Windows 8, and Windows 2012, is set to RTM in Early August. Should hit TechNet within a week or two after. October is the timeframe when manufacturers and system builders should get their wares available to the consumer. All the wait and it’s finally here. For better or worse for some people. A lot of very conflicting opinions on this release. 99% of it aimed at the Metro interface.

For the first time, we provided details on Windows 8 availability. Tami confirmed that Windows 8 is on track to Release to Manufacturing (RTM) the first week of August. For enterprise customers with Software Assurance benefits, they will have full access to Windows 8 bits as early as August. Additionally, she noted that RTM is when we’ll be turning on the commerce platform so that developers can start earning money for their apps – we’ll have more to share on the Windows Store for developers blog soon. Of course, right now with the Windows 8 Release Preview, all apps are still free for people to try.

Mary Jo Foley poses the question Can Microsoft speed the pace of Windows? I can see an annual release of Windows, but with a lot of caveats. No more Service Packs, as these would replace them. Low cost to upgrade. Backward compatibility between major releases. Downside: major fragmentation. Developers, technicians, system admins would be catering to the lowest common denominator. Enterprises would update every 5-7 years, but on various schedules (one may start in 2015, another in 2017). Would they want them all synchronized, or can they co-exist in various versions across the network and still be secure? They would be minor releases with only a year of development, beta testing, and release. 

Lots of questions, but a very plausible scenario. What do you think?

But given there’s no true cloud complement to the Windows client, does that rule out Microsoft ever moving toward more frequent Windows releases on x86/x64 platforms? Will business users balk if Microsoft puts Windows on a faster delivery track? And does Microsoft, with its new emphasis on introducing products first designed for consumers rather than businesses (then later adding business functionality), care all that much?

Coming from an unlikely source, Vanity Fair, an article describing how Microsoft is it’s own worst enemy. I’d wonder about the claims made if I hadn’t heard very similar things from Microsoft’s own employees in the past. They are basically fighting with each other, and not just different groups – within the same product group.

The quoted text below shares what several ‘Softies have told me in the past, and that is one of the most destructive practices at Microsoft (among others).

Microsoft has had some very innovative ideas, but their huge bureaucracy has killed those ideas because they didn’t quite fit with their main products: Windows and Office. The sad part is that they were considered irrelevant to their main products until the competition comes out with something similar and brings it to the market with mass success. Then, Microsoft plays catch up, ignoring the fact that they had the same exact product on the table years previously. This is definitely one of my main pet peeves with Microsoft: they kill way too many great ideas only to bring them back years later, when it’s too late.

Blame Steve Ballmer? I can’t. Not yet. Many do blame him, but I don’t think I can put all that on just the one guy. I’m not really a Ballmer fan (of course, I haven’t met the guy yet, so I can’t say for certain, anyway), but the CEO of the company cannot make every decision in the company.

The linked article is a very good read, and I encourage everyone to read it. I’ll be purchasing my first issue of Vanity Fair just to read the full article. Every company makes mistakes, but Microsoft has had more than it should have. Many of those mistakes could have been very successful products. Microsoft really is shooting itself in the foot…

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

When Windows 8 is finally released, you’ll be able to upgrade your Windows XP, Vista, or 7 machine to the newest OS for only $39.99 online or $69.99 until January 31st 2013. I know a lot of people are on the fence on upgrading to Windows 8, and don’t want to upgrade at the usual cost. I’m sure they will be jumping on this when it is released.

Other bonus: free upgrade to Windows Media Center if you want it. Yes, sir, I do like it.

We set out to make it as easy as possible for everyone to upgrade to Windows 8. Starting at general availability, if your PC is running Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 you will qualify to download an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for just $39.99 in 131 markets. And if you want, you can add Windows Media Center for free through the “add features” option within Windows 8 Pro after your upgrade.

With all the attention on Windows 8 (both positive and negative attention) and it’s releases, it’s easy to forget about the new MS Office 2013, or Office 15. Rumors have been heard (translation via Google available here) calling for a beta release for next week. the newest version of Office has not had a public release at all, but a Technical Preview available to select developers, partners and a few select others.

Possible shipping will probably not be until the first part of 2013.

English translation quote – There is much information on what’s new in Office 2013, which is being developed under the code name Office 15. So leaked out that there is extensive SkyDrive integration, a read mode and Web extensions come. Which can be downloaded from the Office Marketplace or use via the web-apps, Office 2010 Starter also replaced. That was a free version of Office with stripped down versions of Excel and Word.

