'Welcome To the PC Malaise Era' (getwired.com) 271
Long-time research analyst Wes Miller, who previously worked at Microsoft, believes that Windows-powered PCs are now stuck in the same rut that American cars grappled with in 1973 to 1983. He writes: I've said before that Windows has never escaped x86. I'm still not sure if it ever can. So the challenges then come down to three things:
1. Can Intel succeed where they've failed for the last 5+ years, at building hybrid processors? The next year to two years should answer this question.
2. Can Microsoft succeed at finally getting application developers to write platform-optimized, energy-respectful, halo applications for the PC? I've been writing about the Windows Store for a long, long time. A long time. And I'm still not sure how Microsoft can light a fire under Windows application developers when they've lost that mindshare.
3. Can Microsoft begin pushing the Surface platform forward again? This one's completely up to Microsoft. I've seen the rumors of the next Surface Pro... and it's more of the same -- evolutionary, not revolutionary.
I guess we will see in the next 3-5 years whether Intel can cross this chasm; if they can't, then the future likely belongs to ARM, and that future will likely mean less and less to Microsoft, outside of running classic Win32 applications on x64/x86 Windows.
1. Can Intel succeed where they've failed for the last 5+ years, at building hybrid processors? The next year to two years should answer this question.
2. Can Microsoft succeed at finally getting application developers to write platform-optimized, energy-respectful, halo applications for the PC? I've been writing about the Windows Store for a long, long time. A long time. And I'm still not sure how Microsoft can light a fire under Windows application developers when they've lost that mindshare.
3. Can Microsoft begin pushing the Surface platform forward again? This one's completely up to Microsoft. I've seen the rumors of the next Surface Pro... and it's more of the same -- evolutionary, not revolutionary.
I guess we will see in the next 3-5 years whether Intel can cross this chasm; if they can't, then the future likely belongs to ARM, and that future will likely mean less and less to Microsoft, outside of running classic Win32 applications on x64/x86 Windows.
Revolutionary vs Evolutionary (Score:4)
So, what does "revolutionary" actually look like for a PC? Would it be recognized as a PC?
I don't know, but I'm fairly certain that it has almost nothing to do with the CPU hidden under the hood. The answer isn't Intel vs ARM vs ... anybody. That's a technical quibble that is being shown every day to mean less and less. Apple's evolution from Motorola 68x to PPC to Intel to ARM should have made that part obvious.
Re:Revolutionary vs Evolutionary (Score:5, Interesting)
At the end of the day, there's a helluva lot of legacy software out there that outright breaks when Windows runs on a new architecture. Some of that is software developers' faults; they've been developing on the x86 ecosystem in one form or another for the better part of 40 years (even longer if you consider the continuum of 8080/Z80 to 8086). But it's worse than even that. I'm still forced to use a web application that was optimized for Internet Explorer in the early 2000s but is only partially usable even now on other browsers, and there's a huge amount of software built on top of the IE ecosystem that is likely to break in obvious or non-obvious ways; so that even Edge now has to have an "IE mode", meaning more cruft thrown into a major piece of Microsoft's modern software stack.
The fact is the NT kernel was built from the ground up to be portable, and has run on a number of architectures over the last 30 years. But that doesn't mean much when a lot of the software is compiled to x86 binaries. Developers have never really bought into .NET, so even that hypothetical route to making software architecture independent hasn't been bought into by many developers.
Apple's solutions of periods of being able to run old architecture binaries has been accomplished in no small part because Apple exerts a helluva lot more control over its architecture. It builds its computers, it builds its operating systems. Microsoft doesn't have that level of control. I can go on Amazon or down to Best Buy or whatever and buy one of dozens of PCs, some running Intel, some running AMD, all with different chipsets and video cards. Microsoft got huge by building an OS that could run on PC compatibles, and it has always been a moving target that I do give MS some credit for managing, somehow, to largely stay on top of, but that strength is also a weakness that means any transition to new architecture is going to come at far larger cost for developers.
Java was developed to get over this, Microsoft has tried to sell .NET to the world to untether itself from x86, but so far not so good. It's a pity that Java never lived up to its promise, because CPU speed now is sufficiently powerful that you could hypothetically build an entire software ecosystem that had no idea whether it was running on x86 or ARM, or whatever new thing comes along next.
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"Java was developed to get over this, Microsoft has tried to sell .NET to the world to untether itself from x86, but so far not so good. It's a pity that Java never lived up to its promise, because CPU speed now is sufficiently powerful that you could hypothetically build an entire software ecosystem that had no idea whether it was running on x86 or ARM, or whatever new thing comes along next."
That ecosystem exists... it's now called the web browser... and in the back-end, its running for the most part on a
Re: Revolutionary vs Evolutionary (Score:2)
Microsoft should have insisted on multiple architecture binaries back in the days of early Window's NT. That was a critical mistake and something Microsoft has not done anything to remedy in the interim.
