The company's brilliant engineers must feel like velociraptors handcuffed to brontosaurs
Four months ago, Microsoft released Windows 8,
a complete rethinking of the interaction between humans and computers.
As a paradigm shift, the only real comparison is when Apple introduced
the iPhone, moving the world from clunky Soviet-style mobile interfaces
to the colorful, responsive touchscreens we have today. Of course, Apple
had the advantage of not having to support 20 years of legacy code.
Today, Microsoft isn't so lucky. Many programs designed for Windows 3.1
(released in 1992) will actually run on Windows 8. This is an
astonishing feat of engineering, but a giant boulder Microsoft feels
compelled to push up a hill. And such robust backward compatibility
comes at a price. The biggest problem with Windows 8 is every version of
Windows that came before it.
To understand why Microsoft is all
but required to support programs written when Bill Clinton was an
obscure southern governor, you have to look at the Redmond company's
install base. Microsoft's Business division is worth $24 billion and the
Server and Tools division brings in $18.7 billion. Those two divisions
represent more than half of Microsoft's total revenue — almost all of it
from corporate America. (And those numbers don't even include Windows
dollars.) Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, has boasted that there are
670 million computers running Windows 7, and every one of them is a
potential Windows 8 upgrade.
But they're not, really, because the vast majority of those systems
do not belong to your average consumer. They belong to rigorously
controlled corporate IT departments, the members of which are obliged to
keep business systems up and operational at all times. This leads to
massive testing delays across the board. You don't just upgrade to
Internet Explorer 8, for example, as such an upgrade might break a
database developed in Visual FoxPro that cost $80,000 to build and
brings in revenues of $2 million. Carried forward, by the time the
largest of corporations with the most workstations and custom internal
software gets around to parting with Windows 7, Microsoft could well be
on Windows 10.Microsoft can't move much faster than the IT departments of their enterprise install base, but Microsoft needs a fast adoption of the new Windows interface, and they need it now. Microsoft engineers must feel like velociraptors handcuffed to brontosaurs. As a way of assuaging corporate IT trepidation, Microsoft strives for backward compatibility, whereby the most radically modern operating system in the world can to some extent run software originally developed to fit on a 5.25-inch floppy disk. And yet that is only half the problem. IT managers also hate change because change can be confusing to a nontechnical workforce. Even the tiniest of variations in one version of Windows to the next will always bewilder some non-trivial percentage of users. Why should a shop welder, for example, who uses his computer to pull up photos from an Access 2007 database inclusively, concern himself with skeuomorphism or SMB management? Unlike most IT departments, the guys who work in the trenches are a business's actual profit centers. (When Windows 7 dropped the word "start" from the start menu icon, who can say how many man-decades of productivity were lost?)
And yet that is one reason why Windows 8 is such a bold business gambit. Since Windows XP,
Microsoft has known that a massive overhaul was due. The desktop
metaphor was reaching its natural limit, and home users were shifting by
the millions toward a simplified (and more secure) walled app model of
software. In an attempt to split the baby, Microsoft first tried to add
luster to Windows XP through the aero theme, and an oppressive User
Access Control to software execution. That abomination was called
Windows Vista, and had the opposite effect of what was intended. Aero
was garish by and large, when it happened to run on the rare computer
packing adequate hardware. Meanwhile, the internet filled with guides to
disabling User Access Control entirely, leaving systems more widely
insecure than ever before. (This type of problem also appears in
password requirements. While P@S$w0rd123 is certainly more secure than January2001, users end up writing down P@S$w0rd123 on a sticky note affixed to their monitor. January2001 remains safely stored inside of a human brain.)
By embracing Modern UI, as the swinging slabs of the Windows 8
interface are called, Microsoft is outright telling both the public and
enterprise that now is the time to retrain workers and to embrace and
roll out the new Windows, because this is the future and there's no
going back. And yet the house that Gates built is terrified of severing
all ties to the past. Would businesses even consider brand loyalty when
faced with the mandate of complete software redevelopment and
deployment? Faced with such massive and expensive demands on in-house
and contract developers, why not take a hard look at Apple, with their
astonishingly well-engineered hardware and rock solid NeXT STEP
foundation?That is not a door that Microsoft wants to open. Accordingly, legacy software support isn't going anywhere for quite some time. That's why Modern UI is saddled with an anemic and occasionally accessed Desktop interface. As long as both incompatible and contradictory interfaces exist on the same machine, Windows will remain a vaguely schizophrenic experience, and corporate IT will stick to developing what it knows. So how can Microsoft nail the landing of its Great Leap Forward? By showing developers and the IT industry how it's really done. They need to spark imaginations by demonstrating to the world the most advanced, gorgeous, sophisticated, and intuitive uses of Modern UI imaginable. They need to fully embrace the Windows Store for the entirety of the Microsoft library, and train users to feel okay about storing a credit card on their Outlook Mail accounts, and comfortable purchasing expensive programs without visiting Best Buy or Walmart. If they can't force corporations to migrate their moribund Visual Basic 6 applications, they can wow companies and shame them with the incredible technology that they're missing out on. "Embrace Windows 8 and you'll see massive, long-term productivity increases by way of this magical new platform and interface."
That is not what they are doing, and to see how Microsoft
is failing to lead the way on Windows 8 development, all you need to do
is install Office 2013. It's impossible to overstate the importance of
Office to Microsoft's continued relevance in the changing marketplace.
(Microsoft has all but acknowledged this by withholding the completed
Office for iPad. Once it hits the App Store, there will be no compelling
reason for businesses to invest in Surface tablets.) It's the one
software suite every business in America is going to purchase en masse,
and every consumer out there will want some part of, even if it's only a
word processor.
Office 2013 is therefore the one program that Microsoft absolutely
must have in the Windows Store. And of course, it doesn't. You can buy
it online or at Office Depot or through Office 365 (itself an
interesting development to be discussed another day). But on its
flagship software distribution channel — the place through which it
wants every developer in the industry to submit and sell programs —
Microsoft's most important suite is nowhere to be found.Let us grant that Microsoft is still working through the thorny issues of bulk licensing for enterprise, and needs another year to get it right. Let's say billions of dollars are on the table if they get it wrong — billions that might end up at One Infinite Loop. At a minimum, then, Microsoft should show us the indisputable power of live tiles and the Modern UI, with databases processing information in real time and displaying results alongside slabs of sports scores and headlines. When Visual Studio is compiling a massive program, give us a live feed of the progress. More substantively, Word and Excel should leverage internally the power of Modern UI. (To see what a truly innovative embrace of the new aesthetic might look like, check out this jaw-dropping mockup of Steam for Windows 8.)
Here is what actually happens when you install Microsoft Office
2013: It creates the six most uninteresting legacy icons on the entire
Modern UI interface. These icons do nothing but stare back at the user.
Middle school students only a few months advanced beyond "Hello, world!"
would take greater pride and infuse greater imagination in their
Windows 8 tiles. Regardless, having failed at the aesthetic, maybe when
you click the icons, Office demonstrates exactly what is so powerful
about the new interface, and why Microsoft has bet the company on its
adoption.
No. Clicking Word or its brethren pulls up the legacy desktop and
runs the program from a traditional window. The program's look is
updated from Office 2010, but is no more essential or unique to Windows 8
than Office's sorry excuse for live tiles. To be clear, the icons,
however plain, work, and Office is as solid and unobtrusive as ever. But
that wasn't the standard Microsoft needed to strive for. They needed to
show the world why a world without Windows 8 would be a sad world
indeed. In this, Microsoft failed to close the deal on the very fine
Windows 8.Source: Yahoo news
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