Pre pre-announcement announcement here: Monday will be the day Steve Ballmer and Co. announce Office 15 to the masses. Something to look forward to on Monday.
Based on leaks from the Technical Preview, it appears Metro, the main design language for Windows 8 and Windows Phone, will figure prominently in the look and feel of Office 15.
Steve Wozniak, The Woz, has said some very positive things about Microsoft even going as far as saying it’s as if “Steve Jobs came back reincarnated at Microsoft”. Some great things have been coming from Microsoft lately, I agree.
Perhaps one day my wish of hanging out with Woz will be fulfilled. He’s a great guy with an open mind and very brilliant. Just a cool, down to earth guy.
I have much more love for the iPhone now. If you have a jailbroken iPhone, you can buy a Windows 8 UI theme via the Cydia store which looks very functional. Looks pretty nice. I really love the UI on the phones. Of course, you’d still have to worry about it freezing, locking up, etc.. My wife has an iPhone and she complains about it freezing quite a bit (not jail broke – she won’t let me). My Windows Phone, on the other hand, has never had a hiccup. My old Android phone, although slow, was very stable as well.
The theme includes a Windows Phone-like lock screen complete with notifications, volume controls, and a swipe up to unlock feature. Once Metroon is activated it works in a similar way to Microsoft’s Windows 8 Start Screen, providing a launcher for apps with live tiles providing information on apps at a glance. All iOS apps can be pinned to the Metroon Start Screen and there’s even a Charms bar that appears when you swipe from the right-hand side of an iPhone or iPod Touch. A desktop tile brings you to the familiar iOS home screen and the Charms bar is once again accessible to bring you back into the Metro interface, almost identical to Windows 8’s desktop mode.
Rather than fix the problems with the gadgets in Windows Vista or 7, Microsoft is urging people to disable gadgets completely. After a vulnerability was announced (detailed emerge at the Black Hat 2012 conference), Microsoft offered the temporary fix of disabling the gadgets. A more permanent solution may come in the future, but that is unknown.
With the release of Windows 8, gadgets will not be supported and will be replaced with live tiles, which have a lot more potential and functionality, in my opinion.
Now, Microsoft has issued a Fix It solution to disable Gadgets and the Sidebar. These features, if left enabled, may allow the execution of arbitrary code, and could allow attackers to take complete control of a person’s system, Microsoft warns in a Knowledge Base article.
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?’"
