Veteran Microsoft troll Scott Barnes takes another potshot at his former employer, à propos Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference:
The idea that your R&D can be re-used across all your platforms in a consistent and carefully designed manner that isn’t highly reactive to your competitors is quite arrogant and clearly a dumb idea.
Microsoft will show Apple who’s boss, they’ll take the Windows 8 Tablet and ram it down the vegan fruit eating zen smoking hipsters throats. They’ll give them a lesson in how to confuse and alienate their customers with inconsistent visions and platform resets that are a massive answer to a question that nobody asked.
To continue my Windows 8 doomsaying on a more serious note, Tim Anderson speculates that Windows 8 deliberately annoys desktop users with ubiquitous Metro artifacts because Microsoft believes a large majority of customers will migrate to mobile devices anyway. Assuming Ballmer and Sinofsky aren’t simply insane, that is indeed a plausible explanation. But this strategy requires Windows 8 to succeed on tablets, dragging along the desktop users who have no interest in Windows 8 for its own sake.
So how likely is that? A recent global IDG Connect study asked IT and business professionals which tablets they intend to buy over the next 12 months. 44% chose Android, 27% iPad, 21% weren’t sure… and a whopping 3% opted for Windows 8. This means that even if all undecided respondents were to pick Windows 8 (rather unlikely, to put it mildly) it would still lag behind both iPad and Android.
As for corporate IT, Jonathan Hassell complains that Windows RT is unattractive and Microsoft’s overall strategy is unclear. The demise of Zune and the struggling Windows Phone show that Microsoft’s brand holds little appeal for content consumers on mobile devices, either. That leaves the question exactly who is going to buy those Windows 8 tablets whose success is supposed to secure the future of Windows.