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I'm actually surprised that multiple ports of RISC NT lasted as long as they did as the number of non-x86 NT applications were near-zero and the mach
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The Alpha ports of Windows lasted for as along as they did, because it was part of the agreement with DEC to keep supporting them after it was clear that the internals of VMS to implement NT, to the point where they probably violated some patents. To avoid lawsuits, they agreed to pay DEC and continue to support Alpha until HP, who eventually acquired the platform, decided to close it and PA-RISC down in favor of Itanium.
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Maybe they should have, but then again, back in the early days of Windows NT 3.5, there was one dominant 32 bit archtecture; x86. As I recall, they did have ports to PPC and Alpha, but other than Apple, I don't recall a lot of PPC systems out there, and Alpha was promising, but never really went anywhere (I saw exactly one DEC Alpha workstation running NT back in the day, and it was $$$). They did have an opportunity at the very least, but they through DOS VDM support in there, as well as the WOW layer to r
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They did. NT was originally built against MIPS and then ported to x86 and Alpha to prevent programmers from doing any x86 tricks. The whole Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) architecture at the core of NT is in part to allow them to support multiple archs without too much rewrite. The problem was the market had zero interest in anything other than x86 clones, since any MIPS or Alpha machines were orders or magnitude more expensive and none of the old DOS software ran on them at least at first. Sam
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Apple's solutions of periods of being able to run old architecture binaries has been accomplished in no small part because Apple exerts a helluva lot more control over its architecture. It builds its computers, it builds its operating systems. Microsoft doesn't have that level of control. I can go on Amazon or down to Best Buy or whatever and buy one of dozens of PCs, some running Intel, some running AMD, all with different chipsets and video cards. Microsoft got huge by building an OS that could run on PC compatibles, and it has always been a moving target that I do give MS some credit for managing, somehow, to largely stay on top of, but that strength is also a weakness that means any transition to new architecture is going to come at far larger cost for developers.
I don't think it matters that much that Microsoft doesn't build the hardware and Apple does. The biggest factor is the different philosophy: Apple are willing to abandon legacy APIs and architectures and Microsoft aren't. Switching processors is a little hypothetical, since alternatives to x86 have never been enough better to really force Microsoft to choose whether to support them. But if ARM leaves x86 in the dust, Microsoft could work with PC manufacturers to roll out ARM PCs with an ARM-based Windows th
Re:Revolutionary vs Evolutionary (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft was writing operating systems for a pretty diversified set of hardware. In the early days of MS-DOS there were specialized variants of DOS for hardware that was a bit left field, but for the most part MS became THE x86 company, creating that somewhat unhealthy Microsoft-Intel hegemony which only really began to fall apart when ARM became the go to CPU for smart phones and related hardware. Microsoft made its fortune by writing an operating system and ecosystem that ran on x86, full stop. That success, particularly in the enterprise world, meant the customers buying a lot of licenses (like large corporations and governments) demanded that they not have to buy a new version of the software with each new release. In other words, the organizations that essentially bankrolled Microsoft wanted to make sure some crazy DOS app written in 1986 on an 8088 or 80286 would still run on a Pentium a decade later.
This in and of itself isn't a terrible business model. IBM has been making continuous iterations of the 360 line for 55 years or so now, all with the idea that you can still run decades' old programs on new hardware, because when you're spending tens of millions of dollars writing software, you want to make damned good and sure that it's useful life is measured in decades, not years.
Selling DOS and later Windows to consumers was, as much money as it made Redmond, a sideline. The real cash was selling hundreds of thousands of seats to enterprise purchasing departments, and to do that, they had to guarantee that the software would last. I think MS had hoped that the NT line would give them a similar development cycle to more specialized hardware manufacturers like IBM and Apple, but it never rolled out that way. It means a bit less now since 16 bit software is a thing of the distant past, and if you want to run it that bad, there's always software like DOSEMU. .NET has been around nearly 20 years now, and yet a helluva lot of software is still distributed as x86 binaries. That's momentum, and it's a hard thing to get around. Apple never had that kind of momentum, precisely because their Mac market was sufficiently small with sufficiently high levels of buy in that they could just go "Well, next week we're dumping PPC for Intel...", with some reasonable stop gaps, and moved on. If MS had, say, dumped Windows 3.1 in the mid-90s and went straight to NT without any legacy support, not thouands or tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of users would have been disrupted, millions of consumers from Aunt Mavis just checking her email to major corporations would have had a major nightmare on their hands.
