back to article Business is back, baby! Hasta la VISTA, Win 8... Oh, yeah, Windows 9

There’s nothing tech companies like more than creating buzz. The more buzz, the less substance – as a rash of me-too tablet events a few years back proved. Tomorrow, Microsoft is scheduled to host an event on the West Coast that many believe will be the scene of the unveiling of the next version of Windows. Upping the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    they can shove their TIFKAM back up their compiler

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Limited audience

      As quite clearly, they have no clue what people want anymore, so just show something and see what the reaction is (but given it's press and Microsoft are footing the bill, everyone will love it regardless).

      And therein lies the problem. Because the only way Microsoft know how to work, is buttering up the press with nice things, and nobody in the press dare upset Microsoft, as the nice things then stop, Microsoft have lost touch with what consumers want/need.

      They have created an army of yes men, but back in the real world, because everyone around them is now yes men, they have no clue what the problem is anymore.

      This is why Windows 9 will also fail

      1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

        Re: Limited audience

        but given it's press and Microsoft are footing the bill, everyone will love it regardless

        Ahem. May I kindly suggest you go to the hot place for that one. Some of us are perfectly capable of going on vendor-bought junkets and giving them not one iota of slack compared to the scathing examinations we'd give them if we had to buy the stuff ourselves.

        Which is why they don't invite me to these things...but we're not all so low on self esteem that a plane ticket and some bad conference food is enough to buy our loyalty, thank you very much.

        1. Gene Cash Silver badge

          Re: Limited audience

          "Which is why they don't invite me to these things"

          Er, I think you just made his point of the "army of yes-men"

          1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

            Re: Limited audience

            I've no truck with the "army of yes men" comment. Just the idea that all press become "yes men" when exposed to junkets. We do not.

        2. Ottis

          Re: Limited audience

          But, Sir, it is as stated to those who are invited, and thus the point is valid. Your opinion in the estranged wilderness is unimportant to them, as is that of their real world users.

      2. SQL God

        Re: Limited audience

        Microsoft's audience is management. (Think Pointy-Hair in Dilbert.) I'm a tech. Their SQL Server 2012 management console is completely graffitied-out in ridiculous end-user pop-up tools to the point that it is almost unusable to a hardcore developer like me.

        High level managers and goofy kids coming up through today's universities absolutely love all the superfluous flash, easy (and very basic tools) and sizzle of current MS product demonstrations. High efficiency information workers just suffer working around all that junk.

        As a MARKETING approach, Microsoft is (unfortunately) doing exactly the right thing. We're just bummed out that WE are not on the receiving end of all their billions.

  2. SteveK

    Autocorrect?

    Do I detect a whiff of autocorrect/autocomplete/rushed deadline?

    "...Windows 8 operation system..."

    "...Wind 32 apps on the desktops..."

    "...in their move from Widows XP."

    Or are these deliberate and I'm just behind the times on Microsoft-bashing?

    1. Hollerith 1

      Re: Autocorrect?

      As well as other typos. Tich!

      1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

        Re: Autocorrect?

        corrections@theregister.co.uk ?

        1. Fibbles

          Re: Autocorrect?

          hire_a_proofreader@theregister.co.uk

  3. Bucky O' Hare

    Getting excited about new Windows releases, do people still do that?

    1. TheFinn

      No. They fear it...

      1. Tom 13

        You say 'fear' he says 'excitement'. From a PR perspective, what's the difference?

    2. Buzzword

      I remember Windows 95

      It's hard to believe today, but back in 1995 there were iPhone-esque queues outside computer shops on the night of the launch of Windows 95. That was the last time consumers were excited about Microsoft products (not counting the XBox).

      1. Fibbles
    3. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

      Probably the wrong kind of excitement.

      Like discovering that W8 doesn't quite do background audio anymore - Metro-mode app can claim exlusive lock on all audio channels, including audio CD. How quaint.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Time to rethink

    "There is a very real danger to Microsoft that more companies standardise on the desktop-oriented Windows 7 to avoid Windows 8 – and in so doing avoid Windows Next and Windows After That, too."

    I don't get how MS will avoid this. I work for a Fortune 150 with 50,000+ employees, and the org is still moving from XP to Windows 7, and has been for 3+ years. The complete rollout of Windows 7 will probably end sometime next year.

