“We have bigger hopes, higher aspirations for Windows,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on Wednesday, standing on a stage above a secret room filled with crazy holographic technology. “We want to move from people needing Windows to choosing Windows, to loving Windows. That is our bold goal.” He’s right: love is a problem that Microsoft needs to solve.
I use Windows because out of the options, it’s the one that bugs me the least. Now, I have a tendency to dislike all software – it’s crazy how many faults and problems we accept in software – so it’s unlikely they’ll ever get me to ‘love’ anything, but I still get the general idea: without dominance, mobile users need to choose Windows willingly. This is new ground for Microsoft.
The last time I purchased anything MS willingly was Windows 98! After that it was only because I felt I had to (And only if I couldn’t leach it off my brother). After seeing the latest from MS… I don’t think that will change any time soon!
Work is moving away from MS on the desktop (to just about anything) and to Apple/Android on the BYOD side.
It^aEURTMs hard for MS I guess the golden age is about then ^aEUR“ I had a Pentium 120 Win 98 and Office 2000, in terms of productivity not much improved for the next 10 years. I thought XP was great the blue screens largely disappeared, MS could if not be loved at least well liked. Then nothing for years, MS seemed to think it could rest on its laurels and simply be evil, the world changed and Windows became an obsolete tool to run third party win32 apps and MS Office.
The idea of making Windows something to be admired (sorry I can^aEURTMt bring myself to say loved), something interesting that will advance computing generally and act as a spur to other platforms, including Linux to develop, is a noble aim. Unfortunately I predict it won^aEURTMt try to develop in any admirable way, it will remain a platform for Windows third party apps and advance the cause of evil in an attempt to catch up with Apple.
I guess you never read this:
http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/01/18/apple-software-quality-questio…
Microsoft needs to break one habit – they can no longer leverage their properties to give others a jarring experience like Bill Gates did with Netscape and Palm, and pushing the browser into ring zero of the OS so they could claim it couldn’t be removed.
It might be windows 11 or 10.5, but they need to completely refactor or rewrite the kernel for security. There will always be zero-days, but the NT core code is older than Linux, and you would think by now someone would have PROACTIVELY started cleaning it. Why does Google discover more vulnerabilities than Microsoft does?
It is difficult and expensive, but you can write very solid code.
It may also take ending some legacy support (or sandboxing it), but it is also their frameworks and libraries and apps in addition to their kernel that need to be solid. Not more features (Remembering Apple with Snow Leopard).
The next problem is they now have to offer something more and better than Apple or Google, both cloud and OS. Apple can’t decrypt an iPhone, but everything is on iCloud anyway unless you disable backup. If my Windows desktop, mobile, and cloud were lockable, that would be something that would get my attention.
How about a real, computer-editable XML save file instead of the broken and bribed ISO “open”XML spec docx, xlsx, etc? They could pay and push through a spec so it could be called “open”.
It must be “open” in the common hacker definition, not declared so by people who will never have to use it.
Microsoft has the ability to win by being the best. They can also limp along forever by doing what they have always done. But they can’t do both.
They also need to learn to play nicely with others. They’re very slowly groping their way towards it, and I appreciate it takes a long time to turn a tanker, but they have decades of standards abuse to make up for before I’d even trust them (and they can forget “love” no matter what they do)
The NT kernel is pretty clean and well designed for security. That is not where the vulnerabilities show up. They show up everywhere else. In the past it was in all the security exceptions they gave certain services, and in bad policies like making the default account the administrator, but most of these bad practices have not been a problem since XP. Now Microsoft is mostly fighting a weldeserved but out-of-date bad reputation.
