Now what Microsoft?

[helene_t]

I used windows 1.0 but only for playing "Balance of power", a great game in which you were either the US or the USSR government, and your task was to gain as much influence on various banana republics as possible (through diplomacy and such) while at the same time avoid a nuclear war. Back then (1988) I thought that windows was a wrapper for graphics card drivers. It wasn't until three years later that I realised that it was meant to become an OS.

[kenberg]

Here is something for developers to ponder. There is a point of diminishing returns for innovations. Most of us are not super-users. There probably are some things that Windows 8 can do that Windows 7 can't, but I don't really know what they are and I doubt that I would care if I did. My wife has 8 on her computer, I have 7 on mine. Sometimes she has trouble figuring out how to do something on 8 that she knew how to do on 7. Sometimes I can help, often I can't. So then she just uses my 7.

 

So clarity and ease of use of existing features is now far more important to many of us than new features.

 

It's not just Windows. Gmail has new features. Mostly they are annoying. Firefox was giving me a lot of pop-ups, someone on BBF suggested disabling some of the add-ons. This worked. Significantly, I was unaware that I had ever enabled the add-ons. I don't even know, or care, what the add-ons added on. I was going to switch from Firefox to Chrome but Chrome seems to want to give me all sorts of features that mostly get in my way.

 

There was an article in the Washington Post along these lines. The theme was that smart-phones are getting smarter, but the users aren't and many users are baffled by the new features. This even extends to my car. I bought a new car a year ago. The user's manual is 500+ pages long. Who reads this crap? The shop manual that I had for my first car, a '47 Plymouth, describing in detail how to repair most any engine or transmission or brake or other failure, was significantly shorter. There was nothing said about how to drive it on a daily basis, this was assumed to be known. . Handbrake on, one foot on the gas, the other on the clutch, turn the ignition key, put it into gear, release the brake as you engage the gears by releasing the clutch, that's it. No explanation of other features because it didn't have other features. If I changed lanes w/o first signalling it didn't beep at me because it had no turn signals. (I eventually installed them). I was very happy with this car.

[barmar]

No single user wants all that crap. But it's like having hundreds of channels on TV: there are enough customers who want each of them. So the final product contains the whole kitchen sink of features, to satisfy everyone.

 

I see ads for simple cell phones that just make phone calls. They're obviously a niche market, mostly targeted to elderly customers who don't want to learn new technology.

[WellSpyder]

I see ads for simple cell phones that just make phone calls. They're obviously a niche market, mostly targeted to elderly customers who don't want to learn new technology.

Yeah, I still like the idea of telephones being used for making telephone calls, cameras being used for taking photographs, and the like. And they still don't let me play in seniors events!

[kenberg]

Yeah, I still like the idea of telephones being used for making telephone calls, cameras being used for taking photographs, and the like. And they still don't let me play in seniors events!

 

Old before your time!

 

I think that technology is advancing at such a pace that almost everyone has to make choices. Currently I am doing some stuff with Mathematica. This is a sophisticated program for doing complex computation and related matters. It has some very frustrating aspects. but it also has great power, so I stick with it. If this means I lack the time/energy/interest to develop my Smartphone skills, so be it. But it does get weird. I was in some techno store the other day, I forget which one, and I realized that I had no idea what half the items on the shelves actually do.

[blackshoe]

In some cases, the salespeople don't know what the stuff does either. :lol:

[barmar]

When something does a thousand things, it's hard for any single person to know all of them. Sales people are in an inherently tough spot -- the basic skills required to be a good salesman are not technical, they're personal. But customers expect them to be technically knowledgeable, too. Some companies pair them up with "sales engineers", a techie who tags along on the sales call to answer the difficult questions. But if the engineer were really proficient, he'd be working on the product, not as a backup to the sales rep. So there are a bunch of catch 22's that make it difficult to get really good answers in sales calls.

[32519]

Windows 8.1 to push Metro underground

[kenberg]

From the article:

Microsoft has made many mistakes in the past (we're looking at you, Windows ME), but it's not above course-correction. The future of Windows could now become just another odd relic that we see by default when we accidentally press the Start key.

 

Firstly, as with so much of geekspeak, I have no idea what this last sentence means. But more broadly, are these guys slow learners? Windows 8 implies there was a Windows x for x=1,2,3,4,5,6,7 . Plus updates, plus Vista, plus ME etc. Have they really not yet learned that it might be a good idea to find out what the non-geek user likes before launchingh their dazzling display of stuff?

