[vfx2k4]

Not to inject politics- but this is almost making me giggle as much as McCain delivering a speech from a German sausage joint in Ohio to "a half-dozen local businessmen." Pure comedy!

[Kiminao]

Regardless of the specific ridiculousness of Ballmer's obviously delusional comments, consider the unbelievable idiocy of a CEO with--ostensibly--an overwhelming lead over its competition (that "30 to 1" if it were real) saying that the company's NEW strategy would be to follow that competition... Incredible! A strong company, confident of its product and its plans for the future, with anything like a 30 to 1 lead, would never, NEVER even mention the competition if it had a CEO with at least half a brain. How on earth is it possible that someone with so little business acumen as Steve Ballmer could be the CEO of a company with the worth of Microsoft? (Worth, mind, not quality...)
This is pathetic. Never mind that Ballmer thought the only way MS could develop a viable Internet search engine was to spend $40 billion to buy Yahoo... Good Heavens, couldn't Microsoft build their own parallel Internet for $40 billion, never mind just a search engine?
Sad, very sad.

[lwdesign]

This is probably one of the worst PR blunders that has ever been made by the head of a major company. If Steve Ballmer truly does admire Apple's success in their "narrow" market, why not simply do the R&D and bring forth software and hardware that shows its commitment--THEN make some kind of announcement.
I've been both a Mac and Windows user for over 16 years and I've tried to like Microsoft products, including Office and the Windows OS. I would love to be blown away with the ease of use, fun and excitement of Microsoft's products, but I've never achieved that level of experience. Microsoft makes products that work OK and have an OK level of user friendliness, but they just don't grab the imagination, ease of use, fun and excitement of Apple products--or of Adobe products for that matter.
I do hope that Steve Ballmer can make Microsoft products fun and more Apple-like. It would be a blessing for when I have to use Windows computers. I personally don't hold out much hope, however.

[Gatesbasher]

Kiminao said:

Regardless of the specific ridiculousness of Ballmer's obviously delusional comments, consider the unbelievable idiocy of a CEO with--ostensibly--an overwhelming lead over its competition (that "30 to 1" if it were real) saying that the company's NEW strategy would be to follow that competition... Incredible!

Incredible, but not unprecedented. VW got so rich selling VWs that they could buy out the Auto Union, which had gone broke selling DKWs and Audis. So what did VW do? Abandon the designs that had made them rich and start selling Audis with the VW logo on them. (I'm ignoring how they bought out NSU at the same time and were grooming the NSU K70 as their new flagship car, only changing their minds at the last minute.) Rationality doesn't always prevail in decisions like this.

That said, I don't see Microsoft turning themselves around without totally scrapping Windows and starting over from scratch. Apple did something similar, but Microsoft just doesn't have the guts!

[Wondercow]

If Microsoft really, truly wants to follow the lead of Apple then they have but one choice: dump Windows in its current form and rebuild it from the ground up. Realistically though, MS is too bogged down with old baggage to do this as slickly as Apple. Then we must consider that they'd need to ensure appropriate hardware (something they tried to do with Vista, but failed to achieve). This, of course would alienate a lot of users, IT, and hardware OEMs alike. Which would push the users and some IT into Apple's waiting arms--as evidenced by Vista doing same. So that leaves disgruntled OEMs.... maybe a perfect time for Apple to rethink the clone idea, but with much stricter control and hardware licensing fees. Maybe a return to the Apple ROM chip that would be sold to clone vendors for an amount close to that of Apple's average hardware profit so as to avoid a repeat of the last Clone Wars.

[ffistometer]

You know, one of these days MicroShaft will have an ORIGINAL idea, rather than copy copy copy.
When they do, I'll sit up and take notice of Mr Ballmer, until then, well I'll treat his sweaty rantings with the contempt they deserve.

[joshuawait]

Microsoft is copying Apple. This is an announcement?

[Schneb]

macwilf said:

Mimic is the word:)

Actually, the keyword is "looks" - as if they had never done it before. :P

[IVIIVIi4ck3y27]

Much as I find this just as humorous as the rest of you... scarily, I could see Ballmer and Co. forging forth with a project to reinvigorate the OS and I won't count out the behemoth until they're on a path to a flaming trainwreck without any hope in sight. Even as much as they've slipped... and are slipping... I still won't ever count them out. This isn't Commodore or Atari in computers... this is still a billion dollar company with monopoly power. Not that Ballmer is half the visionary that Gates was, not that Gates was half the visionary that Jobs' is... but, then again... who truly can contest Jobs' vision at this point?

I think the real key though is that Microsoft truly needs to define a narrow set of API's and begin to eat less and less of their own dogfood (i.e. rely more on open source... e.g. adopt Mozilla or Webkit as the foundations of their future browsers as IE has slipped so far behind that it's pathetic... begin to use more and more tech from Linux and/or BSD, Mach, etc. where possible, start to develop the systems to be reliable, secure, and solid and then build their general API stack on top of that). I wouldn't be completely in disbelief if Microsoft began deprecating non-WIN32 API's and slowly move towards a wider scale use of WPF. Anything else could then be branched off to run in a sort of "Classic" mode with a set date for the extinction of Classic being set so developers start cranking. Microsoft NEEDS to corral it's developers in the same way Apple is pushing companies like Adobe and Microsoft themselves to ween themselves off of legacy API's and consolidate onto something that is more modern and that can be simplified (rather than 6-8 different ways to do things that make debugging a chore... pigeonhole developers into a smaller subset). Like I told someone recently... sure our CS4 might not be 64-bit, but... unless Microsoft starts pushing it's developers, our CS5 (built in Cocoa for 64-bit use) could run rings around their legacy-code based CS5 if Microsoft doesn't get off the porch and start pushing.

