Tag Archives | Microsoft. Windows

Windows 8: See You in September?

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 22, 2011 at 9:52 am

When will Microsoft release a beta of Windows 8, or whatever it ends up calling the next version of its operating system? ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley has a timeline that makes September look plausible, with room for a more selective Community Technology Preview version to arrive before that. That timetable would make a mid-2012 release of the final version possible–less than three years after Windows 7’s debut.

We still don’t know that much about Windows 8, other than that it’ll apparently be designed with tablets and all-in-one computers in mind as well as more traditional PCs, and will run on mobile processors from ARM and other companies as well as x86 chips. Oh, and Steve Ballmer says it’s a risky bet.

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Windows 7 Seems to be Selling Well

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 28, 2011 at 7:43 am

Microsoft announced its quarterly earnings yesterday, and among the news tidbits was the fact that it’s sold 300 million Windows 7 licenses since the operating system launched in October 2009. That seems to be ahead of a 2009 prediction by IDC that forecast that the company would sell 177 millions copies of Windows 7 by the end of 2010. (It’s possible that Microsoft and IDC’s definitions of an instance of Windows sold vary.)

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CES 2011: Yup, Microsoft is Bringing Windows to ARM Chips

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 5, 2011 at 2:56 pm

Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote isn’t until 6:30pm PT tonight–I’ll be liveblogging it–but Microsoft already made news today at an afternoon press event by confirming the Wall Street Journal’s report that it’s working on a version of Windows that will run on the ARM chips widely used in phones, tablets, set-top boxes and other computing devices that aren’t PCs, as well as competitive x86 system-on-a-chip designs from Intel and AMD. Windows honcho Steven Sinofksy did some demos of Windows (and Office, and IE) running on test boards powered by these processors, and said that the system requirements of phones and the system requirements of PCs are starting to converge, and that his demos were of “the next generation of Windows,” which he refused to call Windows 8. He also showed a new version of Microsoft’s Surface table build by Samsung and based on all-new technology.

And that’s about all he did–he cheerfully announced that he wasn’t talking about the user interface of the new Windows or when it might ship. More thoughts later…

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Windows on ARM? Logical. Windows on ARM in 2013? That's an Eternity from Now

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 22, 2010 at 9:14 am

Numerous news sources are reporting that Microsoft plans to demo a version of Windows that runs on low-power ARM chips–rather than the x86 processors that Windows has been (mostly) synonymous with since its inception–at CES next month. Here are reports from Ian King and Dina Bass of Bloomberg, Don Clark and Nick Wingfield of the Wall Street Journal, and Ina Fried of All Things D.

I was startled by the news–until I thought it over, whereupon it didn’t seem so surprising any more. For decades, x86 processors (mostly from Intel and AMD) have been inside most computers that mattered, and so the fact that Windows ran on them was a virtue. (In fact, when Microsoft ported Windows NT to other CPUs in the 1990s–DEC’s Alpha and MIPS–the new versions turned out to be irrelevant, and so the company pulled the plug.)

But what happens if tablets and other new-wave computing devices become serious rivals to traditional PCs? x86 as it stands today isn’t especially well-suited to tablets, since it wasn’t designed from the ground up for energy efficiency and small form factors. (That was supposedly one reason why HP pretty much lost interest in its own Windows tablet and bought Palm’s Web OS.)

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Confessions of an Operating-System Agnostic

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 17, 2010 at 9:40 am

[NOTE: Here’s a story from our most recent Technologizer’s T-Week newsletter–go here to sign up to receive it each Friday. You’ll get original stuff that won’t show up on the site until later, if at all.]

Whenever I write about the pros and cons of Windows PCs and Macs–as I did recently for TIME.com–I make at least brief mention of the fact that I’m a happy user of both. But I’m not sure if I’ve ever outlined just why I buy and use both flavors of computer rather than settling on one or the other. Here are some quick thoughts on that subject.

First, a review of my life as a user of operating systems might be in order. For most of it, I was a single-OS user–sometimes ardently so…

1978-1982: I was a Radio Shack TRS-80 snob (thinking back, that sounds like an oxymoron, but trust me–I was one).

1982-1984 or thereabouts: I had and liked an Atari 400, but I don’t recall being passionate about it. I also backslid and did a fair percentage of my college work on…typewriters.

1984-1986: I went through an odd period during which I temporarily lost interest in computers, except for word processing.

1987-1991: I dabbled on a borrowed Mac, but I also bought a Commodore Amiga and became a–I try to avoid this word, but it’s the only one that fits–fanboy.

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Ballmer at CES: Windows Slates, Windows 8?

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 13, 2010 at 7:36 pm

The New York Times’s Nick Bilton is reporting that Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote next month will include demos of slate computers running Windows 7. Sounds like deja vu all over again: At this year’s CES, Ballmer did the same thing. The 2010 Windows slates failed to buck the long tradition of Microsoft products unveiled at Comdex or CES failing to change the world. (At least HP finally released its slate PC.)

