It's really encouraging to see signs of life in Microsoft's culture. I've never been a real fan of their products, but hopefully if some of this fun, creative energy makes it's way into the user experience.
That being said, whenever anyone declares any product dead I cringe a little.
Or they think Android will be the easier of the two to kill. Or the less interesting of the two. Or the less profitable. Or the less symbolic. Or it's their second milestone. Or . . . well, you get the picture.
Looking at the windows 7 demos on video it's very clear they've spectacularly missed the mark. It's like a really bad version of Windows media centre, which I accidentally had the displeasure of trying to setup today when hooking my new XBox up to my PC.
They may think it's good, but really what will happen is that it won't sell and they'll look like idiots, again. Whoever headed up the XBox should immediately be promoted into Ballmer's postion, his effigy should be burnt and then maybe they'll be ready to move on and be a real tech company again.
Whoever headed up the XBox should immediately be promoted into Ballmer's postion, his effigy should be burnt and then maybe they'll be ready to move on and be a real tech company again.
Yeah, because pop culture and how cool you think a guy is really matters. In the mean time since he has been CEO Microsoft has doubled their profit. Metrics matter.
To be fair, merely doubling profits doesn't mean much. It's his performance against the average CEO's that yields a comparison that makes sense. Has the number of personal computers active in the world only doubled since he took the helm? If so, I suppose that doubling MS's profits is acceptable. But I'd be surprised if engagement with computing devices has only doubled, so it's possible he's underperforming expectations.
In the last 10 years would you like to estimate how much the computer industry sector has grown? Double or would I hazard a guess at significantly more?
So, put it into context and doubling the profits is pretty pathetic.
The important thing from my standpoint as an investor is that the CEO "show me the money." Whether that's in terms of profits distributed as dividends, or as a growth in the value of my equity, it doesn't matter, but it has to happen some way. If it doesn't, I'm pretty disappointed. How much value has Ballmer created for his shareholders over the past ten years? Does it compare well to other companies with stable market shares in their primary line of business? These are the questions that interest me, not merely whether he's been able to maintain a market share status quo. That's the baseline of competency, not a sign of success.
It's solid - I'm not sure what everyone is going on about saying it's the world's most terrible UI. I didn't require any instruction at all figuring it out - it's mostly pretty intuitive. Some weird corners and quirks, but that's MS for ya. There are some cool tricks with the software keyboard that even the iPhone doesn't have.
That being said, an iPhone killer it is not. It's more responsive than most Android devices, but the fit and finish isn't quite there to really go toe to toe with the iPhone. It's also missing some pretty key functionality that is now common in the market (read: multitasking).
Also, its chief advantage here seems to be responsiveness. It's bloody fast, and that's a good thing... but it seems that a lot of the speed comes from first party apps being written in native code. Third party apps will be 100% .NET, and it remains to be seen if the same speedy user experience can be maintained in the third party realm.
[edit] The unified contacts thing in WP7 is really cool, and something I wish Apple would copy (but they probably won't). Having the phone be able to unify my friend's twitter, facebook, and address book entries is pretty slick.
I know, webOS had it first ;) It was cool then, it's still cool now, and I wonder why Android and iPhone haven't gone in this direction at all.
I think 3rd party app performance is going to be less about the runtime and more about how well it is coded. The raw perf difference between native and silverlight for something like UI is negligible.
Certainly for UI or high-level logic it's not going to make a big difference... but my impression is that there won't be any native code allowed, which is a stark contrast to both iPhone and Android.
If I need to write some performance-intensive bits of code, I won't be able to on WP7. Lots of the more novel/intensive applications (e.g., real time image analysis from your camera) will not be possible, or at least will suffer a significant usability hit compared to their speedier Apple/Google counterparts.
That being said, whenever anyone declares any product dead I cringe a little.