Microsoft's Plan To Try To Win Back Consumers With 'Modern Life Services' (zdnet.com) 82
It's not a secret that Microsoft hasn't been winning the hearts and minds of consumers lately. Killing off products like the Groove Music service, Microsoft Band fitness tracker, and Windows Phone have left many questioning whether Microsoft's grand plan is to simply focus on business users and leave consumers to its competitors. But at the company's Inspire partner show this week, Microsoft execs told partners that Redmond isn't giving up on consumers. From a report: Yusuf Mehdi -- whose new title as of June 2018 became corporate vice president of Modern Life and Devices -- led a session at the partner show in Las Vegas, Nev., where he outlined the company's vision for what officials plan to christen "Modern Life Services." Microsoft's core value proposition is productivity, he said. Microsoft is targeting so-called "professional consumers" with these services, Mehdi said. Microsoft officials believe because the company already "owns the work calendar with Outlook," that it has a foothold in working to blur the line between consumer and commercial activities. What, exactly, will qualify as a Modern Life Service? Mostly they will be apps, services, and features that Microsoft already makes available or soon will in Windows, Outlook, and PowerPoint, but which officials will attempt to position as well suited to the needs of professional consumers on Windows PCs, iPhones and Android phones.
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They talked about golf and grandchildren!!
(Just like Bill and Loretta on that plane.)</quote>
You, I like
nobody wants outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody ever wants outlook, they're just stuck with it. Most people aren't going to want their personal emails and appointments in that clusterfuckl. Nobody loves your products, Microsoft. We're just fucking held hostage by them. Try not to confuse the two.
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Outlook seems to work fine for me, both email and calendaring. A few things I don't like, like the enormous file icons in Outlook 2016 (fresh in my mind, because we just graded from 2013), and the fact that you can't tell by looking whether it has keyboard focus. Oh, and that lousy ribbon... But I've got gripes about the UI on lots of software (I'm looking at you, Chrome), and overall Outlook no worse than most. My email client at home is TBird. I prefer its UI, and especially the Nostalgy plugin that
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Thanks for the pointer to EmClient, I'm downloading it now to check it out. I would find it hard to do without TBird's Nostalgy plugin, which makes filing msgs a breeze; but I'll see how EmClient handles that.
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The Italian Gambino family had a well organized system of protecting businesses in New York. They missed out on getting the suburban dwellers to subscribe to the insurance plans they had and where are they now... The good old days just do not last.
Maybe Microsoft should team up with organized crime and sell services, you know, protection from those hoodlums braking your windows at night...
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Nobody ever wants outlook, they're just stuck with it.
I could not disagree more. That is one thing that I greatly miss on Linux is a comparable office management suite. No not an email client, a system that connects email, calendars, skype calling, group management, tasks, and notes all together in a very configurable way.
Nobody loves your products, Microsoft
Nobody "loves" any products. Nobody normal anyway. "Loving" a product would make you a fanboi. Instead we use products suited to the task, and in that regard Outlook has no competitor, and we sure as hell aren't held hostage by it.
errr. We're
Consumer, we havent forgotten about you! (Score:4, Insightful)
We come bearing APPS!
Microsoft Execs have no clue what modern day life outside of business is other than a possible revenue stream that they haven't tapped yet. If they really want to win hearts and minds then they could just easily give users back control of their hardware, but we all know that will never happen.
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But I also liked Clippy, especially when printing. Sorry, probably TMI.
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Smartphones "should have" started usurping the desktop by now, but for various reasons (no serious innovation in that direction from big players, and no focus on turning smartphones from 'non-dumb appliances' into real serious OS's / computing devices), so desktop computers remain the only way to do real "serious" work ... this actually remains Microsoft's 'hidden strength' and they should be focusing on that, rather than trying to 'me too' what Google have done (Apps and their App Store, invasion of privac
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Well, for one thing, on Linux by default it does not allow some creepy company that I do not really know to reach in and muddle around with the guts of my machine like some Orwellian nightmare.
Also what updates Linux does do will not cause disruption in your work, which is not really something Linux 'does' per say as much as just its general architecture is better in a lot of noticeable ways and the updates not causing reboots is just one of many.