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I'm well aware that Java is used all over the place, but what it's not used for is desktop apps. That was the vision of Sun back in the day, the problem being that in the mid and late-90s, Java did kinda suck on PCs. JIT has got better, but so have processors. The quad core ARM processor sitting in my phone is a lot more powerful than a mid-90s Pentium II, and my phone has something like eight times the RAM and storage that my Pentium II did. Running GUI Java applications on that machine wasn't exactly a th
Dear MS (Score:2)
Ditch that abominable UI for windows. And stop the telemetry and tying all your crapware together. Then I'll look at what you have to offer.
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Oh wait, this is an article about Microsoft, so obviously nothing they do will be satisfactory to this crowd.
Fix Sucky Standards [Re:Dear MS] (Score:2)
Nooo! If MS attempts to "fix" it, they'll just screw it up in a different arbitrary bleeped-up way. Let's stick with the fuckage we know.
Instead of reworking the Grand Tree of OS menus, they should instead focus on Bing-ifying options: make it easy to find options using search words. "Sound", "speaker", "can't hear", etc. should all list and link to the Windows "audio" settings. You wouldn't have to remember how to menu-tree-walk to it. Learn from customer feedback to tun
Re: Dear MS (Score:2, Interesting)
Tey MacOS... It's utterly fascinating to me, how I only ge anything done in it, by going "How would a complete idiot with no clue of computers whtsoever approach this?", and then doing that. Which of course is uttely cumbersome, and anything with the slightest amount of power is only discoverable with pure luck. (Like typing umlauts. How would I find out you have to hold, unless I stumbled on it by accident. Worst UI since 80s digital wristwatches.). Don't even try to automate it away. Even basic things lik
Does Microsoft care? (Score:5, Interesting)
The vast majority of Microsoft's revenue now comes cloud - from Azure, and Office subscriptions (which counts as cloud since it is backed by a SaaS in Office365).
Office subscriptions are in no way tied to Windows either, as it is also the dominant commercial office suite on both Android and Mac OS.
It's hard to break down exactly how much revenue comes from Windows OEM now, since they lump it into the "other" category along with XBox and Surface and a bunch of other stuff - but the total revenue of that grouping of things was only 33% of Microsoft's revenue in Q4.
It's pretty clear that Microsoft cares a lot more about it's services growth than Windows. Nadella has actually been saying this publically for years and years, so it shouldn't surprise anyone.
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That's a dangerous road to take.
Apple's own software will always be better integrated with its own platforms, regardless of how much antitrust lawsuits you throw at them. They will leverage their platform advantage to bundle other software ... they haven't really gotten around to challenging Microsoft's office, but relying on that continuing is dangerous.
Microsoft had it right with Windows Phone, it really was a necessity for them to stay relevant.
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Re: Does Microsoft care? (Score:2)
Ok... You keep believing that lol
AMD will take over (Score:3)
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No, but Microsoft is. Users follow the applications, and if your platform doesn't have the application, you're fucked. See: Windows Phone.
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Can Intel succeed where they've failed for the last 5+ years, at building hybrid processors? The next year to two years should answer this question.
So why does it have to be Intel?
The only reason I can think of is that they are so much bigger than AMD and they have the resources to turn things around for themselves. They did it before, with the aid of some behaviour where they were lucky to get away with only paying AMD a $1.25B settlement. Oh, by the way, that agreement [amd.com] expired recently.
MS should dump Windows (Score:2)
MS should opensource Win32 and convert windows into a Linux Distribution and then cycle development down and eventually kill it off entirely. I really don't see any reason for Windows to be a thing in 2030.
Underlying Problem (Score:3)
This is kind of a "too many standards" fix to the problem. The reason Microsoft has such a hard time getting developers to write for the UWP is that, between 2005 and 2015 they rapidly cycled from .NET/WPF as the preferred development platform, to .NET/Silverlight, to Metro, to UWP. Within that time frame Microsoft has created and deprecated entire APIs and UI frameworks. Why would anyone develop a major product for UWP with that track record? And, if Microsoft does it yet again, why would anyone develop fo
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Good Analogy (Score:2)
"stuck in the same rut that American cars grappled with in 1973 to 1983."
My PC definitively has a few Rust problems.
Intel and Samsung have problems with EUV (Score:2)
In my opinion Intel doesn't so much have an architectural problem, everyone has an EUV problem except TSMC. Apple used it's size and margins to buy pretty much all 5nm, but given it's node advantage it's architectural advantage is fairly minimal to non existent.
Big/little seems to me to be screwing around in the margins, I think Apple mostly does it to keep architectures similar with iOS where the little cores really need to go way down in power consumption. Those extremes are not necessary for laptops, Int
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Damn, I screwed up a lot of its there ...
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Samsung is still making progress. Not the same progress as TSMC, but they aren't having problems like Intel is with their decidedly-not-EUV 10nm node. Jury's still out on Intel's EUV 7nm node but yeah, it isn't looking too good.
