Microsoft are trying to change their whole business model, to something similar to Apple and Samsung & Google it appears. As the really big money seems to have shifted to making your own hardware and OS. So they might very well change their road map in my opinion, similar to Apple who pretty much give upgrades of their OS away for a really low price but lock it into their own hardware. "Times they are a changing".
all over again?. I mean, they try to do this with windows 95 (they said they gonna release a new version of the OS like a new car, every year a new model) and fail. And then again with windows 98, and fail, again. The only way they could success this time is by releasing the OS for FREE, and even, they would fail. Google does this but every six month, and FOR FREE. Apple does this since OSX, they release a "new" OS every year or two. And tbh, its only a service pack, nothing more, no big improvements.
Biggest failures where Windows ME and Windows Vista ... i also think Windows 8 might fail because of older pc users.
How is Windows 8 going to fail because of older PCs? I can see it failing because of the whole "Force touch on everyone" & "The new start menu" but not because of older hardware. Windows 8 has the same exact system requirements as Vista and Windows 7.
I think the very reason for speeding up releasing every next version of Windows is that Microsoft don't want to replay the story when Windows Vista had been released for years, people still used Windows XP. For those days, not to say Windows XP was better than any other thing, just because there was no good OS could replace it. If Windows 8 would be proved to be another Windows Vista, Microsoft could have used their new release to get over this ugly situation. Even though Metro, to some extends, is really charming. But its focus is set on applications rather than programmes. Different kind of apps could be implemented with same kind of programme. But programme itself is hard to modelised for some a specific purpose, but always leaving room for future re-use. If traditional desktop GUI could do everything better, what Metro brings up is really trouble. For desktop computer, the importance of Metro is not that prominent. Lacks of Glass and Aero effect, and too much higher screen resolution requirement making Windows 8 lose many more existing devices and user-space, in turn make the Metro app just laying on that dock without any use at all. If we could get back to the days Windows Vista released, so many low end GPUs could never satisfy Windows Desktop Manager. For this very reason the appearance is really a disaster, too much ugly. I think that is the reason why people did not want to use Windows Vista. Even though Windows Desktop Manager could also implemented in the underlying software in Windows 8, but the requirement of Metro would drove so many devices out of work. And people this time downgrade back to Windows 7 or XP, is just for the reason of Metro itself. Metro is great! But the screen resolution it requires does really a bad job. One million wishes that Microsoft could get along with this limitation in their following version of Windows.
FTFY. This is what the coming OS releases are really going to be about. They are indeed... for the benefit of corporations, not users.
Like Apple was it all times! Isn't it kind logic that MS start going the same way as Apple? Bad for the user's of MS software but?!
It sounds like MS is simply re-branding Service packs as releases. As long as the price for "upgrade" is cheap and include features and improvements then I wouldn't mind that marketing strategy. If it turns out to be simply update rollups.....
It's exactly what Apple is doing for years since the first release of OS-X! The difference between OS-X and iOS is about the same as between Windows 8 and Windows RT! iPad's running on Arm Processors and using iOS while the first Surface runs on Arm and uses Windows RT! Both different and both similar! Regarding pricing, it seems to be that MS is also changing the whole strategy of pricing started with Windows 8. If MS is carry on what they had started already, and in light that the going down to 1 year cycle, the price should come down further. The future will show what will happen.