I am always amazed at the creativity displayed by those who so obviously have talent. It makes it all the more impressive given that Microsoft would likely benefit by taking this exact marketing route.
What they're doing right now certainly isn't working...
Great work, although looking at them all together like that, Microsoft's 1985 logo appears to be the best of the bunch. I suppose design is cyclical.
I really like the "slate" concept, I'm just not sure it works as a button. Buttons should have roughly equal height and width. The slate looks very out of place on the physical devices themselves. Otherwise, it's great.
A brand has to reflect the culture of how a product is made, sold, experienced, etc...
Microsoft is not about simplicity, it's about feature creep. Microsoft sells software and licenses to big companies. Big companies don't want simple, they want value for their money - features!
A better brand promise would be Microsoft - It Does Everything!
Look at Windows 8. Is it going metro only? No, Metro is a feature on top of the existing mountain of features. Instead of one UI, it's now TWO UI's!!!
Putting this kind of branding on Microsoft is like putting the geeky kid with oversized glasses and suspenders a new wardrobe. Sure, the kid will look cooler, but it won't stop him from playing Magic: The Gathering in their basement.
Microsoft has built their company on saying "yes" to just about everything. The simplest Windows ever sounds like they are saying "no" to things and that's not what Microsoft does.
That's an interesting perspective that I'd never considered before. If you're right, and you sound it, then Microsoft clearly has an internal struggle.
Metro is all about simple. It's fast, it's fluid, it's simple, it's "alive with activity". But it's not complex, packed with features. This is the image Microsoft wants to present to consumers.
On the other hand, Microsoft's Business division is all about things packed with features. Huge, bulky, expensive, extremely powerful but bloated products. Products licensed with 3 to 6 zeros on the price.
Perhaps they need two brands. The consumer brand, and the business brand, because otherwise you have constant conflict.
Haven't they been down this road before with the Windows NT line that they released alongside Windows 9x?
I suppose the different versions of Vista and 7 speak to them re-exploring this business-consumer partitioning. I don't have the information to comment on how effective this split was for Microsoft.
They're not really re-exploring it, they had Home/Pro versions of XP as well. They've always drawn the line between the two, although it used to be a lot more pronounced since 9x and NT were totally different codebases whereas now they're just arbitrarily partitioning their market. I assume the 9x/NT split was decided not to be effective since they ended up moving to a single codebase.
Microsoft largely resolves this conflict in a way that works for consumers but not for tech pundits: they bring the same B2B customer service principles to their consumer product support channels (e.g. three years of Xbox repairs for the red-ring of death - on a 90 day warranty no less).
Keep in mind that Metro is exactly what enterprise wants. Just listen to the good people at 37signals.
Could have easily made the same criticism of Apple in the mid 90s. Microsoft can definitely be saved. You just have to fire Ballmer and put a visionary in charge. There are still some really good people working at Microsoft. Unfortunately, the leadership and vision haven't been there. Nobody has been willing to take risks.
They took a risk in killing the OEMs and building Surface in house. They now need to take a bigger one.
I used the think the same thing, but it's not clear to me that Microsoft "needs" saving. They're growing the enterprise side of their business quite fast and the problem just seems to be that investors expect them to be the next Apple, whereas Ballmer is turning them into the next IBM.
They'll still make boatloads of money on the enterprise side and that'll be enough to keep them floating for decades to come, so I continue to wonder if there truly is a problem with their business strategy or if it's just misaligned expectations.
If Ballmer was aiming for the next IBM, he'd have spun off Windows Phone as IBM sold off its PC business. They wouldn't be buying companies and pouring resources into it and pissing off the OEMs by pouring resources into Surface.
And if they were just shooting for Enterprise++, keeping Windows Phone and Surface to keep enterprise device sales under their umbrella, they'd be spinning off the XBox and consumer media properties.
But they're not spinning anything off. They're still expanding into new spaces. And they're fighting for consumer money harder than ever.
I'd say the evidence suggests that, even though it could be wildly profitable if it went the IBM way, Ballmer still wants Microsoft to be all things to all people.
Apple mid-90s might have been _trying_ to do everything, but they weren't getting there. Yes, they had a lot of products, but they were mediocre and lacked the installed base and mindshare of Windows. It is easier to focus when you aren't walking away from successful markets or customer expectations.
Microsoft nowadays Does Everything because it is evolved from a corporate strategy of dominating the OS space by providing users The Way to realizing the potential of computing technology. They wanted to provide CIOs and developers with the basic foundation, so they had to offer tools for all sorts of stuff.
Its future position is eroded as browsers "embrace and extend" to swallow up much of the daily activity on the desktop, leaving those users free to look at devices on dimensions other than satisfying an OS utility requirement, and as the iPad carves out a consumption-dedicated computing space.
