Apple has Scared Microsoft Worse Than We Thought

After a day of keynotes and discussions at Microsoft’s Build conference, my initial takeaway is Apple has scared the double espresso out of our friends from Seattle, and Windows 8 is shaping up to be almost entirely a consumer play.

The challenge ahead for Microsoft will be to get people to migrate off Windows 7. It was easy to get people to jump to it. XP was creaky and ancient, Vista stunk on ice. But if ever there was an “it’s good enough” argument to be had, it is Windows 7. Consumer satisfaction is clearly very high, as witnessed by 400 million licenses in two years.

You’ve seen the reporting by other writers within our family of publications, so there’s no need for me to rehash them for you, except to note the common theme: consumer sales. Everything I saw on day one of this show, which runs through Friday I hasten to add, was about a consumer experience. I saw nothing that would make an IT manager go “finally” or “I’ve got to have that.” Indeed, the mandatory Metro UI may prove off-putting to IT.

There was nothing new on security, beyond the talk of providing apps from the Windows App Store in a safe, secure manner. Guess what? No IT manager in their right mind is going to allow their users to access that store.

All the talk about the Windows App Store and how you can sell your old Win32 apps and track sales, put in free trial times, and so on struck me as reactionary to Apple’s highly successful App Store. Again, this is a consumer story, not business IT.

The platform portability is a very smart move. Android apps don’t move smoothly between tablets and phones, nor do iOS and Mac OS apps. But with Windows 8, your x86 code will just recompile on ARM hardware. Silverlight apps can be converted to Metro by adding a few lines of code, with no changes to the XAML or data bindings. 

One line of code converts a Windows PC app to Windows Phone, since it’s all built on XAML. All your knowledge to C# and Silverlight will carry over, Steve Sinofsky assured developers. All great, but this is not what IT is sweating over.

The best demo of the day came from Michael Angiulo, corporate vice president for Windows planning and ecosystem. He showed new hardware with UEFI, the replacement for the ancient BIOS system that PCs have used for 30 years. New computers with UEFI and Windows 8 started as fast as the monitor turned on. In some cases, he noted, the system can start faster than the fans can spin up in the case. That certainly got my interest, but on a personal level. For IT, it’s a minor bonus.

The Windows Live demo was nice, but again, a connected address book and Skydrive sharing of photos is a consumer play.

Microsoft has turned what were Web development standards into its desktop apps, and I have to wonder if this will not bring a whole new form of malware, as this stuff isn’t anywhere near as secure. Giving JavaScript and HTML5 native support through the Windows Runtime API strikes me as an opportunity for exploitation, and while Sinofsky said that Windows Defender is getting a major revamp, he said it quickly in the course of a two-hour keynote and did not go into details.

Windows 8 is still at least a year away, so hopefully some answers will emerge before then. Let’s hope so, if they want to get people to migrate off Windows 7. At this point, I’m not sold on it for myself.

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Welcome regulars and new readers alike. Here are a few more recent blog items from yours truly. You may follow me on Twitter here.

• Metro Will be Your First Stop With Windows 8
• Intel Joins the Windows 8 Developer Push
• Microsoft Patents Smart Cloud Storage
• Microsoft Confirms Native USB 3.0 Support in Windows 8
• Is a Streaming OS in Microsoft’s Future?
• Sinofsky Finally Speaks on Windows 8