So What Do We Learn From the Nokia N1 Tablet on Android?

So the Nokia N1 tablet has been annoucned for Spring 2015 launch (China first). It runs on Android and has an 8 inch screen, 8mp rear camera and 5mp front camera. Its very light. And it will not be the monster-seller tablet of 2015. Its not a phone, there is as of yet, no sister smartphone products in the phablet size. But the Nokia N1 is the return of the 'real' Nokia to consumer electronics. What will this mean..

WONT BE BIG SELLER

So lets do quick review. Nokia was world's largest mobile phone maker from 1999 to 2011. Nokia invented the smartphone and was the world's largest smartphone maker from its birth till 2011. Nokia developed several operating systems for smarthones and its main system, Symbian, was the world's largest smartphone OS until that magical year, 2011. What happened in 2011? Nokia's new CEO torpedoed the massive highly profitable market juggernaut, Nokia's handset business (including smartphones) and sunk it with his idiotic move to Windows Phone. The quarter before Elop made his change, Nokia held 29% market share in smartphones with Nokia-record profits and during hte past 12 months had grown MORE than Apple's iPhone, so the gap to the rivals was only growing in Nokia's favor. Nokia had brand new award-winning smartphones that featured elements and aspects that it would take Apple years to copy (larger screens, better cameras, NFC etc). Nokia's app store had just grown to become the second bestselling app store just behind Apple's and closing the gap. Nokia knew how to succeed in the handset market. The problems at Nokia were in its networking unit which was making losses, and in delivery schedules and 'execution' with some phones delayed by a year even. But Nokia knew how to win in the handset business. Nokia was the bestselling phone and bestselling smartphone brand on four of the six inhabited continents including by a wide margin China, the world's largest phone and smartphone market (China is now twice the size of the USA, accounting for 40% of all smartphones sold today).

Elop wiped that all out with a rampage of destroying Nokia. Three years after the new Windows Phone based Lumia smartphones were released, Nokia's smartphone market share was down to 3%. Yes Elop had managed to wipe out nine out of ten customers for the most loyal dumbphone customer base on the planet and the second highest loyalty smartphone brand (behind only iPhone). It was kterally a world record in market leader destruction. No industry has ever seen this rapid collapse of its market leader, not even under catastrophic conditions like Toyota's brakes failures in cars, or from sheer management stupdity before like Coca Cola's launch of New Coke. Never has any company collapsed its global leadership position as fast as Elop demolished Nokia. And note, when Toyota hit its brakes or Coca Cola decided to go New, they were not twice as big as their nearest rival. Nokia's smartphone unit was more than twice as big as Apple in smartphones, and the unit was four times as big as Samsung's smartphone business. (PS we found out after he was ousted from Nokia's CEO job as the shortest-duration biggest failure Nokia CEO of all time, that Elop had a personal bonus clause that rewarded him for destroying the Nokia handset business... yeah, irony of ironies. The Financial Times calculated that Elop was rewarded an extra 1.5 million dollars for every biillion dollars he wiped out of Nokia shareholder value. The FT compared Elop's heist with the worst of Wall Street criminals like Bernie Madoff)

If you thought the Windows Phone strategy was right but Nokia was just inept at implementing it, nobody should be able to do it better than Microsoft. So now we have six months of Microsoft ownership of Nokia's handset business. How is the smartphone business? The Lumia business market share under full Microsoft control now is... 3%. And mind you, in four years since Elop announced his Windows strategy the Nokia smartphone business has not managed one quarter of a profit. Yes now its been 18 quarters straight, launching Lumia, launching Windows Phone 8, and switching ownership from Nokia to Microsoft and nothing helped. Not one quarter of profit. The Microsoft handset business dream is utterly dead.

NOKIA TABLETS

Now, we know that tablets are kind of related to smartphones, especially now when almost all smartphones are touch-screen devices. There is that class of interim devices, 'phablets' smartphones of larger than 5 inch screen size, started by Samsung's Galaxy Note and now copied by the iPhone 6 series. Phablet sales have now in Q4 of 2014 passed total tablet sales for hte first time ever. Next year is the first year when more phablets are sold than tablets.

