Microsoft wants to lock everyone into its store via universal Windows apps, says game kingpin

Re: App stores suck

Stream and the Apple App Store/iTunes do not suck.

Microsoft sucks because they are a huge fraud. The whole childish unusable Metro/ModernUI and Windows10 spyware filled crap proves that.

How to run a monopoly 101

The trick with a walled garden monopoly is to think of it like catching hogs in a hog trap or fish in a net. You put up the walls/slam shut the game/ pull in the net when the prey are inside - not when they've left.

If Microsoft had put in a proper store in 2000 or so, they could have improved user experience. It would have been a trusted place to get software and would have been a walled garden of at least some value. Much better than downloading dodgy looking binaries packed with malware off sourceforge etc.

Instead they've only done a half-arsed job and are now considering "doing it right" after they've blown their chance to do it properly.

Bah Microsoft. Can't even screw up properly!

Re: Deja Vu

Yeah, but Windows 8 wasn't force-downloaded onto peoples' computers.

Windows 10 is being force-downloaded except in instances where someone has taken active measures to prevent it.

Re: Deja Vu

Currently the windows store is a failure, easy to avoid and full of product you'll want to avoid. The backdown on Metro as the primary ui derailed the plan to nudge everyone onto the store as the default software source. Of course Gabes prediction looks wrong now, the plan failed *so far*.

That doesn't mean we can relax, the misuse of gaming to drive Win10 is underway, slowed by the need to push Xbox1 but finally gearing up. Leverage from xb1 is being used to ensure only universal crapps are supplied for windows AAA games, Microsoft's own games are only going to support it.

Bad luck, bad policies and incompetence have only delayed Microsoft's plan. There's still a war to be won.

Re: Deja Vu

Maybe not, but that doesn't mean he was wrong to say it.

The very act of warning that a bad thing can happen is sometimes sufficient to stop it happening. Someone in a position of influence speaking out about a danger can change policies and strategies across an industry so that the problems they are warned about never come to pass.

When that happens then the bad stuff doesn't. Does that make someone like Gabe Newell wrong? Only in a very limited sense. In fact they have been right, and very effective.

We should applaud those who speak out in this way. If we end up with another PC monopoly then pretty much everyone is worse off.

Re: Deja Vu

Yep I came to make this exact point, it was in fact claimed by several people at windows 8 launch. What we'd be talking about is in fact the end of Windows as a general purpose computing platform and Microsoft wouldn't dare.

Don't know why people keep making this idiotic claim. Even Apple wouldn't do this for their desktop OS.

Re: Deja Vu

Your post makes it sound like Gabe Newell made a prediction that didn't come true. That's rather a mischaracterization. What Mr. Newell said Microsoft wanted and was moving toward as much as they could was an application store that they fully controlled and which dominated the Windows ecosystem. That was true then, and it's true now. Everyone who points it out might at least delay how quickly than can accomplish it, but it's still where they want to go. It's also possible that by the time they got anywhere with this, they would have been all but abandoned by their customers (outside of the enterprise, where this will not work), but it's still where they want to go. Just because they might not be able to pull it off doesn't mean they aren't setting up to try it.

Re: Oh dear, It would appear that nobody is doing any remembering.

The FTC started looking at Microsoft's anti-competitive activities on 1991, and closed the investigation in 1993 without taking action. In 1993 the DOJ started investigating, and reached a settlement with Microsoft in 1994, which Microsoft promptly broke when they required all customers to pay for IE bundled with new computers whether they wanted it or not. The trial began in 1998. Microsoft were found guilty of using the monopoly in operating systems to crush competitors, and of tying. The court sentenced Microsoft to be broken into two (an OS company and an applications company) in 2000. In 2001 Microsoft wrote their own sentence which was accepted by the DOJ in 2002, and allowed Microsoft to continue tying.

If Microsoft do crush non-Microsoft Windows App stores, then I fully expect the FTC and DOJ to huff and puff for another decade and achieve nothing.

Re: Oh dear, It would appear that nobody is doing any thinking.

" If Redmond attempted to do this the DoJ in the US and the European competition authorities would be all over them."

If it was being done via consumer software I'd agree - but they're sneaking this in via developers who have to choose to develop this way and could, in theory, write for other platforms too. So they're rying to work on getting other people to make their monopoly for them through easy tools and a write-once deploy-to-many framework.

Sad thing is I think a lot of dev houses will go along with it... and if they aim this at indie devs and universities like they did with .NET then we'll have a whole generation coming through that won't see it as a problem.

Re: Oh dear, It would appear that nobody is doing any thinking.

MS will just laugh at any anti-trust suits brought against them. They have (effectively) unlimited funds and all sorts of malicious sanctions that they can apply!

Re: Oh dear, It would appear that nobody is doing any thinking.

They are not attempting or trying to do this.

They ARE doing it.

Re: Hang on...

No. And it doesn't make the system software "look the same" on any device any more than Win32/64 does either.

No. Because every pc out there has different hardware, no software can disguise that CPUs have different core counts or performance varying by 1000%. GPUs support different feature levels or with vastly different performance profiles.

Games devs like consoles because the hardware is constant. The OS is frequently a moving target.