One more tidbit about Windows 8.1 Update 1 from my aforementioned source: Update 1 may feature some of the work that Microsoft has been doing behind the scenes to reduce further the memory and disk space requirements for Windows. This would allow Windows 8.1 Update 1 to run on cheaper small tablets.
Windows 8.1 Update 1, screen shots of which leaked earlier this week, is expected to allow users to pin Metro-style/Windows Store apps to their desktop task bars. Thumbnail previews of these Metro-style apps will be available from the Desktop task bar, according to additional screen shots. Windows 8.1 Update 1 also is expected to include close boxes for Metro-style apps.
Seems like some welcome changes, but it’s going to take a lot more for people to warm up to Metro. The biggest problem to me is that since there aren’t any compelling Metro applications, there’s simply no reason to put with its idiosyncrasies, especially on desktops. I cannot think of a single Metro application that is better than its desktop counterpart, nor is there any Metro application that is better than similar applications on competing platforms.
Developers need users, and users need developers. Right now – Metro seems to lacks both.
“You’re fired!” “Ah, but with good cause!”
You solve the developer/user catch 22 with a lot of money and patience, which Microsoft has. They solved it with Windows Phone.
Windows 8.1 has the volume, in fact my revenue from the Windows Store is around 75% of my revenue with the Windows Phone Store — the quality of some apps just needs to go up.
That is something that’s hard to buy and only happens after a while. Windows Phone is finally getting apps that are not only on other platforms, but that actually work on par if not better than other platforms. Windows itself will in time have the same.
Microsoft just needs to align the efforts a little better as the combined volume of both platforms is more enticing than the individual value proposition of either one.
They need a unified developer dashboard, payout system, and a way to bundle both phone and tablet applications together. I want to pay once and get it both on my phone and on my tablet.
And the good thing is that these are changes that can be made with little to no impact on shipping schedules for the products themselves as they are largely an infrastructure detail of the store fronts.
Edited 2014-01-24 20:43 UTC
I don’t think it is this simple. Money and patience only goes so far.
In my opinion Microsoft made a lot of strategic errors in how they would lure developers to their new platform.
First they overestimated how many .Net developers would adopt it. The entire new WinRT system was designed to make it as easy as possible for C# devs to migrate, but this move seem to have failed. I think part of the reason has been that the typical C# developer does web applications and they didn’t switch to App development over night as Microsoft had hoped.
At the same time they made it annoyingly hard for the traditional Desktop developers to adopt their new platform. A mixture of dropping all older API’s (GDI, common controls, MFC, winforms, etc.), blocking LoadLibrary usage and not having Windows 7 support for C++/CX meant that they effectively asked any existing Desktop player to rewrite their entire user interface, and sometimes part of the backend as well. The end result has been that virtually all of them decided to wait and see. The fact that Microsoft themselves had to make an explicit exception for Microsoft Office shows just how much work they were asking to be rewritten.
Money and patience will only fix these problems when Windows 8 gains a significant marketshare (by forcing people to invest like happened with Objective C and Cocoa Touch), but even this assumes people won’t simply begin to ignore the Modern section of Windows 8.
The Store has 140,000 applications, a large majority (~80% being C#/XAML). Windows Phone itself has about 200,000 applications, almost all .NET.
I think if anything, they overestimated the amount of HTML5 developers relative to their investment in WinJS.
I personally don’t believe this to be true at all, and it is especially disproven by Windows Phone which already had an army of .NET developers.
I don’t think they had the expectation that traditional Win32 applications would cross over any time soon in significant numbers. I think it was wise to cut out the legacy crap and have a clean base, and I think over time you’ll see some of the older Win32 functionality come back as a WinRT API.
In a world of shipping schedules and deadlines I can understand why large monolithic legacy codebases weren’t a priority.
I think the counter example here is Windows Phone, Microsoft bought both apps and market share and now the developer situation seems more or less self sustaining. 2013 was a breakout year for the ecosystem as a slew of major apps hit the platform, and more are joining at an increasing rate.
From what i have seen in the wp store it seems quite a lot of the apps are just the same all the wp trash talkes when someone mention that android has a bucket load of apps for each app in the windows store.