Surviving into that space will be a very different challenge than Apple had. They have to move from successful businesses into new computing usage paradigms. Those involve a kind of user-experience focus that Microsoft hasn't previously needed, and couldn't match with its strategic utility role in the first place. It will take a very different vision and focus than what brought them here.
I agree that slapping a new logo on the current structure won't do much. But if that new branding is aspirational, its most important audience might be Microsoft's own employees, telling them that their past successes don't matter so much and that they have to get into a different frame. And quickly.
The vision for Windows 8/Windows Phone 8/Xbox is pretty good and is happening under Ballmer's watch. I don't know how much he can take responsibility for but if it succeeds, it will be awesome.
It may look like Ballmer hasn't done much since Gates left, but it's not surprising that it would take this many years to shift a company the size of Microsoft to the common platform/vision that is Windows 8.
Exactly. Which leads to some of the most awful and crazy designs decisions.
Look at the upgrade to 64 bit. In Windows 16 bit days you had the C:\Windows\System directory. In Windows 32 bit, you gained C:\Windows\System32 for your system libraries. In Windows 64 bit you would assume C:\Windows\System64 right? Nope. 64 bit dlls go in to System32 and 32bit dlls go into SysWOW64. WTF?
Same goes with Program Files (32 bit) etc. They are pretty much screwed by legacy.
The windows mobile, XBox, and WinRT guys must feel so much better than having to work on Windows core because they don't have to deal with supporting 17+ years of software still running on their platform.
Though I agree with your general point about Microsoft being hampered by legacy support (but for other reasons such as having 2 UI paradigms of Metro and Windows together), I don't think this is the best example. The everyday user really doesn't care what folder their software is installed to as long as its easily accessible from the desktop/programs.
That is until they need to scavenge and mess around the file system because of a virus, failed uninstall, missing DLL or something. Then they really care.
If that's the problem, what's the better approach to solving it: cleaning up the file system organization, or making it so that those things don't happen and make people mess around with the file system in the first place (e.g. by introducing a declarative isolated application model such as AppX in Windows 8)?
The big issue that comes out of that mindset is that it's people that do work in those folders that end up telling laymen that stuff is done stupid, opening up a nice spot for apple and it's simple and easy everything to come in and take away sales. (Or my favorite, when I can manage to get someone to try out Ubuntu :) )
And now you've got me wondering if it would be possible for microsoft to spin off a whole new company (or just division) to build an os or products under a new brand with no backwards compatibility or tie to the past. So the current products would be kept for enterprises and the new one could target consumers.
Have any companies of this size done this successfully? It would require a lot of work but could help them greatly in the consumer space.
Xbox is a good example of this working in a new cooler market , it has so few ties with microsoft that some of my 10 - 15 year old cousins who dislike microsoft don't even realize the xbox is a microsoft product.
I like the effect of the monochrome images inlaid in the "slate", though they could just do that with the new Windows 8 logo anyway. I don't think the slate shape does anything to fix his criticism that the new Windows logo looks "visually uncomfortable" when applied to devices however, his looks just as akimbo applied to the Surface, if not more so.
Couldn't have said it better myself. The whole concept of a brand also becomes harder to change the more well known it is. For Microsoft it is close to impossible at this point unless they branch out completely another business, and a good example would be xbox.
This is a branding exercise not a GUI implementation.
There has never been any connection between the actual products and MS branding. In fact for most brands those two are only connected via post rationalisation.
If this design makes you uneasy and go "But that's not Microsoft!", slap your gut and tell it to listen because that's just the branding talking. Take a step back and recognize that EVERY emotion you feel about Microsoft is arbitrary. Branding is just the mental handle we use to talk about the automatic emotions we get. That is the tough part about branding: it happens unconsciously. It is that surge of instantaneous feeling that bypasses logic.
Engineering brands is reprogramming everyone's gut reaction. Our "gut" reaction feels right by definition (a tautology) and everything else feels wrong. It is only with conscious thought can we fight it.
We as web developers know the power of the "default". Imagine that! Being able to set everyone's default setting to a selection of your choosing is like a superpower.
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Changing brand is always an ugly business. For example, think back in high school about the personal brand you exuded on campus.
One day, you decided to start dressing in jeans and wearing a motorcyclist black leather jacket everyday. You get comments like "But that's not you! Why are you trying to be someone else? Stop being a phony." It feels impossible that you'll ever be accepted as a badass motorcycle jockey. The next day, you drive an actual motorcycle to campus. People see you driving a motorcycle. In the coming weeks, you offer rides to select people. Those people now start raving about your motorcycle and how "cool" you are.
We revisit the same campus 3 years later and people can't imagine you not as a badass motorcycle guy. You might ask, "Did you know that I use to be a nerd?" They reply, "But that's impossible! There is NO way that's true."
