Post(s) tagged with "surface"

Windows 8 and Surface Going Nowhere Fast

Jun Dong-soo, president of Samsung’s memory chip division, doesn’t think much of Microsoft’s latest efforts:

John Paczkowski, Windows 8 No Better Than Vista, Says Samsung Exec

“The global PC industry is steadily shrinking despite the launch of Windows 8,” Jun said. “I think the Windows 8 system is no better than the previous Windows Vista platform.”

No better than Vista? Too cruel, too cruel.

And Jun was just getting started. That Vista quip was part of a one-two sucker punch that ended with a slag of another one of Microsoft’s big new efforts.

“[Microsoft’s] rollout of its Windows Surface tablet is seeing lackluster demand,” he said. “Meanwhile, previous vigorous pitches by Intel and MS for thinner ultra-books simply failed and I believe that’s mostly because of the less-competitive Windows platform.”

A brutal commentary on Windows 8, which has so far utterly failed to catalyze PC sales. 

When will Microsoft’s board finally get rid of Ballmer?

Source: allthingsd.com

10 March 2013 9 Permalink
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Touchscreen Chrome OS hybrid tablet/laptop coming soon? - Richi Jennings ⇢

Jennings pulls together many rumors pointing toward a touchscreen Chrome OS hybrid tablet/laptop designed and developed by Google. 

If the Android/iOS one-two punch is a precedent, the emergence of a Chrome OS laptop/tablet is more of a threat to Microsoft’s push on Surface than Apple. And the Surface looks like it’s heading nowhere, according to Piper Jaffray’s Black Friday stats.

27 November 2012 Permalink
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iOS is so responsive and so liberal with animations that it has a very tactile feel, and rather than thinking “tap this button to open” or “swipe across this box to share”, conceptually, you just move the things on the screen with your fingers.

The distinction seems subtle, but it’s important. Every action on the Surface feels deliberate. It feels like you’re using a computer.

The standard gestures don’t help, requiring many in-from-the-edge swipes that not only aren’t discoverable but also frequently conflict with scrolling. My gestures often didn’t work, and it wasn’t clear whether there just wasn’t a hidden context menu at that moment or I just screwed up the swipe.

Most of the animations also aren’t helpful, with minimal spatial consistency. Many animations seem arbitrary, not hinting at anything behaviorally useful. Microsoft has applied animations and gestures in Windows 8 about as effectively as they applied color in Windows XP and transparency in Windows Vista: they knew that Apple had been successful with these features, so they made a checklist and just applied them haphazardly. “Apple does animations, so now we do animations! Apple does gestures, so now we have gestures!”

An alternate universe – Marco Arment

Source: marco.org

29 October 2012 21 Permalink
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Microsoft Surface: Too Little To Late?

Microsoft is gambling a lot for a chance to fight with Apple, Amazon, and Google for the proximal (‘mobile’) device market. They are pissing off their historic partners, like Dell and HP, by making their first computers ever. The alternative might be to simply become an enterprise software company, milking Office, Sharepoint, and Yammer for the next decade.

I admit I like the keyboard cover idea, but I expect Apple will respond to that quickly.

But it may be too late, since the clients they want to attract with Surface and later products have already moved ahead with deployments of Apple and Android tablets:

With New Tablet, Microsoft Faces a Balancing Act - Nick Wingfield via NYTimes.com

Rich Adduci, chief information officer of Boston Scientific, a medical device company, has more than 20,000 PCs at his company using older Windows. But he has also deployed more than 5,500 iPads to sales representatives and other employees.

A day late and a dollar short?

Related articles

The New York Times

26 October 2012 24 Permalink
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