Windows 8 & Windows phone had a lot of good things going for it that would eventually get no resources & thrown out. They also had many design ideas borrowed by iOS & Android.
Surely you must mean after Windows 7? Windows 8 was the beginning of the pile of poo that is Windows on the PC-playing-a-tablet and Microsoft just dig deeper and deeper with every new version down the awful tablet design they have going on.
I actually liked parts of it (W8) on my tablets. I chose windows tablets exactly because I know I get updates for years (except now with the TPM requirement for W11). I still use a Yoga 2 8" tablet (9yrs old) every day in bed.
Even though I run Linux on everything else I haven't tried and or messed with it on a tablet. I do not consider my Steam Deck as a tablet - I do use it a lot as one but 99% of the time I enjoy the controller input over touch.
I just can't find a replacement for my Yoga 2 8". The front facing speakers are amazing and every new version of this tablet runs android which is an auto skip for me.
I, too, loved Windows 8 and the small Windows tablets from that era. There are dozens of us! It was so cool to have such a tiny device that worked fine as a tablet, then be able to plug a mouse and keyboard and play games on Steam or write music in Ableton or code in the same IDE you'd use at work. Windows 10 was a step backwards in presenting a modern and touch-friendly UI to the user, and Windows 11 is even worse with all the screen real estate wastage from floating menus and rounded corners, plus the useless "recommended" section, ads and widgets.
Since the manufacturers all gave up on the 8" Windows tablet form factor, I think the only path forward is larger but skinnier tablets. Same trend as phones, alas. For a while my main computer was a 10" Lenovo, but now I've bitten the bullet and moved to a 13" Surface Pro. It's a great piece of kit performance-wise and reasonably tough (my screen is smashed up from backpacking/camping, still works) but it still feels less "cool" and cyberpunky than those cheap and cheerful tablets with a full OS on them used to be.
The Zune HD UX is godawful. Not only do you have to both press a button and interact with the touchscreen to play/pause, skip, or adjust volume, but the relevant button is on the opposite end of the device from the headphone jack. That means it's sitting upside down in your pocket and you have to reach into your pocket and past the bulk of the device just to adjust the volume.
The original Zune UX was a work of art by comparison. The buttons were on the face and recessed, so not only did they not get pressed accidentally, you could control your media right through the outside of your pants without even reaching into your pocket.
You’d have to have the power to upset people, take their personal income (bonuses) away, or even fire them outright.
People like this don’t get promoted in large established organisations. They have to be there from the beginning. All of the “asshole CEOs” are in this category. Think of Jobs, Gates, Elon, or Bezos. They all built massive corporate empires by not accepting garbage from their underlings, but this kind of brutal criticism is not nice. Eventually they get replaced by nice managers like Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, etc… and quality starts heading downhill.
It’s a corporate cycle that’s been going on for centuries.
The depressing part is that their design department (or possibly an agency they hire) make these really fancy UI vision videos. But then you use actual Windows and its UI trash.
No, they aren't. The windows division has consistently shrank to the point it isn't even a top line revenue source for the company anymore and is rolled up into the experience and devices group with office, Xbox, etc. Windows is less than 12% of MS quarterly revenue and continuing to shrink: https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/
The company could totally lose all windows revenue tomorrow and barely notice it. In a few years it will probably be into the single digits of percent revenue and near total irrelevance. Windows is dead as any meaningful business for the company.
Windows is the foundation of their Enterprise Services, Server Products & Cloud Services, and Office Products & Services, which together (including Windows) comprise 73% of their revenue. If Windows disappeared off the face of the Earth, all of that other revenue would go with it.
Interesting that people were mocking “scripting” languages when you have revolutionary stuff like openAi being developed in python.
I don’t, however, love Electron. I’ve built a couple apps myself with it, it’s just that the DOM is too slow.
If someone manages to create an engine that could remove the lag that you get when rendering and manipulating large amounts of HTML that would be fantastic. But right now it’s a subpar experience when compared to native apps.
You just linked to a graph showing how much they are making off of their services that these ads are pushing. They are definitely making a lot of money off of this.
Bingo. Windows looks like a trashy billboard for Microsoft's other services because that's exactly what it is, because that's where the fresh money is.
putting aside that 12% is still a fair bit, I wonder how much value it brings them in more intangible ways, that would only become obvious if they "lost" windows.
