Microsoft’s plan and monetizing don’t affect my decision. I’m just a guy trying to make a living. The only thing I care is if my income > my expense. Subscription is fine by me in this regard, tons of applications I’m using professionally are already subscription based. That model makes it easier on my wallet if anything.
That being said I still prefer Arch Linux for as many things as I can. Sticking to my Windows 7 to play games still.
The biggest problem that Microsoft has, is that they have absolutely no control over the hardware that their system runs on. And, that it, nevertheless, is a completely “monolithic” system. The company is expected to provide a system that runs on everything, and to always provide security patches that will not break anything, but they do not know where their system is running.
People and companies responded long ago to this situation: they simply stopped upgrading. If I don’t see “Windows-XP” in a commercial shop, I’m sure that I will see “Windows-7,” its immediate-64-bit successor. I almost never see any subsequent operating system version. Microsoft puts out new versions, and they’re ignored.
A “subscription model” is a pipe dream. People today pay just a few hundred bucks for “a computer,” and likely as not they treat it just as they do their cars: “they don’t even change the oil, ever.” They’ve never been asked to “subscribe to” the privilege of maintaining an operating-system on the machine, and, if asked/required to do so, they’ll simply vote with their feet: they won’t buy that version.
And … retailers won’t stock it. Why? Because they want a product, “once sold, to stay sold.” They are selling “a product,” not “a service.” Customers whose computers suddenly stopped working would be coming back to the stores, demanding a refund. And it would not make one slightest bit of difference what the forty-seven pages of legalese that they didn’t read before clicking “I Accept” actually said about it.
How else is Microsoft going to make money, a large chunk of their revenue is because of Windows and they’re a for-profit entity.
And where did you get the 34.99 figure from, not like it may be a major deal for most people because it’s dirt cheap as far as subscriptions go. The issue that remains with Linux is that its development is still wracked with a healthy dose of software ideology (ignoring various usability requests in the name of keeping things ‘Linux-y’. If not for Linux Mint they wouldn’t even have a leg to stand on in terms of convincing Windows users)
I think that a 3d game engine interface is the next thing, (as a OS)
ad true 3d UI, from start to finish, with a totally customizable ui
your desktop, could be a desktop. or a tool wall/shelf or? anything.
you could go into ‘compact mode’ where it zooms in on a command line and unloads 90% of the
‘OS UI’ so you can use all those resources in a app.
Microsoft can’t afford to make their customers angry, so I doubt you’ll see them do something stupid like holding your PC hostage with subscriptions. The reason? Google, Apple, and Unix-based OS’s are just waiting for them to make a mistake and drive customers away. The other thing is Windows pre-installations on PC’s – that is what made MS so big in the first place. They aren’t going to jeopardize that by making it less attractive, even though PCs aren’t selling as well as in the past. Mobile is what they will concentrate on, so look in that direction for where they will make most of their money.
MS didn’t get so large by being dumb; whatever their strategy is, you can be sure it won’t alienate their installed user base.
@BPR: I think you just described Linux for the most part. To the best of my knowledge there’s no 3d tool shelf desktop though.
@Safetyman: Microsoft offers financial incentives to manufacturers that get Windows Certified which entails releasing their products according to a set of rules set by Microsoft. No manufacture is required to get Windows Certified when selling computers with pre-installed Windows, but they all do because forgoing those financial incentives means their products would be more expensive than all the others who do get certified.
At this point in time Microsoft is not in a position to make any moves serious enough to push their customers away, but they are in the process of positioning themselves so that they can. If you look at my post about UEFI on the first page you can see that through this certification process Microsoft is trying to strong arm the manufacturers into making equipment that locks out Linux and allows only Windows. Further down the road when Microsoft has knocked out Linux they’ll need to squash Apple & Google. Google wouldn’t be too hard actually, because Chrome OS is entirely internet based, without a connection you basically cannot use a Chromebook so all Microsoft needs to do is hire a few hackers to repeatedly attack Google causing loss of customer data and inability to access any of the applications used by Chromebooks.
Apple’s been a thorn in Microsoft’s side for a good while now and Microsoft has done a pretty good job of keeping Apple a serious minority player in the desktop OS market.
P.S. I remember when Windows 8 came out to much criticism I read an interview with Steve Ballmer in which he said “I’m playing the long game on this one.”
P.P.S. In regards to Google, you know the same thing happened to T-Mobile. Their Sidekick brand was one of the most popular brands and like Chrome OS it relied heavily on on-line services. It was irreperably hacked causing the complete destruction of the Sidekick brand and T-Mobile lost the lions share of their customers, so much so that afterwards T-Mobile was up for sale.
There actually have been attempts to attach a 3D skin over the Windows environment, but the issue is that they tend to be gimmicky and they don’t actually improve your experience compared to a regular 2D UI.
In general, people will not want their application’s UI to look as messy as their real-world toolshelf or desk (you will end up having to spend a lot of time organizing and positioning everything, and the average person just wants to get something done).