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Ask a teenager: "Did you know that Apple use to be a terrible company with mediocre computers, losing money and weeks from going out of business?"
Answer: "What? But that's impossible! I don't believe you."
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For Microsoft to make a big change, it should be that big, sudden announcement of that branding change. It will appear unfamiliar, it will appear strange, they might even appear phony. That's when the process begins. In the coming weeks, Microsoft publicizes new products that incorporate their new paradigm. Sleek, minimal, digital, modern. They even snag a few early adopters that try out the new products. You start getting friends that rave about the new products.
It is during this process that you go from feeling that its impossible that Microsoft is cool, to feeling that it's inevitable that it's cool. That is the magic of branding: the ability to reprogram the gut to have one thing be absolutely right and have everything else feel wrong, unnatural or impossible.
I was in total disbelief when UPS started running their "brown" campaigns. They had one of the most recognizable brands anywhere and some genius decided to throw millions of dollars at the idea of confusing customers with the whole "what can brown do for you?" campaign (and all the sophomoric jokes that went with that when they screwed-up a delivery). Simply amazing. Instead of "What can UPS do for you?" they took off in a completely different direction. I'd love to read a post-mortem on that whole story.
But why should i even care about an advertising campaign , when i can look at youtube videos, reviews, and ask my friends about microsoft's products ? if microsoft's product is cool enough, or solves some specific problem i've got, i'll probably hear about it.
YouTube videos and reviews (online or not) are mostly just astro-turfed advertising campaigns. You and your friends are likely influenced by either of these things on both a conscious and subconscious level, which then feeds back into the advertising campaign (this works in both a negative and positive sense). [Edit: this is how the "cool" that you mention gets created. I highly suggest watching a PBS documentary called "The Merchants of Cool", if a bit dated, to see how prevalent this is]
As an example, take a look at any car magazine (e.g. Sports Compact Car) and read any of the articles. Or read a Cosmo or GQ article. The one thing they all have in common is they push a product through a story that doesn't even seem like advertising. It's both brilliant and slimy at the same time, and is the ultimate goal of any advertising campaign -- to assimilate itself into the culture without appearing that it is even trying. Like Apple.
Like it or not, we are all influenced by ads on some level, and if nothing else, the reason any one of us "hackers" should care about advertising campaigns is at least to appreciate, analyze and improve upon them for our own products.
If you filter reviews, videos and comments and dig in a bit you can get a balanced view of a product.
Yes, ads do influence people somewhat, but the influence is not that big , unless it's supported by a product that can support the imaginary world of the ad.
So brand design is much more than ad design, you have to design every part of your offer to support this illusion.
> EVERY emotion you feel about Microsoft is arbitrary. Branding is just the mental handle we use to talk about the automatic emotions we get.
That might be true for companies that are completely unimportant, but many of us have seen whole careers, companies, and industries rise and fall on the movements of Microsoft.
As a relatively small example, when Microsoft tried to lock my family out of our home PC using and accused us of being software pirates that brought up some emotions that were certainly not arbitrary.
Careful, it's not just about branding. You have to live the brand idea as well, it has to perspire in your products, down to the tiniest detail. Anyone can hire a new brand team, pour millions in TV ads and new copies, but that won't change squat until the products themselves follow the very same idea.
At a company scale such as Microsoft's, true rebranding will take significant time and resources, or they will have to take hard hits first before they realize they have to change something.
As you mentioned in your example, you can rebrand yourself from one day to another and pretend it's the new "you", but you can't move that fast when you have 100 000 employees who have to pull that act at the same time.
Isn't it true that strong vision that people have a true emotional response to and believe in can move 100k people (or even more)?
Maybe an expensive "true rebrand" is a way to make a promise to your people and help build trust in your new direction. Also making it so visible and present can help remind people of this direction when they make every day decisions.
The problem is not only the number, it's the overall inertia between what management wants and what workers are all levels can get to. Management may have a forward moving vision, but it takes time to communicate it, to ensure everyone understands what it means, etc... and there are always resistances, too.
Plus, in a 100k company, I don't think 100% of employees are blindly following what the CEO wants them to do.
I think that the sci-fi thing fits better with some modern Linux distros.
The freeness of Linux reminds me of sci-fi settings where humanity has moved beyond money, a lot of Linux enthusiasts have this kind of starry eyed idea of building the future and having complete control over your device is very empowering. You can really feel the super-computer attached to your keyboard.
The fascinating thing about Microsoft today is they find themselves in such a strategically desperate position that they are beginning to change that attitude.
You are totally right with this, the big companies want to see more for their money. They don't understand minimal. I'm sure we'll get there some day, but right now the closest thing to minimal appreciation goes to the apple users, and the complement to that are the people who relate 'more & inexpensive' as better. I know that, when I show my dad some kind of minimal design he always goes, "where's the rest?, they're wasting so much space here."