Nokia saw this coming too. Nokia has developed tablets on five platforms (Symbian, Maemo, Meego, Windows and Android) and launched commercially on three (Maemo, Windows, Android). So where many tech brands are new to tablets and only paid attention to the market after the iPad appeared, Nokia had been there before and explored the market. Nokia, world's largest handset maker, knew also - partly from commercial launch - that a tablet is not just a larger smartphone. Its a different device. Look at Apple, the older iPhoen keeps growing sales but the younger iPad has seen its peak and sales are now declining. Is not one market, it is two, as I explianed here years ago and now recently many are coming also to that view.

The distribution and sales of tablets is drastically different from smartphones and there is no real synergy between the two. So Nokia for example resisted a Windows Phone/Lumia tablet project until the desperation set in and Elop was willing to try almost anything. As we know, the Nokia Lumia tablet was yet another failure in a long line of handset-maker tablet failures (starting with Blackberry). Tablets were a great idea for PC makers (like say Apple and Samsung) but for pure handset makers (like Nokia, Blackberry) it was lunacy and a huge drain on their marketing and sales costs.

Interestingly, for Microsoft, the tablet market is more promising than the smartphone market, for those same reasons. Microsoft Windows for the PC is sold through IT tech sales channels. The XBox videogaming console is sold through consumer electronics sales channels. These are both good for tablets. And all Windows Phone based smartphones face a global mobile operator/carrier sales boycott (or sales suppression by now, boycott is definitely too strong a word now when the market has been effectively destroyed, they don't really care anymore about Windows). This global carrier dislike of Windows was explained by Elop when he spoke to Nokia shareholders, and Elop said it was not explicit to Nokia, it was against all Windows based smartphone brands. So its first of all a fact, its been confirmed as a well-known phenomenon with Elop underlining the issue using the word 'obviously' -and it is why most Windows based smartphone makers quit the system around that time like LG, Sony, Dell and Motorola. And why the other remaining Windows smartphone manufacturers (Samsung, HTC, Huawei) all shifted away from Windows to Android today doing a trivially tiny slice of their business on Windows at best. Only MIcrosoft/Lumia remain and all 10 of the 10 most used Windows Phone smartphones now are Nokia/Lumia branded. Not one Samsung, Huawei or HTC among them anymore.

So for handsets Windows Phone is poison and smartphones on Windows do not sell. They can't turn a profit and the total Windows Phone market share for Q3 including all brands was only 2.9% (according to IDC). But IDC finds that in the far smaller tablet market, Windows is doing better. They have a 4.6% mraket share there. Microsoft can perhaps grow that Windows tablet slice to a viable business in coming years if they keep throwing tons of money at it, like they managed with XBox in videogaming after years of loss-making.

It may well happen, that Microsoft will arrive to a conclusion that the 'smartphone' side of the Nokia purchase is not viable but will still continue on the tablets, and migrate the remnants of that workforce to focus on the tablets only. And yeah, I'm not an expert on the tablets business, they might succeed there, but 5% market share is not very viable long term in terms of ecosystem etc. Especially not when you carry all the baggage that Windows has as a hated operating system. 

TROUBLE FOR MICROSOFT

But what Microsoft did not want, when it spent 7 billion dollars to buy Nokia's handset business, is to see Nokia compete against it. The exclusive licence to the Nokia brand was a long term thing for dumbphones but only a short-term thing for smartphones (and apparently, tablets). Nokia already pulled a dirty trck on Microsoft when it launched the short-lived X series that ran on Android. Microsoft killed off that project soon after they took over the handset business this year. But that was further confusion to the minds of consumers on what is the 'Nokia' (brand) intending to do. Is that Windows Phone -thingy, the whats-it-called-operation-system is it viable or not. If Nokia already launches on Android. So yeah, Microsoft had to kill it.

Now Microsoft has stopped using the Nokia branding on its newest smartphones. They are just branded Microsoft Lumia. And just months later, appears a brand new Nokia branded gadget, a tablet. This.. running Android. Even before we hear any rumors of a Nokia branded smartphone again from Finland, this is bad news for Microsoft's tablet strategy.

Will the N1 Tablet sell in enough numbers to show any relevance to Nokia's business? No, of course not. It will be the squeak of a mouse in the noise of a thunderstorm, but it is Nokia's first salvo. It does signal first of all, that Nokia wants to return. Secondly, it signals the total break from Windows. If any device by Finland's 'real' Nokia made sense to do on Windows, more than a smartphone, that would be a tablet. That Nokia now clearly spits in the eye of its 'partner' Microsoft, and does the tablet on Android is clear signal, Nokia is finished with Windows. For good. Forever.

