Over the years, Keith McCarthy has become used to a certain way of doing things on his personal computers, which, like most others on the planet, have long run on Microsoft’s Windows software.

Source: Microsoft.com Microsoft's Windows 8 new interface

But last week, when he got his hands on a laptop running the newest version of Windows for the first time, Mr. McCarthy was flummoxed.

Many of the familiar signposts from PCs of yore are gone in Microsoft’s new software, Windows 8, like the Start button for getting to programs and the drop-down menus that list their functions.

It took Mr. McCarthy several minutes just to figure out how to compose an e-mail message in Windows 8, which has a stripped-down look and on-screen buttons that at times resemble the runic assembly instructions for Ikea furniture.

“It made me feel like the biggest amateur computer user ever,” said Mr. McCarthy, 59, a copywriter in New York.

Windows, which has more than a billion users around the world, is getting a radical makeover, a rare move for a product with such vast reach. The new design is likely to cause some head-scratching for those who buy the latest machines when Windows 8 goes on sale this Friday.

To Microsoft and early fans of Windows 8, the software is a fresh, bold reinvention of the operating system for an era of touch-screen devices like the iPad, which are reshaping computing. Microsoft needs the software to succeed so it can restore some of its fading relevance after years of watching the likes of Apple and Google outflank it in the mobile market.

To its detractors, though, Windows 8 is a renovation gone wrong, one that will needlessly force people to relearn how they use a device every bit as common as a microwave oven.

“I don’t think any user was asking for that,” said John Ludwig, a former Microsoft executive who worked on Windows and is now a venture capitalist in the Seattle area. “They just want the current user interface, but better.”

Mr. Ludwig said Microsoft’s strategy was risky, but it had to do something to improve its chances in the mobile business: “Doing nothing was a strategy that was sure to fail.”

Little about the new Windows will look familiar to those who have used older versions. The Start screen, a kind of main menu, is dominated by a colorful grid of rectangles and squares that users can tap with a finger or click with a mouse to start applications. Many of these so-called live tiles constantly flicker with new information piped in from the Internet, like news headlines and Facebook photos.

What is harder to find are many of the conventions that have been a part of PCs since most people began using them, like the strip of icons at the bottom of the screen for jumping between applications. The mail and calendar programs are starkly minimalist. It is as if an automaker hid the speedometer, turn signals and gear shift in its cars, and told drivers to tap their dashboards to reveal those functions. There is a more conventional “desktop” mode for running Microsoft Office and older programs, though there is no way to permanently switch to it.

Microsoft knew in the summer of 2009 that it wanted to shake up Windows. It held focus groups and showed people prototypes of the tile interface and its live updates.

“We would get this delightful reaction of people who would say, ‘This is so great, and it has Office too,’ ” said Jensen Harris, Microsoft’s director of program management for the Windows user experience.

Sixteen million people have been using early versions of the software. The boldness of the changes has delighted some users, who say they believe that for the first time, the company is taking greater creative risks than its more celebrated rival, Apple.

“I think it’s functional, clean,” said Andries van Dam, a pioneer in computer graphics and a Brown University computer science professor, who receives research money from Microsoft. “I welcome it.”

Younger users may be more likely to embrace the new approach. Joanna Lin, 23, who works in sales and marketing for a hotel chain in New York, said she was impressed with the software. “The feeling was very fluid,” said Ms. Lin, who was the most enthusiastic of five people that The New York Times asked to briefly try Windows 8 last week. “Definitely a step up from Windows 7.”

But the product is a major gamble for Microsoft, a company whose clout in the technology industry has been waning. The PC business, which generates much of Microsoft’s revenue, is in a severe slump as newer products like smartphones and tablets take more dollars from peoples’ wallets.

To help it gain traction in the mobile market, Microsoft made Windows 8 a one-size-fits-all operating system for touch-screen tablets, conventional computers with keyboards and mice, and newer devices that combine elements of both. (Confusingly, Microsoft is also introducing a separate but similar operating system, Windows RT, that cannot run older programs.)