What a vague and confused article (Score:5, Insightful)
This author has done a very poor job of explaining exactly what his complaints mean, or what would fix them. I get that he has four main issues:
1. The inability of Intel to deliver processors that deliver a great harmonization of energy efficiency and high performance
2. The beginning push of ARM-based processors into the mainstream computing realm, in the form of Apple silicon.
3. The lack of compelling energy efficient halo applications on Windows to pull consumer desire for the platform forward
4. The lack of PC computing devices that push the platform forward overall.
It basically sounds like he wants hardware and software developers to "wow" him in some undefined way, but he remains unwowed.
And his answer to his own question, "So how do we escape this PC Malaise Era?" is just more handwaving. Intel needs to make new, better stuff! We need exciting apps that are energy efficient! We need more tablets!
Christ what a load of hooey. Meaningless questions with insipid, vague answers.
The OS matters less and less... (Score:3)
The future for most users is web apps in the cloud. Not for the nerds, but we are a small and unprofitable market. If Intel fails, so what? Windows works fine on AMD. If ARM CPUs become better, or RISK-V, or whatever, Windows can be ported on them.
The way things are going with Windows-Linux integration, Windows will become a Linux DE. It makes sense for everyone involved. Windows is not the cache cow for Microsoft anymore, so they will chuck it on top of Linux and save themselves a ton of development effort to keep a proprietary kernel.
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That won't need PCs or Windows. Windows has far too large an attack surface to be a good terminal.
Azure Sphere looks nice though.
Answers (Score:2)
1. No. While Hybrid chips seems to be all the rage, it's not going to do anything but scale performance on a chip vertically instead of horizontally. You'll basically have a thicker CPU that's faster but eats more power, and it will still have the problem of cooling the lower parts of the chip since they don't have direct contact with the cooling die, and since silicon doesn't have great heat dissipation...
2. The Windows Store is dead. The only company still taking it seriously is Microsoft, and even they c
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I'm curious about ARM's new parent company. If anyone can kickstart a post-x86 Windows era, surely it's nvidia with a Cortex-X1 gaming laptop - Surface Pro Xbox.
4) Do we NEED any huge revolution in PCs right now (Score:2)
I guess point 2 addresses this somewhat, but do we really need any huge step function in Windows PCs at this moment? Anything you can buy right now is going to be overpowered for anything the majority of users are doing, with the exception of high end games and content creation, both of which are arguably edge cases.
PCs are powerful, Windows 10 is fairly robust and not too annoying. Rather than mess about with any of that, I'd like to see something more interesting in applications. It's not what you have
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Windows 10 robust? When updates break stuff? Nope. Microsoft quality control is shit, has 800 million member QA department that often gets ignored when it finds problems.
A Marketing Relflex VS Reality (Score:2)
No more Surface junk (Score:4, Informative)
My company went all-in on Surface awhile back and we've had tons of each iteration. They were junk. The failure rate was unreasonably high and even the cheapest repairs were never less than 50% of the cost of a brand new unit. You know, low enough to make you question the wisdom of repair vs replace but high enough to soak you for simple fixes. I finally convinced the bean counters to switch platforms to something that isn't a steaming pile of suck.
American autos (Score:2)
Any comparison with American cars of 1973-83 is nasty.
PC malaise not necessarily negative (Score:3)
PCs reached a point some time ago where they are pretty much appliances with an interactive operating system.
Think of the average user or organisation looking for a computer today; a laptop with 8GB RAM and an SSD which comes with Windows 10 & lifetime updates is neither high-end nor expensive. It will run a web browser, office and budgeting software and probably even some non-intensive games. Assuming no physical damage, this laptop will last a fair amount of time.
There will continue to be developments in computer hardware and architecture. Immediate things which come to mind include advancement of graphic card technology as well as better power management (this includes so-called 'Hybrid chips' i.e. improvement in CPU architecture). There are users who will benefit from the latest and greatest improvements - people working with graphics/media, big data experts, those working on AI and ML.
But the rest of us and the average user will simply pick up these enhancements when it's time to replace their appliance.
The appliance nature of the modern PC is the exact cause of 'PC malaise'. Who gets excited about the incremental improvements in their washing machine or their fridge?
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Apple will take everyone's lunch, being vertically integrated smother the market and will have to make extreme mistakes to be dislodged.
IBM's mistake to create the PC was all our gain, this seems to be the end of the ride.
Not the issue (Score:2)
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How many years have me been saying this (Score:2)
I think they're losing the next generation of devs (Score:5, Interesting)
I work as a programmer, primarily with .NET - and I generally get along just fine.
My kid, though, is just learning programming - and that means writing games. He has done some stuff in Scratch, but his ideas are complicated enough that he's better off moving on from that. He did an online course with Python, and we started writing a text-y game with that - but he really (and naturally) wanted proper graphics. I couldn't immediately figure out how to get an image library working with the goofy install they'd done, so I figured "Hey, I can just get him going in .NET" - that'll be easy to support him with.