And what will happen when ms wont be paying devs for developing apps for the platform anymore? We are talking a platform with less then 10% of the marked…
They pay (or help port, or help market, or any combination) for generally top apps to come over from iOS and Android. Everything else is organic growth.
As far as quality goes, it leaves something to be desired but then again as you mention so does Android. However being a WP user, over the past year I’ve noticed the quality of apps start to improve in a robust way.
Nelson what you’re missing is that Windows RT does not contain the full .NET framework*
*like Win32 it is only available for internal Microsoft developers.
Sinofsky in fact deleted our comments when we pointed out that it wasn’t possible to run Windows without Win32 or .NET and that blocking .NET from developers made zero sense. There had to be a “secret stash” API or else the entire thing wouldn’t run. And of course the “secret stash” turned out to be true and you can find people who hacked Windows RT to run both Win32 and .NET applications. Sinofsky I guess thought we could all be fooled (though he did fool Windows bloggers and non-developers).
So maybe pay attention next time when Windows developers are calling BS on a Microsoft exec, ok?
P.S. The total idiot in charge whose strategies that you have been defending has been fired. I’m not sure if you have noticed.
– Jerkface
(An actual .NET developer who can’t wait for Microsoft’s period of inanity to be over.)
Edited 2014-01-27 00:46 UTC
There is very little actually missing from the Windows Store .NET profile. The only big ticket items are WinForns, WPF/SL, and the ASP.NET stacks.
Some APIs have moved into WinRT proper and others have been replaced with newer asynchronous APIs.
This is coming from someone who actually writes Windows Store applications, not an out of touch WinForms developer who’s breadth of knowledge doesn’t escape a DataGrid.
It’s a subset and that is what matters.
99.9% of existing .NET applications can’t be directly ported.
That’s stupid.
You’re still defending the idiocy that I called out ages ago. Remember when I predicted that MS would scuttle Windows RT? Well it’s happening.
Remember when I called Sinofsky a rat? Well he’s been fired.
Remember when I called Ballmer the biggest threat to Windows? Well he’s been fired.
Your inexperience has always shown through. You fell for Sinofsky’s blogs and you know it. I can’t believe you even post here. You truly have no shame.
You almost sound believable when you trot out fake numbers like 99%, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of code, importantly, existing libraries and PCLs, port over just fine.
WinForns, ASP.NET, and WPF were never part of the core framework anyway (two are legacy UI frameworks superseded by XAML and WPF to WinRT XAML isn’t an impossible port job, and one is a web stack)
and this js what you complain about. Maybe to the simpletons here you come across as having more than a primitive understanding, but anyone worth their salt can see you’re in beyond your depth.
Let’s cut to the chase and see if you can answer a question that Sinofsky avoided:
Why does Microsoft get to directly port Office (a Win32 application) to Windows RT when existing .NET and Win32 developers are not allowed to do so?
Because its Microsoft’s OS? Really, that was your big question?
Which codebase? Win32? It shipped with RT and just like the .NET framework it was artificially restricted from external developers.
Or Windows Phone? They couldn’t provide a subset of Win32 like they did with Windows Mobile?
It actually took more work for them to come up with WinRT since the Win32 subset was already mature. There was also the .NET compact framework.
Let’s review what existed before the iPhone:
1. Microsoft was a smartphone leader in marketshare.
2. Microsoft was a leader in portable APIs.
Hmmmm what to do with this situation? I know, THROW IT ALL AWAY. Yes that is what they did. But who am I to question such a strategy. Windows Phones are clearly a massive hit. I even saw one in public last year!
I was speaking about replicating functionality as a WinRT API, not existing Win32 APIs which don’t respect the concurrency, application, or security model of Windows RT.
So your rant is entirely unnecessary. Go home jerkface.
Sinofsky couldn’t explain how exactly WinRT was better than Win32 at power efficiency. In fact that was a question he avoided.
Microsoft’s position was:
Win32 is inefficient but we won’t talk specifics and though you can’t port your Win32 applications we will be porting Office. Any further questions will be deleted.
