Microsoft continues to target Windows bloat
We wrote yesterday that Microsoft is slimming down Windows 7 to make it more suitable for netbooks than Vista. Further comments from a senior Microsoft boss suggest that will be an ongoing process across future editions of Windows.
Ray Ozzie (pictured), the company’s chief software architect, has given a series of interviews this week about Microsoft’s ‘cloud computing’ plans: applications and processes which run on servers rather than a user’s own computer.
Addressing a Microsoft conference this week he said the traditional ‘scale up’ concept for operating systems and software, in which everything gets bigger and bigger as it has to do more work (particularly in a corporate setting) isn’t practical today.
And in an interview he said simply producing software for more and more powerful computers was also becoming an outdated strategy, explaining “our apps groups are going from focusing on the PC to focusing on PC-web-phone.”
He also appeared to suggest that – in his mind at least – it’s more important to produce a stable operating system which software developers can work with than it is to make something which will “excite” users. “Most users, honestly, they buy the OS that’s on their PC, and the only reason that they would do otherwise is if somebody told them that they were being foolish.”
Ozzie’s arguments certainly fit in with the announcement that when Microsoft releases the next edition of its Office suite, it will also launch a slimmed-down version known as ‘Web Applications for Office’ which will run over the internet rather than be installed on a user’s machine.
Naturally Ozzie’s views aren’t necessarily going to drive every Microsoft decision: any firm of that size will also take account of its financial and marketing wings. But between the arguments Ozzie makes, the competition from online services such as Google Docs, and the growth in both handheld devices and low-tech computers in developing markets, it seems inevitable Microsoft’s products will be going on a diet.
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October 31st, 2008
We’ll see. Right now it is all hype and promises and speculation.
November 3rd, 2008
Hopefully it will finally sink in that confusing your customers by having multiple versions is going to piss off consumers, and that it’s a good idea to let users run all the components their hardware allows. XP Pro and XP Home type breakout should be about it as far as it goes.
Hard to see why you would artificially hobble features when you have the PR problems of MS. I was at a seminar at Microsoft back in 2005 for the Dynamics roll out. One of the vertical marketing guys started discussing how there would be multiple flavors in general terms, and it would be more than three without getting anymore detailed.
He stated how it was actually beneficial for consumers because they wouldn’t be paying for features their hardware couldn’t run, they weren’t trying to squeeze every last nickle from customers. The people in this seminar were CIOs and IT Directors, and we damn near booed him off the stage.
The first step Microsoft should have done when it was clear Vista was not going to be welcomed by excited clients was pass out baseball bats to their direct sales reps and pointed them toward Marketing.
November 7th, 2008
“Ray Ozzie [...] has given a series of interviews this week about Microsoft’s ‘cloud computing’ plans”.
Well, at last! A technology that is a good fit for the Microsoft culture: after all these years of pitching vapourware, the spinmeisters of Redmond should have no trouble creating clouds.