Writing a simple 2d game in .NET is a bizarre mess.
From past experience I knew using the built-in forms/GDI would be slow (performance wise) and unpleasant, so I figured I'd find out what MS recommended now. I searched.. and I don't know. There's like 10 generations of half-realized/extinct crap: DirectX.NET and XNA and at least a couple more, all with half-functional zombie documentation, dead links, and instructions that no longer work. There's a bunch of MS articles pointing you towards libraries that died long ago (SlimDX, SharpDX) and otherwise suggesting approaches that are broke.
Or they suggest you use very heavy-weight libraries - things like Unity or Monogame - that have a whole network of other challenges to pick up, and/or require a ton of boiler-plate code/external tools to get going. These tools are probably great - but the point of this is to learn programming, not to learn how to use a bunch of resource editors.
Eventually I found Win2d, which is so far "not insane"... like, you can load and draw an image to your form without a ton of code, without external tools, and without having to pay to remove a splash screen. But even Win2d has a bunch of baggage that makes it awkward for a new programmer. Like, it works with "Universal Windows Platform", which means a bit of config to get going and is generally odd. You have to edit XML to place your form on the page (which I'm OK with, but is pretty imposing when you're starting out). You have to use special URIs (rather than just hardcoding a path) to get to your assets, since you don't seem to have permission on the regular file system. There's a bunch of methods that are async only, which makes for some very intimidating looking await patterns when you're just starting out.
Like, I can get a project going for him to work with, but it's all been way harder than it should be.
MS should put a simple graphics/sound library in .NET: something that's easy to consume using straightforward, self-contained, procedural code. Ideally, you could compile it to a self-contained EXE, a web page, or an Android app.
Doing that would capture a ton of interest from kids looking to program - and I feel like MS used to understand this (back in GORILLA.BAS days).
Re:I think they're losing the next generation of d (Score:4, Interesting)
Every project - business or otherwise - starts with developers picking a language.
When there's not a strong incumbent in an organization (and sometimes even when there is), they often pick based on what they learned in school (which is the explanation behind every legacy project written in Delphi), or what they've used for hobby programming (which is a large part of why VB6 was so popular in 1998, because so many developers then had done their first programming in GWBasic or QBasic or whatever). In turn, VB6 being popular in 1998 is a large part of the reason why all those business apps in .NET you mention exist.
Microsoft owes a ton of its developer support (and overall success) to good developer tools, and for the most part they know this and work to keep improving. They've spent a lot of time servicing "absolute beginner programmers" (who can learn to organize their thoughts into steps with Minecraft coding exercises and what not) and also to support "dedicated hobbyists" (who can work in DirectX/C++, or who can do things like make a multi-platform game with Unity).
But they've missed a section in the middle - the teen programmer who wants to do their first "real" project. It's harder than it should be to do that project in .NET, and that means they'll lose people to something like Python that has less ties to their ecosystem.
And more importantly, it means I'm annoyed because setting up my kid's project is harder than it should be.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
A 'halo' application is an application that is a must have. The gold standard. The best of the best which makes the purchase of everything else worthwhile. Think Lotus 1-2-3 in 1984. WordPerfect in 1992. Microsoft Office in 2002. Active Directory in 2005. Exchange and Outlook in 2007.
They haven't had a Windows only halo application in years.
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Windows only
Is that even possible? What would prevent a piece of software not to be rewritten for other platform?
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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What's a "hard disk"?
Ask someone who remembers what a "newspaper" was.
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I understand the "news" part, but what the hell is "paper"? Stop making up words!
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People LOVE Exchange/Outlook, and it'll be a while before they're replaced (I suspect, though these things can move quickly, so maybe I'm naïve).
We use GSuite (or whatever it's called now) where I work, and it's OK (obviously not F/OSS), but not great, for the calendaring features, and people are resistant to change.
I run into bugs more often on LibreOffice than I do Office 365, but not notably more, and Offi
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
To the detriment of users. One of the worst interfaces in recent memory, not to mention how it "organizes" files and directories.
Without being rhetorical, how difficult is it to have a document sharing platform which doesn't look like it's from twenty years ago and just as slow?
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how difficult is it to have a document sharing platform which doesn't look like it's from twenty years ago and just as slow?
Having been forced to use modern cloud based options I can confirm that if you add in 'usable', 'accessible' and 'not even fucking worse somehow than shitty Sharepoint' then it's a rather hard problem to solve.
As awful as Sharepoint is anything more usable tends to end up looking like Sharepoint with fewer features.
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I run into bugs more often on LibreOffice than I do Office 365
I liked LibreOffice, but after trying Textmaker for Linux from Softmaker, I had noooo problem spending the $49 or whatever it was for it.