Windows 8 is built on lies and you still haven’t figured that out. Sinofsky was a trendster and hated Win32 and .NET for being “legacy” even if he couldn’t explain why that was bad.
I still can’t believe you’re defending the regime of idiocy.
Nothing about WinRT is implicitly power efficient, but the enforcement of the application model is what’s efficient.
If you’ve ever used a non Windows RT Windows tablet you’d know why that’s important. I’ve had a rogue legacy program chew through like 20% of my battery in an hour. Where as my Surface always has consistent battery life, and won’t get filled to the brim with crapware over time.
The Surface still runs the way it did when it cane out of the box, my W510 has gotten slower over time.
Its less about the performance per watt of the API and more about the predictability of the app model.
None of what you described requires a new API.
Windows can already allocate and limit cpu access.
Rogue programs can be controlled through signatures and or repositories/stores.
It can all be done without a new API or even a new version of Windows. You could lock-down XP like iOS if you really wanted. You could have it throttle or kill any program that taxes the cpu. The possibilities are endless.
WinRT was created for non-technical reasons. The person behind irrationally rejected existing libraries and refused to engage us developers in discussion.
and again, here you oversimplify this to ab absurd degree and where your relative inexperience starts to show.
NO you just can’t moderate the usage of existing Win32 applications, especially not to the degree where itd be meaningful. If you’re actively preventing the processor to go into a low power state, often its not just one program but a program that depends on other programs through some IPC mechanism and will DEADLOCK unless the suspension is an atomic operation on every Win32 program.
This is why Windows 8.1 machines can go into connected standby but can NOT moderate activity while running at a fine grained level. Its either all or nothing.
WinRT apps operate within an isolated container where even the object namespaces are virtualized and isolated so suspending a WinRT app is very simple and fast.
This+all async APIs which prevent blocking and spinning the CPU allow for a more frequent transition into a low power state.
That’s in addition to reliability problems that unrestricted programs cause over time to a Windows PC.
If you care (you don’t, you’re just being clueless and annoying), you can watch the relevent BUILD sessions.
Incorrect, the marketshare leader was Symbian. MS always had rather modest share.
Ignoring the quality vs quantity aspect (I don’t own a Windows Phone so can’t comment on that), keep in mind you are comparing it against iPhone and Objective C where virtually nobody knew how to code in the language. I think even today (without data to back it up) there are tons of more C# developers than Objective C.
However, point taken that a lot of them did decide to write apps.
I actually always saw that more as a publicity stunt. In any case, a C# web developer would never pick that over their preferred language.
For Windows Phone this makes lots of sense, but I don’t think it does for Windows 8. The traditional Win32 applications *have* to port over to Modern for it to become a success. We are talking about all the productivity suites like Office, Photoshop, Visual Studio, Autodesk, etc.
Microsoft effectively asked them all to port to a completely new platform. With the current constraints of WinRT, I’d say in some cases it might be easier to port to Linux. Note that I’m not saying that WinRT is poorly designed. I’m saying when you drop so much legacy things as they did, then what they created is no longer effectively the same platform the programs currently run on.
Except that Windows 8 needs to buy the market share from Win32. A far more mature market where even the minor adjustments in Vista caused large portions to cling onto Windows XP until they had absolutely no other choice.
Or do what is actually happening which is refusing to buy Windows 8 at all.
I’m a small PC shop owner/repair guy and I’ve stopped carrying Win 8 systems altogether and talking to my fellow shop owners its the same everywhere. We saw here just the other day HP likewise dropping Win 8, so why would devs jump on a platform that even major OEMs are abandoning? You go where the users are and its pretty clear that will never be Metro.
As for why I stopped carrying it, and for those like Lucas that will claim I am just refusing to “embrace the innovation” (yeah about as innovating as bolting bicycle handlebars onto a pickup truck) the reasons are simple, the most important to me is that I have the perfect “everyman” test subject…my dad. Not Windows savvy, does the same tasks a good 90%+ of the users do like check email, watch videos, print pics, everyday stuff. to see how Joe average would handle it when his new i3 laptop came in i just handed it to him, figuring “hey with his bad eyesight Win 8 will probably be great”…when I came back an hour later he told me “Take that POS and throw it in the trash” and even after putting in a start menu replacement the i3 sits in its case and he just uses his new galaxy tab.