Its a big win for Android (who doesn't need wins anymore, they have won the war). Its a signal for any remaining Windows partners. And its nasty news for Microsoft.

For consumers it will bring noise that the 'Nokia' Lumia device on Windows might not be a good purchase now. For non-Nokia branded pure-MIcrosoft Lumia, it is a clear distinction. This is not-Nokia. This is the real Nokia. And real Nokia runs Android.

Its a signal to app developers that if they were with Windows Phone because of any remaining loyalty to Nokia, its time to break with that, and just quit Windows. Go Android, thats were Nokia will be.

It is also a way for Nokia to signal to the thought-leaders, the tech press etc, what is the real Nokia vision in gadgets, when the Elop experiment is forgotten. Before Elop Nokia made very good tech products in terms of their hardware, often with very innovative and inventive tech. They were beautifully designed, durable, desirable. Now Nokia can return and tbus this first N1 device isn't needed to be any major sales success really anywhere, it just needs to be shown to various journalists and analysts who visit wih Nokia, to start to build that demand again. We want an innovative competitive Nokia back in the gadget business and gosh, does the smartphone slab i-Phon-a-clone market desperately need some innovation again, the kind that Nokia once gave us.

I am certain the plans are there for a possible return at Nokia into the smartphone space. Looking a how Sony and LG and HTC have wandered into and out of profits in their smartphone businesses, and how poorly Samsung has been able to turn a dominant market position into major sustainable profit levels, there must be doubt at Nokia whether its worth returning. On the other hand, in the biggest future markets for tech - China, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Egypt, Thailand, Pakistan, Vietnam etc - Nokia is a very strong brand still today, even after all the Elop damage. A premium ultralight tablet at a competitive cost below that of the iPad and Galaxy Tab, is a clever strategy to remind consumers how much they used to love Nokia. It opens the door for Nokia if it decides to return. And now we konw for sure. Nokia has signalled, that future OS would be Android.

Comments

[KPOM]

@Baron95, I think what is more likely is that Apple will introduce an iPad Pro with a more robust iOS, rather than try to add touch capabilities to OS X. The two development teams until recently were separate, and if Apple attempted to add touch to OS X it would be about as successful as Windows 8.0.

I agree that Microsoft is ahead of both Apple and Google at creating a converged OS, but am not yet convinced of how desirable that is. Most people I know with touchscreen laptops are more annoyed with the touchscreen than anything else (notebooks aren't really designed to be used with touch input). A "convertible" that switches from iOS/Android to OS X/Chromebook depending on whether it is in tablet or notebook mode might be more compelling.

[abdul muis]

Microsoft is ahead from apple/google is just from the quantity of the source code they ever produce, but NOT in quality. Microsoft product is bloated, buggy, and have lots of hole like a Swiss cheese.

[baron99]

....wow stirred up the astroturfers ...with the all too common refrain that sounds like ....please, please, please, just wait and wait and wait ...microsoft will get it right. They always do... Really they will get it right ...really, really, they will! Believe me I am smart I know they will, just don't look at the statistics or sales. You'll see! really, really, really :-)

Unbelievable and just truly pathetic stuff that drones on and on ...anyone know how many years and years and years we have been hearing this nonsense. Tomi should give a prize to the one that get the time frame right.

Guess what? It is still true going into 2015
NO ONE WANTS A WINDOWS PHONE! Period!

[RottenApple]

@KPOM:

Windows 8 didn't tank because of touch capabilities. It tanked because it deliberately overemphasized them over their desktop features without giving their core customers any incentive to upgrade. The worst issue was the Frankensteinian nature of the OS where the two modes were completely separate. What they should have done is adding proper touch support to the existin Win32 API and then build Metro on top of that instead of implementing a secondary and completely incompatible framework that only managed to piss people off. By doing so they lost years of development in the futile hope to push themselves into other markets.

@abdul muis:
What I don't get is that some people try to look Microsoft worse than they actually are. I'll happily agree that they made a huge mistake with Windows 8 but not everything they do is shit. And with a new CEO I'm confident that Ballmer's attitude of screwing customers to protect the monopoly will end.