Ouch. But as a former geeky kid with oversized glasses that still plays Magic: The Gathering sometimes, I can tell you that the new wardrobe does help :)
As far as products go, that's about the only thing he changed at all. I think it just is a way to differentiate between the "old" MS and the "new" MS in branding.
After looking at quite a few of his blog posts, I wouldn't be THAT surprised to read articles in a few years time about how this guy is the new Jonathan Ive.
Now if only he could start working for an innovative company, I feel great designs on the way.
The irony being that chunks of that (note the boxes, bags) would match Apple stock product surrounds almost exactly if they had an apple on instead.
I also don't understand in a branding exercise why you pick some photos of planets (when Apple is known for its use space imagery on the desktop) and start from there. There needs to be a reason to result path, not a pre-determined result and then ignore of fit some reason to it.
His reason for using space as a theme is probably deriving from his thesis that Microsoft should brand itself as a bringer of future tech. What seems more futuristic than space? It also appears mystically and naturally beautiful as well as allowing for a lot of breathtaking, pure looking pictures.
Windows being a window into the future, seeing space through the slate projects the image this artist had in mind.
I'm no designer, but aren't logos supposed to be recognizable? This is a geometric shape, why not just use a square for the logo, or a triangle?
Would people really associate this shape (which isn't particularly unique and probably not even trademark-able) with microsoft when they see it? I have my doubts
Also unrelatedly, the missing i-dot is really throwing me off (probably just because I am used to it)
With the website you are on it is highly likely that many people would instantly recognize the logo. Maybe not the general population, but here, definitely.
Sure. Just weird to include it between Nike and Google as a company big enough to use simple shapes as logos. I didn't recognize it (obviously). Not a bad logo, though.
Target has almost the same logo just with circles and would be a better example.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but none of those logos is nearly as simple as this one. For example, I wasn't taught a formula for calculating their area in elementary school.
Are there any successful logos that really are this simple?
all of those are significantly more complicated. you really can't argue that a shape made up of one very simple shape is only slightly less complicated than a shape made up of a couple/several simple shapes. by that logic, you could argue that every letter in the Latin alphabet is very simple; I'm sure everyone would agree that there is a significant difference in complexity between a rectangle and an uppercase 'F'.
Interestingly, the red cross logo is actually a trademark of Johnson & Johnson [1], not the Red Cross. It's also easily confused with the Swiss flag, and Swatch Watches (though granted they have inverted colours). Unless there is some context you wouldn't necessarily know which brand that was referring to. If you remove the colour (as is proposed on the page), it's just a plus sign and not recognisable at all.
While I think it's cool that designers show off their creativity in thinking up new ideas for old products, I could never shake the feeling that this was design's answer to fanfiction. The original creators have to look back and go "okay...?"
Very nicely done!! When I first looked at the logo it reminded me of Accenture, so I don't know if the font would work, but it is a step in the right direction.
I really liked the metaphor of seeing different things through the windows (slates). This could be leveraged by Microsoft as a play on "this is your Windows" or "what do you see through your Windows".
I thought this was really great design work. I could definitely see getting behind this because it points out most of what I see that is wrong with MS' Windows strategy. Metro doesn't need to be on the desktop, but it's totally applicable to tablet-like devices, a la WP7/8 and Surface.
If they went this route and did something like this, there would be serious impact to core Microsoft itself. But, it's definitely time for them to come into the new era, so to speak.
Great work. But you know what they say about lipstick and pigs.
Microsoft's problem is not their lack of spending on advertising, branding, marketing, PR, etc. They spend colossal amounts of money in these departments.
Their problem is that they no longer know who they are. Worse, they no longer know who they want to be.
There is no such thing. That's like saying "purely hologram". Pixels have no inherent materiality. There is nothing about the Metro UI that couldn't be recreated on a piece of paper.
The goal is visual communication and delight. Sterile for the sake of sterile isn't virtuous.
I did notice that the proposed "Purely Digital" interface included icons representing an old style phone handle (which younger customers probably haven't seen), a physical letter (increasingly rare), and a paper wall calendar.
The difference is that they're not fundamental to the interface. You won't see an audio player that looks like a reel-to-reel or a dialing app that looks like a rotary phone.
Metaphors are part of visual communication. Blatantly disregarding metaphors creates unnecessary confusion and abstraction--it separates the interface from culture.
Remember, all of this stuff is ultimately (and most truthfully) 1's and 0's. There is always abstraction. It is best to choose the abstraction that is most DESCRIPTIVE.