If you want to see what happens to Joe and Jane when they use Windows 8 frankly this video says more than I ever could. Count how many times he says “no” “stop” and “I don’t want that”. Through the entire video the OS is actively fighting him because unlike previous versions where the OS was built to do what YOU wanted its obvious that MSFT had “use cases” and small screen tablets in mind when they built metro and it just doesn’t play nice if you aren’t “working the Metro way”. Is it better in 8.1? Wouldn’t know, not paying $100+ just to find out. You’d think with Win 8 bombing they’d be smart and lower the price, but nope, that would make sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLTE_bvlWUE“>Windows
Why do you post the same things over and over?
Let me sum it up for you, I don’t believe your or a lot of anyone elses complaints are fair or valid and I have my own reasoning for believing that.
I will concede something, I’ve heard my first real world complaints about Windows 8 yesterday …. wait for it though … the application was assuming that they had IE9 or lower installed, which was what the real problem was.
Edited 2014-01-28 19:30 UTC
We’ve given you a laundry list of complaints Lucas, and just like the Linux zealots your answer to everything is “works for me!”.
Well that is nice that it works for you but the numbers don’t lie and for the VAST majority windows 8.x does NOT work. For just one example there are many touchpads out there that don’t have driver support for disabling gestures, this is a MAJOR problem for Windows 8 as it always assumes a gesture is a swipe and thus you will get “charmed” many times per hour, with each “charming” you WILL lose mouse focus, you WILL have some of your data not register if you are typing, it WILL be extremely frustrating to the end user.
But at the end of the day its not gonna matter, HP has abandoned Win 8, most of the B&Ms are moving away from it, it really doesn’t matter if you and a small minority like the thing if it bombs like new coke Lucas and every indicator shows that win 8 has bombed and bombed hard, so hard that it appears (if Mary Jo Foley is correct, and she usually is) that Windows 9 is just Win 7 with some of Win 8s speed ups behind the scenes…along with the appstore nobody uses.
At the end of the day you can’t say people “aren’t willing to learn” because they seem to have no trouble learning Android and while I’m glad you are happy with it I’ve had customer after customer walk right past powerful win 8 systems to buy a system not even half as powerful and in some cases MORE expensive just because it came with 7 instead of 8.
So you can think its great all you want but its costing OEMs millions in lost sales, because contrary to popular belief computers DO have a “shelf life” and if you don’t get them sold before the new chips come out you’ll end up taking a bath on the remaining stocks so the OEMs WILL end up following HP and bailing.
The ironic thing is if MSFT woud have simply allowed choice Win 8 could have been a hit, but instead Sinofsky tried to ram a cellphone UI onto the desktop and its failed, simple as that. Again watch the video of an actual user using windows 8, count how many times he says “no”,”stop”, and “I don’t want that”. A well designed UI should NEVER EVER make the user feel out of control but that is Win 8 in a nutshell, unless you know “the metro way” of doing things OOTB all you are gonna get is frustrated.
Yeah it works for me, I don’t have a problem and I say why I don’t think it is a problem.
Windows 8 hasn’t bombed it just didn’t sell as well as Windows 7 and we all knew that was going to happen.
Their website seems to disagree with you (I took the screenshot maybe a minute or two ago).
http://imgur.com/hON43tq
Win 8.1 is a free upgrade on your dad’s i3…
I think the strategy was “make a shiny new API” which is the opposite of what made sense.
It actually wasn’t. Easy as possible would mean to open the full .NET framework. Sinofsky however was anti-.NET and refused to answer technical questions as to why he wanted WinRT apps to be separate.
The typical C# developer works on internal applications. Shrinkwrapped applications are still mostly written in Win32 since that was what they were started in. Photoshop, Autocad, etc.
And Sinofsky wouldn’t talk about that either. No .NET framework and yet Microsoft doesn’t have to re-write Office (a Win32 application)? Yea those questions were deleted.
