bosamar
Well-Known Member
Another mixed bag of nuts article, probably by somebody who didn't take time to use RT. The media is Microsoft's worse enemy. How Microsoft Can Save Windows RT | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
How Microsoft Can Save Windows RT
- Thread starter bosamar
- Start date
TeknoBlast
Active Member
Yeah, there's so much bashing out there that it's sickening. Everyday there's some BS story about how terrible Windows 8 is and what a failure Surface is. Very tiring. I think these people and other companies are afraid that MS has something going and that it will succeed. So to combat MS success, all these bashing articles have to be pumped out.
Arizona Willie
Active Member
That fruit company gives tech writers free hardware ( and sometimes cash ) to write articles bashing Microsoft and all it's products.
kristalsoldier
Well-Known Member
There is, however, one thing to be said about MS - in the negative sense. They suck at marketing! By marketing, I don't simply mean TV or print ads, I also mean it in the sense of how to present their products.
Seriously, do you think MS could not have named Windows RT and Surface RT differently? Why name something with an acronym which when expanded means something technical - RunTime!!!! What does RunTime mean anyways to an average consumer?
They also have some serious problems in their product categories - so, we have Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, Windows 8 Enterprise, Windows 8 RT. In the Vista and Win 7 days, they had Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, or Ultimate editions. I mean, come on!!!! Make life simpler!! In this day and age, when most consumers suffer from a mass attention deficit disorder because of the wave upon wave of new products appearing in the market and product use-cycles becoming increasingly compressed, how many people do you think are going to invest the time and effort to deconstruct MS's arcane product categorizations?
And, lastly, MS never has - as far as I know - ever painted what the "big picture" is - at least in comprehensible terms. Their narrative is all messed up - here compare and contrast their narrative to that of Google and Apple.
To this you can add their sometime cavalier attitude to their products - note the examples of Windows Phone 7 and 7.5. For the folks who bought those products, the experience must have been - well, not very good. Imagine buying a new product which is killed off. To be honest with you folks, when I was considering the Surface RT (there is that RT again!), this was something that was playing on my mind. It is another matter that I can see how I can leverage the Surface RT to my advantage - both in terms of investment and in terms of productivity. But that's not the point. What amazes me about MS is that for such a big and experienced company, the way they get their message out to the general public is pathetic - this despite the fact that they have some of the best products in their stable. Given this, I am not surprised to read articles like the one Bosamar posted at the head of this thread. The key strategic question for MS is this: How to generate and sustain excitement in the market place about their products, plans and vision? And, images and video clips of Steve Ballmer jumping around ain't the answer.
Edit: Oh...did I mention - generally speaking, I like and use MS products!
Seriously, do you think MS could not have named Windows RT and Surface RT differently? Why name something with an acronym which when expanded means something technical - RunTime!!!! What does RunTime mean anyways to an average consumer?
They also have some serious problems in their product categories - so, we have Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, Windows 8 Enterprise, Windows 8 RT. In the Vista and Win 7 days, they had Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, or Ultimate editions. I mean, come on!!!! Make life simpler!! In this day and age, when most consumers suffer from a mass attention deficit disorder because of the wave upon wave of new products appearing in the market and product use-cycles becoming increasingly compressed, how many people do you think are going to invest the time and effort to deconstruct MS's arcane product categorizations?
And, lastly, MS never has - as far as I know - ever painted what the "big picture" is - at least in comprehensible terms. Their narrative is all messed up - here compare and contrast their narrative to that of Google and Apple.
To this you can add their sometime cavalier attitude to their products - note the examples of Windows Phone 7 and 7.5. For the folks who bought those products, the experience must have been - well, not very good. Imagine buying a new product which is killed off. To be honest with you folks, when I was considering the Surface RT (there is that RT again!), this was something that was playing on my mind. It is another matter that I can see how I can leverage the Surface RT to my advantage - both in terms of investment and in terms of productivity. But that's not the point. What amazes me about MS is that for such a big and experienced company, the way they get their message out to the general public is pathetic - this despite the fact that they have some of the best products in their stable. Given this, I am not surprised to read articles like the one Bosamar posted at the head of this thread. The key strategic question for MS is this: How to generate and sustain excitement in the market place about their products, plans and vision? And, images and video clips of Steve Ballmer jumping around ain't the answer.
Edit: Oh...did I mention - generally speaking, I like and use MS products!
