are, and there is no indication they believe that Windows 7 will entice any Mac converts back to the fold -- they are viewed as gone forever.  Well worth a read.

 


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post #2 of 23
7/30/09 at 8:04pm
I read that essay with interest. I find it quite agreeable except for one section:
Quote:

But no one seems to be arguing that Windows 7 is something that will tempt Mac users to switch, or to tempt even recent Mac converts to switch back. It doesn’t even seem to be in the realm of debate. But if Windows 7 is actually any good, why wouldn’t it tempt at least some segment of Mac users to switch? Windows 95, 98, and XP did.

To the contrary, this is exactly what I see people arguing: that Win7 meets or exceeds OS X and will tempt Mac users to switch.

Walt Mossberg says that in a recent editorial.
Quote:
The new edition, called Windows 7, is a big improvement over both Vista and the sturdy, 2001-vintage Windows XP still widely in use. It will give Apple’s (AAPL) long-superior Mac OS X operating system a run for its money (though Apple might maintain its edge with a new version, called Snow Leopard, due in September).

Perhaps Walt and others making these claims are looneys that don't count in DF's world. I don't follow Win7 that closely.

Regardless, that assertion is not critical to DF's thesis: it doesn't matter what MS is trying, it matters what they're accomplishing. And the revenue reports show that MS is not accomplishing, regards of whether they're aiming high.
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post #3 of 23
7/30/09 at 9:01pm
Thread Starter 


Quote:
Originally Posted by DaveF View Post
To the contrary, this is exactly what I see people arguing: that Win7 meets or exceeds OS X and will tempt Mac users to switch.

 Walt Mossberg says that in a recent editorial.

Perhaps Walt and others making these claims are looneys that don't count in DF's world. I don't follow Win7 that closely.
Keep in mind that Mossberg is comparing Windows 7 to Leopard (10.5), not Snow Leopard (10.6), when in fact Snow Leopard will be released before Win 7, that is an absurd comparison.

 On top of that Apple is winning the price battle ($29 vs. $150+) and the ease of upgrade battle -- forget about going from a 32 bit version of Vista to a 64 bit version of Win 7 for instance.  Why Microsoft erects these self defeating roadblocks I'll never know, but Apple must love it.
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post #4 of 23
7/31/09 at 3:44am
How is Win7 vs Snow Leopard an "absurd comparison"? And even if it is, contrary to that point, significant commentators are making just that comparison and making it strongly.
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post #5 of 23
7/31/09 at 4:58am
Thread Starter 


Quote:
Originally Posted by DaveF View Post

How is Win7 vs Snow Leopard an "absurd comparison"? And even if it is, contrary to that point, significant commentators are making just that comparison and making it strongly.
Dave, you didn't read my post carefully enough -- I said that Win7 vs. *Leopard* is an absurd comparison.  Win 7 vs. *Snow* Leopard is the comparison they should be making.  

But anyone making it in print at this point is either 1) making up the Snow Leopard part or 2) breaking a non-disclosure agreement (doubt it, Apple would sue their sorry asses).  Thus, not worth the bits its written on.

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post #6 of 23
7/31/09 at 5:15am
Gotcha.

I agree with Gruber's take, but with a slightly different take. Through the first half of Vista development, MS was still trying to create best-of-class software. I was following the previews in '06 and '07 before I bought my Mac. Vista promised a lot, and had it delivered I would have a Vista PC today instead of my MacBook Pro. It promised the moon and was going to change the PC experience.

But it didn't. Everything exciting promised for Vista turned out to be vapor. The killer, Apple-crushing new feature was stripped out. And then they allowed vendors to overly relax the "Vista ready" specs so it performed badly on new machines. The perception, unshakeable now (despite two years of spasmodic, incoherent advertising), is that Vista is crap.

They meant to deliver software that was going to change the PC landscape. That was going to shut down Apple. That would once and for all silence their detractors. They failed. After years of effort, the OS for 2008 is worse than the OS from 2002. So bad, people are paying extra to downgrade.

MS is depressed and flailing about after that massive failure. They've given up hope, culturally. They've internalized their incompetence and are acting it out, even while publicly they keep up the good face.
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post #7 of 23
7/31/09 at 8:11am
I'm not going to switch back but 7 looks pretty good, office has some nice improvements (tho f the ribbon), ms is moving office to the cloud and operating systems are mattering less and less by the day. Zune sucks but 360 is great, anti virus is finally moving to be a real first party concern and even mini microsoft is smiling these days. Don't count ms down just yet.
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post #8 of 23
7/31/09 at 8:32am
Office 2007 seems to have fixed the document destroying bug that has been in MS Office for over a decade, which is good news. I also see evidence it has fixed some severe quirks from past versions. Overall, the feature set feels more refined to me.