It's a very close/almost clone of MS Word, and it works great. Excellent compatibility with Word docs, even on complex documents.
It looks like Word and the commands and stuff are all pretty much where you'd expect to find them.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
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Here are a couple decent references I've found for Word and regex. Word does use a slightly non-standard version of regex but I've used it a fair bit over the years to catch things other tools won't (like mixups with "from" or "form", a lot of grammar tools won't catch stuff like that).
https://docs.xbench.net/user-g... [xbench.net]
https://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/e... [ntu.edu.sg]
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That's because Thunderbird is not an Exchange/Outlook clone, it is a Eudora clone.
In my opinion, that is a GOOD thing.
(Exchange/Outlook is some buggy assed shit that has been the centerpiece of I dont know how many enterprise email system compromises, because it automatically parses embedded HTML, including scripts, enabling nasty things to happen just from viewing a preview of an email.)
Of course, you are probably too young to remember Eudora, but there's always images from the days of yore.
To wit, here's
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Windows is only as slow as your hardware is and Microsoft has done a fantastic job of making Windows 10 lighter than its NT 6.x predecessors.
Re: Huh? (Score:2)
Of course if your gold standard is inside the box of Outlook, it's always gonna be the greatest.
This might sound weird, but to my couple of shell scripts it cannot even hold a candle. Simply due to the lack of automatability and instant adaptability.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Evolution is as good as Outlook, the reason it hasn't taken over is because it's slightly different from and not entirely compatible with Outlook, and nobody in their right mind would use such a talking motorized spork of an application on their own free will anyway. Especially because the server side, Exchange, is a toxic dumpster fire for sysadmins to deal with.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Once you get over 30 or so users, any change is painful, and often the M$ tax is cheaper than the retraining and retooling.
eg. Does Evolution have rooms you can book with a meeting planner?
I've run exchange for about 20 years now with about 75 users, and it has been low maintenance pretty much set and forget.
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close to as good as Outlook
Close form below...or close from above?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you serious? What was wrong with "killer app" that we needed a replacement buzzword that means the same thing?
Nothing was wrong, Halo was just more right (Score:3, Interesting)
What was wrong with "killer app"
It doesn't have the nice double-entendre that "Halo" does when talking about Microsoft... maybe even triple. The allure was too strong.
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Do you ever wonder why we're here?
"Killer app" too violent for inclusive naming (Score:3)
What was wrong with "killer app" that we needed a replacement buzzword that means the same thing?
"Killer app" is a violent term, and the inclusive naming guidelines [inclusivenaming.org] discourage use of such violent terms.
Some say the inclusive naming movement [slashdot.org] is righting some longstanding wrongs in the industry. Others claim it's virtue-signaling grandstanding by the left.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Huh? (Score:3)
Windows is dead. (Score:2, Insightful)
No application developer in their right mind would target Windows exclusively today. Too many security holes, too much spyware, too much history of Microsoft kneecapping anyone that gets too successful, etc.
Re: Windows is dead. (Score:3)
Tell that to the game developers. To them it's PC Windows, console Windows (XBox) or Sony's latest mess. Alriiight, Nintendo's latest mess too...
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So you haven't noticed that a good fraction of all new PC games have Linux ports now? It might be the norm if Steam's gaming console had taken off.
Re: Windows is dead. (Score:5, Interesting)
So you haven't noticed that a good fraction of all new PC games have Linux ports now? It might be the norm if Steam's gaming console had taken off.
True that they're targeted, but Steam isn't the reason why.
Major engines allow us game developers to target a ton of platforms easily. There are problems if you stray too far from the core of the engine, but for many games adding a Linux or Mac target is just a checkbox in Unreal or Unity. The same for Android/iPhone, or for multiple consoles. And you can easily cross hardware generations, clicking the buttons for PS3/PS4/PS5 or 360/XB1/XS can mean a multi-day processing of assets, but eventually the code and data will all work on the target platforms across all the hardware generations. That's why many games already have updates for the new platforms that take advantage of many additional hardware resources. (They won't be hand-tuned to take advantage of all the new hardware, but graphics quality, audio quality, simulation performance, memory pools, and other aspects all come with near-zero effort.)
That is in contrast with the past where every platform required rewriting tremendous portions of the game.
For many games there is no significant extra development work to "just" add a Linux or Mac port when the hardware is effectively identical. QA gets some extra work, but the expensive programming and artwork specialization have virtually vanished.
HPC (Score:2)
Tell that to the game developers. To them it's PC Windows, console Windows (XBox) or Sony's latest mess.
Tell that to scientists developing data analysis (e.g.: bioinformatics) apps.
To them it's unix on a big over-powered honking Linux cluster. Or unix under the layer of crayons on their mac OS laptops.
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All those reasons apply to Mac OS as well.