This year’s slate PCs were basically Windows 7 laptops with touchscreens and the keyboards chopped off. Bilton’s story says that the 2011 versions are a bigger departure from Windows notebooks, and, for the that matter, from the iPad. They involve features like slide-out keyboards and user interfaces that differ depending on whether the device is held in landscape or portrait orientation.

I don’t wanna pre-judge devices that we don’t know much about yet, but if Microsoft figures out a way to make Windows make sense on computers that don’t have physical keyboards-or at least don’t assume you’ll use one at all times–I’ll be impressed. After all, it’s been trying for a decade and had made pretty much zero progress on the whole idea to date.

Meanwhile, the very end of Bilton’s article had a tidbit I’m more excited about: It says that Ballmer may also demo Windows 8 during the keynote.

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Once Again, “PC or Mac?”

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 7, 2010 at 9:40 am

My new TIME.com Technologizer column is up–it’s a quick look at the pros and cons of Macs and PCs as of late 2010. As always, I’m agnostic rather than partisan.

I talk a little bit in the piece about pricing issues, but they deserve a story of their own–the pricing comparisons I’ve done in the past are all woefully out of date.  (I’ve often found that Mac pricing is reasonable compared to truly comparable PCs, but it seems high at the moment–it’s been a while since Apple has done its periodic CPU/RAM/disk bumps on most models. Time to do the math again.)

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The Ones That Didn’t Make It: Windows’ Failed Rivals

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 22, 2010 at 5:37 am

Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0 on November 20th, 1985. Twenty-five years and two days later, it’s not just hard to remember an era in which Windows wasn’t everywhere–it’s also easy to forget that it wasn’t a given that it would catch on, period.

The company had announced the software in November of 1983, before most PC users had ever seen a graphical user interface or touched the input device known as a mouse. But by the time Windows finally shipped two years later, after a series of embarrassing delays, it had seemingly blown whatever first-mover advantage it might have had. At least four other major DOS add-ons that let users run multiple programs in “windows” had already arrived.

In a pattern that Microsoft would repeat with later products, though, it managed to make being late to the party work in its advantage. For one thing, Windows’ super-premature announcement left those four earlier packages competing with it even though it didn’t actually exist yet; many people sensibly postponed buying any “windowing” environment until it was clear how things would pan out.

For another, most of the developers of the earliest Windows rivals shot themselves in the foot, usually more than once: They released products that required cutting-edge machines which few people owned, or got ensnared in lawsuits, or failed to get third-party developers on board. Just as several of them were running out of steam, Windows arrived on the scene. And even though it didn’t gain traction for nearly another half a decade, that was okay; nothing else became a hit in the interim.

“Our approach is that there is only going to be one winner,” InfoWorld quoted Microsoft marketing honcho Steve “Bulmer” as saying in November of 1983, shortly after Windows was announced. The publication got his name wrong, but he couldn’t have been more right about the market.

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The Secret Origin of Windows

Posted by Tandy Trower on November 20, 2010 at 12:00 am

[A NOTE FROM HARRY: Windows 1.0 shipped on November 20th, 1985, which means that Microsoft’s operating system turns 25 today. Let’s celebrate by revisiting this fascinating look at Windows’ beginnings by Microsoft veteran Tandy Trower, which we originally published earlier this year.]

Few people understand Microsoft better than Tandy Trower, who worked at the company from 1981-2009. Trower was the product manager who ultimately shipped Windows 1.0, an endeavor that some advised him was a path toward a ruined career. Four product managers had already tried and failed to ship Windows before him, and he initially thought that he was being assigned an impossible task. In this follow-up to yesterday’s story on the future of Windows, Trower recounts the inside story of his experience in transforming Windows from vaporware into a product that has left an unmistakable imprint on the world, 25 years after it was first released.

Thanks to GUIdebook for letting us borrow many of the Windows images in this story.

–David Worthington

Microsoft staffers talk MS-DOS 2.0 with the editors of PC World in late 1982 or early 1983. Windows 1.0 wouldn’t ship for almost another two years. From left: Microsoft’s Chris Larson, PC World’s Steve Cook, Bill Gates, Tandy Trower, and founding PC World editor Andrew Fluegelman.
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Waitaminnit, Maybe HP’s Windows Slate is Interesting After All

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 19, 2010 at 12:21 am

At first, HP’s Windows 7 slate was going to be a big deal. Then HP stopped talking about it and I declared it dead. Then it came back, but in a form that left me wondering if it was cursed. What a saga!

On Thursday afternoon, I saw the gadget–now known as the HP Slate 500, and aimed at business types rather than consumers–up close and in person. I tried it a bit. And while it may still turn out to be a train wreck, I’m now thinking it might at least be an interesting train wreck. Or even–just maybe–an interesting machine, period. (The 500 went on sale a few weeks ago, but is apparently a rare, back-ordered commodity.)

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