But the Ribbon is a problem. In a rare feat, they've actually made several things harder to use. And it's worsened by not fully Ribbon-izing Office. Drill into tools and you find yourself using the previous dialog boxes. The Ribbon is not a total failure, but it's definitely not an improvement -- not for an experienced Office user.

MS is definitely not out. But as described in the essay, they may well be in a protracted decline, from dominant monopoly to big player and perhaps in some years to irrelevant.
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post #9 of 23
7/31/09 at 4:55pm
When Mossberg says "run for its money" I read that in the contest for "best OS" that pundits care about, which is not necessarily enough to actually make people switch. If he had said, "so good, it might tempt users to switch [back]" -- that not only would conveniently clear for this discussion, but there is a qualitative quantum difference.

It's not enough for Microsoft to match or even stay ahead of Apple; they have to try to beat them, fair and square. In order to do that, they have to take real risks; they are not.

If anything, the Ribbon is that kind of attempt. I followed the development of it with some interest, but I don't actually use word processors on a regular basis, and I've never used it. The mixed reaction to it may have caused them to be more conservative.
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post #10 of 23
7/31/09 at 5:43pm
I'll accept that my point was too strong. But Gruber's is as well on this point: "But if Windows 7 is actually any good, why wouldn’t it tempt at least some segment of Mac users to switch? Windows 95, 98, and XP did."

Tech columnists are clear on this point: Windows 7 is good. Quite good. Possible very good. Maybe even as good as OS X 10.5

There is a big difference, multiple quanta of a difference, between "not beating OS X" and "not actually any good".

As for the Ribbon: I'm a word processor user. The Ribbon teaches the wrong lessons if MS is more conservative from it. It has problems obvious within minutes of use. It indicates they have a seriously flawed design review process. The lesson learned should have been: fix the review system to get better ideas implemented.
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post #11 of 23
7/31/09 at 8:47pm

Quote:
Today that is simply no longer the case. Microsoft has lost all but a sliver of this entire market. People who love computers overwhelmingly prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think about their choice of computer platform in detail and with passion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are leading indicators.


Fricking wysin even fricking close twyget editor won't quote - Edit:  in the airport now and fixed the above, somehow itialics is on for this edit and I can't turn it off, dangit!!!!!

I think this is true but I think Gruber is too close to apple to state it as fact without qualification.
Edited by Sam Posten - 8/2/2009 at 04:30 pm GMT
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post #12 of 23
7/31/09 at 8:49pm
Grumble grumble grumble, I tried making that last post lookreadable, but htf is still terrible on an iPhone, sorry
Edited by Sam Posten - 8/1/2009 at 01:36 pm GMT
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post #13 of 23
8/1/09 at 6:59am
Thread Starter 


Quote:
Originally Posted by Sam Posten View Post
I think this is true but I think Gruber is too close to apple to state it as fact without qualification.
Gruber is mainly reacting to Microsoft's recent statements denigrating, ignoring the competition as much as anything else.  He isn't necessarily doing any head to head comparison of the OS software itself.  

Seen in the comments of a completely non-technical blog: "If you care about what OS you’re using, Apple now has a bigger monopoly than Redmond ever had."  That is what Microsoft must overcome to reverse the trend.  

The biggest argument for Win7 as quoted by Gruber is that the corporate IT people, who utterly rejected Vista, might upgrade from XP to Win7.  That will certainly generate cash for MS, if nothing else.  

My company is typical -- not a single Vista machine in the entire place.  To put it another way -- the IT dept. now officially supports iPhones, but it doesn't support Vista.  So getting them to upgrade to Win7 would be a big deal.  But it is also a scary (for MS) juncture.   The vast majority of the PCs are old Pentium machines (no Core 2 Duos), so any OS upgrade will involve buying new hardware.  Meanwhile Snow Leopard does have one killer feature -- MS Exchange Support, out of the box.  If it is executed as well as the iPhone (no reason it shouldn't be) it will make it possible to painlessly switch over to Macs.  Practically all in-house software these days is browser based.  Now I'm not saying any such thing will happen -- but it is pretty much the first time it *could* happen in 15 years.  And what will happen is that all the very few current Mac users, like me, will be running Snow Leopard before WIn7 is ever released.  Meanwhile any corporate move to Win7 is not going to happen for AT LEAST 12 months after Win7 is released (the switch from 2000 to Vista didn't happen until at least 3 years after Vista was released).  

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post #14 of 23
8/1/09 at 7:02am
Thread Starter 


Quote:
Originally Posted by Sam Posten View Post

Grumble grumble grumble, I tried making that last post lookreadable, but htf is still terrible on an iPhone, sorry
Edited by Sam Posten - 8/1/2009 at 01:36 pm GMT
Off topic, but I am still fighting the new BBS software -- is there an option for using the old BBS formating code instead of the -sometimes it works- WYSIWYG version?

