Microsoft may be bringing innovative UI to the market. They may even have a technically mature infrastructure. But how are they going to regain the trust they lost by breaking API and promises time after time in the last twenty years ?
I love the quote in the article about the 90s being the dark ages of personal computing. What happened in the 90s? Oh, yes, Windows 3.x and Windows 9x.
For some of us, though, it was an age of enlightenment, having to work on various unices and then picked up Linux at home. (I started work in the 80s on MS-DOS & Novell environments)
What I have found the last 2 years or so is not that Linux is so awesome, but that Windows is, by itself, simply really bad. Having picked up iOS, MacOS and Android devices recently, they all work pretty well. Windows simply sits by itself in being a remarkably sluggish turd that cannot decide what it wants to look like. Of course, I have not actually had to use Windows 8 yet, but 7 was bad enough of a WTF U/I change (and slow as ever, with klugy programming environment).
I haven't tried Windows 8 on a desktop, yet (I couldn't get the consumer preview to work on any of my machines or in a VM). But I did switch from an Android to a WP8 phone and couldn't be happier. In that form factor, WP8 is exactly what I want and the UI is really well designed. I haven't used Windows since XP (and keep an XP VM for any work that requires Windows), but I'm actually quite interested in trying out a touch-enabled Windows 8 laptop based on the positive experience with my phone.
Edit: I should add that my main environment is Linux running dwm in monocle mode on a 17" MacBook Pro. Noone could be more surprised than me that I would be intrigued by a new UI coming from Microsoft.
I don't think the OP was talking about breaking backward compatibility with Win32. More like releasing a version of "Java" that produced bytecode that wouldn't run on anything but Microsoft's virtual machine. Or just the general and continuing behavior of Microsoft's developer tools to produce and encourage developers to write software that only runs or runs properly on Windows.
I expect them to do what they've been doing. They're Microsoft. That's what they do. That's the problem.
Nobody wants to be locked into a single vendor's platform. It's good for the vendor and bad for everybody else. How can they be surprised that everybody else now dislikes them for doing it?
Th problem is whatever you do you're locked into an ecosystem of some sort. Even open source software. Have you tried building a portable c program on windows, Linux and OSX? Java is the least painless thing but we all know that's just another ecosystem.
The bit people forget is: stop procrastinating and build some shit.
To be honest, most people really don't give a shit. The next cigarette or pay day is far more important. Perhaps I'm getting old, but there are more important things to worry about.
>Th problem is whatever you do you're locked into an ecosystem of some sort.
The difference is that not all ecosystems are tied to a single vendor. Nobody has a lock on POSIX or Java like Microsoft has on Win32. And the hardest part of getting a portable C program to run on Windows, Linux and OSX is to get the program that was much more easily ported between Linux and OSX to run on Windows, because Microsoft has to do a million inane things like using WSAGetLastError instead of errno just to be different.
>The bit people forget is: stop procrastinating and build some shit.
I don't think people forgot that. We've just started building shit for and on non-Microsoft platforms and found it to our liking.