Moving everyone to WIN32 64-bit and WPF would be the way to go and would help make 64-bit Windows far more usable and competitive. As it stands now... Vista 64 and XP 64 were total train wrecks, not that Vista itself is that pleasant an experience. It just does way too many things bass-ackwards or downright wrong to be anything short of frustrating. A friend of mine bought XP-64 when building a gaming PC recently and while it does offer a performance improvement, it offers far too many incompatibilities and performance issues that he's hit the crossroads of downgrading back to his old XP CD and selling off the excess RAM he purchased or... punting and getting Vista (32-bit) and dealing with it's own set issues as well. This type of conundrum is not going to help Microsoft continue to mount sales over it's competition, and it will only seek to help the Mac and Linux (whether using KDE or Gnome) make inroads.

I just helped my cousin buy herself a new Mac and I really didn't even have to sell her on it, she sort of sold herself on it. Her last experience on her Dell was less than pleasant (was her 2nd straight Dell) and when she contemplated buying a new machine, a friend of hers up in her native Wisconsin told her "You should get a Mac." I walked her into a Best Buy this past weekend, showed her the iMac for 3 minutes, then proceeded to walk her around showing her the various Dell and HP models that were there. She immediately made a b-line back to the iMac. This was rather intriguing to me as in the past... I've had to actually go as far as giving a full-length demo to other friends and family (who often went and bought a PC anyway) but merely showing her a brief demo of iPhoto and what could be done with it in-store and a quick demo of Photo Booth had her stunned at how awesome the experience was. She didn't just jump into the fold... she bought herself a 24" iMac for her first Mac. In a way, I'm still shocked... as I just didn't expect it to happen.

To me... this is the type of problem Microsoft is going to face going forward. It's also not just that but that they have too many vendors with too many different aesthetics and designs and product ideas that they're going to have to cater to. I see Microsoft's statement as sort of an answer to the Mac, wanting to tie the software to their vendors hardware more... to make their machines more chic and more of a coherent inside/out packaging. I don't see it as Microsoft admonishing to designing hardware, but more trying to help out an HP have an HP-user experience and to help Dell, Alienware, Gateway, et al. establish their own user experiences as well that fit that hardware. I think to HP's new AIO with the touchscreen UI that HP came up with it and think of this as the step towards what Ballmer is meaning. Sort of a tailor-made aesthetic experience for each brand. In a way, I consider it the next step beyond what Microsoft has done in the past with allowing each vendor to ship their own system restore discs with their own various bits (i.e. special desktop patterns, software bundles, etc.) into now theming the UI and providing elements to make each machine stand out on it's own. It's not really a bad strategy in the end.

That said, you can dress things up in drag as much as you want to... it's still going to be the same underneath and that's a large part of where Microsoft needs to change directions. The NT kernal isn't the bad part of the OS (it's quite good), it's the layers of cruft piled on top with wreckless abandon that 3 different major rewrites of the system since NT4 haven't bore any fruit on and made legitimate progress with. It might be more secure, it might be more compatible (although that in itself is an inherent problem) but it does more hand-holding, there's UI paradigms and elements that are completely ramshackle and broken, and even trying to setup a broadband connection using Vista's Wizard's (which want to treat every connection as either a dial-up or DSL-like PPPoE connection) is just one more facet in how Vista and other Windows releases tries to do too much for you and succeeds at very little and leaves novices and experienced users in anguish. Apple in contrast gives you the tools to do anything you want but helps step you through the process eloquently and, like Microsoft, can even "automagically" set it up for you but still (unlike Microsoft) leaves things there accessible to tweak and within easy reach. There's no reason to have to step through things in 4-6 different means to get to the end like there is with something like TCP/IP tweaks alone.

[Gatesbasher]

You make some excellent points. I don't think anyone doubts that Microsoft has the resources to do it (or has the resources to buy and then murder the companies they need to do it.) I just doubt their commitment to take the plunge and actually do anything irreversible.

I think this is the key point:

IVIIVIi4ck3y27 said:

>I wouldn't be completely in disbelief if Microsoft began deprecating non-WIN32 API's and slowly move towards a wider scale use of WPF. Anything else could then be branched off to run in a sort of "Classic" mode with a set date for the extinction of Classic being set so developers start cranking. Microsoft NEEDS to corral it's developers in the same way Apple is pushing companies like Adobe and Microsoft themselves to ween themselves off of legacy API's and consolidate onto something that is more modern and that can be simplified (rather than 6-8 different ways to do things that make debugging a chore... pigeonhole developers into a smaller subset).

Apple made it clear 10 years ago that Cocoa was the future and Carbon was going away in a couple of years. Now, developers still squeal like stuck pigs at any suggestion that the final deprecation of Carbon is anywhere near. Since Apple was going to a completely new OS, it should have been obvious that they meant business, but Adobe, to name one, still doesn't believe them. (Not that they give a damn about the Mac, anyway.)

Given Microsoft's history, I don't know how they could get their developers to believe what they say. Remember Cairo: announced 1991, abandoned 1995, partially resurrected as Longhorn, and then finally delivered after hemorrhaging the majority of its features as Vista in 2007. If you were a Windows developer, would you believe them when they say they're going to make some tremendous transition, abandoning everything before a certain cutoff point? (Have they abandoned DOS completely, even now?)