    Does MS expect IT to instantly start moving people from 7 to 8(or 9 or whatever)? There's no way that that's going to happen. Windows 7 is going to be around till 2020 at the very least, probably longer.

    The simple truth is that Operating Systems are no longer the sexy things they were in the 90s and early 00s. The vast majority of what people do needs nothing more than Windows 7 (and frankly, XP worked just as well for a lot of people). The new shiny stuff is great for sysadmins and IT, but the end user, perhaps not as much. Good enough is good enough - just like with CPU power, where a CPU from 2009-ish is vastly overpowered for MS Office (unless you're a real Excel guru, in which case you know when to upgrade).

    The future is really in integration and OS-agnostic management.

    Simply upgrading the box on the desk is not enough - MS has to sell a credible vision of mobile + tablet + secure remote access, along with easy management - and I think it needs to start managing OS X machines as well.

    The likes of Casper are used in my org today, and it's messy. Apple doesn't seem to want to do stuff with the enterprise, so if MS got some smart people to create a tool (or plug-in) that lets you manage OS X machines, and iOS, that would be $$$ in the bank.

    1. Wade Burchette

      Re: Time to rethink

      There are a few reasons why I will use Windows 7 as long as I can.

      First, I hate the cloud, and by extension the "cloud first" idea. I do not like the idea of my OS wanting my to sign up for an account so I can use it. Sure, it is optional now (but also very hard to find out how not to), but will it remain that way? Windows 8.1 has a lot of settings centered around advertising, Bing, and location. Windows 7 has none of those things. You can turn those settings off, but will that always be true? Because of that, I will be keeping Windows 7 for a very long time. I view the cloud as nothing more than a way to extract money from you the rest of your life. I'm going to fight against it as best as I can.

      Second, to say Windows 8 is dog-butt ugly would be too kind. My eyes have a hard time focusing on anything. There is not enough contrast. This flat, square look is and always will be terrible. The new Windows logo is dumber than a box of hammers.

      I have read about an Aero mod for Windows 8, though I haven't tried it. Mods can make Windows better, but they can't take out the cloud/Bing/advertising junk.

    2. Censor

      Re: Time to rethink

      Apple is partnering with IBM for the enterprise.

      1. ecofeco Silver badge

        Re: Time to rethink

        "Apple is partnering with IBM for the enterprise."

        That's effin' SCARY! (and not in a good way)

        1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

          Re: Time to rethink

          @Ecofoco

          IBM have over 20,000 OSX machines deployed in active service amongst their workforce. They know OSX management better than anyone excepting Google.

      2. P. Lee

        Re: Time to rethink

        Apple should have partnered with SUN when they went OSX: killer workstations, also ready for x86.

        1. Tsiklon

          Re: Time to rethink

          that would have been a bit of a turn up for the books, i wonder how things would have gone if Apple bought Sun up instead of Oracle. Solaris with Cocoa interoperability? OS X & ZFS? Decent Apple Servers? OS X Sparc, Power and x86? Apple with a large and solid enterprise division would be quite a sight, at a purely academic level i think it would have been properly interesting.

      3. John Tserkezis

        Re: Time to rethink

        "Apple is partnering with IBM for the enterprise."

        This was outlined in the Speaking In Tech podcast.

        It appears they've commissioned IBM to write ~100 iOS apps to link with their equipment. They're by far most of the them are going to be simple one-purpose apps, but this is a bad thing regardless.

        Instead of BYOD, you're forcing kit that isn't quite suiteable for enterprise onto users who will most likely keep their own/other phones anyway becase the IBM/Apple kit most likely will only ever fit a narrower range of uses.

        Having more than one phone is stupid, it's a smartphone for feck's sake, it should be able to do everything, then why do so many corporations make it so much harder for their employees? Im guessing because liability is easier and cheaper to handle when it isn't your problem anymore.

        1. Tom 13

          @John Tserkezis

          Your start wasn't cringeworthy, but this is:

          Having more than one phone is stupid,

          As an employee I do NOT want my work phone to be my personal phone. I want them to be different because if I change jobs I want to take my data and my phone with me. BYOD is a marketing LSD trip. Businesses and government agencies don't want it because that breaks their security models, especially as it relates to data retention. I know HOW to configure my smart phone or home computer to download copies of my work email to my mail client of choice, but company/agency security policies prohibit that. The end result is you wind up with a business and a personal smart phone.