I'd say the real reason is that people aren't looking for reasons to use computers anymore, people use browsers and maybe productivity software and that is it. This is also why the entire suggestion is flawed to begin with.
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Apple just released the M1. It's faster, runs cooler, and yields 20+ hours of battery life, and this is just version 1.
But I do think you are correct that computing in the traditional sense is less and less significant. I grew up as a developer, I have a high end MacBook Pro, I've been using Linux since the mid-90's.
Today though, running a large engineering organization, I get 90% of my work done on an iPad Pro which has the vast majority of apps I use daily, it has never ending batter life and is super por
Re: Windows is dead. (Score:3)
Work? On an iPad? What does that look like?
An internet faucet and vending machine with a multiple choice and fingerpaint interface... For /work/? How?
Re: Huh? (Score:3)
You mean a killer application?
That was always the word for that ever since I first used 1-2-3.
Sorry, Halo is a sluggish shooteroid for console casuals. ;)
Oh, and you already lost by thinking in terms of applications.
Re: Huh? (Score:2)
Whoops, closing tag gone wrong.
In the Beginning was the Command Line.... (Score:2)
Neal Stephenson's essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line" explains why a window specific platform app is a relic of the past, not the future.
The main thesis of the essay says that computing is built on top of the value stack and that each layer underneath becomes increasingly commidified.
Thus
Lotus 1-2-3 in 1984 and WordPerfect in 1992 made the command line useful, but when the command line became commodified with a GUI OS, thost a
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Have you ever tried to use PowerShell? From what I can tell, Microsoft is aggressively trying to make the command line as opaque and inconsistent as possible. It makes the complaints in "csh Considered Harmful" look positively benign in comparison.
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Have you ever tried to use PowerShell? From what I can tell, Microsoft is aggressively trying to make the command line as opaque and inconsistent as possible.
If only there were an operating system that would allow you to run Unix commands in its shell...
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If only there were an operating system that would allow you to run Unix commands in its shell...
We could probably code a GUI for it in Visual Basic.
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Can you really expect there to be huge innovations in word processors and email clients after 40 years of development? Maybe they've just reached maturity? You can only introduce the computer to the world once. Trying to "revolutionize" everything over and over makes it shittier compared to getting it right and sticking with it. That's the real reason Windows sucks these past few years. Metro, telemetry, Microsoft Store, tablets, crappy "feature" focused update cycle that breaks core functionality for the s
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Agreed. Another term is killer app [wikipedia.org] -- that program that everyone "must have". To expand your list:
* VisiCalc on the Apple 2
* Lotus 1-2-3
* Doom on the 386 / 486 was a killer app
* Quake on the Pentium was a killer app
* Halo on the original XBox was a killer app
* Infinity Blade on the iPhone was a killer app
* Modern gaming fads would include Fornite and Minecraft
There is _nothing_ today that "requires" Windows because Operating Systems and Applications have become commodity items. For the majority of people t
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
And now, much in these leaden apps and UIs is augmented by advertising support. Selling telemetry. Embedded yet hidden scripts on web pages, e.g. the third vector of monetizing applications.
No UI or app innovation takes place because ad sales dis-incentivize innovation. More money is being placed in script development, and AI to make sense of the data than truly interesting and useful apps. Now we have apps with fridges, and data to recognize faces passing by doorbells. We now encroach on the user, making the user the property/asset to monetize, as in what happens with 90% of social media.
This is why we can't have nice things.
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That is an excellent analysis and summary. Thank-you! Sadly all too true.
When even the freaking OS is spamming you with ads it is no wonder that no one cares about where MS is stumbling along next when MS can't even respect your time, space, mind, and devices.
Hell, when even MS brags that 60% of Azure [microsoft.com] runs Linux that tells me that even Microsoft realizes that the back-end is where all the money is. They aren't really interested in innovating the desktop. They make a good chunk of change with "Big Data".
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Remember how "WinTel" ruled the world?
No more.
Apple goes to ARM.
Embedded systems run ARM and even RISC-V with Linux. Microsoft lost that battle but it hasn't been a glorious new day in OS/UI/UX development because the nature of the industry has changed. Microsoft lost WinCE for numerous reasons, most of them amounting to greed, and the pseudo-science of their pseudo-innovation. It was an echo chamber of their own dominance, handily thwarted by Torvalds, Jobs, and others, who really innovated, rather than co
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Well, not every UX-based decision is a good one, and not every good UX-based decision pleases everyone.
The removal of the Start menu from Windows was a dipshit move. Who thought that was a good idea? I have my suspicion (based on watching many of my colleages in the UX world) that the people behind that were primarily Mac users. Far too many UX people live in the MacOS/iOS space _only_. This is problematic for designing for regular users of other OSes.
Myself, I regularly use MacOS, Windows (since 3.11 - try
Re: Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can actually accept a lot in terms of actually justifiable change, if one can provide a demonstrable reason besides :"But its just so.... OLD!!"