Developer mindshare. There are a huge amount of developers who want Windows (or really Visual Studio proper), and there is a meticulously tarred highway from Windows to Azure.
The irony is that this bullshit will drive developers away, because they are some of the least likely to put up with it.
> There are a huge amount of developers who want Windows
I watched rabid Windows fans that had been developing for many years slowly become disappointed apologists during the decade of 2010. They still use Windows and trust .NET and SQL Server, but they have had their joy slowly beaten out of them by Microsoft’s change of focus.
Balmer yelling “Developers developers developers” on stage in 2000 was a sign of how important developers used to be to the company.
I think Microsoft should get back to their roots and create a Windows Developer Edition for individuals & small businesses: remove all the consumer shit, fix the tasteless look, pre-install developer tools, charge $100 per year for it (with discounts to onboard anyone developing targeting Windows OS). Nice if they could come up with a GUI to compete with Electron (or at least an HTML slimmed down with inefficient features removed?). They need another VB6 too! (Disclaimer: I’ve not really used VB6). Pushing your developers into the arms of Apple Mac’s seems like a poor long-term strategy.
I know this will never happen, but I wish that they would go even a step further than that:
I wish they would admit that, for better or worse, Linux is the desktop to corral around. A proprietary OS for BYO hardware is very simply a Bad Idea, both in terms of developers (because you're at the mercy of the OS developer's documentation only) and in terms of users (because software will always theoretically be more stable on an OS that a developer can crack open).
So, rather than creating a Windows Developer Edition and charging for it, I would love to see them sunset Windows into a legacy/Enterprise-only OS that they charge a hefty fee for. And then I'd love to see them build a Linux distro that deeply interops with their services (i.e. their real money-makers) that they release for free.
This new "Windows" would be the new OS that comes pre-installed on laptops by HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. It could look essentially the same -- perhaps their desktop environment could be called Glass (get it?) -- and it could still run win32 apps via Wine (which they would be a massive contributor to in this fantasy world of mine). A headless version could of course be available for servers running Azure. Etc etc etc.
They could charge for support (i.e. the FOSS playbook that's been pushed the 70s). They could of course continue to create proprietary apps and modules that they charge for, I don't care -- for example, a CoreAudio/CoreMIDI competitor that only audio professionals would really need. I'm not naive enough to think that proprietary/non-free software will ever go away, but the OS is simply not the place for that. Platforms of all kinds benefit from being FOSS.
I know that there's a great kernel down there, but Windows is just a mess. Just kill the damn thing. Let it die. I ran Windows 11 since it was released and recently switched back to 10 because 11 is just so unbearably bad, and I still only use Windows at all as little as possible, only when I have to for certain work.
None of this will ever happen of course, but a man can dream.
>> I'd love to see them build a Linux distro that deeply interops with their services (i.e. their real money-makers) that they release for free.
>> This new "Windows" would be the new OS that comes pre-installed on laptops by HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. It could look essentially the same -- perhaps their desktop environment could be called Glass (get it?) -- and it could still run win32 apps via Wine (which they would be a massive contributor to in this fantasy world of mine). A headless version could of course be available for servers running Azure. Etc etc etc.
They created their own derivative of the Chrome browser, so why not create their own derivative of ChromeOS that does what you are saying? :)
LOL since 2010 I've watched windows laptops disappear and mac laptops appear in pretty much every department i visit EXCEPT finance. There is exactly one engineer on my team that still uses windows but he admits that it's just inertia. Every piece of software he uses regularly either exists on linux/mac or can be replaces quite easily on linux/mac with no loss in productivity. Hell he spends most of his time in windows ACTUALLY in the linux subsystem.
I still have a single windows box and it's more or less a game console at this point and since getting a steamdeck I'm not sure it makes a ton of sense to keep it. Steamdeck+ps5 probably gives me all the gaming I want with less hassle.
I have a gaming box too, but recently noticed that Minecraft is much faster on Linux, hence I installed Linux along. Still most of games are on windows, but this is old laptop and I don't have time to test them and move to Linux.
It is on at least one less computer than it could be.
I decided not to have Windows at home (I'd choose Pro version as preference for several reasons). It is enough suffering with it working hours, I feel relieved almost every day when I can turn it off finally.
They make no money here. Not from license, nor from advert or other whatever they try to push down the throat.
Whatever gains you're perceiving from this on your profit chart isn't worth the compounding deterioration of your products experience.