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from the yes-microsoft-still-has-relevance dept.
A couple of interesting tidbits came out of Build 2014 yesterday. The conference is being streamed for those who cannot attend in person.
Microsoft Planning on $0 Windows for Some Devices
Apparently competition, combined with a desire for Microsoft to invade new market spaces, is applying downward pressure on the price of some forms of Windows licenses. Microsoft announced that Windows would be available at no cost for "Internet of Things" devices as well as for phones and tablets with screens less than 9 inches. Not included: Whether this applies to Windows 8.1 or Windows 8.1 RT, but the inclusion of "phones and tablets" leads me to believe that it will be the RT version.
Start Menu To Return To Windows 8.1
After nearly a year and a half since it was removed in Windows 8, the start menu is finally returning. The previews shown at BUILD show that live tiles (similar to those on Windows Phone) will be displayed side-by-side with the more traditional hierarchy of groups. No word on when this will finally be released to users.
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Thursday April 03 2014, @04:55PM
I'm glad they're taking steps in the right direction, it's just too bad it took them so long. I'm liking the way things are running without Ballmer at the helm. Unfortunately the bad part of this is they're essentially giving people a reason to stick with windows, or at least reducing the reasons to abandon it.
I know it's a controversial P.O.V that *a lot* of people disagree with, but I was looking forward to companies porting enterprise applications like CAD to another OSes, which would have been the only option if Windows became unusable as an enterprise OS. It looks like Satya Nadella recognizes where MS bread and butter is.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03 2014, @05:24PM
It looks like Satya Nadella recognizes where MS bread and butter is.
CAL's and Office (which they are moving to a yearly sub rate). Everything else is about 'even' or at a loss.
(Score: 5, Informative) by edIII on Thursday April 03 2014, @07:17PM
Mr. Nadella recognizes one thing clearly, that Ballmer was just too plain arrogant to understand:
The majority of people do not love Microsoft, do not love paying high dollar licensing fees, and do not love having to pay multiple expensive Microsoft certified engineers to keep their systems up
This is very much like when the new method for aluminum was found and all of the sudden it was worth far less than gold. It simply doesn't cost hundreds of dollars in licensing and more than that in infrastructure and maintenance costs per employee to have productivity and collaboration software anymore.
Mr. Nadella will do whatever it takes to preserve the vendor lock-in, and part of that is the fight for the consumer desktop as well as the enterprise desktop.
In the company I was managing I pushed out Open Office simply due to the costs alone. Those savings allowed me to afford other SAAS that improved customer retention. The biggest problem? Training? No. Features? No. Compatibility? Yes.
Microsoft and Adobe create a vendor lock-in stranglehold on industry. That only happens because Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum conspire together to create specific formats and features that will only work in Microsoft/Adobe software.
Time and time again I would be called to deal with a PDF or Word document that had some strange encoding or encryption that no 3rd party reader could possibly deal with. I ended up creating a remote desktop machine for everyone that had a single copy of Word/Acrobat for those issues. Talking with the companies creating them was no help as usually the response was, "Just get Word/Acrobat and stop bothering us".
If Mr. Nadella pushes the consumer and enterprise too far on the desktop and causes a mass migration it could upset that delicate vendor lock-in ecosystem that more than Adobe is cooperating with them to create.
Open source is more than capable at this point of delivering all of the features (the useful and common ones) and that is driving the price down.
I think Mr. Nadella knows that his only hope of keeping Microsoft alive is to preserve that vendor lock-in as long as possible till they can and have fully switched over to SAAS and Azure virtual machines for enterprise.
Even then the revenue will be cut in half when all is said and done
I bet the biggest thing he is pissed about is how Google can do it so cheaply since it figured out a way to be subsidized by the advertisers all across the world for everything they do.
So I am not surprised in the least that they are bringing it back finally with Ballmer gone, or that they are planning free operating systems for mobile devices. Microsoft will do whatever it takes to remain relevant, which usually involves some form of vendor lock-in.
It's finally starting to get ugly for Microsoft and in another 10 years you will see Microsoft start to struggle like Apple had when they almost had to call it quits.
Less revenue, a war on all fronts, and mistrust and malcontent with the techies is not a recipe for long term success. They need something unique and high quality to compete in the future, not just relying on the people to be there because they have to.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by dotdotdot on Thursday April 03 2014, @09:30PM
I don't see this as a good thing. I would rather pay for something up front than have it subsidized by selling my private data to advertisers.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday April 04 2014, @01:55AM
It most certainly is not a good thing.
The Google paradigm is as damaging or more to end users and businesses. Government may be one thing, but advertisers are pure evil with no pretense of wanting to make things good for the consumer. They already have indexes and risk assessments for practically everything like whether or not I am likely to take my prescriptions on time, am I pregnant, am I gay, am I deadbeat, etc.
Can we really trust Google to maintain our privacy and agree to not use the individual indexes they create for all of our communications and data? When there is that much money at stake and they literally require it to continue operating?
I think the general consensus is no. They are just the competition to Microsoft by providing a very disruptive influence to whole scores of industries. They are like a true scourge in that way. Like we needed a new plague.
As big as a problem that they are though, I cannot truly hate them as much as Microsoft for their behavior. Google can and does make tremendous code contributions to the global communities. They can be a little bit arrogant about how their way is the right way do it, but still they do push out quality product compared to the rest of the proprietary offerings.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.