You are right that none of it made sense. Microsoft has been managed by total idiots. It’s no surprise that everything has transpired as it has. Developers were absolutely livid during the Windows 8 development period and the strategy of the Windows 8 team was to suppress and censor. Microsoft still hasn’t learned that the smartest developers are outside the company. The amount of hubris that resides in Redmond is phenomenal. They really thought a combination of censorship and self-praise would make all the criticism from developers go away.
“Developers were livid” quantified by a few comments on a company blog. Amazing the delusional state you operate in.
I’m deluded? Windows 8 is a flop, Surface is a flop, WinRT is a flop, Windows Phone is a flop, Sinofsky and Ballmer have been fired and here you are questioning my connection to reality while trying to defend pieces of this failed floptastic strategy that has brought nothing but shame and embarrassment to Windows developers.
I have the track record when it comes to predicting Microsoft flops while you have the record of whoring for every single Microsft product and strategy even if the majority of Windows developers are calling it f—ing stupid.
Anyways here is what happened to the developers that went along with this stupid plan:
http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/354457/windows-8-developers-…
The rest of us remained livid and went back to developing Win32 and .NET software.
Everyone on this website can see what a shameless whore you are. I don’t mind you being a whore for money/crack/whatever but I draw the line when you try to gloss over actions on the part of Microsoft that were clearly angering the majority of Windows developers.
Posting an article written by a non developer asking a rhetorical that an extremely small slice (seriously, who the fuck uses pubCenter when the CPM is so terrible) of devs are impacted by low fill rates on an ad network, fill rate mind you that has since dramatically improved. This doesn’t prove developers are livid, this proves that you are insane.
This little habbit you have about speaking for developers as if you’re representative of their experience grows tired Mr. Jerkface. You use an irrelevant, EOLd UI framework from .NET2. You’re like that annoying guy at work that rants on about WebForms. Let it go man.
90% of the Sinofsky mentions are literally coming from you in your attempt to cast him as some boogey man. You haven’t published a single Store application and instead post the first link that Google throws at you.
What is your definition of irrelevant? I would estimate that WinRT to Winform jobs on dice are about 1:1000, and that is being generous. The business world uses Winforms heavily and there isn’t the drive nor the resources to move everything to the web. WPF has mostly been ignored and Winforms are mature, not EOLd or depricated.
Maybe local Winform applications aren’t trendy but the business world doesn’t give a flying f— about being trendy. They want software that works on a platform that they know will be around in 10 years. That’s why .NET and Java are so popular while Windows 8/Metro have been rejected.
I don’t have to attempt to portray him negatively. He has already gained a reputation on his own as the douchebag responsible for Windows 8.
As for your comment about me not submitting to anything to the Windows store……why would I do that? It’s a wasteland. Going to the casino would be provide a better risk/reward payoff and less embarrassing to boot. I would feel like a complete idiot if I told my managers that I was taking some time away from contracts to develop a Windows 8 app. That would reflect a serious lack of judgement. I’d rather save face and tell them I’m going to go blow a grand at the casino.
Microsoft always loves making new APIs, no doubt about that. However I think the motivation overall was a bit deeper than this.
The way I see it, one of the main lessons learned by Windows Mobile and the first iPhone was that simply shrinking a desktop UI to a small screen device produces a poor user experience. Apple deliberately wrote a different API for the iPhone (Cocoa Touch) because virtually none of the user interface concepts for a mouse work well for touch.
What I think Microsoft did wrong was to go completely overboard when copying this, and also not understand that a touch UI doesn’t work well for a mouse either. Sharing the UI between desktop and touch makes very little sense.
Easy as possible within the constraints they had given themselves. Part of the problem with supporting the full .NET framework is that in a sense a large portion of it is a thin wrapper around Win32 functionality. So what they chose to do was to drop every part of .NET that relied on Win32. Otherwise they had to port themselves.
In a way you could say they dropped support for so many things that their new OS wasn’t really Windows anymore. Everyone had to port.
The fact that Microsoft has to make an exception for Office is half my point of my original post. When nobody can afford to port, then nobody will port and Microsoft ends up having no applications for their fancy new platform. No amount of patience or Microsoft money will help here.