Apple took the opposite approach with the Mac and mobile devices like the iPad, which have distinct interfaces, albeit with some shared technologies. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has said of Microsoft’s strategy: “You can converge a toaster and refrigerator, but these things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.”

Jakob Nielsen, a user interface expert at the Nielsen Norman Group, conducted tests with four people who used a traditional computer running Windows 8 and found that they had “a lot of struggles” with the new design. Mr. Nielsen said they appeared to become especially confused when shifting back and forth between the modern Windows 8 mode and the desktop mode.

Mr. Nielsen said Windows 8 was more suitable for tablet computers with their smaller displays, but it was not helpful for workers who needed to have lots of applications visible at once.

“I just think when it comes to the traditional customer base, the office computer user, they’re essentially being thrown under the bus,” Mr. Nielsen said.

Microsoft disputes this idea. Mr. Harris said most test users did not have trouble juggling the two modes — and regardless, workers were more likely to operate in desktop mode if they wanted to see many applications simultaneously.

Microsoft is convinced that most people will quickly become accustomed to Windows 8. But to help ease the transition, the software offers tutorials when it is first started up. And Microsoft is spending more than $500 million on a marketing campaign that is partly intended to familiarize people with the new design.

Mr. Harris said the company needed to modernize Windows for the way people use computers today: “We’re not surprised people have a strong reaction to it.”

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Windows Phone may have crossed the 12 million unit mark

Over a year ago, TNW noted a correlation between the number of active Windows Phone Facebook users and the number of Windows Phone handsets that had been sold. After some calculation, we discerned that there was a ratio of 6.756 handsets sold per active user of the application. In January we posited that, based on the number of active app users, some 2 million Windows Phone handsets had been sold.
One week later, Microsoft confirmed our numbers. It was almost silly timing, really.
However, that’s all old potato, so what are we doing today? Taking the ratio to the current number of active Windows Phone Facebook users, of course. Now, this wasn’t our plan, at least not today. The fine chaps over at WMPowerUser had the idea, and we agree that the timing is fortuitous; currently, everyone wants to know what sort of impact Nokia is having on Windows Phone sales. By the way, it appears to be a positive one.
Now, to the chart!

Before we dive into the math-mongering, that rise in sales figures, right after the start of new year, is likely due to Nokia’s arrival as a Windows Phone OEM.
Now, shall we mathmagic? Yes. Yesterday, Windows Phone’s Facebook app broke past the 1.9 million active user mark. Using our ratio, that implies that some 12,836,400 Windows Phone handsets have been sold. To be conservative, we round down to 12 million.
What does that number mean? Not much, given that it stands apart from context; would 15 million have been a material improvement, or 10 million a painful decrease? However, it does give us an idea of how large the hardware install base is for Windows Phone.
One last note: these figures, and the ratio that we use, lose their credibility over time. As people buy a second Windows Phone handset, they remain a single Facebook user, while two phones have been sold, for example. So, keep in mind that this is all highly speculative.
But really, Microsoft, it’s time to tell us how Windows Phone is doing.

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Windows Phone has quietly picked up 7% of the Chinese market

We’ve seen precious little from Microsoft in terms of sales and market share figures for its Windows Phone platform lately, and so when the company speaks, we listen. A recent report in the Dutch publication Emerce contains a fact, attributed to Microsoft that surprised us: Windows Phone has snagged some 7% of the Chinese market.
Microsoft’s Michel van der Bel, its COO of in the region, characterized the company’s progress in the following way [Text via Emerce, translated by Google, edited by TNW]:

“We’ve only just begun. Our smartphones and PC-tablet hybrids [TNW: Windows 8], are suitable for the consumer, and are easy to integrate into an existing business infrastructure. This flexibility allows us to better respond to the cosumerization of IT than our competitors.”

According to WindowPhonePowerUser, Apple’s iPhone controls 6% of the Chinese market, implying that Microsoft has managed to slip past its rival with its handsets in the massive country, and emerging, critical smartphone locale. Of course, the iPhone has yet to officially touch down in the country, so the achievement is of dubious value. However, WMPowerUser’s report does note that Android controls nearly 70% of China’s smartphone market, so Windows Phone remains a smaller fry.
Still, progress is progress, and such work in a country like China is key to Microsoft’s goal of building a global brand for its phones, making it less reliant on markets that are more hotly contested, such as the United States.
7% is nothing but a start, but a start it is.