I don’t know where to start given there is so much misinformation within a single post:
1) Internet Explorer does not run in ‘ring 0’ or ‘ring 1’, it is part of the developer API frameworks that Microsoft provides to all developers and that is no different than what Apple does with Webcore/JavascriptCore or KTHML/KJS with KDE or Webkit/Javascript that comes with GNOME. The problem with security relates to poor security decisions regarding the setup 10 years ago and Jim Achlin and his successors have acknowledged that the heady days of the 90’s turned what was an otherwise pristine operating system into what we saw with all the security issues that plagued Windows XP in the early years. The situation is different today so to bring up stuff that is long in the past I have to ask whether you’re up to date on how things are in the Windows world.
2) The problem with OOXML isn’t anything nefarious on the part of Microsoft but the fact that Microsoft insist on round trip compatibility which ensures nothing is lost in the process and I’m sure part of that also included support for deprecated proprietary technologies that have since been replaced but support is still included for the sake or compatibility. In Microsoft’s own defence, even their own Office suite isn’t OOXML compliant based on what has been submitted and ratified by ISO/ECMA, even the standardised ODF not everyone conforms to either. I know it sounds obvious but writing software isn’t easy and making sure it complies 100% to a standard is even more difficult.
3) Windows NT line has never had a problem with the kernel and if you look at the latest changes that came with Windows 7 such as removing the global dispatch lock and lots of other goodies the issue has always been the subsystem. The subsystem was grown out of previous subsystems but the work they’re doing with WinRT takes the existing foundations that are viable to be salvaged and rebuild onto of that a better subsystem without all the flaws of win32 and thus we have WinRT today. As for applications, the touch based Office will be one of many releases that’ll eventually see the gradual transition to a universal application based on WinRT for the Office stack so that what we’ll see is a more consistent experience of features across the board.
I’m a OS X user right now and honestly I haven’t been this excited about what Microsoft is doing for years – it might even be enough for me to jump ship when Windows 10 is released if things keep developing the way they do. Apple need to realise this, banking on the missteps of Windows Vista and 8.x might wins one some marketshare but you need to have something more than just banking on the continued missteps of the competition or otherwise you’ll end up like what happened to AMD when Intel eventually got its act sorted and delivered Yonah followed by Core 2, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, etc. etc. If Apple keeps dicking around with side projects in lieu of fixing up some of the OS X problems many have faced with Mavericks and Yosemite then they might end up losing some users who have been with them for over a decade but having come to the end of their tether.
Edited 2015-01-24 05:34 UTC
For #2 – Office 2010 Mostly follows the OOXML standard, and 2013 does completely. Well, as completeley as it can – the ECMA and ISO Strict standards are slightly different.
Sort of.
The ISO “Transitional” standard is basically identical to the ECMA, but the ISO “Strict” standard is a little bit different. Office 2010 can read ECMA and ISO “Strict”, and reads/writes to ISO Transitional.
Office 2013 does that, but writes to ISO Strict.
At least, that’s what Wikipedia says.
Wikipedia is wrong. MS Office implements OOXML in the sense that it is the defining implementation of the standard. They do not follow the standard in any strict sense, it is up to other implementations to have the same quirks and bugs as MS Office, and they can’t really fix the bugs either because now documents are saved with them.
Well, I’m not sure If I agree with you. You are either saying “That Word is the standard” Which is crazy wrong.
OR that “The standard that does exist, doesn’t really matter, because MS doesn’t follow it and doesn’t care about it. ” Which makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Wikipedia cites TechNet, which is a pretty good place to cite.
I suppose you’ve got a better source?
I use OS X daily. Up until Mavericks, it seemed to have it’s act together, and was becoming a suitable replacement for what I still consider the glory days of desktop computing — BeOS R5…
The walled-garden crap of iTunes, and Mail is a constant annoyance. I really really miss the hot-damn features of BFS being baked into Tracker and useable from there. Finder still doesn’t measure up.
So I use the system that offends me least. A year ago I parted ways with Linux as the full-time OS and picked up OS X for daily use… it works, but it’s not what I want. Same as Linux. Same as windows.
Edited 2015-01-24 03:34 UTC
I also consider BeOS R4.5-5.1 the pinnacle of my desktop experience. I have liked but never loved OS/2 and Windows 2000. Nowdays i use Debian for the same reason you claim to use OSX.