[mikeh]

We recently renovated our house: a major year-long job. One of the minor tweaks was a Honeywell programmable thermostat that has a touch screen that lights up when one presses it, to display an incredible array of data and possible inputs.

 

It is not intuitive, beyond the very basic + and - signs that allow a variation of the temperature (we have a heat pump so we can cool the house as well as heat it). I asked the HVAC guys for a manual and they told me to look online.

 

I did.

 

The manual is over 700 pages of dense print with some diagrams. It turns out that the manual covers every single model of residential control made by Honeywell. So to find out where the relevant bits are for my control I have to firstly find the model, which information is on the controller in extremely fine print with multiple alphanumerics. Then, without the aid of a good online index I have to find those portions of the manual that apply to my model and not to ones that look almost identical and that have model numbers that are very similar.

 

I usually wear bifocal contacts, which sacrifice a little precision for convenience. I literally can't read the very fine print on the panel, which, for reasons known only to somebody in Honeywell, is a pale green screen with relatively muted grey-black symbols, which are far more difficult to read than black on white, or other normal schemes. Maybe the pale green looked 'techno' to somebody aged 30 or less, with 20-20 eyesight.

 

The result is that I have (so I am told) a very powerful control interface that allows me to program my home climate, including (by use of an app I haven't downloaded) from my smartphone or ipad anywhere in the world, and all I know how to do is to turn the temperature up or down manually.

 

However, we had an issue with the heatpump and the tech showed my wife how to program automatic daily variations, so we have that dialled in now. Neither of us are sure that we could alter it again without the tech coming by.

 

How difficult would it have been to:

 

a) label the model number in a readily visible, readable manner

b) have a discrete manual for that model available on line, rather than having a single manual for dozens or scores of devices, with no good index

c) make the display legible by using a higher-contrast between the symbols and the background...even if space constraints prohibited a larger font.....for that matter, making the panel an extra inch wider and deeper wouldn't have cost an arm and a leg, given how much they charge for the system.

 

But this is a breeze compared to the tiny wall-mounted controller for our outside lights. I literally cannot read the font on the screen. Again, pale green background with pale grey symbols, but a tiny screen and even tinier font. Apparently we can program these as well, but neither of us can read the screen so even if we could find the manual online it wouldn't do us any good. So all we can do is manually turn them on and off.

 

I know: I am definitely becoming an irascible old git.

[kenberg]

Mike,

 

I think that the reason that they do not make your panel larger has nothing to do with cost. Just as some people like to speak of how large some things are, these designers take much pride in making things as small as possible. Back in my student days there was a (mercifully brief) time when I took great pride in being able to work all homework assignments on one sheet of paper. I wrote on both sides. I wrote in the margins. I wrote small. I left out simple details. The grader was ready to beat the s*** out of me.

 

And yes, things like green on gray drive me nuts. Advice to designers: Try it out on your grandfather. If he can't read it, fix it so that he can.

 

Quote from A Danish crime novel I am reading (The Purity of Vengeance):

 

The technology of mobile keypads was seemingly the work of Pygmies with macaroni for fingers, and the average northern European male who needed to operate such a contraption could only feel like a hippopotamus trying to play the flute.

 

I know exactly what he means.

[mycroft]

Windows 8 does, indeed, imply there was a Windows 1..7. But not "plus Vista (6), ME (4, I think - I try to minimize my thinking about Windows ME Harder), XP (5)".

 

Microsoft has spent so long with "we know what we want you to work like" (and frankly, they're right often enough!) and "you have to use Office on Windows" that they can, and have, just changed the UI and Office behaviour, and their customers will learn. After all, "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company Microsoft." Oldsters will know the Office 95 debacle, where Microsoft stepped on "what users want" majorly the first time; it may have been "what users want" (and Office 95 was, in fact, really nice, especially the format that should still be used today), but it was so different from the previous versions that everyone needed retraining. And that's fine when it's your IT staff, or your high-level accountants and spreadsheet and template builders; it's less so when it's every office assistant learning how to type a letter again. When MS brought out the next Office version, they had *incredible* resistance to uptake on a product that businesses had, before, routinely just upgraded; even though they'd learned their lesson (which stuck until the damn ribbon - who came up with the bright idea to eat vertical space just as widescreen monitors came in?) and Office 97 had a very easy transition model. Since then, MS has had to do a lot of interesting things to "encourage" people to upgrade Office.

