Tag Archives | Microsoft

Microsoft’s Courier: The Dream That Died…and Why

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 1, 2011 at 9:53 am


Jay Greene of Cnet has an excellent story up–the first of a two-parter–on Microsoft’s Courier two-screen tablet, which got everyone excited with an animated demo, but was killed before it ever shipped:

But the device wasn’t intended to be a computer replacement; it was meant to complement PCs. Courier users wouldn’t want or need a feature-rich e-mail application such as Microsoft’s Outlook that lets them switch to conversation views in their inbox or support offline e-mail reading and writing. The key to Courier, Allard’s team argued, was its focus on content creation. Courier was for the creative set, a gadget on which architects might begin to sketch building plans, or writers might begin to draft documents.

The Courier was a wonderful concept product, but I’m not convinced it’s a tragedy that Microsoft axed it, for three reasons:

1) It’s a heck of a lot easier to make a product impressive in a conceptual demo than in real life.

2) Like the Tablet PC, the Courier was heavily invested in the idea that lots of people want to take notes using a stylus and store them in their own handwriting. I’m convinced that very few folks actually want to do that.

3) It behooved Microsoft to identify the one most promising future path for Windows–which turned out to be Windows 8–and then pursue it as aggressively as possible. (And I don’t see why Windows 8 couldn’t be used as the basis of a Courier-like device.)

Still, it would have been fun to see the Courier in that demo in real life. Maybe the most important lesson is this: DON’T LEAK DEMOS OF PRODUCTS YOU AREN’T WILLING TO SELL.

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Why Would Anyone Use Windows XP Today, Anyhow?

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 26, 2011 at 10:15 am

Windows XP Splash ScreenAs the world celebrates–or at least acknowledges–the tenth anniversary of Windows XP, I wondered why so many people continue to use an operating system that dates from an utterly different era in the history of personal technology. So I conducted a quick survey to ask XP users…well, to ask them why they’re XP users, and whether they intend to continue on with the OS forever. Bottom line: A plurality of them use it because it’s what their employers provide. But most of them seem to be reasonably okay with that.

(Standard disclaimer: This was an informal survey, and the results reflect only the experiences and opinions of the people–almost 900 of them–who happened to take it. I’m not claiming their responses map to the world at large.)

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The Life and Times of Windows XP

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 24, 2011 at 10:44 pm

If you’d been alive in 1924 and had enjoyed the comedy stylings of a young Vaudevillian named George Burns, you never would have believed he’d still be packing them in seventy years later. In 1963, you might have dug the music that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were making, but the idea they’d still be touring almost forty-five years later would have sounded insane. Those of us who watched Dennis Eckersley pitch for the Red Sox in 1978 would have scoffed at the notion that he’d be playing for Beantown once again in 1998.

And then there’s Windows XP. The press release announcing its release on October 25th 2001 called it “Microsoft’s Best Operating System Ever.” A decade later, so many people still agree with that assessment that it remains the planet’s most pervasive desktop operating system.

Nobody would have been prescient enough to predict that Windows XP would be flourishing so many years after its debut. Not Microsoft. Not consumers and businesses. Not the analysts who get paid to know where technology is going. And certainly not me.

No single factor explains XP’s astonishing longevity. The most obvious one, of course, is the failed launch of 2007’s Windows Vista, an upgrade so lackluster that many PC users simply rejected it, instinctively and intelligently. But I think you also have to give XP credit for being just plain good, especially once Microsoft released Service Pack 2 in 2004. And desktop operating systems, from any company, simply aren’t as exciting as they were in the 1990s; people are less likely to want a new one every couple of years, and more likely to drive the one they’ve got into the ground.

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Microsoft Does Another Deal Over Android

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 13, 2011 at 11:24 am

Microsoft has struck a deal with Quanta, the giant contract manufacturer, to license its patents which may be violated by Google’s Android and Chrome OS. (I knew that Microsoft had been doing these pacts for Android, but wasn’t aware that it thinks that Chrome OS also rips off its intellectual property.)

Jay Green of Cnet reports:

As Android has grown and surpassed Microsoft’s mobile-phone operating systems in the marketplace, the company has targeted handset and tablet makers that use the Google operating system. It’s racked up a laundry list of licensees in a little more than a year, starting with longtime partner HTC. Just last month, Microsoft reached an Android licensing agreement with Acer.

I’m not criticizing Microsoft for its dealmaking. For one thing, I’m not a patent lawyer, so I don’t have a stance on the legitimacy of its claims against Google’s products. For another, aggressive licensing is probably less depressing than what the rest of the industry is doing: Attempting to sue everybody else’s pants off. But considering the company’s lack of success with Windows Phone so far, the possibility exists that it’ll slowly devolve from a product company into a patent-licensing one–and that would be sad.

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Microsoft on the Windows 8 Start Menu

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 4, 2011 at 2:11 pm

Curious what’s on the mind of the people who are creating Windows 8? Microsoft’s Windows team blogs the thinking behind its decisions in posts that are sometimes remarkably detailed. It’s published a post that’s the first of a series on the Windows 8 Start menu, which has nothing to do with any previous incarnation.

I think that Microsoft is making a mistake by removing the classic Start menu from Windows 8 altogether. If you’re in the desktop running conventional Windows programs and click Start, you get instantly dumped out into the very different world of Metro. It’s a jarring and unpleasant experience, even if you like Metro, and I think that Windows 8 skeptics are going to see it as an argument against upgrading. But I’m still glad that Microsoft is explaining why it’s doing what it’s doing.

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The History of Operating Systems, Charted

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 18, 2011 at 4:26 pm

Horace Dediu of Asymco has tried to quantify and chart how fast Windows is evolving compared to other operating systems. I could write hundreds of words quibbling with his methodology–for one thing, Windows 3.1 wasn’t the first stand-alone version of Windows and, in fact, required that you buy and install a separate copy of DOS–but his thoughts are interesting and his commenters have lots of smart things to say.

The contrast is then striking: Consumerized devices with over-the-air updates on a 12 month cycle are five times more agile than a traditional corporate Windows desktop. Another way to look at this is that for every change in a corporate desktop environment, the average user will change their device experience five times. Although Microsoft might find comfort in Enterprises’ leisurely pace of change[2], those are the wrong customers to keep happy going forward.

Dediu says he’s glad that Windows 8 is named Windows 8. It’s worth reminding ourselves that it’s only a code name at this point–and that “Windows 8” is the first version of Windows in Windows history that might plausibly be called something other than Windows, since the Metro interface lacks windows as we knew them. (That said, I hope that Microsoft does indeed call it Windows 8.)

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