Ultimately, I think Gassée is taking the easy way out on this. It's far too easy to jump on the "Windows 8 sucks" bandwagon with the likes of people like Dvorak (who has never wrongly predicted the demise of a tech product). Far more difficult is to examine the reasons why Windows 8 is unpopular. I think a lot of the reason why Windows 8 is unpopular is simply because it's different. Was Sinofsky unfairly scapegoated for problems at Microsoft? I suspect so. Will this give Apple a chance to "finish what Sinofsky started"? I think Apple has its own set of problems to deal with that have nothing to do with what Sinofsky did at Microsoft. Thus, I think linking Sinofsky's departure to Apple is a disingenuous marketing plug.
Wasn't he fired from Apple?
edit: A quick wiki lookup indicates that he was "forced out" at Apple. The article also reminded me of the issues he had when Apple made some changes to Macs in the late 90's that made it difficult to dual-boot BeOS which caused difficulties for Gassée (nevermind the whole issue of Amelio choosing to acuire NeXT over Be).
I think there is just as much reason for Gassée to hold a grudge against Apple as to be "invested" in Apple.
(of course his argument may be wrong/right on other grounds, but I don't think it's certain that any allegiance to Apple really plays into the argument at this point)
I thought that BeOS was interesting, but not compelling enough to make a switch to (much like the NeXT stuff).
I think we have a pretty good idea by now why windows 8 is going to fail in the marketplace. Usability professionals have already chimed in.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/30/3576512/windows-8-upgrade...
http://www.techspot.com/news/50745-statcounter-data-says-win...
"In July 2009, in only eight hours, pre-orders of Windows 7 at amazon.co.uk surpassed the demand which Windows Vista had had in its first 17 weeks.[72] It became the highest-grossing pre-order in Amazon's history, surpassing sales of the previous record holder, the seventh Harry Potter book.[73] After 36 hours, 64-bit versions of Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate editions sold out in Japan.[74] Two weeks after its release its market share had surpassed that of Snow Leopard, released two months previously as the most recent update to Apple's Mac OS X operating system.[75][76] "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Mountain_Lion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7
Personally I tried Windows 8 when I was tasked to upgrade all the customer service machines at my company. So terrible we ended up switching over to Apple machines. Would have went Chromebooks but got vetoed since some employees need MS Office. Only our finance people are on PCs now because they don't want to relearn the Excel hotkeys.
This 4 million number is equal to the number of individual consumers who bought a shrink-wrapped Windows 8 UPGRADE box. It was announced 4 days after the launch of the platform on the 26th.
Windows 7 had the advantage of coming after Vista. Vista sucked. People knew it sucked. Apple made funny commercials making fun of it (the MIB security dude). People wanted to leave it.
Windows 8 may or may not be good, but Windows 7 is good and a lot of people must be disinterested simply because they're fine at Windows 7.
Windows 7 is this year's Windows XP.
The fact of the matter is, there's a huge number of people who aren't aware you can browse the web on a smartphone (Android or iOS), or just don't use the feature very often. I know a lot of people who spend pretty much all their time on their phone inside the Facebook app, some games, and the SMS app. Many of them were very surprised to learn that there was a full-featured browser available on their phones.
I know that there's a full-featured browser available on my phone, I also know that however great and fast my phone is, browsing the web on a device with a screen of about 4 inches in size with no mouse or keyboard always kinda sucks. Even the absolute best mobile websites are barely adequate user experiences, IMO, and thus I use native apps on my phone whenever possible.
It's classic microsoft, to translate their monopoly in PC OS into tablet marketshare.
I think the decision process will then be "is the touch screen and a little less weight worth giving up the performance of a real laptop?" And (as much as I love my tablet), I think the answer to that won't be a resounding "yes".
Microsoft knows exactly what they're doing. And I agree, due to it's similarity to a conventional laptop, they won't sell as much as they could. That being said, the Surface Pro is a bad-ass piece of machinery, and probably going to be hard to beat any time soon.
Aside from those points, I agree with what you said. From my perspective though, who in their right mind wouldn't want a tablet with a dual-core hyperthreaded Core i5 with 4GB of RAM and a beautiful 1080p screen?
In the same way that Vista was a disaster due to its changes and incompatibilities, Windows 8 is a version 1. And in the same way that, by the time Windows 7 had come out, the industry had adapted, new drivers had been written, C# was a standard, etc, etc, when Windows 9 comes out 2-3 years from now RT apps will be widespread, Windows tablet hardware will be a couple of generations refined, and Office will probably work with Metro.
And there will be glowing reviews talking about what an achievement Windows 9 is, how it is the best OS Microsoft has released in years, and how it completely wipes out the colossal disappointment that was Windows 8, ignoring of course that Windows 8 like Vista before it provided the foundation upon which the new system is built.
Will Microsoft be around forever? Who knows, but a company this large, only a few years removed from the success that was Windows 7, is going to get at least a few more kicks at the can.
If they miss an inflection point, they could be in deep trouble.
It's frustrating to me, because most of the Word documents I see do not need or use the vast caverns of Word utility. I'm guessing 90% (probably 99%) or more of docs I see and produce could be satisfied with text, or rtf at most. We spend hundreds of dollars individually on Office and get locked into Windows because we might someday need to do a mail merge.
Similar for Excel. Excel is an excellent product that most people don't need. Most of what we produce with Excel could be done with csv and a basic presentation layer. For the serious stuff, we would have been better off with SQL databases and presentation products decoupled from the database.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/the-wh...
