It's my understanding that the head of the team was in fact fired. In my opinion it
is safe to say that both he and Ballmer would still have their jobs if it were'nt for
the consumer backlash against Win 8. And oh by the way the Win 8 license sale thing
is deceptive in that someone can downgrade it to Win 7 after
the computer is purchased if they so choose, and a nontrivial number people have
chosen to do so. (just like was done with Vista/XP).
There's a big difference between the head of the team and "a good chunk of the development team". The head of the team who's responsible for a lot of the design decisions, perhaps so. A good chunk of the development team and you've got a major brain drain problem. And you can't just pick up a bunch of developers off the street for something like that, have them start, and pick up where you were - they won't have the knowledge about the Windows architecture and its code to be as productive, even if they have experience at other companies. The next version or two of the software would suffer, and likely be more buggy, as a result.
Zelig said:
I'm alright with a model like Mac OS or Android which is opt-in to install non-appstore stuff. It's essentially no different for technically savvy people, but could hopefully eventually stomp out people installing crapware. App store guidelines need to be far more stringent to weed out crappy apps though.
I don't know, I'm split. From an idealist perspective, I'd favor opt-out to installing non-appstore stuff, since most people will leave the default, and that favors a distribution monopoly. And from what little experience I have with the iOS store a few years back, you're absolutely right about the guidelines needing to be better if the app store model is to improve quality. From what I saw, I usually got better results in terms of actually useful software by Googling for Windows programs than searching or browsing the iOS store. Maybe there's just more free and/or open source software for Windows, but while I can often find a free program for what I need on Windows, or at least a reputable non-free option, there was so much software that was essentially adware on iOS, with noticeable ads when running the program.
I also noticed a major spike in the amount of spam I received after using the iOS store. Since it was essentially none before, it was very noticeable. And since the subject was heavily related to the applications I'd downloaded in the iOS store, I'm pretty sure that's where the spam originated from. I don't know if Apple intentionally shared my e-mail or if they had some sort of security breach, but it gave the app store model a bad taste. I've never had that sort of problem with Windows applications from the Internet, and since I don't supply my e-mail when downloading them, the trust issue never really exists there in the first place. (Well, aside from the possibility of viruses, but I tend to recognize sketchy when I see it) So this may also be part of the reason I'm very hesitant about app stores.
Whether the Windows 8 Metro store is as bad, I'm not sure, since I've stuck with the desktop on Windows 8. And hopefully Apple has improved the state of their store since 2009, although I don't plan to find out for myself.
Now, if app stores actually increased the quality of what you found in practice and I had more faith in the data protection aspects of them, I can see where it might benefit the average Joe. The monopolistic tinge would still bother me, though.
Can you actually install non-Google-store stuff on Android without rooting it? I thought you had to root it to do that, or install a 3rd party store such as the Amazon store. If you can actually put programs on it completely outside of the store, I might consider it. Realistically, I'm still unlikely to adopt it for a phone, since data plans are expensive in the U.S. and I don't really trust Google anymore, but that would be one less strike against it.
I suspect the number of people who've downgraded to Win7 is in fact trivial. The 200 million figure includes every license MS has sold, regardless of whether the OEM product is in a retail store, in a warehouse or on a truck from the factory. There are about 175 million Win8 devices in active use, and I'm guessing most of the remaining 25 million is stock that's in transit. (They're selling about 12.5 million licenses per month, so two month's worth of stock would account for the entire amount.)
I'm not sure. Do enterprises count under the Windows 8 license number, or as Windows 7 licenses? If they count as Windows 8, that's going to be an awful lot of downgrades.
If they don't, it would be interesting to see what the Windows 7 license sale numbers are since the release of Windows 8. Of the three companies I've worked for in the past 5 years, all three of them are still deploying Windows 7, not 8. And I'm pretty sure they aren't in the minority. At least two of them skipped Vista entirely, so it wouldn't surprise me if they skipped 8 entirely as well.
