"We're essentially enabling you to break the electronic concrete of the past and move your business to the future, by connecting your people, by enabling your people to communicate and collaborate in real time, and by taking all the wealth of communication, collaboration, and social networking opportunities, and apply those into very specific business scenarios."
Now that sounds good! What would be even better, is if you build the whole thing on web-standards ;-)
"Luckily, there was a second tablet available on stage that was working, so the changes for the hypothetical app were successfully written to the pretend database, and all was well."
That's not luck. I would think that a backup is almost always a must for any presentation.
It's marketing speak, and no one of importance to Microsoft is going to call them on it. I would imagine their line of thinking would be Ubuntu doesn't ship on tablets or phones. OSX doesn't ship on tablets or phones. What they run are stripped down and re-imagined versions of the parent OS.
Approval of the magnitude of this claim is up to the reader.
This could get into deep discussions about what is an OS (versus a kernel), what constitutes the "same" OS (versus a modified version of the OS) and even what can be put in the same class as Windows.
I think what Microsoft is getting at is, OSX and Ubuntu don't run the same code on their mobile devices. Windows 8 will. It's marketing, and NetBSD doesn't even cross their mind.
It all depends on where is the line defining what's an OS. A Linux machine doesn't need X to be a Linux machine - Unix machines have been serving terminals for decades. So much, in fact, I joke that, in order to be a serious computer, one has to have no monitor, keyboard and mouse ports - if you really need a physical console, a serial port will do. So, I've seen Linux running programs on a very broad selection of hardware, from ARM to zSeries (68020+ has always been more of a curiosity, albeit there were serious Unix machines using them).
I mean what about previous versions of windows? They ran on tablets and desktops. If you mean non-x86 than windows NT initially was going to target MIPS and later became a x86 first(I believe they still released the MIPS version too).
Windows NT 3 could run on (some) MIPS, Alpha and PPC hardware in addition to x86. NT 4 was also ported PPC, but support was soon dropped and only the x86 and Alpha versions got any updates or support. There was even a release candidate of Windows 2000 for Alpha (I think I still have CD somewhere), but it never got a final release.
Massive company. Massive software projects. Massive amount of end users. Massive amount of use cases for their software. Time restrictions on their development.
The wording you used makes it sound like they make buggy software on purpose, which makes no sense.
Actually, they do. Microsoft could spend more time and resources debugging it, or limit the number of use cases it addresses, make it simpler, support less hardware...
Obviously, they chose more functionality for the end user, a broader selection of supported hardware and shorter time to market. That comes with a price.
It's always a compromise. "Done is better than perfect"
And, to be fair, it could also be a hardware problem. You know, hardware has bugs too.
freehunter's right. Imagine if a company like Bethesda worked on a project with the scale of a Windows OS. I love Bethesda games, but they tend to be buggier. And so would a Bethesda OS. When you look at the numbers, I would argue that MS does a pretty good job.
Oh, sorry. Yeah I meant why they end up producing buggy software when competitors like Apple have proven it's possible to both ship and make stable software. And Apple does both hardware and software.
You partly answered your own question. When you control the hardware and the software, the number of testing variables goes down dramatically.
Of course, by that logic, since the same company that made my macbook did the hardware and the software, I'd expect it to be much more stable than my windows boxes, but sadly it is not.
Windows 7 crashes on me about as often as OS X (or Ubuntu for that matter). Visual studio on the whole seems less buggy than XCode. iTunes is bit of a monstrosity and seems to bug out on fairly regular occasions. And while I haven't had any problems myself, I know of several people who have had lots of trouble with wifi on their MBAs. Where you thinking of any specific examples?
As much as I like bashing Microsoft (and they do make buggy software), this is not an apples to apples comparison - Apple has much more control over the complete stack than Microsoft does. And Apple software is hardly perfect either.
What Apple (Jobs, really) did was always rehearse every keynote to exhaustion (his and everyone else's), until everything is absolutely perfect. Not everyone is as perfectionist as Jobs was.
I had IIS blue-screen on me in front of a full audience (yes, I once worked for the evil empire). And I did rehearse the damn thing a good couple times.
The difference with Apple is, Apple has one use case for their software. There is plenty of blogging on HN every week with someone complaining that OSX is unstable or unsuitable for a use case outside of what Apple had intended.
Apple controls the hardware, the software, and the user. This makes it a lot easier to appear bug-free.
Honestly? The average consumer doesn't need that degree of quality. I have friends who cannot tell the difference between scrolling on my Android phone and scrolling on my iPhone. It's something that drives me wild.
I feel that it's almost the same principle - things may crash here and there but it's "no big deal" to most people.
Are you actually suggesting that iTunes is "stable software"? Please wake me up when your fantasy is over. Also, I've experienced more crashes within iOS on my iPad than I have in 15+ years of using Windows. Anecdotal evidence of course but it's not like you cited any actual data either.
No iOS product would crap itself like that during a keynote demo. Sure, I've had them panic and reboot on me in real world use, but Apple takes the time to make sure the demo runs smoothly.
When you can't or don't make your demo run smoothly during a high visibility presentation, it makes you look careless, either in the development of your product or of your demo. In either case, it reeks of incompetence. This might not be a justified impression (accidents happen), but that's how life is.
No iOS product comes close to the complexity of a Microsoft Dynamics product either, nor are developers at Apple expected to develop and demo such complex products on pre-beta operating systems created by a different group.
Software is buggy sometimes, that's just life, and Apple is not immune to it. The best a company can do is have a backup system that they can quickly switch to so they can continue the demo.
Apple doesn't make a habit of demoing products still in development. In there case when things crash (as they've done in the past) they don't really have a good excuse when that code will get released in a few days.
Microsoft isn't done they have until October minus 1 month for manufacturing to go.
It's not finished. It will break. You have a backup device (or two) ready when you present it in front of a crowd.
Apple does it (I remember keynotes where they had to switch to their backup Mac), Microsoft does it, everyone does it.