Regarding iTunes and ‘walled garden’, what do you exactly mean given that music these days is pretty much either streamed or downloadable in non-DRM format? are you talking about the walled garden relating to the AppStore and not being able to side load applications onto iOS devices? sure, that is a pain in the backside and I think the lack of consistency when it comes to implementing policy is sending out a pretty scary message to developers that Apple will simply make up policy on the fly depending upon their whims and I could imagine that is unsettling for a developer who creates an application which conforms to his interpretation of the policy only to find that Apple then turns around to re-write the policy resulting in months of work down the drain.
For me the use of OS X has been ‘the one that sucks the least’ and over in Arstechnica’s own Mac area there are many who are using Mac’s because it is the platform that sucks the least but some are getting to the end of their tether with the OpenGL and OpenCL behind the times, we’re still sitting holding onto HFS+ even with all its faults, bugs in Mail that never seem to effect iOS customers (Gmail works perfectly on iOS but crashes and burns on OS X). If Microsoft really do get their act together with Windows 10 then they might find that it is the final nail in the coffin for those of us who have held in there, keeping the faith and hoping that these issues in OS X will be addressed in a timely manner. I’m personally going to give Apple until the end of this year which means we’ll have WWDC and all the announcements, enough time for several updates to be pushed out and if by the end of the year we’ve got Apple still enamoured with Apple Watches and other crap at the expense of OS X then maybe it’ll be the time to jump ship.
Okay, Microsoft… I will love you again if you just put tabs in File Explorer. PLEASE!!!! For the love of all that is holy
It’s not that hard to download XYplorer
Or Total Commander.
So keep hating Microsoft but love Donald Lessau? I don’t think that’s what Satya Nadella meant.
Not when you’re on a locked down, corporate machine. Which is kind of the whole point. At home, I use Directory Opus. At work, I’m pretty much stuck with the default file explorer.
Microsoft should come clean, admit their wrongdoings and recant doing from the following unethical practices:
1. Bullying the competition with software patents
2. Hijacking the ISO standardization process when they pushed through their OOXML specification
3. Lobbying lawmakers to block laws which promote open standards and free software for use in the government
4. Preventing users from running their own software using draconian DRM on closed devices (Windows Phone and RT)
5. Enacting restrictive Marketplace policies against GPL-3 software
6. Launching misinformation campaigns (“Get the facts” etc.), Astroturfing and other ways of spreading lies, especially against Linux
If they stopped doing that, it would at least cause me to not dislike them any more.
If they also did this in a non-arrogant way (unlike e.g. their Xbox DRM policy reversals, where they said that “users just weren’t ready for it”), and in addition owned up to their history of monopoly abuse, then I might start seeing them in a slightly positive way.
But in order to love them, I need a commitment to open standards, interoperability and user rights, both in word and deed.
Exactly. It’s highly dumb for them to talk about love, unless they expect people to love crooks.
TRUE. They should end (not in words, but in deeds) patent racketeering and their sabotaging of open standards. Also, let them stop overriding other Operating Systems on a multi boot computer. That sort of arrogant behaviour is an immediate “no go”.
Wake me up when I can:
– read an EXT4 partition from Windows
– open .odt files in MS Office, without it messing the layout and refusing to open 1 in 3 files
– read & write my (work) Outlook agenda or contact lists from my (home) Linux machine, without endless hoops & crutches.
Also, they should *finally* make their software better.
– please let Windows give us meaningful, human readable error logs
– make a decent package manager that doesn’t need 5 reboots for a simple software install.
– make a search engine that actually works in Outlook
– etc etc
I’ve suffered too much for too long, to suddenly “love” this company.
Edited 2015-01-26 08:28 UTC
“Again” would imply that the were loved at some point in the past. Maybe back in the 1970’s when they specialized in BASIC?
