Windows 10 upgrade

[HAL]

It's too bad we have to use a monopoly like Microsoft.

[Tannin]

I'm intrigued by their "stabilise the platform" reason. They have been using that phrase for a while now, but nobody seems to have the faintest clue what it means. (If anything.) It certainly won't save them a single penny in support costs as the end-of-support dates for Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 are already set in stone: they have to aide by their existing commitments to continue support for 8.1 until January 2023, for example.

One possibility is that they have some secret new product in mind which will (they think) be a genuine must-have, and they are planning to make that run only on Win 10 (or possibly 11), thus compelling "upgrades" to the software rental model. That's a Microsoft-flavoured sort of idea and in keeping with their corporate history, but it will have to be a humdinger of a product and Microsoft have a well-established record of introducing "must-have" new products which turn out to be complete flops, even after they pump billions (literally billions) into life-support for them. They lost insane amounts of money trying to rescue flops like, for example, Bing, Bob, Windows RT, Surface, Windows Phone, and X-Box. With X-Box they eventually succeeded and it's now a profitable product, but it will never go anywhere near making back even a small fraction of the billions they spent propping it up. On the whole, Microsoft are very, very good at defending and extracting maximum possible dollar from their monopoly products (DOS, Office, Windows), and pretty piss poor at introducing new ones. They nearly always fail.

Anyway, I'm just speculating at this stage. It's a brave new world now, with Microsoft bleeding badly while Google and Apple make fortunes from smashing the MS OS monopoly. Where will it go from here? Nobody knows.

[Dave The Man]

Nope - Sticking with Windows 7 64 Bit.

Won’t Change until I have too - Like Computer Dying

[Dave The Man]

[Dave The Man]

[stui magpie]

[Tannin]

Microsoft's Surface was probably the most spectacular flop since new Coke. But - just as with the X-box - Microsoft poured an incredible amount of money into it and gradually reduced the mountains of them sitting in warehouses by selling them at around one-third of cost. You have to admire their inability to admit defeat - they may never recover the fortune they pissed away on flogging them off below cost, but the Surface is indeed now looking as though it may become a viable product. Their expectation that the crippled Surface RT would be the big volume seller and lead them to market glory, however, of course turned out to be completely wrong. Do they even make it anymore?

The "single platform" notion has failed utterly. It was in any case never even faintly a reality: the "single" platform required no less than four different code re-writes to work under the various incompatible APIs of Windows desktop, RT, Phone, and whatever the other one was. (I forget already.) We are not talking "minimal tweaks" here, we are talking top-to-bottom rewrites, or at very least, recompilation with multiple changes if you are content to target the application at the lowest common denominator (phone) and accept that the desktop version will be a crippled poor relation of what it could have been if you'd designed it for the systen it as going to run on in the first place.

They are trying to rescue something from the ruins now, and have certainly made some progress, but the hard reality is that it technological nonsense to attempt a "single platform" across such disparate devices as computers, tablets, telephones, and watches. Even Apple - the obsessive high priests of customer lock-in and our way or the highway - don't try to do that, with good reason.

Meanwhile, Google are eating their lunch and expanding into larger and larger systems. Microsoft are between a rock and a hard place. Apple's massive wave of success is drawing to a close now: the number of people willing to pay the Apple Tax is dwindling and their market share is continuing to drop. They are faced with no longer being able to gouge the massive margins they have become used to and competing with leaner, more efficient companies like Samsung, Lenovo, and HTC. I really don't see what their way out is this time.

As for Google, they don't give things away, they sell them, and sell them for a mind-boggling amount of money. What they sell is you: your movements, your search terms, your browsing history, your vulnerability to ads of different types, and their "free" products are simply the bait they spread out to attract the people they sell. Google's business model is so far superior to the dated and threatened models of Microsoft and Apple that it's not hard to imagine the big G wiping them out, just as Microsoft wiped out giants like Novel and DR and Word Perfect and even Borland, and just as Google wiped out Alta Vista and Yahoo and Bing. Apple will morph back into a small boutique manufacturer for people who value style more than money or function.

[pietillidie]

[Tannin]

More fibre generally helps with movements.

[swoop42]

So does a VPT thread.

[Piethagoras' Theorem]

I don't appreciate microsoft installing what is essentially adware (the little flag icon that's stuck on your toolbar) through their automatic update service. You can remove it by uninstalling update KB3035583 and then hide any future notifications. Sneaky bastards

[Dave The Man]

[King Monkey]

Not as evil as Apple forcing Bono and his mates on us.

[Bucks5]

^ I hear they will be inflicting Kayne West on us next time (seriously)

[stui magpie]

^

If you're going with Apple, you deserve it.