J515OP
Super Moderator
Kristal I agree that MS does pretty much suck at marketing. One thing to remember is that for most of its existence MS hasn't had to market anything. In reality MS isn't a consumer facing company. It is largely the default OS for the world's computers and they haven't ever needed to do much to convince PC makers to put Windows OS on their machines. Things are changing but being a big company doesn't automatically mean they can be good at everything. Certainly the more they get involved with customers directly (MS Stores, hardware, services, etc.) the more critically important these things become.
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kristalsoldier
Well-Known Member
I agree. That's that anti-MS bias that is so common nowadays. Different metrics for different companies!
kristalsoldier
Well-Known Member
Yes, agreed. But times are changing and for MS they changed the minute they released a mobile phone, Zune and XBox into the market. They should have upped their marketing right there and then.
I agree with the article. Let's be honest here, Win8 sucks balls on par with Vista. Don't get me wrong, it has its team AWESOME moments but it has a lot more WTF moments, and the team AWESOME moments just serve to make the WTF moments all the more F. Maybe the experience isn't so bad on a desktop only machine (I can't imagine its a step up from Win7 though), but when its billed as the next-gen OS you don't get the full flavor of WTF until you get touchy feely with Win8 on the SP.
And before you accuse me of being some sort of Fruity fan boy, I absolutely hate the Apple ecosystem and own none of their hardware. None. Not even an iPod. Nada.
And before you accuse me of being some sort of Fruity fan boy, I absolutely hate the Apple ecosystem and own none of their hardware. None. Not even an iPod. Nada.
I won't call you a fruit fan-boy, but you give no examples of what these WTF moments are in your experience, I hear much BMW (bitch, moan and whine) about Windows 8 mostly around the lack of a Start Menu, it is the same sort of crap I heard when XP's Aqua UI was introduced and IT Professionals did everything in their power to make it look like NT 4 because users could never use it, it wasn't the users that didn't like it was the IT Pro's who hate change. After the short learning curve most people accept or even like Windows 8 outside a very vocal group of Windows 7 fan-boys 
Start button is the least of Win8's problems, who cares about the start button? MS should have just grabbed their balls and done away with the desktop side of the UI completely.
You want examples of how much Win8 sucks? How about three BSODs within an hour of owning the SP. Daily BSODs, sometimes just once, sometimes three or four times, for what? I don't know anymore. Honestly, I stopped trying to "fix" every "problem" I ran into and just chalked it to "It's a Win8 thing". Problems tend to disappear after a few days, resurface after a few more and then do the conga around a whirlpool as a plane crashes into cherry pie. In other words, It's a Win8 thing.
About a day or two ago, Firefox just kept crashing every other web page for the whole day. Now, its working just fine. What changed before that day and after? Nothing, no new programs or updates. Hairdo is the same, my mustache could stand to be trimmed a bit but a penguin just said he liked it. Beats the hell out of me. Its a Win8 thing.
Every so often, when waking up from sleep the system thinks the "Windows" key is pressed so when I try to login the system thinks I want to change monitors (my password starts with a "p", apparently pressing the windows key + p scrolls you through monitor options). This is whether I have the type cover attached or not, before wake up, after wake up, dancing around the Surface while waving the keyboard in the air in the sign of a pentagram under a harvest moon. Nothing works except to power cycle it. Happened consistently for three days and then it cured itself over the weekend. Its a Win8 thing.
Sometimes during login, it won't accept any input from any keyboard. Power-cycling makes it sane again. Other times during login, it acts like it wants to play peek-a-boo with me. I then have to attach the keyboard to it and depending if I whispered sweet nothings to it or not will it work. Actually that doesn't help either, it just does what it wants. WiFi cuts out whenever it wants to, though hopefully today's update will fix that, if not that's ok cause power-cycling the machine seems to help. Actually that doesn't help consistently either. It just does what it wants. Its a Win8 thing.
Multi-tasking with the peek feature, having a web browser open that is in a web portal on the desktop side in one view and a metro app open on the other makes the SP BSOD. I think that's the right variables anyways...wait, no its not. Plenty of other times when peeking a desktop web browser open a portal to another dimension that had a Metrocity worked just fine. Who knows, its a Win 8 thing.