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post #15 of 23
8/1/09 at 7:29am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ted Todorov View Post
... I am still fighting the new BBS software -- is there an option for using the old BBS formating code.
No.
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post #16 of 23
8/1/09 at 7:40am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ted Todorov View Post
My company is typical -- not a single Vista machine in the entire place.  

Practically all in-house software these days is browser based. 

Meanwhile any corporate move to Win7 is not going to happen for AT LEAST 12 months after Win7 is released (the switch from 2000 to Vista didn't happen until at least 3 years after Vista was released). 
We're similar. Four years ago, the Vista upgrade was being planned. It never happened; we're 100% XP and specifically buy the downgrade for new PCs.

But the move to web is a mixed bag for us. Core engineering tools are normal applications; the "web apps" OS is just fantasy for an engineer. And key apps aren't available on Mac.

As for upgrading to Win7: We aren't upgrading to Office 2007 until this Fall. Oour transition from NT4 to XP was c. 2005. We're in a recession. I read the tea leaves and see a transition from XP in 2011.
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post #17 of 23
8/1/09 at 3:42pm
Mainly because the hardware that XP has been running on for all these years will finally die, and give companies the justification to buy new hardware, which will show up running Windows 7.  At my workplace, it's been a pain upgrading so many older PCs and laptops (either hard drive and/or RAM) running XP just so they can also run a gutted version of Office 2007 and Notes 8.  So the sooner the old hardware finally dies or gets replaced by IT directives to make room in their budgets, the sooner Windows 7 will gain more marketshare because it's still cheaper to buy non-MAC hardware and run Windows from a corporate perspective.
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post #18 of 23
8/1/09 at 3:48pm
Dies? Dude some of my customers still have COBOL running :) and orininal pdp11s! Xp will be with us for a loooooong time
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post #19 of 23
8/1/09 at 7:37pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick Sun View Post

Mainly because the hardware that XP has been running on for all these years will finally die, and give companies the justification to buy new hardware, which will show up running Windows 7. 
There's no correlation with new hardware and new OS at my work. We buy new computers and downgrade to XP. (I've got a brand new laptop running XP Pro).

That said, if the company wants to migrate to Win7, then planned attrition will be used to upgrade too-old computers; as they won't do an all-at-once replacement of all PCs.
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post #20 of 23
8/2/09 at 7:51am
Of course, no company is going to flip the switch and upgrade all their PCs to Win7-capable overnight.  We've been doing the Downgrade-to-XP dance for PC/laptop purchases for the past 3-4 years that Vista has been out, but it'll be interesting to see when Microsoft finally pulls the plug on XP, and then hardware will be replaced gradually through attrition, Win7 will find its way into the corporate computing landscape on a larger scale.  It's sort of like the non-HD TV sets in so many homes that need the cludgy ATSC add-on boxes if they were strictly OTA to receive programming/shows, eventually when those sets die, people will replace them with HDTV sets, gain better video quality, and technology marches on.  Not a perfect analogy, but somewhat in step with the discussion at hand.

From a corporate perspective, I think Vista has always been looked upon as the beta for Win7 all these years, and not quite ready for prime time (due to PC hardware pricing structure when Vista first came out, and overall OS-philosophy has had to deal with many user-interface issues to balance out the security focus that weighted down Vista's user experience from the onset).  Of course, businesses with active directory/domains in place will have to do some server backbone upgrades to be able to incorporate both Win7 and XP users on their domains.  Not a trivial migration, but it'll happen, just give it time.

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post #21 of 23
8/2/09 at 9:56am
I'll believe XP is no longer for sale to Big Corp's when I see it :)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick Sun View Post

...but it'll be interesting to see when Microsoft finally pulls the plug on XP, and then hardware will be replaced gradually through attrition, Win7 will find its way into the corporate computing landscape on a larger scale. 
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post #22 of 23
8/2/09 at 9:58am
http://rc3.org/2009/07/31/the-wal-martification-of-microsoft/
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post #23 of 23
8/2/09 at 3:34pm
Okay I must be missing something about the improvements on Windows 7. I have the latest RC (expires June 2010) of Windows 7 and am putting it through its paces.

My initial thought: Windows 7 = Really Stable Windows Vista + a few bells and whistles. it's what Windows Vista should have been upon release. It's funny, Microsoft tried to nail Apple on Snow Leopard, citing that it's really more like a "service pack" than a new release, so even though it's only $29, Microsoft said "we don't charge for service packs".

To which I reply, Yes You Do, because Windows 7 is essentially a service pack to Vista. Actually, it is worse than a service pack. It is what Vista should have been all along, had it not been rushed to the marketplace three years ago. And instead of charging $29 like Apple's supposed Snow Leopard service pack, MS is charging full price.

Of course, I dislike Vista so much, I'm probably going to buy 7 not because of its new features, but essentially to dump Vista...

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