Microsoft Windows 8 has confused users and disappointed the PC industry.
Windows chief Tami Reller all-but-admitted it last week. But, she also
foreshadowed that help is on the way in Windows Blue. She confirmed that
this Windows 8 update—which has now officially been dubbed Windows 8.1—will be previewed for users this summer and will go live in the fall.
Summary: There’s one big move Microsoft could still make to
salvage Windows 8. Whether it will have the courage to do it remains a
question mark.
While it's rumored
that the Blue update will reinstate the much-missed Start menu and
allow users to boot into the Desktop Mode, it's highly unlikely
Microsoft will do the one thing that would best fix Windows 8: Separate
the desktop and tablet versions. That would require a surgery equivalent
of separating conjoined twins, but it would have a powerful effect on
both Microsoft's upstart tablet business and its traditional desktop
base.
We’ll talk more about why that would be such a great idea in a
moment, but first let's take a quick look at the reality of where
Windows 8 stands right now.
Reller tried to put a brave face on the Windows 8 debacle by reporting that Microsoft has sold 100 million licenses
of the new operating system since its launch last October. That's a big
number and it sounds impressive until you put it in perspective.
According to Gartner, the declining PC market
for Q4 2012 plus Q1 2013 still added up to 170 million PCs sold
worldwide. Windows holds a dominant position with about 90% market
share, so that means about 150 million of those 170 million PCs were
running Windows. If Microsoft’s numbers are correct, then that means
two-thirds of the Windows PC purchased were running Windows 8.
Again, that sounds fairly impressive until you consider how much
Microsoft and its hardware partners push Windows 8 on all new PCs. In
fact, it's almost impossible to buy a consumer PC without Windows 8. So,
you may rightfully ask if that means that it's the enterprise that has
rejected Windows 8. That's certainly a big part of the story.
Gartner pegs the global PC market as 47% consumer and 53% business.
So if we assume virtually 100% of the consumer PCs sold were running
Windows 8 then that would be 71 million (47% of 150 million). That would
leave just 29 million Windows 8 machines sold to the enterprise. That
means that only one-third of the Windows PCs sold to businesses have
been running Windows 8 since its launch last October.
That's fairly consistent with a recent TechRepublic poll of 4,000 IT professionals
in which only 15% of them said they have deployed Windows 8 or plan to
deploy it in the future. In fact, the lower percentage in the
TechRepublic poll probably points to the fact that there are some
organizations that have bought PCs with Windows 8 on them but wiped them
clean and installed Windows 7 instead, based on their enterprise
licensing options.
So why has the enterprise turned against Windows 8? The bottom line
is that the radical user interface change is too confusing and not
productive enough. Even many of the IT leaders and companies who are
inclined to like Windows and support Microsoft are frustrated with
Windows 8.
In the comments to the TechRepublic poll mentioned above, user PeterM42,
an IT consultant in Great Britain, summed up the attitude that pervaded
many of the Windows 8 naysayers when he wrote, "Windows 8 on the
desktop will not take off until the Metro 'toy' interface becomes an
option as provided by the superb 'Classic Shell' software (or gets
ditched altogether). Corporates [sic] do not want to pay the MASSIVE
bill for retraining users to use something which basically is rubbish."
That brings us back to our main point. Ultimately, the biggest
problem with Windows 8 is that it was based on a fundamentally mistaken
assumption.
The idea was that one device could best serve people for two very different experiences:
1.) A desktop experience where people typically sit down and do prolonged, intensive work
2.) A more restless experience where people stand, walk, lounge, or demonstrate, typically working in shorter bursts.