Really it is more that when you use Linux your system is goin
Well, they could try making a sensible OS again. (Score:1)
Crazy, I know.
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Wait, you mean actually fixing the horrific dark patterned UI disaster of a data mining hacky cloud based microsoft thin client called windows 10?
Are you serious man? Fixing their flagship OS that comes with preinstalled games, has a broken user interface, has 5 different right click context themes, and error messages of "something happened?"
Actually implement QA again and fix the long standing horrific user interface bugs?
Get a grip.
oh, new buzzword: "Modern Life Services" (Score:5, Insightful)
Adding "Modern Life Services" to the list of buzzwords that mean nothing.
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Adding "Modern Life Services" to the list of buzzwords that mean nothing.
Au gratin, I mean contraire -- I beg to differ. This is a WONDERFUL turn of phrase that describes things exactly:
1: Modern: Current, Available, Bad, Cool, In-demand, Wanted -- not that OLD icky thing that's always worked.
2: Life: Length of usage. You'll ALWAYS want this item and won't want to be without it. Without Life you've got Death, and you don't want to think about THAT.
3: Service: We tell you that we'll do stuff for you for MONEY. And then you pay us! And on good days -- if we're bored eno
here's an idea.. (Score:5, Insightful)
go back to your roots:
to an operating system that stayed the fuck out of the way, didn't peddle "apps" or subscriptions, and let you go about your own business..
to applications that ran on your own computer and let you focus on your job or task.. without constant nagging about online 'features'..
the constant push online... constant interruptions for ads (excuse me, i mean "notifications").. and continuing to harvest user data without limits, no bounds, without transparency.. will all just fuel your demise. you're fading because you're doing all of this now.. if you do it even more, you aren't going to 'win us back', you're going to push us further away... right into the waiting arms of a competitor.
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So go back to nt351? Because everything went sharply downhill in nt4.
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Look if you're going to pull out old shit and talk like you remember.. NT4 was fine. A decent upgrade to NT 3.5x.
Look, if you're going to talk like you know more than I do, you're going to have to account for the fact that NT4 merged the kernel and GDI memory spaces to improve rendering performance, and that's when NT reliability went away. NT3.51 was a rock in the sense of stability, NT4 was a rock in the sense of a paperweight.
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continuing to harvest user data without limits, no bounds, without transparency..
Without transparency? It's all detailed very specifically right here:
Basic Level [microsoft.com]
Full Level [microsoft.com]
It details what data and what events get sent. Personally I use macOS for all of my personal computing but for a lot of my professional work I need Windows applications. After reading through those pages and considering what I use my Windows system for (mainly Photoshop, Maya and a variety of other content creation applications) I don't see any significant issues.
Too late (Score:1)
Went Linux in 1998 and never going back. Been a sysadmin since and Windows and Microsoft are pillars of intransigence. Licensing is hideous, is difficult to keep up with in the enterprise, and this is on purpose. I've helped organisations move completely to open source and never look back. Ernie Ball did this as a corporation and also never looked back. Plenty of corps use Red Hat and LibreOffice exclusively and do just fine. Microsoft doesn't care about interoperability or the customer in the long run. The
Modern Life Services... (Score:3)
Welcome to Microsoft how may we monitize and screw up your whole life for profit today?
Re: Modern Life Services... (Score:2)
"Marketing, marketing, marketing!"
Here's an idea... (Score:2)
How about porting Media Center in a way that allows protected content to Windows 10 and improving it by letting Xbox-One work as a viewer like the 360 can?
Why?
Because, that's about the ONLY reason I keep running windows at home because it's the only way I can record and view protected content with my cable card tuner.
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Microsoft's doomed efforts to win back customers (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft (and everyone else) should remember this when they think about making moves likely to piss a lot of customers off. What can they do to win me back as a customer? Great question... Well, do they by any chance have a time-machine, and the ability to go backwards in time and prevent the company from acting like a bunch of goddamned fucking dickheads? No? Well, then nothing. There is literally nothing Microsoft can do that will induce me willingly to give them another goddamned fucking penny for anything under any circumstance whatsoever.
