Microsoft is not composed of morons, their engineering is world-class, and they're not out to ruin their business or their product line.
Microsoft miserably failed with a very second rate mobile operating system for over a decade. Their browser has been an also ran to a couple of small-teamed competitors. Their core operating system, despite being the linchpin of their business, has seen endless grand ambitions abandoned because of a gross inability to execute (do people forget how dramatic of a change Vista was supposed to be? They tossed all of that and re-branched XP, releasing essentially minor GUI changes to bring in the payday for another half decade).
Any argument that argues the technical ability of Microsoft starts on a flawed foundation. I have a lot of respect for certain parts of that company, but they have had some enormous failures, both from a vision and technical perspective. There is nothing that demonstrates that Windows 8 is the pinnacle of engineering.
EDIT: One of the most foreboding elements of Windows 8 is that an improved copy dialog gets play in ever commentary about the operating system. Seriously, just think about that for a while. Otherwise it's a thin veneer of a shell, inconsistent with the overwhelming majority of the operating system, that makes it a stellar operating system?
Yeah but look at Windows Phone, Xbox, and Zune. I think they're very capable of evolving and innovating when their product has competition. Balmer and his management style still needs to go but the main reason they didn't innovate with Windows is because they had no reason to.
They didn't change Windows because there was no serious competitor to it and they were in a position of "there's no reason to change we're not losing sales". Now that there's competition they're in a position of "If we don't change we will lose sales" which is a huge motivation.
Just look at their Xbox brand which they grew so well they surpassed Sony's PS3. Having competition has motivated Microsoft to innovate incredibly well. No one can deny that the Xbox brand, especially Xbox live, is a huge success in both sales and in innovation. Just look at how much they've changed the Xbox 360 alone. From the dashboard, the the UI, the target demographic, the addition of the Kinect controller, gamer tags, avatars, and the look and style of the console itself. Xbox live did so well it forced Sony & now Nintendo to finally innovate their own online services.
Same with the Zune. It was a commercial failure because they launched at a time when stand alone mp3 players where on their way out and smart phones were in. But everyone I know who had a Zune loved it. When it started it wasn't anything worth mentioning but MS evolved it into an elegant, sleek, beautifully creative device and (its few) users loved and praised it.
So Microsoft is definitely starting to change and evolve. They're surrounded by competition and have no choice but to get the creativity flowing AND shipping.
When it comes to mobile and browser, Microsoft probably did not prioritize properly and I think they acknowledged it too. Using that as an argument to question their technical ability is not right. IE10 can take any browser head on and so can the new mobile OS.
The problem is that other browsers keep defining what a browser should be, and then Microsoft has to play catch-up. Same with Windows Phone and Windows 8: other people defined what a mobile OS should do, and now MS is trying to catch up.
When you're not defining the market, you're an also-ran. Microsoft in the last 10 years failed abysmally at defining new markets, which is what they had done with Win95/Win2000 first and then Office and VisualStudio and IE5 later (yes, IE5 was commercially fantastic -- there's a reason all those shitty "web-apps" from 2001 were not written for Netscape or Mozilla).
In this sense, Windows 8 is more of the same: other people pointed the way, and MS is now scrambling to imitate them as best as they can. Not a recipe for success, if you ask me.
I thoroughly agree with this. If they know what they have to replicate, they can do it in style. I can't find three significant points of conceptual difference between Windows 8 Metro and iOS....
available mouse pointer.......... ummm..... more colors?
Meanwhile: mandatory revokable code signing. no side-loading. centralized apps. restrictive filesystem. fullscreen by default. centralized homepage. everything-is-an-app. sliding pane navigation. implied scrollbars. ARM SOC hardware. on and on and on and on, it's a direct clone of what's working in the marketplace.
Microsoft miserably failed with a very second rate mobile operating system for over a decade. Their browser has been an also ran to a couple of small-teamed competitors. Their core operating system, despite being the linchpin of their business, has seen endless grand ambitions abandoned because of a gross inability to execute (do people forget how dramatic of a change Vista was supposed to be? They tossed all of that and re-branched XP, releasing essentially minor GUI changes to bring in the payday for another half decade).
Any argument that argues the technical ability of Microsoft starts on a flawed foundation. I have a lot of respect for certain parts of that company, but they have had some enormous failures, both from a vision and technical perspective. There is nothing that demonstrates that Windows 8 is the pinnacle of engineering.
EDIT: One of the most foreboding elements of Windows 8 is that an improved copy dialog gets play in ever commentary about the operating system. Seriously, just think about that for a while. Otherwise it's a thin veneer of a shell, inconsistent with the overwhelming majority of the operating system, that makes it a stellar operating system?