          On the iPhone front, yes they are a nightmare for companies to manage. Which speaks volumes about how badly MS fumbled their smart phones. With Management built right in, they should have swept Apple right out the door if the phone was fit for purpose.

    3. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: Time to rethink

      Exactly AC. I've been saying this for months here and people act like I'm telling a fairy tale.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Time to rethink

      Those who believe an OS is just a GUI, usually fail to understand that hardware evolution needs OS evolution as well. There has been big improvements in the past few years - a large increase in the number of processing units, large memory spaces, sold state disks, now also directed attached to the PCIe bus which will need to become even faster, and GPU no longer limited to UI processing. Older OSes were never designed, nor could be retrofitted, to take really advantage of such hardware. Sure, non real need for browsing or the like, but there are a lot of users who perform complex and heavy tasks on PCs. They may not care much about UI widgets bells&whistles - but the do care their hardware is used for what they paid for it, and not by an OS designed mostly for a single CPU, 128MB of RAM, and 'slow' spinning disks of a few GBs only.

      The OS internals needs to be designed in different ways, using different techniques to handle larger and newer resources.

      But if all you care are shiny buttons, well, you don't need them.

      1. P. Lee

        Re: Time to rethink

        > Those who believe an OS is just a GUI...

        While true, Win7 does all this, as does Linux and OSX. MS' problem is not that 8.x is ugly (though that's true), but that after W7, nothing much of value is added by W8 and probably W9 too. Now the driver for OS upgrades is application support which will be mostly driven by MS' desire for an OS upgrade, not hardware changes.

        This may be slightly unkind to MS, but even if they did do a great job of rewriting windows for v9, I'm not sure its a job anyone actually needs done without serious architectural changes. How about the OS and apps not being mixed on the same file-system? A general, "this app is cleared for auto-update from this repository" for third-parties?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Time to rethink

          Under the hood Windows 8 has improvements over Windows 7. For example, its hypervisor is far better, and can take advantage of newer CPU virtualization support. Sure, you can use another one, but if your OS comes with a good embedded hypervisor, why not? Especially since they are a pretty intrusive kind of software.

          There's also better support for high DPI displays, and they'll become more common soon.

          As SSD disks becomes mainstream, the OS needs to change how the disk is used to maximize its life, or performance.

          What about DIrectX 12? Will be it retrofitted to 7 or will it be an 8+ exclusive? You may not need it, or you may...

          There's a difference between supporting new hw somehow - i.e. using SATA disks pretending they were plain older ATA ones - or exploiting its capabilities fully. New hw may present itself to older OS in a compatible way, but you're going to renounce to use it fully. Does it make sense to spend $$$$ in new hw, and use it only in a legacy compatible mode?

          Also, new release may start to drop old legacy features for many reasons, including security - and support new standards as well.

          Meanwhile, some applications start to remove support for older operating systems, XP and Vista. For example the latest Canon camera utilities don't support them. If you buy one of the new cameras announced at Photokina (i.e. the EOS 7D MK II or the Powershot G7 X), they are supported only by the latest utility releases (and some are 64-bit only) - if you have one of the older OS, or you upgrade, or you have to renounce to use their software. Lightroom already no longer supports older OSes.

          It's not always the OS to drive the adoption of new applications, sometimes it's the other way round. You may need a newer application because it does support something you really need, just to find it won'r run on older OSes. Supporting XP and Vista along 7 and 8 is becoming more and more time consuming, and since XP is EOLed, and Vista has a tiny share of the market, expect more and more new releases dropping support for them. If you're ok with older software it won't hurt you much, but if you need newer ones - and you could, if you need to support something newer, you will need a newer OS.

          1. Paul Shirley

            @LDS

            The reality is for almost all windows users the ui is the OS, a view Microsoft reinforce by packaging the whole thing as one monolithic blob and their take it or leave it choice of ui. Few are aware of improvement in the core post win7, few need those improvements enough to care. And crucially the businesses that should care know win7 is good enough already for their users needs.

            By tying the os to their ui so tightly Microsoft have tied their future to the ui. And the win 8 ui stinks.

          2. Steve the Cynic

            Re: Time to rethink

            "What about DIrectX 12? Will be it retrofitted to 7 or will it be an 8+ exclusive? You may not need it, or you may..."