Others - you can't use select(..) on files. Nasty file-locking model. No good remote filesystem solution out of the box (CIFS is slow and unstable) and the third party solutions are nasty. No native workspaces and the third party attempts are nasty. You can't reflect against the system API (all current mainstream OSs suffer from this). The API is particularly thick with legacy overhead.
The presence on your list of a complaint about workspaces is evidence that Windows is not so bad because having workspaces is not that important.
OS X did not have workspaces at all for many years, and the two different versions of it they have introduced are kind of lame in the details of how they work. (Specifically, Command-Tab cycles among all open apps, not just the ones in the current workspace, as is done on Linux, and there is no other quick way to switch to a different app in the same workspace -- Mission Control not qualifying as quick -- with the result that I sometimes make a point to put two windows that "belong together" in separate workspaces just so I have a quick way to switch between them.
I'd tend to agree that Workspaces are "nice to have" rather than particularly important, but aside from "show desktop" and (the very nice) Aero Snap, Windows doesn't have any particularly useful window management tools at all.
To pick a (not entirely unimportant in the present context) nit, Spaces contain windows, not applications; each application has zero or more windows (an useful and important feature of OS X) contained in zero or more Spaces. There's an option to control whether or not switching to an application with no windows in the current Space switches to a (not "the") Space that does contain such windows, and the default ("yes") is sensible.
The quick way to switch to a different window in OS X is Exposé, which is broken in Lion, but fixed in Mountain Lion (clear "Group windows by application" in Mission Control Preferences).
Finally, the quickest way to switch between specific applications, windows, or even arbitrary Cocoa UI elements is binding AppleScripts to key combinations (using one of many tools; Alfred.app is as good a place as any to start). For anything more complicated than 'tell application "Foo" to activate', Script Debugger [1] and Accessibility Inspector [2] are your friends.
You can learn more about AppleScript in the course of its free 20 day evaluation period than you could in 20 months with Apple's tools (and $199 only sounds expensive until you use AppleScript nontrivially for the first time).
[2] Traditionally bundled with Xcode, it's been split out into a separate "Accessibility Tools" package in some recent builds, and hidden inside the Xcode.app bundle in others (though Spotlight should still find it).
I don't consider forking to be important, Windows is better off optimizing for multithreading instead. (You don't want to fork a heavily multithreaded process.)
The API is not that bad, especially if you implement some lightweight wrappers around it. It's capable of very high performance and does async IO better than Linux.
So you stick to vendor-supplied "vi" binaries as well?
The Windows NT problem is this: it's very fussy about whence and how it's booted, and there's therefore never been an easy, obvious way to set up a decent, customizable recovery environment on external media (including, naturally, one's favorite editor(s)).
Contrast with, say, OS X, where, in a pinch, you can even run suitably linked GUI versions of Vim and Emacs directly from a Time Machine backup in the recovery environment.
My main complaint is the lack of a (decent) package manager; Windows Installer doesn't so much as handle updates by itself, forcing applications to spawn dozens of "updaters" and making it impossible to coordinate them.
(This is perspective as a home user - enterprise tools might be different)
That would bankrupt them very quickly. They only made NT because they had to, and it took years to transition. Also, there's really nothing wrong with it.
I'm more interested in the HN comments here. Personally, I felt it was an inconsistent, and pretty tame take on an iconic brand (I'm not a fan of the new Windows logo either).
Check out his HTC 1 concept.. a bit dated but still interesting
I think the new logo has a very interesting effect, that is according to me though. It's asymmetric yet simple. Where Apple's logo and most logo's can be perfectly centered this one doesn't. I think that's mainly because it looks "italic".
I also wonder if this logo follows on certain points the golden ratio, but than again it's soo simple it shouldn't.
Lastly, if you'd place this logo on varia devices they would even kind of look "unbranded" which some people, including myself, really like. I can't really explain what I mean, but compare a logitech keyboard to an Apple one, the Apple-keyboard doesn't has a logo to advertise their brand, yet it's "one of a kind".
A phone without any brands explicitly written or displayed on it looks more sleek and modern to me.
But don't take my opinion to serious, I'm just a developer.
Thanks for the reply! But even the Deutsche Bank's logo has a square around it, which again makes it visually easier to center. I guess it's just me, but I can't help noticing how it doesn't looks centered, even if it is.
Also I didn't realize Deutsche Bank has such an appealing domain name!
I posted and complained about that same skeumorphic podcasts app today. Apple leads so much in the realm of hardware design but is starting to take steps backwards in it's own application/software design. I'm very anxious and hopeful for Microsoft to progress in this arena and give Apple some competition.
I see the Sony and Toshiba labels and they still throw me. I'd really like to see Microsoft step up their game in hardware. I know they all come from the same factories, but there's something about the simplicity of and the lack of another brand on Apple's products that make them so gorgeous to me.
