Tag: Microsoft

Microsoft grew big on the back of Windows, its PC operating system and Office, the software people and businesses use to create written documents, crunch numbers and build presentations. Now the company is moving into hardware devices and cloud computing. For a while it looked as if Microsoft was losing relevance, but that seems to be changing.

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surface book
Microsoft Surface Book

A year ago Microsoft launched its first laptop. Last week the Surface Book had a refresh. It remains the best take on a 2-in-1 computer, but at a high price.

All Windows computer makers offer riffs on the laptop-cum-tablet format. There are many designs to choose from at a range of prices. Yet twelve months after it first appeared, Microsoft’s Surface Book still offers the best balance of features.

Hybrids and 2-in–1s are everywhere. For the last two years they have been the fastest growing PC segment. Scrub that, they are the only growing PC segment in recent times.

Most 2-in–1 devices involve compromise. Often you end up with something that is not the best laptop, not the best tablet. Many hybrids feel like tablets with keyboards attached as an afterthought.

Microsoft takes a different approach with Surface Book. It more than passes muster if you only use it as a laptop.

Laptop first

Some Surface Book users may never move beyond using it as a conventional laptop. Yet that misses something. Hit a key to unlock the screen. The Surface Book becomes a large Windows 10 tablet similar in many respects to the 12.9 inch Apple iPad Pro.

While most hybrids are tablet first, laptop second, the Surface Book is laptop first.

If you think the distinction between tablet first and laptop first is splitting hairs, think again. The Surface Book is a first class laptop.

Feature for feature it matches, often beats many premium Windows laptops. Most people reading this would be happy with its performance, design and weight

None of the rival hybrids come close in that department.

First-class Surface Book

Although the original Surface Book is a year old, it still runs fast. The review model has a sixth-generation Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB of memory and a 256GB solid-state drive. It sells for NZ$2750.

Well-heeled users can push the specification of the original Surface Book. Go all the way with 16GB of memory, 1TB of SSD storage, an Intel Core i7 processor and a separate Nvidia GeForce GPU. That will cost NZ$5800.

Newer Surface Books are faster. They have a more powerful graphics processor and longer battery life. The new top of the line will set you back by NZ$6000.

Pleasing to typists

You get an excellent back-lit keyboard. The keys are well spaced. They have enough travel to please touch typists. As a writer I’d consider buying the Surface Book for the keyboard alone. I haven’t seen a better laptop keyboard in years.

Microsoft has also chosen a great trackpad. It’s bigger than many Windows laptop trackpads and is responsive. This makes it easier to navigate the screen without taking your hands off the keyboard. It reminds me of the old-school mechanical Apple MacBook trackpads.

Microsoft has packed such a full compliment of ports into the Surface Book that it feels almost retro. The power port doesn’t do double duty as anything else. There are two USB 3.0 ports, an SD card slot, a Mini-DisplayPort and 3.5 mm headset jack.

The Surface Book is thick and heavy by MacBook or Ultrabook standards. It weighs 1.5kg. That’s more than we’re used to and a touch uncomfortable at times. You’re compenstated for extra heft by a better than usual combination of keyboard, touch screen and battery life.

Detachable screen

When you use the Surface Book as a laptop, a locking system holds the screen in place. Hit the detach key or the right onscreen icon and the muscle wire system releases the tablet. You have to have power to do this, the release mechanism is both mechanical and electronic.

You can turn the screen around on the keyboard base to use as a display. Fold it all the way over and it becomes a tablet with the keyboard still attached.

It sounds unlikely, but you may want to do this. The bottom, keyboard part of the Surface Book has all the ports along with extra battery capacity. You can also put a graphics card in this section.

Windows tablet

Surface Book has an excellent screen. The display is as sharp as iPad and it has the 3:2 aspect ratio. At 13.5 inches it is larger than the 12.9 inch iPad Pro in size or roughly the size of an A4 magazine.

Microsoft has included great speakers which mean the tablet is ideal for watching video.

Although the tablet is thin — just 7.5mm — it houses the computer electronics. This makes it bigger and heavier than most tablets, but in one sense it can do more. In another sense it can’t. That’s because it runs Windows 10.

Whatever your views on Windows 10, it lacks the depth and quality of pure tablet software you can find on the iPad. There also seem to be less tablet software options than Android.

You won’t get as much battery life from the tablet part of the Surface Book as from other tablets. In practice it lasts between 3.5 and 4 hours depending on your applications.