 

And then came Windows ME. After that, businesses didn't routinely upgrade from Windows 98SE to XP when it came out, because of all their woes downgrading from ME back to 98SE. And, frankly, XP SP0 ... had its teething problems. We all now think of XP as the great stable MS OS version, but that's because they really did do a good job with their SPs (in particular SP2. SP3 was a stability/malware protection issue, primarily; there wasn't much user differences in it).

 

Businesses, knowing of their experiences with XP SP0 and ME, now *by default* do not plan an upgrade process until 6 months after a release comes out, and do not implement that plan until 14-24 months after - waiting for the early adopters to find out if it's an Even Star Trek Movie MS OS or not. As a result, most big businesses avoided the Vista trap, and waited for Vista SP1 Windows 7. It's only now, frankly, that some companies are going from "we're moving to W7" to "images are being rolled out".

 

MS has two big problems right now:

- tablets/phones/... are big. The long-heralded "death of the PC", at least for personal use, may in fact be at hand; or if not, it might sit on the shelf as a media delivery vehicle to the tablet/TV. You don't need Office for that, and you certainly don't need a new OS. Laptops are dying even worse, but those that are being sold are being sold with touchscreens, making them "tablets with keyboards".

- You just don't need Office any more. You haven't needed Office for a long time - Open/LibreOffice has been usable for 90% of us for years - but "nobody" had heard of it. Google Docs, now; that people have heard of. And it comes with "on-the-web" storage for "free" (Google gets to mine it for ad generation purposes, and the NSA gets to mine it for ...whatever they use it for, and...)

- The only other thing people do on computers that *requires* Windows is games. But traditional games as a section of the market are disappearing into the Candy Crush and other microtransaction vehicles (that can be spun up at a fraction of the cost of a "real" computer game, and can make massively more), and then they're trying to get the XBone (and stop the PS4) from taking a lot of even that.

 

So in order to survive, what the user wants is irrelevant. If they can't get computers running Windows on the same "intuitive" interface as the tablets (running Windows), they're in trouble. Look at what they're pushing. Windows 8 with big blocky "start screens" that would work very well on an 11" touchscreen, with no mouse or keyboard in sight. Surface RT: "The tablet that runs Office." Yes, they know it will fail insanely beautifully on power users' 3 1920x1400 widescreen monitors; but nobody does that any more, do they?

 

And finally, the "non-geek user" wants what the "non-geek user" has. They hate change; and they hate having to pay again for something that didn't change. But they have to kill off XP somehow, or again, they don't survive.

[kenberg]

And finally, the "non-geek user" wants what the "non-geek user" has. They hate change; and they hate having to pay again for something that didn't change. But they have to kill off XP somehow, or again, they don't survive.

 

I am withdrawing my early comments made on this post, I realize that I understand little of all of this. I will say that there seems to be far more interest in producing dazzling, thoough often not particularly useful, features than there is in providing clear explanations of how to cope with this wizardry.It makes for a frustrated bunch of consumers.

[Mbodell]

I know: I am definitely becoming an irascible old git.

 

This is one of the reasons Nest was so successful and just sold for $3.2 Billion to Google after less than 4 years since founding. The incumbent thermostat companies were not exactly design and end user focused.

[blackshoe]

"We are the telephone company Microsoft. We are omnipotent." - with apologies to Lily Tomlin. :lol:

 

@mikeh: I sympathize but you're complaining to the wrong folks. Tell Honeywell. It probably won't do any good, but you never know.

[mycroft]

My apologies, Ken. I thought I had made my saunter through the more troublesome history of Redmondware (the company's headquarters are "1 Microsoft Way, Redmond WA") amusing, but also understandable enough for those who didn't have to live through them. Looks like I failed on both fronts.

 

The only relevant parts are "when they've done a big change, especially when it's a change that is obviously noticeable to business rank-and-file (those who use computers to do their job, not use computers as their job), there has been extreme pushback *on the next version* from those who, before then, automatically upgraded." and "they've done it often enough that pretty much everybody is now in that category" ... and the "Microsoft has problems" bit.

 

The last line may not apply to you - but "users hate change" is an IT motto - and for good reason. Look at the BBO updates threads, for a prime example. But the problem is that XP, eventually, was so good that people just aren't upgrading, and that means Microsoft isn't getting any more money except on new computers. And 5-year-old computers are so good that if you're not playing high-end games, there's no need to buy another computer (with another copy of MS OS builtin) - so that revenue stream is dropping, too. They're buying new phones, and slabs (tablets or pads or phones-that-are tablets like the Galaxy Note); but those don't have either of Microsoft's Big Two on them.