How about taking notes in the Metro OneNote app and trying to copy and paste those notes into Word on the desktop side, which only gives you a blank box. However if you paste those same notes into Metro's Mail app and email it to yourself you can then download the pictures to save as a jpeg, at which point you can copy and paste the image into your Word doc. If you feel like you really want to cut out the save-as-a-jpeg-to-file step cause you know we only have a limited amount of room here, you can email it to yourself, turn on your desktop that runs Win7, open up the same version of Word and just copy and paste directly from the email to your Word document. Its a Win7 thing. :cool2:
IMO, These problems are symptomatic problems of Win8's bi-polar build. And the schizo attitude eliminates the only advantage I see Win8 could have over Win7 in a desktop experience and that's maybe a speed increase. Why have a faster OS when the user has to do all this stupid rotation between Desktop and Metro? It could very well be that in a desktop experience there is no disadvantage either but then why bother? And that's the problem. Win8 for a desktop machine is an irrelevant product at best and for the Surface its a V1 product when it needs to be a V2 product. In other words, it needs to stop being Vista and be Win7.
You want examples of how much Win8 sucks? How about three BSODs within an hour of owning the SP. Daily BSODs, sometimes just once, sometimes three or four times, for what? I don't know anymore. Honestly, I stopped trying to "fix" every "problem" I ran into and just chalked it to "It's a Win8 thing". Problems tend to disappear after a few days, resurface after a few more and then do the conga around a whirlpool as a plane crashes into cherry pie. In other words, It's a Win8 thing.
About a day or two ago, Firefox just kept crashing every other web page for the whole day. Now, its working just fine. What changed before that day and after? Nothing, no new programs or updates. Hairdo is the same, my mustache could stand to be trimmed a bit but a penguin just said he liked it. Beats the hell out of me. Its a Win8 thing.
Every so often, when waking up from sleep the system thinks the "Windows" key is pressed so when I try to login the system thinks I want to change monitors (my password starts with a "p", apparently pressing the windows key + p scrolls you through monitor options). This is whether I have the type cover attached or not, before wake up, after wake up, dancing around the Surface while waving the keyboard in the air in the sign of a pentagram under a harvest moon. Nothing works except to power cycle it. Happened consistently for three days and then it cured itself over the weekend. Its a Win8 thing.
Sometimes during login, it won't accept any input from any keyboard. Power-cycling makes it sane again. Other times during login, it acts like it wants to play peek-a-boo with me. I then have to attach the keyboard to it and depending if I whispered sweet nothings to it or not will it work. Actually that doesn't help either, it just does what it wants. WiFi cuts out whenever it wants to, though hopefully today's update will fix that, if not that's ok cause power-cycling the machine seems to help. Actually that doesn't help consistently either. It just does what it wants. Its a Win8 thing.
Multi-tasking with the peek feature, having a web browser open that is in a web portal on the desktop side in one view and a metro app open on the other makes the SP BSOD. I think that's the right variables anyways...wait, no its not. Plenty of other times when peeking a desktop web browser open a portal to another dimension that had a Metrocity worked just fine. Who knows, its a Win 8 thing.
How about taking notes in the Metro OneNote app and trying to copy and paste those notes into Word on the desktop side, which only gives you a blank box. However if you paste those same notes into Metro's Mail app and email it to yourself you can then download the pictures to save as a jpeg, at which point you can copy and paste the image into your Word doc. If you feel like you really want to cut out the save-as-a-jpeg-to-file step cause you know we only have a limited amount of room here, you can email it to yourself, turn on your desktop that runs Win7, open up the same version of Word and just copy and paste directly from the email to your Word document. Its a Win7 thing. :cool2:
IMO, These problems are symptomatic problems of Win8's bi-polar build. And the schizo attitude eliminates the only advantage I see Win8 could have over Win7 in a desktop experience and that's maybe a speed increase. Why have a faster OS when the user has to do all this stupid rotation between Desktop and Metro? It could very well be that in a desktop experience there is no disadvantage either but then why bother? And that's the problem. Win8 for a desktop machine is an irrelevant product at best and for the Surface its a V1 product when it needs to be a V2 product. In other words, it needs to stop being Vista and be Win7.
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J515OP
Super Moderator
Well I'll have to disagree with your conclusion and I am sure others will as well. Windows 8 is far from Vista (whose primary flaw was a lack of drivers) and is definitely a step toward the future beyond Windows 7. As far as your specific Surface issues you should try a complete reset of your device. Some problems are known and may continue but your level of issues sounds like it calls for a full reset and then install updates from scratch. Yes that probably will suck to do, but your other option is to continue to put up with the issues you describe without trying the primary fix for your types of problems.
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