The big picture

At 13.5-inch, the display is bigger than the 12.9 inch iPad Pro or the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 tablet. Microsoft. Uses the 3:2 screen ratio, which feels better than 16:9 when used as a tablet.

Resolution is 3000 by 2000 pixels, this makes for stunning images. While it is more generous than most tablets or laptops it doesn’t match the 4K displays. Unless you’re using it to edit 4K video, you won’t notice the difference.

Microsoft includes a Surface Pen with the Surface Book. In practice this works best when you use the device as a tablet. Clicking the pen fires up OneNote, just like on the Surface Pro.

The Surface Book has two batteries. There is one in the base and one in the screen. When you use the device as a laptop you get close to two working days, about 15 hours. That’s enough for the longest flight. When used as a tablet you only four hours, which is lower than most tablet-only alternatives.

Niggles

In use I found the Surface Book wouldn’t automatically switch to tablet mode when released from the keyboard base. And a couple of times it fired up even with a closed lid. On many occasions I’d close the lid and it would continue to chime notifications.

One last positive. Because it’s from Microsoft, there’s no bloatware.

Verdict

You get a beautiful screen and great performance with the ability to switch to a tablet when that helps.

Microsoft managed to fit a useful new device format into a gap no-one could see. For want of a better name, it’s a premium hybrid PC, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

If you want a powerful Windows laptop that doubles as an occasional tablet and have the budget, this is by far the best option.

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Frazer Scott Microsoft NZ“No-one has the breadth of services and offerings that Microsoft brings to bear in this space”.

— Microsoft New Zealand chief marketing and operations officer Frazer Scott

At Intergen Dynamics Day 2016, Frazer Scott outlined Microsoft’s strategy to help companies with their digital transformation. This is the context for Dynamics 365.

It all boils down to four pillars and three trends.

Scott says we are living through a fourth industrial revolution. Or, as Microsoft describes these things Industrial Revolution 4.0.

He says: “There’s a blurring of the divide between the physical and digital worlds”.

Microsoft Azure

While the trends are big data, analytics and cloud computing, Scott says cloud is the underlying technology. Hence Microsoft’s massive investment in its Azure cloud service.

Microsoft four pillars of digital transformation are:

  • Engage your customers. Scott says the goal is to have a “market segmentation of one”. This means using analytics tools to mine data for a complete view of each customer. Then gain insight into the customer before giving them a personalised experience.
  • Empower your employees. Recognise they are mobile and celebrate individual work styles. You need to realise that allowing employees to be more creative will pay off with greater responsiveness. Also use tools to give your staff better insight so they can make better decisions.
  • Optimise your operations. A modern business needs to be more responsive and agile.
  • Transform your products. Is about disrupting markets with new products and services, even by introducing new business models. Instead of looking back, you can use data and analytics to anticipate what will happen.

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Speaking at Intergen Dynamics Day 2016, Jucy Group head of technology Tristin King talked about choice. 

King says there are two types of choice. The big ones are all about desire and by need.

He says: “The other type of choice is an ugly choice, it’s a burden to most of us much of the time. These are small choices and they are often really hard. They are hard because they are driven by logic, by risk and the fear of missing out — even if it is only a minor thing”. 

We make a lot of these choices. King refers to a Cornell University report which says we each make about 200 choices about food each day.

These take up a lot of time. Another study looked at more important decisions. It says adults make 27 judgements every day and we might spend as long as nine minutes making each judgement. 

King says: “That’s four hours a day we spend making choices.”

When it comes to buying a new phone, we can be overwhelmed by choice. Even once you’ve decided on a brand there are more choices to make. There are technical matters such as camera, screen resolution and so on. Then there are decisions about where is the best place to buy a phone. This can take hours.

Then many of us go through the same process when it is time to update the phone. King says: “We get in this loop of decision-making. We worry about which is the best phone and about whether we get the choice wrong.

But for a bunch of people there is no choice. They are going to buy an iPhone. King says Apple is now the world’s biggest company and makes a great margin, He the most amazing aspect of this is that Apple has just a nine percent market share but 73 percent of phone profits.

He says they did this because they removed choice. “Apple understood what people’s desires were and what they need from a device”.

On one level King’s comments on choice seem remote from enterprise technology. But it is easy to lose sight of why companies are willing to spend large sums on powerful systems and analytical tools.

King says Jucy uses tools like Microsoft Power BI to understand how and why customers make choices, then remove the painful choices and help them to enjoy memorable experiences.