Huh... I had no idea the Windows 1.0 logo looked like that. It's actually rather timeless. Kinda interesting that they've brought it back a little with the new logo.
I noticed the same thing.. the windows 1.0 logo looked like something modern. I don't know why they did not just dust it off and go back to their roots.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadI personally thought it was beautiful, really breathtaking.
Left top one on http://www.minimallyminimal.com/storage/post-images/microsof...
I am always amazed at the creativity displayed by those who so obviously have talent. It makes it all the more impressive given that Microsoft would likely benefit by taking this exact marketing route.
What they're doing right now certainly isn't working...
I really like the "slate" concept, I'm just not sure it works as a button. Buttons should have roughly equal height and width. The slate looks very out of place on the physical devices themselves. Otherwise, it's great.
It will never work.
A brand has to reflect the culture of how a product is made, sold, experienced, etc...
Microsoft is not about simplicity, it's about feature creep. Microsoft sells software and licenses to big companies. Big companies don't want simple, they want value for their money - features!
A better brand promise would be Microsoft - It Does Everything!
Look at Windows 8. Is it going metro only? No, Metro is a feature on top of the existing mountain of features. Instead of one UI, it's now TWO UI's!!!
Putting this kind of branding on Microsoft is like putting the geeky kid with oversized glasses and suspenders a new wardrobe. Sure, the kid will look cooler, but it won't stop him from playing Magic: The Gathering in their basement.
Microsoft has built their company on saying "yes" to just about everything. The simplest Windows ever sounds like they are saying "no" to things and that's not what Microsoft does.
I love the design, but it's not Microsoft
Metro is all about simple. It's fast, it's fluid, it's simple, it's "alive with activity". But it's not complex, packed with features. This is the image Microsoft wants to present to consumers.
On the other hand, Microsoft's Business division is all about things packed with features. Huge, bulky, expensive, extremely powerful but bloated products. Products licensed with 3 to 6 zeros on the price.
Perhaps they need two brands. The consumer brand, and the business brand, because otherwise you have constant conflict.
I suppose the different versions of Vista and 7 speak to them re-exploring this business-consumer partitioning. I don't have the information to comment on how effective this split was for Microsoft.
Keep in mind that Metro is exactly what enterprise wants. Just listen to the good people at 37signals.
They took a risk in killing the OEMs and building Surface in house. They now need to take a bigger one.
They'll still make boatloads of money on the enterprise side and that'll be enough to keep them floating for decades to come, so I continue to wonder if there truly is a problem with their business strategy or if it's just misaligned expectations.
And if they were just shooting for Enterprise++, keeping Windows Phone and Surface to keep enterprise device sales under their umbrella, they'd be spinning off the XBox and consumer media properties.
But they're not spinning anything off. They're still expanding into new spaces. And they're fighting for consumer money harder than ever.
I'd say the evidence suggests that, even though it could be wildly profitable if it went the IBM way, Ballmer still wants Microsoft to be all things to all people.
http://ycharts.com/companies/IBM/profit_margin
http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/profit_margin
Microsoft nowadays Does Everything because it is evolved from a corporate strategy of dominating the OS space by providing users The Way to realizing the potential of computing technology. They wanted to provide CIOs and developers with the basic foundation, so they had to offer tools for all sorts of stuff.
Its future position is eroded as browsers "embrace and extend" to swallow up much of the daily activity on the desktop, leaving those users free to look at devices on dimensions other than satisfying an OS utility requirement, and as the iPad carves out a consumption-dedicated computing space.
Surviving into that space will be a very different challenge than Apple had. They have to move from successful businesses into new computing usage paradigms. Those involve a kind of user-experience focus that Microsoft hasn't previously needed, and couldn't match with its strategic utility role in the first place. It will take a very different vision and focus than what brought them here.
I agree that slapping a new logo on the current structure won't do much. But if that new branding is aspirational, its most important audience might be Microsoft's own employees, telling them that their past successes don't matter so much and that they have to get into a different frame. And quickly.
It may look like Ballmer hasn't done much since Gates left, but it's not surprising that it would take this many years to shift a company the size of Microsoft to the common platform/vision that is Windows 8.
Look at the upgrade to 64 bit. In Windows 16 bit days you had the C:\Windows\System directory. In Windows 32 bit, you gained C:\Windows\System32 for your system libraries. In Windows 64 bit you would assume C:\Windows\System64 right? Nope. 64 bit dlls go in to System32 and 32bit dlls go into SysWOW64. WTF?
Same goes with Program Files (32 bit) etc. They are pretty much screwed by legacy.
The windows mobile, XBox, and WinRT guys must feel so much better than having to work on Windows core because they don't have to deal with supporting 17+ years of software still running on their platform.
Have any companies of this size done this successfully? It would require a lot of work but could help them greatly in the consumer space.