[kenberg]

No apology needed, I got the drift. The part I deleted above was where I said that "I hate change that is instituted simply so the company can make a profit". I decided that I didn't really know enough to make such an insinuation.

 

I do think that we have entered a phase where geeks enjoy geeking, and the guidance that you get doesn't keep up very well. Here is a simple example. I use gmail. Suppose I want to find a message someone sent me and I am pretty sure it was sent in the month of December in 2012. I would like to find it. I only recently learned that you can get gmail to put up just the messages for that month. But I have forgotten exactly how. Something like putting "before: 01-01-13, after: 11-30-2012" into search. Yeah, something like that. But not that. I forget what it is, I forget where I found it. Yes, I am sure I can find it again. Google allows me to search for videos. no interst. I can join google groups. I think I am in one, I don't use it. I frequently would like to find old messages from a specific time period. It is not transparent to me how to do so.

 

This is one example of many. I often find stuff that apparently someone else really wants to do that I have no interest in doing. Maybe I am crazy, but I am thinking that more people want to bring up and search messages from a specific time period than want to search for videos of Lady Gaga. Yes I can, and do, search on keywords or on who sent it, and this often but not always works.

 

Anyway this is what I was getting at. Not for the first time I think that I am in some sort of weird group with weird needs. But browsing through old messages from a specific time period? It says somewhere how to do this, the problem is to find it.

[barmar]

This is one example of many. I often find stuff that apparently someone else really wants to do that I have no interest in doing. Maybe I am crazy, but I am thinking that more people want to bring up and search messages from a specific time period than want to search for videos of Lady Gaga. Yes I can, and do, search on keywords or on who sent it, and this often but not always works.

I have no interest in the minutiae of people's lives, but the popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and all the other social networking sites obviously means that I'm out of step.

 

The thing about it is that people often don't know what they'd like or need. Before Twitter, if you asked people "Do you need a way to broadcast short messages on a whim?", most probably would have said no, because they never even thought about it. But once it became available, people decided they liked it, and now it's become a regular part of their lives.

 

Software makes it easy and inexpensive to make new things and see how they work out. You don't have to spend millions of dollars building a factory and hiring workers, only to discover that no one wants to buy your product. You put it online, and if it takes off you reap the benefits, if not you go on to your next idea. The same thing goes for new features in application software -- if you have an idea for a new way to use the program, you add it.

[PassedOut]

Bill Gates Talks Microsoft, Philanthropy, Condoms During Reddit AMA

 

Gates answered topics ranging from the computers that learn to selling stocks to his most unexpected hobby (playing Bridge) and most expensive guilty pleasure (owning a plane).

 

...

 

And speaking of actors, Gates OK'd the casting of movie star Samuel L. Jackson in the film role of himself, saying that wife Melinda "would probably watch that version."

Guess I would too.

[the hog]

Having never seen a need for it over "building tables", and having had no luck whatever when attempting anything beyond that, and having worked in Business Practise Automation with several companies whose current documentation was in sets of Excel spreadsheets sent back and forth over email (and unchecked, of course)...it may be pretty terrific, but it's a Swiss-Army Chainsaw with instructions in Ukranian to me. And its "-alikes" are at least as good, for 99.9% of the population (frankly, who use it like me, and who occasionally has to read a spreadsheet sent to them from Excel) (and run on my choice of OS).

 

For the 0.1% - it's the Tool of Choice, and their world would be twice as hard were it not there. And since I have my own set of those, who am I to complain? But hardware. MS is really good at hardware.

 

You are not serious? Well perhaps you are, but I can guarantee you that Excel is used by far more people than you suggest. Mind you, I still believe the new versions of Office with the ribbon are not a patch on say Office 2003. That is especially true for Access.

[WellSpyder]

You are not serious? Well perhaps you are, but I can guarantee you that Excel is used by far more people than you suggest.

How many people do you think Mycroft is suggesting use Excel? I didn't see anything in what he posted suggesting a number of users, and I suspect he is well aware that far more than 0.1% of the (relevant) population use Excel. The point as I understood it was that the rest would be just as well off with a different spreadsheet package, not that they actually used a different one.

[mycroft]

Well, there's that. For 99+% of Excel users, they would never miss the big green E having LibreOffice slammed on their desk. I'm certainly one of them.