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Surface Pro

In mid–2013 I needed a new computer. Like many others I chose A MacBook Air instead of a Windows laptop.

It wasn’t my first Apple. In 1984 I bought one of the first 128k Macs. There were others.

Yet for twenty years my work had revolved around Microsoft Windows.

A vote against Windows

So why throw away the skills and software investment?

It came down to three reasons.

First, the 2013 MacBook Air’s all day battery. At the time no other laptop came close to this. With care you could eke out 12 hours. The best Windows laptops of the day could manage, perhaps, six hours. And that’s being generous.

Second, the MacBook Air is light and thin without compromising on the keyboard or touchpad. While many rival 2013 laptops were as light and thin, there were compromises.

Microsoft misstep

The third consideration is more complicated. It wasn’t so much that Windows 8 was an annoying, hard-to-use mess. Although that is true.

It was that Microsoft’s misstep opened the door to alternatives in ways earlier Windows upgrades did not.

Moving from Windows 8 was not going to be a wrench.

At around this time Windows 8.1 arrived. It was another dog’s breakfast. Microsoft doubled down the madness.

Windows 8.1 was meant to fix 8. It changed nothing.

The move from Windows 8 to OS X Mountain Lion proved less jarring than the move from Windows 7 to Windows 8. There was no going back.

There could have been going back.

Surface Pro

In mid–2013, Microsoft’s first Surface Pro was a promising alternative to the MacBook Air.

True, it was underpowered and overpriced. The first Surface models needed expensive add-on keyboards that are fine for casual use, but painful after hours of touch-typing.

Microsoft’s second generation Surface Pro was better. The keyboard wasn’t perfect but was usable.

Had they arrived a few months earlier, a Surface Pro may have graced my desk instead of the MacBook Air.

This may sound contradictory given the earlier comments about Windows 8. There is a simple explanation.

Windows 8 didn’t make sense on a two-year-old desktop computer. Nor did it make sense on a 2013 Ultrabook. Windows 8 was almost as bad on an ordinary 2013 touch screen PC.

Glimpse

You could see what Microsoft was trying to do with Window 8 when you tried it on a Surface.

Windows 8 still wasn’t great. Yet on a Surface it showed occasional glimpses of logic. There were hints of elegance.

As Apple might say; it just works.

Maybe it doesn’t work well as you’d hope. Yet on a device that acts as both a laptop and a tablet Windows 8 was no longer incoherent.

Coherence isn’t the first word that springs to mind with Windows 10. Yet, for the most part, that’s what distinguishes it from Windows 8.

If you’re using Windows 10 on a laptop without a touch screen, you won’t find yourself accidentally dropping into tablet mode. It acts like a laptop operating system.

A laptop operating system that acts like a laptop operating system shouldn’t be a big deal. But that was the problem with Windows 8. It didn’t act like a laptop operating system or a PC operating system.

Apple operating system

When I chose the MacBook, I turned to Apple for the hardware and stayed for the software.

It took time to warm to OS X.

The first thing I did after taking my new MacBook Air out of its box was install Windows 7.

For a while the MacBook Air was a Windows laptop. It may have been the best Windows possible laptop of the time. The MacBook was snappier, lighter and had longer battery life than anything that came with Windows installed.

Over time I moved to OS X. It was a revelation. Life was easier, work was easier, everything was easier. My productivity soared.

Robust alternative

OS X, or macOS as it’s now called, isn’t perfect. It has flaws and annoyances. On the plus side it is robust in ways that Windows never was. You can go months without rebooting. Try doing that with Windows 8.

These days a lot of computing takes place in the browser. You can do almost everything there.

That’s the thinking behind the Google Chromebooks. They use a browser as an operating system. With so much software now being delivered as an online service, operating systems take a back seat.

This is an area where Windows will struggle to recapture its greatness. When everything revolved around operating systems, Microsoft called the shots in the computer industry. Apple carved out a niche.

Browsers, clouds

Now the PC action is all in and around the browser and cloud computing. Today’s main battleground is with phone operating systems.

Microsoft is strong in cloud. It has first class cloud apps, but it lost the plot with phones.

You can still get phones that run Windows 10. Almost no-one buys them. Microsoft has little interest in selling Windows Phones. That may undermine other parts of the business.

Integration

In contrast Apple not only has the popular iPhone, but has found ways to integrate the iPhone with its laptop operating system.

