A Rosier Year Ahead for Windows 8? Yeah, Right

Articles have been flooding the scene telling us how disappointing Windows 8 sales are but predicting a rosier 2013. The comments from Newegg are particularly interesting as the company apparently had high hopes for a blockbuster Windows 8 demand. You have to ask yourself: why would anyone anticipate this?

This blows my mind since most of the old-school pundits, myself included, panned the product from the outset. It's the Edsel of operating systems. Even those who wrote glowing reviews about the systems seemed somewhat insincere and unsure of themselves. The pre-promotion for Vista had more going on than this. Now the Newegg folks are shocked. Really?

I don't know about you, but I cannot see how any new OS, even if it were great, could pierce the Windows market and impress anyone with huge sales. No one is sitting on a computer saying, "Wow, I cannot wait to upgrade to Windows 8!"

Upgrading Windows is painful because of the architecture of the system as a whole. You essentially have to re-install everything from scratch. Windows does not just take everything and move it over perfectly. The only instance this would happen is if you are not invested in the machine at all and have virtually nothing mounted, so all you have to do is move over a bunch of photos.

And then there are the high-end software systems. Upgrade your computer to Windows 8 and now you have to contact Adobe to get Creative Suite running again. Programs that require authentication will generally be exhausting to set up on the new machine.

To be honest, I could be wrong about this OS. It might only be the pain of the upgrade killing any sales, but I doubt it because it is the deadly one-two punch at work here. There is reluctance to upgrade due to the agony involved plus the awkward new OS that does not streamline workflow in any way. And there are too many decorative active tiles that try to communicate the message: this is not a computer!

Microsoft and its PR machines are part of the problem. It has gotten to the point where they will not listen to the critics. Back when they used to, things went better. Most critics have observations that are valuable. Ignore them at your own risk.

Instead, Microsoft studies everything internally. It runs closed focus groups. It cajoles bloggers. It meets with strategists. Employees say "yes, boss that's great!" and they nod their heads at meetings in agreement with whatever is being presented.

Exactly how the company deteriorated to this point is somewhat mysterious. It seems to have something to do with the mobile nature of today's computer executives. I think the sociology of this needs some study.

In the past, when Microsoft worked on various platforms, it took the most powerful base platform, which would be a PC, and then scaled it down for lesser devices. This ended up devolving into the early smartphones, which were essentially diminutive Windows PCs with the same desktop metaphor. It was impractical on the phone and required a stylus that would invariably be lost.

At some point, some supposed genius at the company decided to reverse the process. You'd start with an OS built specifically for the phone then scale it up to the PC so you ended up with something on the PC that worked like the phone. Why didn't someone recognize this reverse scaling as a dumb idea and stop it then and there?

Microsoft, I should add, has some screwball belief that all these offerings need to have the exact same look and feel because people cannot handle more than one idea. "This PC is nothing like my phone!! What am I going to do!?!?" This, of course, is idiotic on too many levels to comprehend.

So we are now witnessing the first wave of rejection for Windows 8 with high hopes of things improving. In reality, we will see the second wave of rejection, which will be meaningless until the third wave comes along. The third wave will consist of people rejecting Windows 8 on their new machines and demanding Windows 7. And yes, we've seen this play out in the past with XP and Vista.

Work on Windows 9 must already be underway.