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Dear Woody,

You made me feel that I wasn’t the only one wandering in the desert. I read your article and said Hallelujah, somebody else gets it.
I am a long time reader of PC Magazine but about six months ago all the old grouches disappeared, and it was like Microsoft bought shares in the Magazine. I started being told why I should like Microsoft and be grateful for them. This is the company that has got very rich selling me sub standard products every other time they bring out an OS.I would like to be a 20 year old and have no memory of these but I don’t. Win 7 is a good stable OS. Going to an OS that can handle tablets is a great idea it really is one up on Apple.
However forcing me into it I don’t like and won’t do. It is a stupid move on Microsoft’s part and will provoke a backlash. Why will Corporate Departments switch to a nightmare scenario of Win 8? They have enough problems with users without adding my fingers can’t push the screen or lawsuits for carpal tunnel syndrome. MS just doesn’t bake in the same user experience as Apple.MS engineers build the product, and then give the software to ” engineers to human people” who have to work out how to help people push the right buttons. Apple thinks through how humans want the software to do its job, and then ask the engineers to make the buttons do it under the hood. Getting MS to put out a useable tablet OS is like asking North Korea to develop a profit and loss plan. They don’t know how to do it.
In business you have to recognize what you are good at, and do that. MS should have built a better Win 7 which despite all, they are not that bad at. Then either farmed out the development of a tablet variant of it to an Apple like company. Put the two together as a double choice in the same OS at the same price that are just as good and you the customer choose.
I fear the tablet move was done to stimulate Hardware sales which have been in the basement. As people buy more enclosed tablets there is no add on business. If they buy a desktop or a laptop / tablet there is an initial surge into touch sensitive screens and SSD’s and oh what the heck let’s get a new system. Then there is the whole incremental upgrading.
Microsoft has to change leadership and bring people in who were not there when we started. Ballmer is ignorant and thinks the profit is holding up because of his brilliance. It’s not, its because of the legacy products Office primarily which will be gone within 5 years. The ONLY reason I use office is to send and receive from clients and dealers. If I could upload to the cloud and they pick up in either their format or a universal format why do I need office?
Imagine having management at MS that listened to what the customers wanted? A stable OS that really booted in seconds, an Outlook that could automatically understand and put all the details of a correspondent into my contacts. We could start with the little things and move up. Some of you may not remember pre-office dominance days. We used to have competing software that offered better features and came out with new improved features every 6 to 12 months. There hasn’t been a real improvement in Office for seven years. It sets the bar at mediocrity.
Once again Woody thanks for expressing mine and I feel a lot of other people’s outrage at Microsoft and their wanton disregard for what their customer’s want and need.