Earlier this week at the Gartner Symposium ITXpo in Orlando, Microsoft’s lame duck President, Steve Ballmer, once again restated his vision for “One Microsoft/one world.”
Actually, we jest. As reported by Larry Dignan on CNET, the vision remains a single Windows GUI to be used across all devices, from smartphone to tablet to PC. That’s what he and the rest of the crowd in Redmond have been saying since long before the release of Windows 8, when Metro was still Metro, which was their first attempt at implementing this one-size-fits-all vision. Nevermind that it hasn’t worked for them so far. You know what they say about “try, try, try and try again?”
We’ve seen this crisis coming since the introduction of Vista, which should have been a shining moment for the company. After all, the operating system was nearly six years in the making. They botched it, releasing a much anticipated OS that was not only a resource hog but basically just didn’t work. Wow. This was just after the release of Zune, a “me too” iPod, and before the release of the Kin phones, which are so rare that they probably fetch a premium on eBay.
We’ve grown used to seeing demonstrations of computer tech in these police proceedurals, but rarely anything that looks so obviously like a commercial. In all instances, the camera lingers on a shot of the GUI formerly known as Metro. In some cases we see Skype being used, with the brand conspicously evident. In others, we get treated to watching a handheld tablet turn into something resembling a laptop, perhaps a netbook, when the device is connected with it’s cover keyboard. Wow! Microsoft magic at work.