I have a Surface RT Tablet, awesome tablet, good hardware quality, I can’t complaine about the metro apps, those are smooth I have plenty of them, all working great, this update will make it more awesome.
Edited 2014-01-24 20:52 UTC
Eh yeah Windows 8 was made for your device. It is just that everybody else has to have a sucky experience.
I get along with 8.1 just fine on my main development machine. Wait, what? You mean your generalization isn’t 100% accurate? Oh, right.
You’re generalizing between hardware and software problems too. Window 8.1 is substantially better than 8 but after the amount of driver problems I had to diagnose to get some targets imaging in sccm was enough that I can understand a lot of people having issues. (4 out of 20 models isn’t much, but the varied hardware is a pretty good cross section of devices)
Windows stability problems in Vista up are almost always driver related. But that’s what you get with proprietary hardware.
I personally haven’t had issues on any machines I’ve tried 8.1 on, but obviously my experience isn’t universal and YMMV as the Windows ecosystem is huge.
All I’m saying. I think its wrong to say a problem applies to everybody, or even applies in a manner which would impact a non trivial amount of people without hard evidence.
Well done you. I keep having to re-authentiate 8.1 every time I switch the thing on. This is on a Surface Pro so there is really no case for it saying that it is an illegal copy.
Hence it does not get used very often these days. It was bought for a specific project that got canned days before I due to deliver it. Thankfully my invoices had been paid but otherwise I’d never have paid for it myself.
IMHO, it is more style over substance but that is just my opinion based upon 40+ years of computer use.
I’m going to wait and see. One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was to allow the 8.0 to 8.1 upgrade.
It was the classic facepalm “why did I want to fix what wasn’t broke?” moment.
Just about everything broke, including the touchscreen capability. It kicked off hours of pain downloading the drivers and reconfiguring things. I spent 2 months with ever worsening network connectivity and bizarre inconsistencies with devices and finally gave up and reset to factory 8.0. Everything works fine and I’m not going to update for a LONG time.
After a year of running flawlessly on 8, I upgraded to 8.1 and had hard freezes daily, due to what I believe was a gfx driver issues (Geforce 460). How did they f things up so bad with what was seemingly a minor update.
Anyway, my stability issues have since been resolved so now it’s all good.
Actually, I like the Facebook Metro app, mainly because I now get desktop notifications without having to run some bloated Win32 app, or install yet another browser extension. IMO, this is what Metro apps do best. I’d rather not have to run them full screen though, as in still being able to use the task bar when they’re active.
I’ve got a Surface Pro 2. Nice machine.
I like the IE 11 Modern app a lot better than the desktop app. I still use desktop Firefox a lot because of the extensions and the data synchronization between my phone, Ubuntu laptop and desktop.
But the IE 11 font rendering is amazing. The drag to go back a page is great. The touch integration is just all around good. Firefox does not do any of that on desktop.
Facebook is another good app. It works really well as a Modern app, again with the touch integration.
Another nice thing about the Modern apps is that they aren’t allowed to suck the battery dry. I had a desktop app that went crazy somehow and when I resumed using my Surface it had gone from 75 to 50% battery in 20 minutes. Modern apps get suspended. Actually suspended, if you look in task manager. They aren’t even allowed to schedule on the CPU.
Now, on a 30″ desktop monitor I don’t like them. But if I was allowed to run Modern apps in desktop windows it’d work alright.
unfortunately it looks like the same children arguing the same pathetic bullshit as when I decided to leave because of the children :c
I can assure you that majority of large corporations and educational institutions will *never* warm up to either Metro or Windows 8, and that represents rather substantial part of Windows’ users. At least till some kind of compatibility mode will be introduced that allows Windows user to do things they way they did in Windows 7. And no dependence on touch screen, please.
It’s one thing when you have a posting from a single user saying “Gee whiz I got a Surface 2 and I just LOVE it” and another thing when IT department of a large shop with hundreds or thousands user analyzes all possible implications resulting from moving to Windows 8. Who do you think contributes to the “big picture”?