Constraints on Microsoft include European and Chinese markets. Microsoft already lost a big case in European courts a while ago when they tried to force Firefox out of business, and were damn near broken up in the United States, into an operating system company and an applications company. I’m sure they felt they dodged a bullet then, and don’t want to risk getting the anti-trust lawyers riled up at them again. And the Chinese, of course, would gladly invest the time and money to make their own pirated Chinese language version, if they thought they could get away with it, and it was worth their while.
I suspect Microsoft is looking for a way to turn Windows into a subscription service rather than a product. But their hubris has gotten them into trouble before, and probably will again.
@Ace: I tried a 3d file manager years ago because I thought the novelty would be fun, but ultimately it proved considerably less useable than a typical 2d manager.
At any rate hardware accelerated desktops have been around for a while, including Windows. Those Windows you’re looking at right now are planes created in an orthographic 3d environment with an offscreen buffer rendering the contents and displaying them as a texture on that plane.
The Plasma desktop I’m using right now takes things a few steps farther than Windows by adding in a number of effects to those 3d objects, like wobbly windows, as they call them, that act a little like cloth when being sized and dragged. You can also download and/or create your own animations for minimize, maximize, open and close effects for the windows which is neat. Anyway it’s all already 3d, just a 3d representation of the 2d environment we’re all used to.
So what BPR is talking about in terms of using game-engine like technology to render the desktop is already being used in most of the major desktop environments.
@Orinoco: China has been trying to make their own competing OS for a while now too. The Chinese defense department had been working on the Kylin OS since 2001 and recently China has started work on another new OS citing US spying as a reason for wanting their own in-house OS.
P.S. In regards to desktops, the desktop itself is little more than a graphical file manager. In Linux, for instance, the desktop is not so tied to the underlying kernel. The kernel is responsible for things such as resource management, the desktop just provides a graphical means to access the functionality provided by other aspects of the OS. Making your own 3d desktop probably isn’t as complicated as it might sound. You wouldn’t have to re-write all the nitty gritty stuff handled by the kernel, just a graphical interface that allows the user to interact with that functionality.
And when Ace talks about needing to use the terminal in Linux, truth be told a lot of applications are command prompt based in Windows too. In Windows there’s just more ‘front ends’ available that provide a graphical interface to those command line based applications. The graphical front end provides the options to the user in a user friendly manner, then when the user takes an action the front end translates the user’s selections to the appropriate command and ‘types’ it into the command line for you. There are a lot of Linux front ends too, but writing a graphical front end in addition to a command line based application increases the work load quite a bit.
At any rate the ‘desktop’ is just a front end for the operating system itself.
But people expect to avoid manual typing in the terminal completely in this day and age, if Linux is to be ready to receive hordes of Windows users as a result of Windows 10, then the distro managers need to take into account the expectations of those users.
As I hinted before, the only distro right now that’s making a serious effort to provide a complete graphicall front-end is Linux Mint, and that has helped them become perhaps the most highly praised variant of all time (it’s apparently setting records at the Distro Watch site).
I understand that and really a lot of Linux distributions have made huge leaps as far as user friendliness is concerned. The thing is that these distributions are free and open source, a lot of the people working on these distributions are volunteers and are producing things for Linux pro bono, but of course they need to earn money somehow in order to survive so they have additional jobs, unlike a Microsoft employee they can’t dedicate forty hours a week or more to Linux.
Moreover there are a lot of programmers that make plenty of wonderful software for Linux, but a lot of programmers are not that great at making little graphics like icons and window backgrounds. A programmer can make a great application that works from the terminal, but unless that programmer has some skill with applications like GIMP or Blender he’s going to need some artists to donate their time so he can make a graphical user interface.
An application is one thing, but add on a GUI and you’re talking not only a lot of extra programming, but also artwork which most people here probably know is not particularly easy or cheap.
Some clarity for you:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-commits-to-10-year-support-lifecycle-for-windows-10/
“Microsoft executives have started talking up new ways to make money from Windows. Executives see advertising revenue from Bing, the company’s Internet search engine, which is enmeshed in various functions within Windows, as one avenue. In addition, if the company can get enough people to buy games and other software through the Windows app store, its cut from those transactions could become meaningful.”
"Sure Microsoft wants to make money off of subscription revenue. But the company’s number one priority right now seems to be ensuring that everyone uses Windows 10 on all their devices.
After all, once the world’s on Windows 10, and using the latest versions, Microsoft is in a better position to sell you stuff like the growing Office 365 productivity software suite as a paid subscription."
The problem is, simply, that Microsoft has millions of installed units, and plenty of corporate clients that are much bigger than they are. The “consumer market” is almost an afterthought for them.
Someone in Redmond still wants to make Windows “cool and sexy,” but that’s not what those big corporate customers want. They want a reliable application platform that basically does not change much. Windows, to them, is a necessary-evil that enables them to run their business because it runs the software that they need to run. Microsoft continues to do what they’ve done ever since Vista … gratuitous changes that corporate customers did not ask for and do not want.
