Julius Seeker wrote:Microsoft isn't good with <strike>numbers</strike> branding
Microsoft is attempting to "simplify its branding" as well as reverse direction on the disaster of Windows 8; the One initiative is an originally-internal drive over there to simplify all their fragmented development technologies - "One API", if you will.
This is a spectacular idea from a developers' point of view; and badly needs to be done. Microsoft is in a bizarre place wherein they still hold a near-monopoly on desktop space at a time when desktop profits are dropping and Wall Street analysts are telling every company to specialize in tablets and mobile or perish. So they need/want to develop an API that is theoretically develop-once/play-anywhere; hence the "One" technology set intended to eventually unify the desktop, mobile, and console parts of the company into a single platform users can develop for - especially since their biggest weakness right now is the way Windows Phone has hardly any appspace to speak of when compared to Android and iOS.
Sadly for us all, they are a giant tanker executing a three-point turn on this and it's slow, plus they have no idea how to sell the upshot to users - any more than they have ever had an idea about how to sell themselves, really. I have heard Microsoft described as "a great company that has problems selling its story", and I agree with that after several decades in their indie developer fold.
Great technology. Great APIs. (For those who disagree, I urge you to snack on the offerings from Apple - whose APIs work well but force ownership of an expensive desktop Mac you'/d never otherwise buy - and Android - who were so far behind on GUIs that their API was still a command line a few years ago.)
Itty-bitty branding brain.
They should have released this generation under any kind of rebrand designed to say to customers, "We're not actually going backwards from 360 to 1!" - and the One initiative should have always been developer-only, and made clear that it was "One API", instead of pushing THAT branding initiative on customers who don't understand it.
They didn't. So that ship has sailed already with some truly strange branding choices already etched all but in stone on the side - or in a massive, multimillion-dollar PR campaign that is making them look silly, which is effectively "stone" for a major corporation in a lot of ways.
The One is probably going to be Microsoft's failed console generation the way that the PS3 was a step back for Sony and the GameCube for Nintendo (much as we all loved it, saleswise, it was). Hopefully it won't also be a failed API generation; but I think they're behind on the progress they need to for real unification of technologies there too. It's really a shame because Windows Phone is actually awesome now, as is Project Spark and a lot of the Win8-only technologies most people never saw because nobody would buy the thing and half the people who did couldn't run it...but WinPhone still can't do something important that their desktops can, which is run custom shaders, and Spark remains locked in an endlessly cool but inaccessible-to-the-public vaporware beta - so they're going to have a hard time "defragmenting" their platform space APIs in ways that matter, in my opinion.
Lots of cool tech over there, but the get-it-to-market-in-a-cohesive-way pipeline that needs to work at any major tech corporation to get ahead is having logistics failures.
Basically this is going to be a reorg generation for Microsoft, and they're going to get a lot wrong for now...but in my opinion there exists a significant chance that they could hit the next console/mobile/desktop generation of their stuff out of the park.
(Also, someone tell Sine that he should reenable HTML tags so the strikeout tag actually works.)
