Windows 8 stains Ballmer's legacy

Computerworld - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer survived the flop that was Windows Vista, but he wasn't able to do the same after the disappointment of Windows 8.

"Last year, Ballmer said Windows 8 would be his defining moment," said Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy. "Now, this has caught up with him. Windows 8 is the primary reason why he's retiring, specifically Windows RT. There's been a lack of progress on Windows Phone, but the forcing function was clearly the write-down of the Surface RT."
Windows 8 stains Ballmer's legacy - Computerworld
 
What the "experts" really seem to shy away from saying is that Windows RT failure is a failure of Microsoft in the mobile sector. Without the RT piece, which is really the Modern UI apps, you have the Windows desktop. That isn't selling either as the market place has said in a giant voice that they don't like the new way of navigating on their desktops, and they aren't interested in hybrid computers that cost more for less power.

That is Ballmer's real failure with Windows 8. If Microsoft had been able to engage the "big boys" such as Facebook, very early in the development process, and rolled out Windows RT with mature social networking apps, and not just Microsoft Office, they would have had a real chance to succeed. Instead they focused on shrinking the desktop, which unfortunately, shrank demand.
 

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Had they failed only in the RT area, that would be no big deal. After all even Apple has hard time showing investors they are still sound in the tablet sector.
The huge failure of Ballmer and MS is evidently the attempt to put Metro on PCs.
They lost all credibility doing so. Metro/W8 was the anti-serious OS. How can businesses still trust MS after this?
 

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Thankfully Windows 8 was created before he left.

I'd hate to be in the spot of using something else at the moment other than W8.
 

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Putting aside RT, the real shame is it could have been so easily fixed to work the way desktop users want it to work with just a few lines of code. But Ballmer persistently chose to ignore the demands of customers.

Properly handled it could have been an all time winner.

My high end Intel mobo is less than 2 years old and Intel do not support the board for W8. I'm using generic drivers from W8 on it with mixed results.

I get repetitive graphics problems even when using custom W8 drivers from NVIDIA for graphics card. To stop IE10 constantly freezing I had to go back to an earlier version of NVIDIA drivers. External HDs on USB3 ports take anything up to 12 seconds to copy to/from for a 25KB file. Also not having F8 boot to Safe Mode is a regular pain in the butt. DVD multi-session open data disks burnt on Nero often can't be read when trying to add data at a later date. The error message comes up: Insert disk into drive. The PC has to be rebooted once or even several times before the DVD is able to be read. And the list goes on.

I attribute it mainly to trying to have one OS for all platforms.
 
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Thankfully Windows 8 was created before he left.

I'd hate to be in the spot of using something else at the moment other than W8.


At least that's the thought until Win 9 comes along and corrects everything that Ballmer stubbornly refused to address.
 

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Properly handled it could have been an all time winner.

I think that's what frosts my apricots more than anything else.... it should have been so damned easy...
 

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