 

But I'm also saying that for 99+% of Excel users, Excel is their "only tool is a hammer" - and they rarely, if ever, work on nails. Witness my statement above that (apart from an expense report, true), all the spreadsheets I've seen in the last 5 years are either tables (project plans, schedules, sample csv files, whatever) that do no math or other internal manipulation at all (usually with lots of colours and bolding and...) - and it *should* be done in the right tool - be it MS Project or equivalent, or the csv file (why send around 2K of text when you can send a 1.5MB .xlsx file?), or again, whatever. Also, many of these sheets are sent around to multiple people, and are marked up by multiple people, and within two weeks you have three different sheets being passed around that need to be merged together (and hopefully we haven't had two people putting in 30% on that one task who don't know about each other).

 

I'm guilty of this, as well - I used my spreadsheet package to build a graphical representation of two floors of my office, with names; and all it did for math was comma-join all the cells I selected so I didn't miss anyone I got expensed for. Using any spreadsheet package is - overkill.

 

As I said, for those who *need* Excel, the world is a much better place for it. But I don't think that of the number who *have* Excel, even the number who *use* Excel, more than a very small fraction *need* it, or *should* use it.

[billw55]

Can't quite tell if you are an open source fanboy or not. Seems close :)

 

I use excel because that is what my company installs on my company-owned computer. I use mostly for cost estimation, and sometimes data compilation. Most of this involves arithmetic among cells. Probably all of it could be done with an OS alternative. Then again, I have never had any problem with excel that made me wish I was using an alternative.

[mycroft]

Am I an open source fanboy? Probably not. I'm certainly critical of a lot of crap that goes on in the OS world - and especially the "cool things get done; less cool things don't, even if they're what make the whole tool usable for humans" stuff. However, I haven't had a computer that booted Windows by default, for home or work, for over a decade. And I recommend "good enough" open-source (specifically free-as-in-beer OS) tools to anybody I can convince to use them. An open source zealot? That I'll cop to.

 

"I use excel because that is what my company installs on my company-owned computer." Yep, sounds like a good reason. It looks like you use it for its intended purpose, too. Also good. You're one of the Few. I don't see how that should mean I, or even you, should pay for it at home, unless you use it both for its intended purpose, and the frustrations involved with using a Excel-alike cost more than the $X00 that Office costs (it certainly doesn't for me; but Excel is not the tool for me in general).

 

I really don't hate Excel (except for that ribbon crap, coming up with that just as vertical space was becoming even more precious with the promogulation of widescreen monitors was just ludicrous). I just find that for most people, it's like having a Ferrari to go to the corner store; and (since it is installed on everybody's company-owned computer, and people are like that) most people use that Ferrari to carry their skis offroad, because it does in fact work for that. It confuses me more, because unlike the Ferrari, there's no benefit to "being seen using Excel" :-)

 

I have a similar issue with asking for the output of a command to be sent to me - say 4 lines of 40 characters each - and getting a screenshot of the command window with the answer, at full resolution (otherwise it can't be read, of course), embedded in a Word document and sent as an attachment. I wish I was joking; I wish I was joking when I say I only talk to IT departments in my job. Seriously, and not only once, I'd get 1.5MB .docx files when I asked for 160 characters - and even then I have to hand type it out if I need to do anything with it like load it into my system to find out if I can reproduce the issue. But Everybody Has Word, so All Files are Word Documents. All Tables are Excel Spreadsheets (double points if you embed the spreadsheet in a Word doc), and All Discussion Notes are Powerpoint Slidedecks. As I said, "when the only tool you have is a hammer..."

 

Which brings me back to my original point, which was that MS *relies* on "All computers run Windows, and all business computers have Office" - and it's worked for years. But it also relied for many years on "Everyone will run the newest version of Windows and Office, because it's better" for years, too; and between alienating customers with upgrades gone horribly wrong (so now everybody waits for someone else to take the upgrade plunge), and the fact that, really, for almost everyone, what they have had for 5 years now is all they need (so they see no need to pay to upgrade), we get the OP - "What now, Microsoft?"

[blackshoe]

Microsoft's position in the business world is really funny, considering what happened to Apple with the Lisa: Apple said to fortune 500s "here's the only hardware you'll ever need, running the only software you'll ever need (a package very much like Office)". The fortune 500s said "no thanks, and went off and bought Windows (well, DOS, in those days) boxes and, eventually, Office. Of course, the price point on the Lisa was a bit much, but still.... B-)