This is because pareto-optimality is in fact a thing that exists. It is entirely possible to accidentally stumble upon a mostly ideal solution, and further meddling is then likely to only reduce utility, and not improve it. While not guaranteed to be true, it is also not guaranteed to be false either, and requires actual effort to determine on a case-by-case basis. More often than not, UX people pretend that they can always just axe a useful metaphor system in favor of a completely new one, simply because somebody has a "modernity!!" boner.
See also, the red-headed stepchild of the UI formerly known as Metro, which is still trying hard to cling to the desktop space of windows 10.
For a tablet interface it makes some sense. For a desktop interface, it simply does not. Rather than accept that perhaps one was very close to a pareto-optimal state with the prior desktop metaphor, and attempt well researched and careful revisions to that metaphor, the decision to just uproot it practically wholesale was undertaken, with disastrous consequences.
Further adding to the problem, was the pretentiousness of the UX people in trying to insist that users were "simply wrong", and that "Once you use it, you will love it", despite the UI and UX paradigm underpinning that interface being nearly a decade old now, and people STILL hating it.
(see also, the very same problem that happened with Gnome 3.)
Many times, it appears to convey a message more of UX people desperate to justify their positions, and eager to try and claim some design mantle clout, than any real desire to uphold the principle function of a UX develoer, which is to determine how best to service a user so that interface elements of the operating system are the least obtrusive, and maximal utility and happiness are attained/retained. By this, I mean that it apears more often than not, that UX people are favoring killing old paradigms in favor of new and untested ones, simply because those old paradigms are old, when a more faithful adherence of the discipline would tell them that doing so is not unly unjustified, but also grossly unwise--- That what they should be doing is instead championing against the marketing people who are demanding change for change's sake (because it makes the product seem new to better justify a massive outlay to upgrade), because doing so is counter to the core function of UX as a discipline..
See also, when Slashdot decided that it needed to try forcible adoption of its new "Beta" user interface, which was met with unanimous disapproval, because of its horrible use of whitespace, poor utilization of screen real-estate, and deletion of useful formatting options, just to suit the whimsy of some core web developers it had employed at the time-- and the rationales that were presented to justify the forced migration, and ultimately, the very real threat of the slashdot viewership leaving wholesale to sites like reddit if they continued-- being necessary before they finally recanted. (A real UX project would take poignant note of this kind of outcry, and the citation of specific greivances with the changes, and realize they had fumbled terribly.)
You mention iOS and MacOS background UX people as being major culprits, and I would tend to agree, but would further malign that demographic a bit, in that they especially trend toward the kind of officious "Suffering for Fashion" mentality, and tend to include/demand paradigms that exist exclusively for some concept of "Cuppertino Chic", (as in, seeking to distill something that is "uniquely descended from the Apple universe, as an abstract embodiment of an unjustifiable "betterness" than what anyone else has produced before or since, due exclusively to its "apple-ness") that if you do not embrace whole-heartedly, regardless of how obtuse and undesirable it may be (such as say, a medieval ru
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Let us be thankful that we have Apple to invent Big/Little, integrated GPU and UMA technologies! What would we ever do without them?
Funny how no one talks about these years-old technologies, then Apple does one and people just can't shut up about the innovation.
Also, it is unclear what exactly a "hybrid processor" is, but there's no reason for anyone to think that the M1 is one, much less the canonical example of one.
x86 doesn't do Big/Little because that design is an outgrowth of extreme low power requirements where x86 doesn't play. Apple didn't invent it nor is there a good argument why conventional PCs need it.
"This means one ends up in a situation where the CPU is constantly adjusting clock speed and running threads off all cores even when the situation doesn't warrant doing so. You also get less efficient use of CPU caching, as CPU-intensive tasks are often ran by dedicated bits of software and a hybrid CPU ships with separate caches for the groups of high-performance and high-efficiency cores. "
All meaningless horseshit. You don't know what you're talking about.
You know what would have made a good "hybrid" example? The Neural Engine inside the M1. Problem is, none of the fanboys like you know anything about it because it's not part of the Apple pep rally. When Apple figures out how to use it on the Mac, that will change. As is, it's just another vestigial turd in the M1 that came from phones and is unused.
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Apple doesn't want you to use old peripherals or 3rd party peripherals whose drivers depend on X86.
Unsuspecting consumers buy new Macs only to realize they need to spend a bundle more for new peripherals with drivers designed for the new processor.
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Why would you need a "feature" that slows down your machine to consume less power when you're connected to AC power? That sounds like a massive negative to a user.
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Hell Windows PCs are doing just fine, too. Especially if you aren't using Windows Store. The entire article seems to be a rant about a particular lineup of MS products/features not being relevant to their own platform.
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