It feels like magic when an incoming iPhone call gets the Apple Watch tapping your wrist and a notification appears on the MacBook. You can answer the call or respond to a text message on any of these devices. They act as a coordinated team.

Windows 10 fixes a lot of the Windows 8 problems. It’s the operating system Microsoft should have had in 2013.

The damage from a failed version will echo down the years at Microsoft. And elsewhere. While it isn’t the reason why PC sales plummeted in recent years, the Windows 8 debacle did not help.

Big numbers

Last month Microsoft trumpet that 400 million computers now run Windows 10. It’s an achievement. But let’s not forget in most cases Microsoft gave the software away.

Today it costs more than $100 for an everyday user to buy a Windows 10 upgrade. At that price Microsoft missed $40 billion in revenue.

It’s not just the money. Nor is it the loss of prestige or the distraction. There’s also a loss of momentum. Above all these, there’s the dawning realisation that Windows is no longer centre stage.

Nothing is going to fix that.

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Windows 10

Some diehards still argue Windows XP was Microsoft’s best-ever operating system. Nobody says that about Windows 8. Windows Vista was just as forgettable. For many users, Windows reached a peak with 7.

Where does Windows 10 fit in this picture?

If Windows 10 has yet to earn an XP or 7-like reputation for greatness, it has already passed one test. It is not an embarrassment. It was clear from the moment Windows 10 first appeared, that it was an improvement on the ill-conceived Windows 8.

Fast adoption

One year after launch Windows has a 20 percent share of desktop operating systems. Microsoft says users have adopted 10 faster than any other new version of Windows. Some 350 million computers around the world run Windows 10.

Let’s not get too carried away with this number. The 20 percent figure comes from netmarketshare.com in August 2016. In that month Windows 7 still accounted for 47 percent of operating systems in use.

There are reasons why users have been so quick to adopt Windows.

For a start, it replaces Windows 8. Many users couldn’t wait to move on from that train wreck. Even the 8.1 upgrade didn’t ease their angst.

Frustrated users would sieze almost any route out of 8.

Free upgrade

Moreover, until a few months ago, Windows 10 was a free upgrade.

Microsoft gave everyone using older Windows versions constant, unmissable reminders to update. There were warnings that the software wouldn’t stay free for long.

Windows 8 was unpopular. Microsoft gave users financial incentive to upgrade. It would have been a surprise if users didn’t adopt Windows 10 faster than earlier versions.

It is more remarkable that almost half of all computer users chose to stick with Windows 7.

Since its launch, Windows 7 has enjoyed a well-deserved reputation from users. It is easy to use. It feels right in a way Windows 8 never did. The software is robust and reliable. Windows 7 is low maintenance.  All these things matter when it comes to operating systems, especially for business users.

Happy users

That’s not to say Windows 10 upgraders are unhappy. According to Microsoft, customers are more satisfied with Windows 10 that with any previous edition.

You have to take this kind of statistic with a pinch of salt. For years Microsoft reported impressive high satisfaction scores for unloved versions of Windows. There’s a press release somewhere telling the world how much users loved Windows ME. That version of the software is now regarded as joke.

The voice of the market is far more important that any internal marketing survey. To date there hasn’t been a huge outcry of despair from Windows 10 users.  Yes, you can see plenty of niggles and whinges[1]. Yet there’s no widespread outpouring of anger, grief and denial like there was with Windows 8.

Windows 10 better than 8

Everyone knows Windows 10 is better than the unloved Windows 8. The recent Anniversary Update is another step in the right direction. Microsoft says there are 5000 new features in the update. Most changes are obscure improvements that will pass most people by unnoticed. Even so there’s a clear feeling the code is tighter. And that’s something people will notice.

One aspect of Windows 10 that is yet to sink-in with the great unwashed is how it improves in the background. There are big updates, but there are also frequent smaller updates. In a sense, Windows 10 is an operating system-as-a-service. Just as SaaS applications get frequent tweaks, Microsoft fixes Windows 10 without users noticing.

There was a lot right with the first official version of Windows 10. It was fast, stable and secure. But there were flaws. These have been cleared up over the last 12 months.

There’s a joke in geek circles that Microsoft gets every second Windows version right. It’s too soon to say if Windows 10 will prove a long-lived success like XP or 7. It has already confirmed the good-bad-good Windows release pattern. That’s something to celebrate.

  1. Most of the anger with Windows 10 focuses on privacy issues. We’ll look at that in a separate post. ↩