Tag Archives | Microsoft

The Trouble With Touch Screens and Old-Fashioned Windows 8

Posted by Jared Newman on August 30, 2011 at 3:00 pm

I’m optimistic about Microsoft’s tablet plans for Windows 8. The idea of combining a touch-optimized layer for tablet apps with the familiar mouse-and-keyboard interface for legacy software seems to me like the best of both worlds, at least in theory.

But Microsoft might run into trouble by trying to shoehorn touch screen support into the traditional version of Windows, which will remain accessible on tablets even though it’s not designed primarily for them. Exhibit A: Windows 8’s redesigned Windows Explorer, which will bring the ribbon interface of products like Office and Paint into the operating system’s file manager.

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The Nation’s Windows 8 Newspaper

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 26, 2011 at 9:41 am

Hey, a preview of USA Today’s Windows 8 app over at ZDNet:

So far, all we’ve seen of applications utilizing Windows 8’s new user interface is what Microsoft has publicly demonstrated. But now, just 2-and-a-half weeks away from Microsoft’s BUILD conference, I’ve managed to unearth a couple of portfolios showcasing the first Windows 8 apps to be seen in the wild by 3rd party, non-Microsoft entities — one of them, being from USA Today.

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Xbox 360 Price Cut: Microsoft Won’t, Walmart Will

Posted by Jared Newman on August 25, 2011 at 2:20 pm

When Sony announced a $50 price cut for the Playstation 3, I assumed Microsoft wouldn’t rush to do the same with the Xbox 360. The console is sitting on top of the sales charts in North America right now, so there’s no immediate need to drum up sales by slashing prices.

But that’s not stopping Walmart. A leaked flyer, provided to Joystiq, shows that the Xbox 360 4 GB bundle with Kinect will get a $50 price cut to $249 on August 28. The leaked flyer doesn’t show any price cuts for other Xbox 360 models or bundles.

Microsoft has distanced itself from the rollback. “Walmart made an independent decision to implement this temporary price cut,” the company told Joystiq. “We’ve made no announcements about price drops, and do not discuss our pricing plans in advance.”

I buy the claim that Walmart is acting alone. But while Microsoft calls it “temporary,” Walmart’s circular says nothing of the sort. And if the retailer can afford to roll back the price, I wonder how long it’ll be before other retailers — and Microsoft itself — do the same.

My gut still says that any price cuts on Microsoft’s end will be designed to sell more Kinect units, ahead of a big software push for the motion-sensing camera. New games like Dance Central 2 are on the way, and the Xbox 360 dashboard is getting a redesign with deeper Kinect support.

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Hey, They’re All Just PCs

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 22, 2011 at 3:31 am

For one of the most successful, profitable, all-around-important inventions of all time, the PC has never gotten much respect. People have been announcing that its time is over almost since its time began. The newest round of debate was sparked by the thirtieth anniversary of the IBM PC earlier this month, particularly after IBM’s Mark Dean, who helped design the first IBM PC, wrote a blog post that referred to the post-PC era and compared the PC to vinyl and vacuum tubes. And it really caught fire last week when HP announced that it probably wants to get out of the PC business.

Now, it’s certainly news when the world’s largest PC company decides that it’s no longer happy being a PC company at all–even if it’s only coming to the same conclusion that a fair number of Wall Street analysts reached years ago. It helped to prompt Microsoft VP of Corporate Communications Frank X. Shaw to blog contending that we live in a “PC plus” era rather than a “post-PC” one, and arguing that smartphones, tablets, and e-readers are “companions” to the PC.

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Gone in Sixty Seconds: The Shortest-Lived Tech Products Ever

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 19, 2011 at 8:18 am

Companies in Silicon Valley are fond of saying that they like to “fail fast.” They mean that it’s virtuous to try lots of new things, but to give up quickly when something’s not working. But sometimes they fail fast in a manner that’s nothing to brag about. They invest millions (or hundreds of millions) of dollars in a new product and hype it to the Heavens–and then kill it after only a few months, if they ever release it at all.

From this day henceforth, HP’s TouchPad may be the poster child for bizarrely short-lived tech products. But it has lots of company–famously infamous flops such as Audrey, the G4 Cube, and Foleo. Let’s honor them, shall we?

For this list, I considered only products that were on the market for less than a year, or which never quite made it to consumers, period. Every item that made it was from a large company that should have known better. And while they all share the indignity of a short, embarrassing life, they represent multiple types of failure. (Some of them should never have left the drawing boards in the first place; others could have been great if they’d been given more time to succeed.)

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A World Without the IBM PC

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 12, 2011 at 1:20 am

Apple's famous ad.

On August 12th, 1981, IBM announced its first PC. That makes today the thirtieth anniversary of the platform that’s sometimes been called the PC clone, IBM PC compatible, or Wintel…but is most often simply called the PC. We started our celebration on Thursday with Benj Edwards’ look at PC oddities such as Bill Gates’s donkey-avoidance game. But thinking about some of the weirdness that the PC inspired got me to thinking: what if IBM, which took a long time to decide to do a PC at all, had decided not to do one? What if it had decided that microcomputers were a blip and it should stick to mainframes?

The announcement of the PC was one of the most important moments in tech history, since computers based on the PC’s design quickly flooded the market and established a standard which lives on to this day in every Windows PC. As I played around with the idea of the IBM PC suddenly vanishing from the history books, I started asking myself questions, and trying to come up with answers. (Hey, the whole subject is so unknowable that there’s no such thing as a wrong answer…)

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Zune HD Gets A Few New Apps

Posted by Ed Oswald on August 3, 2011 at 10:55 am

Microsoft may never build another piece of Zune hardware, but Microsoft is still moving forward with software for it, at least. On Wednesday, the company released nine new apps for Zune HD users, which owners can grab by heading  to the Zune Marketplace.

The apps include eight games: Finger Paint, Trash Throw, Slider Puzzle, ColorSpill, Splatter Bug, Vine Climb, Decoder Ring, and Tug-O-War. Microsoft has also released a calendar app. Updates for Email, Echoes, Zune Reader and Penalty! Flick Soccer were also part of the update.

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Bastion and the Slow Rise of Downloadable Console Games

Posted by Jared Newman on July 26, 2011 at 5:48 pm

Despite a growing stack of unplayed or unfinished video game discs in my living room, I spent a good chunk of last weekend playing Bastion, a downloadable Xbox Live Arcade game.

It’s a beautiful game, with a grizzled narrator who turns your every move into the stuff of campfire legends, an addictive combat system that strings you along with new weapons and powers, and a colorful post-apocalyptic world that literally reassembles itself chunk-by-chunk as your character trudges forward. I easily spent eight hours playing Bastion from start to finish, all for the Microsoft Points equivalent of $15.

I’ve played some excellent Xbox Live Arcade games over the years — Braid, Limbo and Shadow Complex, to name a few — but Bastion feels more like a full retail title than any of them. And it does so for a fraction of the price of a new game on disc.

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