Xbox is a good example of this working in a new cooler market , it has so few ties with microsoft that some of my 10 - 15 year old cousins who dislike microsoft don't even realize the xbox is a microsoft product.
There has never been any connection between the actual products and MS branding. In fact for most brands those two are only connected via post rationalisation.
Of course it can work.
Engineering brands is reprogramming everyone's gut reaction. Our "gut" reaction feels right by definition (a tautology) and everything else feels wrong. It is only with conscious thought can we fight it. We as web developers know the power of the "default". Imagine that! Being able to set everyone's default setting to a selection of your choosing is like a superpower.
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Changing brand is always an ugly business. For example, think back in high school about the personal brand you exuded on campus.
One day, you decided to start dressing in jeans and wearing a motorcyclist black leather jacket everyday. You get comments like "But that's not you! Why are you trying to be someone else? Stop being a phony." It feels impossible that you'll ever be accepted as a badass motorcycle jockey. The next day, you drive an actual motorcycle to campus. People see you driving a motorcycle. In the coming weeks, you offer rides to select people. Those people now start raving about your motorcycle and how "cool" you are.
We revisit the same campus 3 years later and people can't imagine you not as a badass motorcycle guy. You might ask, "Did you know that I use to be a nerd?" They reply, "But that's impossible! There is NO way that's true."
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Ask a teenager: "Did you know that Apple use to be a terrible company with mediocre computers, losing money and weeks from going out of business?"
Answer: "What? But that's impossible! I don't believe you."
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For Microsoft to make a big change, it should be that big, sudden announcement of that branding change. It will appear unfamiliar, it will appear strange, they might even appear phony. That's when the process begins. In the coming weeks, Microsoft publicizes new products that incorporate their new paradigm. Sleek, minimal, digital, modern. They even snag a few early adopters that try out the new products. You start getting friends that rave about the new products.
It is during this process that you go from feeling that its impossible that Microsoft is cool, to feeling that it's inevitable that it's cool. That is the magic of branding: the ability to reprogram the gut to have one thing be absolutely right and have everything else feel wrong, unnatural or impossible.
As an example, take a look at any car magazine (e.g. Sports Compact Car) and read any of the articles. Or read a Cosmo or GQ article. The one thing they all have in common is they push a product through a story that doesn't even seem like advertising. It's both brilliant and slimy at the same time, and is the ultimate goal of any advertising campaign -- to assimilate itself into the culture without appearing that it is even trying. Like Apple.
Like it or not, we are all influenced by ads on some level, and if nothing else, the reason any one of us "hackers" should care about advertising campaigns is at least to appreciate, analyze and improve upon them for our own products.
Yes, ads do influence people somewhat, but the influence is not that big , unless it's supported by a product that can support the imaginary world of the ad.
So brand design is much more than ad design, you have to design every part of your offer to support this illusion.
That might be true for companies that are completely unimportant, but many of us have seen whole careers, companies, and industries rise and fall on the movements of Microsoft.
As a relatively small example, when Microsoft tried to lock my family out of our home PC using and accused us of being software pirates that brought up some emotions that were certainly not arbitrary.
At a company scale such as Microsoft's, true rebranding will take significant time and resources, or they will have to take hard hits first before they realize they have to change something.
As you mentioned in your example, you can rebrand yourself from one day to another and pretend it's the new "you", but you can't move that fast when you have 100 000 employees who have to pull that act at the same time.
Maybe an expensive "true rebrand" is a way to make a promise to your people and help build trust in your new direction. Also making it so visible and present can help remind people of this direction when they make every day decisions.
Plus, in a 100k company, I don't think 100% of employees are blindly following what the CEO wants them to do.
The freeness of Linux reminds me of sci-fi settings where humanity has moved beyond money, a lot of Linux enthusiasts have this kind of starry eyed idea of building the future and having complete control over your device is very empowering. You can really feel the super-computer attached to your keyboard.
Now if only he could start working for an innovative company, I feel great designs on the way.
I also don't understand in a branding exercise why you pick some photos of planets (when Apple is known for its use space imagery on the desktop) and start from there. There needs to be a reason to result path, not a pre-determined result and then ignore of fit some reason to it.
Windows being a window into the future, seeing space through the slate projects the image this artist had in mind.
Would people really associate this shape (which isn't particularly unique and probably not even trademark-able) with microsoft when they see it? I have my doubts
Also unrelatedly, the missing i-dot is really throwing me off (probably just because I am used to it)
http://www.owenjonesdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/1_...
or this:
http://www.wearesuntravel.com/SquareLogo_Jewel.303162624_std...
or this:
http://www.vintagevideogamer.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/...
Target has almost the same logo just with circles and would be a better example.
