MSFT Spending Half a Billion on Advertising for Windows 8
Attendees at a Microsoft company meeting in Germany have apparently leaked a presentation to WinFuture.de and revealed that Microsoft will be supporting the launch of Windows 8 with $500 million for advertising and marketing.
The number was not officially mentioned, but the company noted that its marketing budget would be 167 percent of the budget that was made available for Windows 7 - which was about $300 million. Additionally, the presentation also confirmed that Windows 8 is nearly completed and is scheduled to be released to manufacturing by the end of this month.
Microsoft officially announced today that the OS will hit RTM in the first week of August. However, if Microsoft sticks to the schedule outlined in the information given to WinFuture.de, we might be seeing Windows 8 RTM announced almost exactly three years after Windows 7 RTM, which Microsoft announced on July 22, 2009.
Exactly, that's money down the drain.
Windows 8 will be the biggest OS flop in history, bigger flop than Vista and Windows Me combined.
Some of that money should go to paying coders to implement a start button.
Exactly, that's money down the drain.
Windows 8 will be the biggest OS flop in history, bigger flop than Vista and Windows Me combined.
There is no amount of money that will get them out this flop.
The current Dr. Pepper commercials are funny to me in the same way. "Be unique, just like everyone else, by drinking Dr. Pepper."
How so?
Remember that there were a lot of things that made Vista a flop:
1) Underpowered hardware (less than 2 GB of RAM for Vista RTM was bad news, and most PCs didn't have that back then)
2) Repeated delays
3) Developers dragging their feet with Vista-compatible drivers
4) User Account Control being too strict
5) Six years of complacency (XP came out in 2001, Vista came out in 2007).
6) Major program compatibility issues at the time
7) XP was "good enough."
Out of all those things, only #7 would qualify for what would make Windows 8 a "flop." After all, Windows 8 is NT 6.2...not that big of a chance from Windows 7 being NT 6.1 (remember, XP was NT 5.1 and Vista was NT 6.0).
MS is gradually turning into one of these slow and heavy dinosaurs that find it increasingly difficult to compete in dynamic industries like IT. They'll find themselves progressively outsold in the consumer sector, people no longer need a dedicated home PC to surf the internet, shop, communicate, do their banking and gaming.
Their basic market, computer operating systems, that just couple of years back they ruled unchallenged, has now been split into several sectors, leisure time devices - tablets, TV/movie devices, smartphones, gaming consoles and office computers / workstations. In all, but the last, of these sectors they are being vastly outsold and are finding it hard to compete. They will need to invest more and more and reduce their market share. At the rate at which such companies are spending it takes only one wrong step and they might not be able to walk again. For Nokia it was 8bil in R&D spending, let's see it this is the wrong step for MS?
1) 7 is "good enough."
2) Metro
And #2 is the problem
I prefer butchered design than ****loads of security and stability issues.
I'm also assuming you mean the vanilla Vista. The SP2 Vista with Platform Upgrade comes close to Windows 7.
Personally, I think it would be easy to establish that the main reason Vista was a flop was that it was widely avoided by businesses, in fact, most businesses did not adopt Vista, and have only recently, that is, within the past two years or so, adopted 7.
Changing to a new OS is a big outlay for businesses in time, money, personnel, etc. I highly doubt that 8 will be adopted by businesses because of the fact that they just transitioned to 7. Without adoption by businesses, I expect that 8 will sell about as well as Vista did, which will mean that it will be the next MS OS flop.
Some of that money should go to paying coders to implement a start button.
I honestly believe most folks are disappointed with their experience with these Windows 8 previews. It takes too much clicking to navigate through Windows 8. It's just not as straight forward as previous versions of Windows. I can see where older folks or those new to Windows would find it hard to navigate. Hell, it took me for ever to finally figure out how to shut my damn pc down. Plus, closing applications isn't as straight forward as it should be. You may have MANY applications running in the background that you thought you had closed. I can see where the Metro interface would be fine for touch screen devices, just not so friendly to those of us who use a keyboard and mouse; which is a hell of a lot of us!
Microsoft should give it's users a choice of the Metro user interface or the standard Windows user interface.
Also, Microsoft should quit charging so much for a Windows release. Apple charges $29.99 for their OS! Everything on a Mac looks nice and it just works! Sure, Apple computers are expensive, but they are a joy to use. Microsoft just needs to get it together.
I have some questions about the Windows 8 upgrade; I have a copy of Vista Ultimate, do I have to install it on my computer in order to purchase the Windows 8 upgrade or can I just install the Windows 8 upgrade? I'm not crazy about Windows 8 (as of now), but may buy a copy if I can Install it without having to install Vista first! Plus, the upgrade price isn't too bad for a new version of Windows. However, I may very well just take a pass on it. Depends on how I'm feeling.
Metro UI is NOT useful on a desktop or laptop PC. Period! We need to be able to have a default boot to desktop EVERYTIME !
Vista was just a makeover. windows 8 is so different i don't think the windows name fits the new GUI