The way I see it, holding this line (and if everyone else would be so kind as to do the same) could help dissuade other companies from engaging in the kind of fucked-up jackassery Microsoft has indulged in in the past. They need to understand that actions have consequences, that they can be far-ranging, and that if we just forgive Microsoft and start buying their miserable shit again, it will only encourage OTHER corporations, whom, as you'll recall, we have almost no power over since they've bought almost every one of our corrupt, useless, spineless, gutless, heartless, dickless, brainless, feckless, worthless, puppet politicians, the only way we can check corporations and the way they treat us, is to hold the line, and deny them our money (to the extent we can, obviously when they go around us and bribe our public oaf-ficials and get government contracts, that's our money they're stealing and there's nothing we can do about that... but besides that,) especially if and when alternatives exist, and the more we do that, the more alternatives there can be, (and hence, there will be,) and the better the quality and more reasonable the price we will be able to get them for.
Try not to forget there was a time when Microsoft, using illegal and unfair anti-competitive business practices, virtually destroyed all their competition, NOT because their products were better, (they were demonstrably inferior in most respects,) but because their greed was rewarded in a new business/financial/economic sector that due to its nascence, no one knew exactly how it worked or how to regulate it properly for the longest time, before the law caught up with them, and others could adapt to the damage they were doing. The result was the so-called Microsoft Tax, where you ended up paying Microsoft whether you wanted to or not, (hence the term, "tax") whenever you bought a new computer because the company you bought it from (with few exceptions) would have an involuntary arrangement with Microsoft in which Microsoft was paid a licensing fee for their wretched malware by the computer manufacturers when you bought one of their machines, whether you wanted a copy of that pile of fetid, steaming dogshit they called "Windows" or not. (The alternative to a company installing Windows with every system they sold was not being allowed by Microsoft (under the terms) to install Windows on ANY machines they sold, which was an effective death sentence for the company, unless of course their customers weren't drooling submorons who didn't want to use a pile of shit like Windows, which simply wasn't the case with most of the home PC market, or unless the company made its own OS to compete with it... like... Sun Microsystems, for example.
(Hahah, you thought I was going to say, "Apple," didn't you? Yeah, I actually meant Apple. There wasn't a whole lot of space for competing operating systems; the only way for a new one to really get its foot in the door was for it to be offered for FREE, (i.e., GNU/Linux) and even THAT has trouble with adoption, despite it CONTINUING to be free, over a quarter century later...)
Even if you didn't use Windows, such as if the first thing you did with a new computer is slap a new hard drive in it, and install GNU/Linux or one of the variety of flavors of BSD... for quite a while,... you still paid for Microsoft's shitty excuse for an operating system which could be just as well described as a malware delivery platf
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"do they by any chance have a time-machine": Why yes, they do. Although if you thought your CPU was drawing a lot of power; the Microsoft time machine draws 1.21 gigawatts. But wait until you see the chassis!
Windows 2000! (Score:2)
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The last original idea they had was the Ribbon. I for one do not find that useful.
An Idea (Score:3)
That would be a damn fine first step.
Hey Microsoft, this one's simple! (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation of story into microsoft agenda (Score:1)
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To be honest, that sounds like Google. See the outrage when they bring up a new version of Google News, or Google Maps. Google ignores the complaints, because Google Knows Better. Or take Chrome. I've used a number of browsers, and the Chrome UI is IMNSHO the absolute worst.
(Actually, re-reading your post, I guess I misunderstood--I thought you said "I know what you want better than you do." But I like my response so much that I'm going with it.)
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Just spent a day to fix broken internet on a windows 10 machine after a botched MS update. Since internet was gone they couldn't rollout another patch to fix it. Apparently the update broke the windows DHCP client. Had to set a fixed IP. Two weeks before an update broke audio on the other PC at home. Since Windows 10 installs its own drivers for everything, a simple install of the device driver from the manufacturer had no effect. Great work!
Maybe it's a good idea to fix this first to stop customers from fleeing?! WTF?
WTF Dude? You're supposed to go out an buy a new computer when Windows 10 updates brick your machine. You have deliberately deprived your computer vendor of two new hardware sales. Do you want them to lose money?
Thanks, MS (Score:2)
Oh sure (Score:3)
...I mean, given their stellar track record at everything, who wouldn't want Microsoft to manage their life's details and activities?
GIVE MORE MONEY (Score:2)
Did I read that right?