Are there any successful logos that really are this simple?
http://blog.iso50.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/windowslive...
http://www.findthatlogo.com/wp-content/gallery/pepsi-logos/o...
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DvlYtL1ReM0/TIHrinS6g5I/AAAAAAAACw...
this is even better:
http://www.logodesignconsultant.com/images/Memorable-simple-...
this is probably the winner though:
http://www.petergreenberg.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/log...
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1559971/Johnson-an...
btw, would love to know what you used to put this presentation together.
Related: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=is+this+the+iphone...
I really liked the metaphor of seeing different things through the windows (slates). This could be leveraged by Microsoft as a play on "this is your Windows" or "what do you see through your Windows".
If they went this route and did something like this, there would be serious impact to core Microsoft itself. But, it's definitely time for them to come into the new era, so to speak.
Microsoft's problem is not their lack of spending on advertising, branding, marketing, PR, etc. They spend colossal amounts of money in these departments.
Their problem is that they no longer know who they are. Worse, they no longer know who they want to be.
In that respect, they are very close to Sony.
There is no such thing. That's like saying "purely hologram". Pixels have no inherent materiality. There is nothing about the Metro UI that couldn't be recreated on a piece of paper.
The goal is visual communication and delight. Sterile for the sake of sterile isn't virtuous.
Remember, all of this stuff is ultimately (and most truthfully) 1's and 0's. There is always abstraction. It is best to choose the abstraction that is most DESCRIPTIVE.
Others - you can't use select(..) on files. Nasty file-locking model. No good remote filesystem solution out of the box (CIFS is slow and unstable) and the third party solutions are nasty. No native workspaces and the third party attempts are nasty. You can't reflect against the system API (all current mainstream OSs suffer from this). The API is particularly thick with legacy overhead.
OS X did not have workspaces at all for many years, and the two different versions of it they have introduced are kind of lame in the details of how they work. (Specifically, Command-Tab cycles among all open apps, not just the ones in the current workspace, as is done on Linux, and there is no other quick way to switch to a different app in the same workspace -- Mission Control not qualifying as quick -- with the result that I sometimes make a point to put two windows that "belong together" in separate workspaces just so I have a quick way to switch between them.
To pick a (not entirely unimportant in the present context) nit, Spaces contain windows, not applications; each application has zero or more windows (an useful and important feature of OS X) contained in zero or more Spaces. There's an option to control whether or not switching to an application with no windows in the current Space switches to a (not "the") Space that does contain such windows, and the default ("yes") is sensible.
The quick way to switch to a different window in OS X is Exposé, which is broken in Lion, but fixed in Mountain Lion (clear "Group windows by application" in Mission Control Preferences).
Finally, the quickest way to switch between specific applications, windows, or even arbitrary Cocoa UI elements is binding AppleScripts to key combinations (using one of many tools; Alfred.app is as good a place as any to start). For anything more complicated than 'tell application "Foo" to activate', Script Debugger [1] and Accessibility Inspector [2] are your friends.
[1] http://www.latenightsw.com/
You can learn more about AppleScript in the course of its free 20 day evaluation period than you could in 20 months with Apple's tools (and $199 only sounds expensive until you use AppleScript nontrivially for the first time).
[2] Traditionally bundled with Xcode, it's been split out into a separate "Accessibility Tools" package in some recent builds, and hidden inside the Xcode.app bundle in others (though Spotlight should still find it).
The API is not that bad, especially if you implement some lightweight wrappers around it. It's capable of very high performance and does async IO better than Linux.
The Windows NT problem is this: it's very fussy about whence and how it's booted, and there's therefore never been an easy, obvious way to set up a decent, customizable recovery environment on external media (including, naturally, one's favorite editor(s)).
Contrast with, say, OS X, where, in a pinch, you can even run suitably linked GUI versions of Vim and Emacs directly from a Time Machine backup in the recovery environment.
(This is perspective as a home user - enterprise tools might be different)
Check out his HTC 1 concept.. a bit dated but still interesting
I also wonder if this logo follows on certain points the golden ratio, but than again it's soo simple it shouldn't.
Lastly, if you'd place this logo on varia devices they would even kind of look "unbranded" which some people, including myself, really like. I can't really explain what I mean, but compare a logitech keyboard to an Apple one, the Apple-keyboard doesn't has a logo to advertise their brand, yet it's "one of a kind".
A phone without any brands explicitly written or displayed on it looks more sleek and modern to me.
But don't take my opinion to serious, I'm just a developer.
Also I didn't realize Deutsche Bank has such an appealing domain name!
I see the Sony and Toshiba labels and they still throw me. I'd really like to see Microsoft step up their game in hardware. I know they all come from the same factories, but there's something about the simplicity of and the lack of another brand on Apple's products that make them so gorgeous to me.