@baron99:
Troll is as troll does, right?
Don't ever think that Microsoft are that dense. There are intelligent people working at that company who know how to do stuff. If they fix their mistakes (mostly Ballmer's, actually, who no longer calls the shots) they may become successful in other areas again. But for mobile I agree it's to late, but not because Windows Phone cannot be fixed but because the market has already been taken by other competitors that can't be squeezed out anymore.
The big and fatal mistake was that Windows Phone was everthing Windows was not - and that's also the main reason why the Metro interface is mostly ignored by desktop users. We rather prefer to install classic desktop apps instead of using this half baked stuff.

[abdul muis]

@RottenApple

"What I don't get is that some people try to look Microsoft worse than they actually are. I'll happily agree that they made a huge mistake with Windows 8 but not everything they do is shit. And with a new CEO I'm confident that Ballmer's attitude of screwing customers to protect the monopoly will end."

I don't mean to make Microsoft look worse than they actually are. I was 'confuse' on why Microsoft under Steve Balmer were so screw up. They have lots of man power & skill & experience in the OS, but they did not deliver something that majority want. Not to mention that their Desktop OS (Win 9x era, XP era, Vista era) were buggy and have back door.

[RottenApple]

@abdul muis:

Let's first talk Windows 8:

You have to understand Ballmer. His prime goal was not to put out good products but to preserve the monopoly they had. He also made the mistake of underestimating the customers, thinking they'd swallow wholesale what he serves.

Only if you accept these two things, Windows 8 starts to make sense. The entire system was desgined to do one thing only: Make people get used to Metro. They sacrificed a lot just to achieve this simple goal, they also ignored every sort of criticism that would have meant deviating from that path.

The only problem was: The customers did not react like Ballmer expected. They did what their testers did: Unload a shitload of criticism and complaints that sank the entire project. Worse, they damaged it that much that even the touch-only platforms suffered.

About older OSs:

It's easy to say from hindsight that their OSs were buggy. We should never forget what task Microsoft had to achieve in the time ranging from 1995 to 2007:

- migrate from 16 bit to 32 bit
- adjust the aging Windows code base to more modern standards of security.
- keep things compatible enough so that complete reprogramming of software can be handled through normal development cycles (i.e. do not force programmers to rewrite things from one version to the next, something highly popular at Apple.)

In order to achieve the first goal, going from 16 bit to 32 bit they needed 6 years and 3 intermediate versions of Windows to get it done. And by their very nature these versions were heavily compromised. But this was necessary, or they would have lost their customers. For those 6 years they NEEDED a 16 bit OS masquerading as a 32 bit OS, so that all the old (and often critical) software continued to work.

That's why, despite having a working 32 bit OS in 1995 they decided not to use that as the consumer operating system but the compromised version. It was clearly not to save work, had that been the motivation they'd just have released Windows NT 3.51. Of course that would have been a compatibility nightmare for a software world that still was 90% 16 bit.

Up to the next step, then: Windows XP.
Again, in hindsight it was insecure and had serious issues. But at the time this was developed there was no consciousness of internet security and things like that, they were just starting to get noticed. And even system programmers have to learn this stuff before being able to deal with it properly.
And a direct consequence of this learning it became apparent that security measures had to be implemented deeper into the OS - which was done with Vista, which featured a more secure driver model and some other security related features.
So, obviously the driver model was somewhat incompatible with XP, and this was the root cause for Vista's bad reputation. The average consumer cannot and will never understand these issues, he only sees that stuff stopped working.
Another major issue with Vista was that one of the more important security features - UAC - was very badly implemented, prompting many users to just disable it (and some even to disable it on later iterations of Windows where it actually does what it's supposed to be.)

When I got my first Vista machine in 2007 all the problems were already ironed out and that computer served me well for 5 years without ever catching a virus, showing a blue screen or having me to reinstall Windows even once - when it broke it was due to a defective HDD and I just decided that instead of getting it replaced, I'd just sell the remaining parts and buy something new with better hardware specs (and most importantly, fans that don't make such a noise.)

So, if you ask me, much of Windows's bad reputation comes from things Apple has notoriously been doing from version to version, only Apple could afford it with the economy as a whole not depending on their software. For most Microsoft users the worst thing to happen was that their 15 year old custom software ceases to work with the next version, and that's by far the worst premise to work on an operating system. Ideally you want the old cruft gone, but how do you do that if your customers would burn you if you did...?