            I'll observe in passing that DirectX 9.0c remains a strong (the strongest? the only?) contender for the title of most-demanded version in the consumer market - most games I've seen recently list it as the "required" version, sometimes with DirectX 11 as an option... Until this changes, then, I'd say that no, DX12 won't be particularly important. (YMMV in some specialised fields, of course, but that goes without saying.)

          3. King Jack
            FAIL

            Canon

            Canon always shaft customers of older kit. I have perfectly good scanner which they refuse to let me use on Win7. It's XP only but not because of technical advancements it's because they want to sell me a new one. It's just pure greed. I'll never buy a Canon anything again.

            Ps third party drivers work fine on Win7.

        2. Tom 13

          Re: nothing much of value is added by W8

          In fact I think from both the business and the consumer standpoint you can argue W8 has NEGATIVE value added. None of those default forced cloud connections are wanted by businesses. A fair number of consumers seem to not want them either.

      2. Nikerym

        Re: Time to rethink

        I disagree with this entirely. Sure you need a certain level of power, but with everything moving to the cloud in general including processing power as long as your local machine can handle the basics such as Office/Web Browsing/other client systems there is no need to increase power within the PC and as such the OS. Back in 95-2005 hardware was still scaling massively, going from 1ghz Pentiums in 95 to 3.5ghz with dual and quad cores etc. in 2005 but since 2005 we have had very little growth in the hardware space, the operating systems that ran then (XP) and their later versions are capable of running all the newer hardware, with windows 7 which was released in 2007 has no problem with all hardware today, 7 years later. there is no way 95 could handle the hardware from 2002.

        Hardware doesn't increase as fast as previous, and yet Microsoft continues the same 2-3 year lifecycle for release of products. It's not like 2004 where you could see a noticeable upgrade from windows 98 to XP. there will be little to no performance or productivity gain from a system performance point of view for the average business user from upgrading from windows 7 to anything within the next 2-5 possibly even 10 years (unless they discover and release true quantum computing or something else that leaps us forward again)

        With the move to the cloud for most processing this just reinforces the fact that we don't need high performance on the local client desktop anymore. All we need is Windows 7, and a browser that runs on it capable of rendering the served cloud application.

        1. Tom 13

          @Nikerym

          Minor nit:

          Hardware doesn't increase as fast as previous,

          I'd actually say hardware is increasing as fast as it use to, what has changed is that those increases use to translate directly to worker productivity. When I started work right after the discovery of fire one of my colleagues was doing automated circuit board layout. He'd do the initial placement work, then fire of the Compaq brand AT compatible. Three days later, he'd see what came out. We're not talking microprocessor layout here, just simple pump controllers. Move that to a 386 with a math co-processor and you could do it in half that time. These days you'd gain maybe half an hour from a 4 hour process.

          Personally I'm not a big fan of the cloud, but replace the cloud with the business LAN and the rest of your analysis still holds. The desktop doesn't necessarily need the latest gee-whiz toys from the boys in Q shop.

        2. Al Black

          Re: Time to rethink

          I installed a Win 8 upgrade on a tired Win 7 Core 2 Duo Laptop. To my surprise, Win 8 ran in Desktop mode nearly twice as fast as Win 7 had been running on the same hardware. Given that desktop mode is so easy to switch to, and that it is indistinguishable from Win 7, I don't see what the fuss is about. The OS is better than any earlier Win version for the user, although I understand that Corporates have major issues with verifying compatibility with hundreds of Apps, which means Win 10 will be out before they are ready to switch to 8. I don't think it is fair to say "a Windows 8 operation system companies avoid like a vial full of Ebola", but they do have to do due diligence before adopting a new OS, and that takes time: more time than a MS Version release life-cycle. Microsoft need to move to 5 year releases with free bug fixes in between.

      3. pie.slapper

        Re: Time to rethink

        There are a lot more people simply plonking numbers into a payroll program or an accounting spreadsheet that worked just as quickly and easily on hardware an OS 's 3 or 4 generations old.

      4. Tom 13

        Re: a large increase in the number of processing units

        You need to work on your reading comprehension. You skipped right by the line where he declared those types of changes moot for the median, mode, and probably mean user as well. These changes maybe critically important to Big Data users, but when you look at MS sales, Big Data users are an edge case. Their sales numbers center on Word, PowerPoint, and basic Excel users.