The removal of the Start button from Windows 8 has had a lot of people… well – pissed. It’s not even an option anymore. I’ve been using the Start menu since Windows 95, and I can see it’s usefulness running out for some. But, for others (myself included) still use it efficiently. I can pin a couple dozen apps on my Start menu, a few dozen icons on my desktop, and still require more for applications that I rarely run (and can’t efficiently search because I don’t recall the exact name of the application). Cluttered, for sure.

Microsoft has their reasons, but I don’t care much for their reason. I can see other reasons (touchscreen, etc.) but for this simple reason, I’m not convinced. If this were the biggest reason that Microsoft removed the Start button, it should be an option to put it back for those users that still use it. There are a few conspiracy theories out there – Metro can push users to the Windows Store to raise more money, kill off desktop applications within the next few releases to make the Store the only outlet.

"We’d seen the trend in Windows 7," said Chaitanya Sareen, principal program manager at Microsoft, referring to the telemetry gathered by the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program. "When we evolved the taskbar we saw awesome adoption of pinning [applications] on the taskbar. We are seeing people pin like crazy. And so we saw the Start menu usage dramatically dropping, and that gave us an option. We’re saying ‘look, Start menu usage is dropping, what can we do about it? What can we do with the Start menu to revive it, to give it some new identity, give it some new power?’"

I really like the Storage Spaces feature of Server 2012 (click to read more and a small overview of the technology), currently still in beta. It is one of the major reasons that I will be upgrading from Server 2008R2. I originally have Home Server and loved it, but the loss of the drive pool feature in the newer version of the Home Server software dropped it. There are several third party options, but I went to the larger version of the server software. Now, it looks like they are bringing that functionality to the full server installs.

Storage Spaces is a feature that takes standard JBODs (Just a Bunch of Disks) connected to a Windows 8 Server and allows them to be used to create pools of storage.  The pools can then be used to create volumes on the server.  The benefit of using Storage Spaces is that it enables advanced features such as resiliency and space optimisation.  It also forms a basis for using directly connected disks with the Windows hypervisor, Hyper-V.  The concept of Storage Spaces is not new.  Many operating systems have logical volume managers (LVMs) and in fact, Windows already offers some volume management features.  Disks can be partitioned and recombined to create mirrored and parity protected RAID volumes.  However storage spaces does things differently using disk pools, which provides significant advances over the disk management functions available today.

Gunman loaded a van with full canisters of gasoline and rammed the Greek Microsoft headquarters. No one has claimed responsibility as of yet, but rumors are saying it is about the recession and economic woes in the area. No one was hurt, but there was ~ $75,000 USD of damage. No reports of injuries.

Arson attacks against banks, foreign firms and local politicians have become more frequent in Greece in recent years as the country battles soaring unemployment and struggles through a recession deepened by austerity policies imposed by foreign lenders.

Microsoft has confirmed that the Windows Phone has just surpassed 100,000 applications. Not bad at all considering that a year ago they had just hit 10,000. Well done Microsoft and all the WP developers. In my eyes, this shows a commitment to the platform from Microsoft and from the developer community.

Apple dominates project starts, and Android is a strong second, but Microsoft is emerging from the noise level. Peter Farago, vice president of marketing for Flurry, blogged that Windows Phone project starts went from 1 percent last year to about 6 percent in June. BlackBerry project starts, for comparison, have stayed around 1 percent for the duration.

I am going to a default look for the site until I can get my other theme working correctly with the newest version of WordPress. Unfortunately, when I updated to 3.4, it broke many things with my current theme and a few plugins that I used and needed for the functionality of the site.

On top of that, I am also looking at moving to a new webhost. Although I didn’t think my site traffic was too high, apparently it was too much for my current host. I have a few options I may go with, but the costs are a bit more than what I am currently paying (which isn’t much, really).

Thanks for sticking around, thanks for your support, and thanks for all the great words that have been coming in! I’ve got a few things that I hope turn out for the best (although, in the past I’ve gotten bad news – this time it looks pretty swell!). I feel that the good news would really help out in bringing more great news, more hands on information, many updated KB articles, and increase my network of colleagues in the Microsoft realm. More on that in a few weeks, hopefully.

If there are any suggestions, recommendations, requests for the new site update, please let me know at dharper@mstechpages.com. I build and maintain this site to be great for the readers and make it as informative and easy to use as possible.