Not like parts of the Linux world are any different (remember all the comments about Ubuntu’s developers changing things for the sake of changing things, like suddenly throwing in a new UI titled ‘unity’)?
FOSS organizations have often shown to not be any better at listening to their users than corporations, and in several cases are instead shown to be worse (but I swear that some people seem to choose FOSS regardless not because the software is better, but solely to stick it to the corporations).
I heartily agree … both KDE and Gnome have “gone strange.” But you can actually do something about that.
One issue facing Microsoft is the fact that people don’t buy a new PC as often as they used to (due to the slowdown in hardware advances).
This means there are less licenses of Windows being sold, it’d be good for them to kick Intel into increasing the size of their R&D funding so that less years go by before you have a meaningful hardware upgrade (providing that AMD is never able to get back into the game).
Also, regarding ad revenue. If Microsoft does it the same way as Google Android then you’re not going to have ads popping up on your desktop or in your purchased applications, but only in the free applications that come with the OS (never seen an ad pop up on my android tablet when doing something like opening an app. or switching screens).
@Ace: Actually the Unity desktop environment from the Ubuntu folks was in response to user criticism of Gnome 3. People really disliked the direction taken with the new Gnome so Ubuntu decided to write their own desktop to replace it.
Interestingly enough Gnome 3 itself was in response to user demand for simplification and ease of use, but they over simplified. The argument about FOSS not listening to the customer doesn’t apply here, not saying it’s not a valid argument, just that in this case the FOSS community listened too well to user demand and as it turns out the users didn’t actually want what they thought they wanted.
@Sundial: I agree, but as the above shows it’s not always corporate customers that lead a product in the wrong direction. The thing is people don’t always know or understand what they want or what they need because they don’t fully understand what else is required to meet those demands nor do they always understand the ramifications of having those demands met.
From the corporate customer stand point, which is surely Microsoft’s bread and butter, putting too much emphasis on their needs could lead the consumer away from Windows because it focuses too much on what the corporations want and not enough on what the consumer wants.
The problem here, for corporations, is that this could compromise Windows main selling point which is broad compatibility. Developers make software for Windows because of the large user base, but if those consumers start migrating elsewhere then the developers will follow. In the long run it’s in the corporate customers best interests that Microsoft dedicate some time and effort to the average consumer.
P.S. The consumer not knowing what they want is actually not that uncommon. There have been a number of articles in the news lately about how food chains such as McDonalds and Pizza Hut have lost millions betting on what the consumer wants. Surveys and focus groups all suggested that these restaurants should be serving healthier, more customizeable meals. The chains listened to this consumer demand only to find that the consumers are not buying the products they said they wanted.
The reasoning behind this is not always the same, in this particular case it would seem that what the consumer said they wanted ended up being too expensive. They said they wanted healthier more customizeable meals, but they did not know that these meals would be more expensive to make and are not willing to pay the price. Really the consumer lied, they said they wanted healthy, but what they really wanted was cheap and the two are not the same.
Atari is another example, during the development phase for their handheld game system Lynx the consumers repeatedly told Atari they wanted a bigger device, something that felt more substantial in their hands. They ended up bulking up the device with plenty of empty space just to make it bigger to satisfy the demands of their focus groups, but when they released the device it didn’t sell largely because it was too big. Sega’s less capable, yet much smaller device fared much better.
Of course there’s also the infamous “New Coke” which was in response to Pepsi’s blind taste test victory. Focus groups all indicated that New Coke tasted great and would be a big seller, but instead it was too similar to Pepsi so Pepsi fans saw little reason to switch because they already had what they liked and Coke fans were alienated because they liked Coke the way it was.
P.P.S. Walmart, on the other hand, seems to be making a different choice. Maybe they’re all too familiar with this phenomenon? Right now the consumers seem to be saying they want Walmart to pay their employees more, there seems to be a very strong public opinion on this subject.
So far Walmart has not catered to this demand and it might be that they know the public is lying about it, or rather does not fully understand what they think they want. In order to pay their employees more they’d have to raise the price on their goods and the only reason people shop at Walmart is because their goods are cheap. If they paid their employees more the consumer would stop shopping there.
The consumer says Walmart should pay their employees more, but in reality it is the consumer that is not willing to pay Walmart employees more.
People like the romance of the idea of walmart paying its people more, It feels good to say “I stand for this good ideal, Even though I don’t have to do anything material to make it happen, But doomit like me because I stand for this good idea”
Well, I do know one thing for sure: my computer is not a television.
Microsoft is a company that provides an integrated operating-system-plus-application suite to literally millions of computers around the world. Most of those computers are owned and used by businesses, who already pay considerable sums for licensing and support. These are Microsoft’s bread and butter.
Microsoft’s contribution to what those users are doing, however, should be unobtrusive. The system “just works,” every single day. It does not try to “monetize Microsoft.”
Microsoft has done a lot of things over many years to offend business users and to make them unwilling to upgrade their machines. They should be reversing those mistakes, not adding to them.