[KPOM]

@Baron95, what I think is interesting is that ads for the Surface Pro 3 and Lenovo Yoga compare themselves to the MacBook Air, not the iPad. By contrast, Android tablets compare themselves to the iPad. If convergence is 2-3 more processor generations from Intel away from becoming reality, then the challenge for Nokia or anyone selling an Android tablet is how to address this. A fancy skin on Android won't cut it. Apple, OTOH has an ace up its sleeve in that it designs its own processors. They don't need to wait for Qualcomm or NVidia to get their act together. They are on their 2nd generation AArch64 bit processor before the rest of the industry has gotten their first generation fully introduced. The triple-core A8x is pretty impressive, putting out numbers not dissimilar from Intel chips from the Core 2 era. All new apps will be 64-bit starting in February, and all updates will be 64-bit after June. That's not something Android can easily replicate because of the fragmentation. So if Apple is secretly readying an ARM-compatible version of OSX that can run on a future iPad, or a "supercharged" iOS that can legitimately power a desktop (albeit not s server) that could be another weapon in their arsenal, as it likely would already have a vast array of 64-bit applications compatible with it.

[Winter]

@KPOM
"A fancy skin on Android won't cut it."

Android has quite a lot in common wit Linux. Which too runs a full software stack on ARM. So I do not see your point.

[Winter]

@Boron95
And why would Android not be able to run on X86 or any other Intel procesdor.

[abdul muis]

@Baron95

"Most people failed to understand the herculean task of allowing an old DOS program to run on a modern Windows PC."

Herculean task???? There is a program called DOSBOX that run on Linux to run a dos program. That DOSBOX even run on symbian^3, symbian^5 and also android device.

"the failures of Windows NT Alpha and Windows Enterprise Itanium seem to indicate that backwards compatibility is very much valuable to customers."

The failure of itanium is because intel priced the processor too high, making it a niece CPU, not a mainstream.

"Clearly Google and Apple are ahead in SW for low powered devices, from phones to watches to glasses. Clearly Microsoft is ahead in PCs, Servers due to installed base and compatibility."

No, microsoft is NOT ahead in server. Linux is dominating the server installed based.

[abdul muis]

@baron95

You were many times write that you have android tablet and you hate it. My question is why did you buy that tablet instead of microsoft or apple tablet? and which one?

[RottenApple]

@abdul muis:

"Herculean task???? There is a program called DOSBOX that run on Linux to run a dos program."

Sorry, but you can't view 1995 decisions from today's state of hardware.
Today DOS software is mostly irrelevant, that's why Windows has no native support for DOS anymore.

Back in 1995, on the other hand, fully functional DOS support was of paramount importance to manage the migration to a 32 bit OS. We are talking about decisions that led to the rise of Windows 95 here, DOSBOX doesn't even enter the picture, on machines from 20 years ago the entire concept of CPU emulation would have been s show-stopper from the start.
Think about it: DOS was so important back in the day that Microsoft had to wait for 6 years until they could risk releasing an NT-based OS as their mainstream product, and even then they faced a lot of criticism for abandoning compatibility with old software.

"The failure of itanium is because intel priced the processor too high, making it a niece CPU, not a mainstream."

The main failure was that this was an extremely complex CPU that reqiuired very specific optimizations to work well. Lack of compatibility both in design concept and object code also did not help. In short: Itanium didn't offer anything of value to the customer. It was correct that initially it was priced for the high end server market, but previous x86 iterations started the same way. It was designed to become mainstream eventually but the fact that AMD just two years later managed to construct an x86 compatible 64 bit CPU was the final nail in Itanium's coffin. Once that was out it didn't stand any chance in the market anymore. Why build on a product that requires a lot of work if you have an alternative that gives the same advantage with considerably less work and problems?

[baron99]

ALERT! - The Microsoft Astroturfers are trying to feed us nonsense again! In this case about why Vista failed. Here is why?

https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

It is a very well written research paper. ...and the executive summary sets the tone.

I am still hearing the wait, wait ...wait nonsense in posts. Aren't you astroturfers embarrassed to say that after all these years and years and years and years and years and years? ..... But lately, I haven't heard the stupid Microsoft refrain that they are "all in" ....Yeah, "all in" to failing! You delusional astroturfers really need a life ...seriously!

[RottenApple]

@baron99:

Yes, sure, call everyone disagreeing with you an astroturfer sure makes you look smart. Grow up!