That’s probably the only time I would consider Microsoft (mildly) lovable. 8-bit Microsoft BASIC wasn’t bad.
My first hatred for Microsoft occurred when I tried to use that piece of crap known as Amiga BASIC. It was all downhill from there.
Not even then. People ridiculed the fact that Micro-soft BASIC needed 4k of RAM on the Altair and Bills “Open Letter to Hobbyists” just sealed the deal.
When Windows 95 launched, people were waiting in lines that went out through the doors to buy it.
If that’s not love, I don’t know what is
It isn’t possible for MS to foster any ‘love’ for their products, that would break their commercial strategy. Loving a product means loving your interface to the functionality. MS regularly dismantle and rejig the interface, remove and change functionality as it causes perfectly good applications to become seemingly old-fashioned and obsolete overnight. Your initial love for the product becomes a hatred for Microsoft as they damage your personal relationship with it. On their part it is a deliberate policy. Most of us end up ‘hating’ MS for what they have done to the apps we have ‘loved’. VB6 and XP were prime examples.
VB6? Windows XP? What? ActiveX Controls were nasty, they needed to walk away from that technology, and VB.net is so much better, if you took the time to learn to use it. Windows XP is arguably their most successful OS ever, but what they did to it hurt you in some way?
Vb6 came out in 1998, and .net debuted in 2001. 3 years is over night? did vb 6 apps stop working when .net came out? No. Did the vb 6 IDE stop working when XP came out? No, it continued working and installing until Windows 7, almost 11 years later.
XP was supported until 2013, meaning it was supported for 12 years? What MS is supposed to support it’s software forever? No forward movement? No new technology?
Your reasoning is flawed, and just an example of self entitlement.
Nope, I can mirror this to cars. I can understand newer models offers more comfort (UI) and security (kernel) but you still use them the same way to do the same things. This is just technical evolution, not revolution.
You shouldn’t be ‘forced’ to upgrade with a software rendered useless with planned obsolescence. And car makers supports their older models for at least 20 years.
If Microsoft cannot support software that doesn’t require to keep a stock of spare parts, then it should kit the business.
And please avoid the typical ‘they have to eat’ regarding how much they earn out of thin air, wages fixing cartels, Google buses and native people expropriated. I bet there is enough money to grant longer support.
Your analogy is flawed, for a few reasons. A twenty year old car can still drive on the same roads, while a twenty year old computer isn’t powerful enough to render modern web pages.
A car doesn’t normally interact with other cars, while a computer normally does. In situations where a computer doesn’t have to interact with other computers, old software is perfectly fine. George RR Martin uses Word Star 4.0 on an old DOS machine to write his novels, for example. Of course, when your computer has to interact, everything changes. An old 8086 is enough to grab mail through an unencrypted POP3 server, but what about an SSL-encrypted IMAP server?
Your analogy is also wrong in that car makers support their cars for twenty years. It can seem that way, because so much of a car is made by third-party suppliers. You think Ford manufactures the starter motor, or the alternator? Of course not. They source parts like that. It also means you get situations where simple pars aren’t made. The power window motors for my 2000 Jeep Cherokee stopped being manufactured in 2005.
ATARI ST running at 8 MHz with just 1 MB of memory can go on the Internet, use POP3/SMTP/IMAP. No, they cannot use Flash because it is proprietary. The power of the computer have nothing to do with the running OS. Computer too slow ? Change your computer. OS too slow ? Well, nothing can be done.
Again, MS have plenty bi/mi/llionaires within its ranks, so I guess there is enough money being made to support their software on a longer time frame without sending them to the soup kitchen.
I just see you are trying to put words in my mouth to avoid the main issue I exposed. You work for them ? You are a millionaire and are scared to earn a little less ?
Edited 2015-01-25 08:01 UTC
What? That car analogy doesn’t work, because you can’t buy parts from a 2014 mazda 3 and just easily add them on to your 2001 protege.