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Upcoming Microsoft deal: Buy a Windows 7 PC, upgrade to Windows 8 for a mere $15

Microsoft, in a bid to keep Windows 7 PC sales strong through to the end of the operating system’s lifecycle, has a plan: offer people a dead cheap Windows 8 upgrade , thus making the option of waiting for the upcoming operating system to drop a poor decision.
How cheap will the deal be? According to Paul Thurrott, the bump to Windows 8 will cost a mere $15. Of course, this sort of promotion is hardly new – Microsoft does something similar every time it releases a new operating system. It helps people get onto the new code quickly, and ensures that Windows revenue doesn’t take a massive dive in the quarter preceding the new operating system’s release.
Even worse, as the company doesn’t formally announce the release date of the software for some time, not offering a cheap upgrade could add to consumer uncertainty, which might lead to a wallet-closing situation.
One more note, however: this time ’round the upgrade bush, Microsoft is pushing people to Windows 8 Pro, and not its normal flavor. There won’t be (so far as can be told) an upgrade to the vanilla Windows 8 edition. Why MSFT is pushing people to Pro is hard to say, and until we have a final feature breakdown of the various editions of the operating system we won’t be able to say much more.
The promotion is set to kick off on June 2nd, so if you were thinking about picking up a new machine, you might want to count to ten before you pull the trigger.

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Microsoft’s Windows 8 play: Kill Live, build one login to rule them all

Sometimes the biggest news isn’t shouted, but is instead intimated, as it is a pivot from former strategies. So far as I can tell, Windows Live as a brand is over. Microsoftis moving from it to a single-login system that will be a huge boon to Windows 8, and the company’s cloud projects.
Essentially, Windows Live has long been a disjointed bag of hurt; its components were disparate, and hard to use in concert. Microsoft is fixing that problem, and boosting Windows 8 at the same time by moving to ‘Microsoft accounts.’ The login that you use to get into Windows 8 will also be your account login for nearlyall your cloud services, from SkyDrive to Hotmail.
By doing this, Microsoft is solving a branding problem (no one knows what a ‘Windows Live’ is), a cohesion problem (products scattered here and there), and an account redundancy issue (different logins for different systems). The company is building one login to rule them all, and it’s a great move.
Consumers are now going to be given a plethora of services, up front, I suspect via pre-installed Live Tiles on their Windows 8 tablet interface (the ‘Start Screen’), with no work needed. It will just be there, as they will have already logged in via their Microsoft account. As Microsoft notes:

When you connect a device or service to your Microsoft account, you’re automatically provisioned with a set of cloud services, including a contact list, calendar, inbox, instant messaging, and cloud storage.

Also, billing is about to unified, meaning that paying for Zune and other services will be brought under the Microsoft account aegis:

Microsoft account is our identity service for individuals who use Microsoft products and services. You can use your Microsoft account to sign in to your Windows 8 PC, and then use the same account to check your billing for services like Xbox LIVE, Zune, and the Windows 8 app store.  And your Microsoft account is connected to your Xbox gamer tag so you can track high scores and games.  You can sign up for a Microsoft account with any email address, and provide additional verification information including your mobile phone number and a list of your trusted devices.
We’ll be rolling out the change in nomenclature from Windows Live ID to Microsoft account over the next several months across our product line. There are still some areas we continue to work on such as migrating your account (credit cards and purchase history) from one market (currency) to another if you’ve connected your account to services such as Xbox LIVE.

Windows 8 is likely to land in the October time frame, meaning that it will be in place for the holiday rush. That means that come next January, there will be millions, upon millions of new Windows 8 users, sporting fresh Microsoft accounts. And they will all be SkyDrive users, whether they intended to be or not.
Microsoft, in a single move, has set itself up to explode its cloud services, kill a brand that was, frankly, bad, and bring a big amount of cogency to its huge operating system bet.
Damn.

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