        And yes, that means MS has to rethink their business from the top down and the bottom up. The OS is now the commodity, and service is the where the money is. They probably need to transform themselves into what Novell was trying to become: The center piece of a semi-independent service stack. They work out the core details and supply the customizable software while the OEMs perform the engineering and customization.

      5. Daniel B.

        Re: Time to rethink

        Those who believe an OS is just a GUI, usually fail to understand that hardware evolution needs OS evolution as well.

        Oh, but we do understand that OS evolution is necessary. Every single OS has had to do some underlying tweaks during major releases due to this, hence filesystem changes, binary support changes (switching from 32 to 64-bit) and even low-level partition scheme changes (MBR to GPT). Even Linux has to move on to at least 64-bit and ext4 to avoid the awful year 2038 problem. Newer OSen are aware of SSD media and will usually be able to manage them accordingly; it would be even better if filesystems were SSD aware … wait, Linux has had JFFS2 since 2001, and there are at least other three SSD-aware filesystems out there. They'd be more in use if MS weren't forcing everyone to using its dismal NTFS or FAT for "everything else".

        So what does MS offer instead? No SSD-aware filesystems, a newer one that's yet again propietary and it's gimped as usual for consumer-grade OSen. Oh, and a fugly Fisher-Price GUI. So most users, consumer and enterprise don't see a real advantage on the new OS and a great disadvantage in using that ugly thing called TIFKAM.

    5. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Re: Time to rethink

      so if MS got some smart people to create a tool (or plug-in) that lets you manage OS X machines, and iOS, that would be $$$ in the bank.

      Hi, the latest System Center will do this. Cheers.

  5. Zog_but_not_the_first
    IT Angle

    Windows 7

    The new XP

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Its got a 'KILLER APP'.....

    ...its called 'START Button'...........i've genuinely got butterflies in my stomach.

  7. Matt 32

    >MS has to sell a credible vision of mobile + tablet + secure remote access,

    From the folks that bought Skype as a favor to the NSA so it could be redesigned to allow interception, good look with that.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This is why there was no Win7 SP2

    They could see the writing on the wall with Windows 8 so they delayed and then dropped plans for SP2, because it would restart the clock on Windows 7's life. This way they can dump it in 2020, instead of 2021 or 2022.

    They will be about ready to introduce Windows 11 in 2020, so probably Windows 10 will see most of the upgrade action in the year or two leading up to that date. Otherwise, there is exactly ZERO reason for any corporation on Windows 7 today to update to Windows 9. That is a ton of work with no tangible benefit. Few care about running Metro apps, on the desktop or otherwise.

    There's really nothing they can do to change that, as Windows 7 is stable enough, secure enough, and supports 64 bits and SSDs well. The only thing it doesn't support is touch, which as predicted turned out to be something few people care about in a laptop and no one cares about in a desktop.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: This is why there was no Win7 SP2

        Given the percentage of the Windows user base likely to be Windows 7 from now until 2020, do you really think any drive maker would abandon a market of that size? I wouldn't expect to see 512e drives go away until after Windows 7 is out of support in 2020.

    2. Nikerym

      Re: This is why there was no Win7 SP2

      "The only thing it doesn't support is touch, which as predicted turned out to be something few people care about in a laptop and no one cares about in a desktop."

      And with cloud being so prevalent now for application development you can build touch into the cloud interface for access from a touch enabled device anyway

      http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/graphics/toucheffects/

      Above is an example of such released by Microsoft. so you don't need the operating system to drive the touch component, it can be driven by the site.

    3. D@v3

      Re: 7 doesnt support touch

      errr, yes it does. quite well actually.

      we have a deployment of Dell Lattitude XT laptops with swively screens. Came loaded with vista, which was upgraded to XP almost instantly (which had some touch suuport) and was then then re-upgraded to 7 as soon as that became available.

      Not sure about multi-touch, but the handwriting recognition is pretty decent, and really the most useful touch feature that I have found on a device with a built in keyboard and mouse

    4. Tom 13

      Re: This is why there was no Win7 SP2

      I think you've put your finger on the key problem MS need to fix right here:

      That is a ton of work with no tangible benefit.

      If you could perform the upgrade with minimal work and not a lot of extra cost would you do it?

      My guess is, if you really believed you could trust that they'd left the key bits your apps used alone, the answer would be "probably". That runs contrary to their current business model in which each "new" OS is radically different from the old one to justify the cost expenditure with productivity improvements.

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