Windows 7 and Vista work the same way as XP. To argue otherwise is to either lie to try to make your point, or you do not know how to use Windows. Windows 8.x, sure it’s a little different, but they are back tracking on that.
No software company supports it’s products for 20 years, not Oracle, not Apple, not RedHat, or Google. Canonical only supports 5 years for LTS, 9 months for normal releases.
Your expectations are out of alignment with reality. MS has one of the longer support periods in the industry. Why should you expect better from MS?
Why shouldn’t we ? Because the others don’t offer much support everybody have to ditch out their ‘old products’ after a while ? I can understand for hardware parts (well, not really) but software is another beast. See what is possible : http://osne.ws/lsm
So we want to stagnate, one version of software forever? No new technologies, no forward movements, no innovation?
Yeah, sounds peachy to me.
You can add new techs if you want, but why disabling the older ? I mean, why the need of Windows 10 to get high DPI, it’s just an increase of pixel count. An update should be enough, no need for a whole upgrade.
Isn’t that their plan going forward? Some people are still going to have buy it, people buying or building new computers, but going forward, it’s free, and upgrades from older versions are free for a year.
I contest the entire premise of your analogy:
Windows XP still works just fine on the internet, it’s even compatible with the latest version of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. Skype, Facebook, OSAlert, cPanel, eBay… It’s all there and it’s all 100% compatible with Windows XP.
Windows 98 or Windows 2000, I’m not so sure.
The problem is not the third parties softwares running on XP, it’s the abandon of support of XP. I bet its architecture is not far different from 7 hence back-porting security patches wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass.
Yet I understand they have a business model to run, milking the cow in a more frequent pace. Now offering free Windows 10 upgrade, but I bet not in two years for Windows 11 once you’re hooked again.
There won’t be a Windows 11, 12, 13, 14, 15…etc
Windows 10 is the last major upgrade. Microsoft made it clear, once you upgrade your Windows 7 or 8.1 PC, it will be supported for the life of the device.
Likely, these updates will be released quarterly or yearly and will probably be called Update 1, 2, 3, 4 etc, but they will ‘free’.
In regard to a vendor (commercial or otherwise) ripping up and changing important aspects of UIs and APIs, this applies equally well to Apple, Linux, GNOME, KDE, etc.
In fact, if anything Microsoft maintains backward compatibilty to their detrement. They have to hold onto old APIs, thereby taking up extra disk space and RAM for more DLLs, in order for older programs to run. And Windows has generally been good at running programs compatible with many prior releases of Windows.
Apple rips out APIs all the time. Carbon, general niceness with Java are two that come to mind. Apple summarily killed Game Ranger by dropping an important networking API set.
And as for Linux and FOSS software it suffers from code rot bigtime. Take an application from 5 years ago, and just TRY to build it. The autoconf scripts won’t be compatible with your version of autoconf. The app will rely on data structures and functions long obsoleted from the current versions of a dozen libraries it depends on. Unmaintained FOSS projects quickly become impossible to compile for the lastest GNU/Linux environment.
lol
They need to be stop being crooks before speaking about any love. So far they are improving but they are far from fixing their past bad behavior.
Edited 2015-01-25 01:33 UTC
i will come out and say that I’m dfinitely biased anti MS.
The problem MS has is that over 20 years they’ve consistently and blatantly proven themselves untrustworthy. MS has been a “we win you lose” business partner in all but a very few cases. Their willingness to deal under the table, strongarm tactics, treating end users like idiots at times…
It’s going to take them years of work and good track record to rebuild any trust. It may be too late by then.
Windows versioning confusion
Windows 1.0
Windows 2.0
Windows 2.1
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.1
Windows 95
Windows ME
Windows 2000
Widnows NT 3
Windows NT 4
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows 8
Windows 8.1
Windows 9 No way
Windows 10
Windows 100!!
Like most people, I doubt you’re confused by Windows versions. And if by the slight chance you are, I feel sorry for you.