No, the reason why Vista was so badly received had nothing to do with content protection but everything with three things primarily:

1. the new driver model (whose main motivation was system robustness, not content protection.)
2. excessively high system demands
3. overzealous UAC implementation

Once 1. got ironed out (it took a few months, which shouldn't surprise anyone - it should also come as no surprise that the hardware manufacturers were clearly not thrilled by having to invest more work here!) most of the problems went away but the damage to Vista's reputation couldn't be salvaged anymore. But what about Windows 7 then? It got all the same 'issues' but became a huge success. So what gives?

The problem with that 'research paper' is not that it is false but that nearly everything it says was completely irrelevant for the average user and that it certainly misleads in some points because it concludes everything from the sole (and bogus) premise that all those changes were done for content protection alone. It has 'written by an activist with an axe to grind' stamped all over it.

Also let's not forget that these content protection 'features' were mandated by law, not just being implemented on a whim so you can hardly blame Microsoft for adding this stuff.

[baron99]

For those who want to listen to the astroturfers re-writing history please go along in your uninformed way.

For the rest of you, these issues about why the paper was written etc are handled in the back, so please read the Q+A section at the end.

https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

Vista was (still is) a joke. A complex and extremely slow, buggy and unwieldy OS. It was basically Microsoft calling their customers crooks and trying to over control the usage of their OS to protect Hollywood content. They wanted to be the gateway into the home ....and how is that working out for you Microsoft astroturfers? ...are we still "waiting"? ...are they still "all in"? :-) Add this enormous complexity on top of an already crappy OS and get the disaster named "Vista" ....only a fool wouldn't think their reputation and past actions that burned millions of customers and developers effects buying decisions like buying the dead WP or writing apps for it. What you are seeing is that people and developers look to microsoft when there is NO choice. When there is a choice they run from microsoft as fast as they can. Therefore: NO ONE WANTS A WINDOWS PHONE!

[RottenApple]

@baron99:

You are pathetic if you denounce everybody who doesn't agree with your tripe as an astroturfer.

Unlike gullible sheep who fall for all bullshit they are fed with (both pro and contra any specific issue), intelligent people inform themselves and don't just post links to the propaganda that suits their agenda best, like you do.

Re. Vista:
No, it wasn't perfect but if you hang all the 'problems' on a peripheral issue that had no meaning and no impact for the average user, you just set yourself up for ridicule. BTW., all the things you criticise are present in Windows 7, Windows 8 and any upcoming Windows iteration.

And nothing of all this has anything to do with Windows Phone. Windows Phone failed for completely different reasons that have no correllation whatsoever with the shortcomings of one desktop OS iteration that already was old news when Windows Phone surfaced for the first time.

[baron99]

...only a FOOL ...OR an ASTROTURFER would try to SELL us the fairy tale that what microsoft did in the past would not effect WP. Suurreee ...microsoft has a stellar reputation, and never screws anyone who does business with them (like Nokia) and if we "wait" and "wait" and "wait" and "wait" and "wait" and "wait" and "wait" and "wait" and "wait" and "wait" and "wait" and "wait" and "wait" ..... (LoL), while they are "all in" everything will be just fine and dandy ....no facts (the hall mark of an astroturfer) just pure nonsense based on biased talking point opinions with a touch of name calling. Ever notice how the astroturfer opinions that are always about how microsoft will win in the end. :-)

You want the facts and if you have ANY doubts about vista please read an excellent "factual" paper:
https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

Unlike the non-sense biased astroturfer opinions found on this thread it is carefully done research and has withstood the test of time (please see the Q+A too). It is an excellent read.

[RottenApple]

@baron99:

Now that's just a classic post that admits defeat. Instead of posting some substance to back your claims you resort to insults and incorherent nonsense.

[baron99]

Read the paper ...there is all the "Vista substance" anyone would ever want. I don't want to repeat it. Go read it! It is a comprehensive and through analysis of Vista. But, then again, I have been assuming astroturfers can read, understand and interpret facts... or that facts matter to them.

https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

[AndThisWillBeToo]

@Earendil Star
You've posted the same link like what - six times? People here have replied to you saying that the article is wrong as it is based on a false assumption (and they've told their view on what would be better basis on why Vista failed)...
...agreeing on you that Vista was a failure...
...while asking a very valid question why those same reasons do not apply to Windows 7?

Do I see your response? No. I see more and more of the same link and order to read it. Did they not already? Did they not tell their view on it?

As it seems you only add provocation and irritation and no engagement to discussion or counterargumentation. Calling people astroturfers does not help, nor does troll-like behaviour. Surprise us and for a change answer with something that does NOT start with "Wow astros are really pissed now".