Tags: microsoft | Operating Systems | windows 8

PC sales suffered their steepest quarterly drop  in 20 years, plunging 14% in the first quarter of 2013 versus the same period a year ago, according to IDC, and Microsoft’s Windows 8 is being blamed by many analysts for the slump. Meanwhile, today Microsoft announced it would bring back its Start button in Windows 8.1, in an effort to placate critics of the Windows 8 interface. What is going on? Are we witnessing the death of the PC? Should financial advisors upgrade to Windows 8?

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Let’s take the most important question first: Should you upgrade to Windows 8? The answer is "maybe."

If you are working in Office every day and don’t care to use touch capabilities, then you may not need to upgrade to Windows 8. The main difference between Windows 7 and Windows 8 is the touch interface.

The touch interface can be used on computers running XP or Windows 7 by upgrading to the Windows 8 operating system, but few advisors are going to go out and buy a touch-screen display in order to run Windows 8 on their desktops and use the touch features. So let's assume you are looking at upgrading your desktop computer to Windows 8 but won't use the touch screen features. Does it pay for you to upgrade?

Some nice features in Windows 8 are not in Windows 7. They may be enough to make upgrading worthwhile to you.

Share
One nice feature in Windows 8 is how you can share ideas with your social networks. A “Share” button—dubbed a “charm” by Microsoft—pops up anytime you slide your cursor to the right side of the screen. While you cannot yet share LinkedIn updates from the Share charm, you can share status updates to Facebook and Twitter. That’s nice.

For advisors interested in social networking and content marketing, the sharing feature could be a real benefit and may even spur you to share twice as often with prospects and referrals sources because it is so much easier to do.

Search
Another nice feature in Windows 8 that’s not in Windows 7: the Search charm. Wherever you are in Windows 8, you can access the Search charm by sliding your cursor to the right side of the screen. When you click or touch the Search charm, a dialog box appears for you to input a search term. If you are in Word or Excel and you hit the Search charm, it will search your documents for a term. If you are browsing the Internet, the term will be searched using your search-provider preferences. If you're in the app store, it will search for an app. That is very convenient and a real improvement.

If you don’t care to use a touch interface and you don’t care about social networking and don’t need a more user-friendly search capability, then you do not need to switch to Windows 8.

But if you are committed to using PCs for the next few years, then upgrading to Windows 8 makes sense. Eventually, you will use a touch device or want the other new features offered by Windows 8. So you might as well bite the bullet now.

I describe it as "biting a bullet"  because most people do not like change. Since  Windows 7 is working fine, it's easy to do nothing. Why learn a new system and possibly disrupt things? If you feel that way, wait another three or six months and you'll be okay. But if you want to share more socially for content marketing and networking reasons, then upgrading  makes sense.

I‘ve been using Windows 8 for two months on a Surface Pro, which is a tablet and laptop in one. On my desktop, which I use for video editing and other content creation tasks, I use Windows 7. But I’m going to migrate to Windows 8 in the next couple of weeks to get the social and search benefits on my main computer. I’ll let you know how it goes.

By the way, I don’t think we are witnessing the death of the PC. We are evolving into a new era that makes PCs less important. If you do not create content using Excel, Word, Publisher and Office daily, PCs now compete against the Android, Apple iOS and BlackBerry operating systems. But if you create content all the time in Office, then Windows 8 is still the best choice for you. And most advisors create content often enough to make sticking with Windows the best choice as it evolves by embracing touch, gestures, and other modes of navigation.
 

One final thought: Advisors who work daily in Excel, Word, Publisher and Office can consider buying a new touch screen PC, ultrabook or tablet, and that’s a great way to introduce yourself to Windows 8. Once warning: Don’t buy too small a display unless you plan on attaching the device to an external monitor. I recently reviewed the Surface Pro, which has a 10.6-inch display, and I find it too small to work on without a monitor unless it is sitting in front of me on a table. 
 

Tags: security

An Associated Press Twiitter account was hacked this morning, and hackers posted a bogus tweet saying two explosions had rocked the White House.

Here is a webinar in which computer consultant Brian Edelman and I recently discussed security practices for advisors to avoid such a fate. (You must be an A4A member to see the video.)

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Facebook’s new Home Android launcher has passed the 500,000 download mark on the Google Play store after a little over a week in the wild, though it continues to accumulate mostly negative reviews and has sunk to an average rating of 2.2. While most advisors do not use Facebook for marketing, it's good to to mnitor its progress. 

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According to The Next Web, Facebook first released the software in the US on April 12 before rolling it out to international users on the 16th. 500,000 downloads is a modest start for Facebook, but its dwarfed by the one million downloads of Instagram within 24 hours of when it arrived on Android last April.

I’ve been using the Microsoft Surface Pro for two months now. It’s revolutionary but not great.

Surface Pro is both a laptop and tablet in one device. That’s revolutionary. At $1,200, it’s inexpensive for a PC but expensive for a tablet. With a 1.5 GHz Intel i5 processor, it runs the full suite of Microsoft Office products flawlessly and fast. It weighs just two pounds, so you can take it anywhere.

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But the problem is that, as a tablet, it’s not as good as an iPad, because it’s a half pound heavier and has only a four- or five-hour battery life versus twice as much on an iPad. In addition, as a laptop, its 10.6-inch diagonal screen is a little small. Consequently, it’s not perfect as a tablet or as a laptop.

It took me two months to write this review because the Surface Pro is a complicated device, and buying a computer has become so much more complicated. With the introduction of tablet-PCs, tablets convertible into laptops, and touch screen PCs, you really have to pick the right device to match your lifestyle and work style.

Computer-Buying Is More Complicated
The Surface Pro will work well for people who hook their laptops up to an external monitor and also want a tablet for business meetings and on the road. But if you like to lay down on your back and read on your couch or in bed, the Surface Pro’s is noticeably heavier than the iPad. Also, if you like to work with your laptop perched on your knees in an airport or in bed, the Surface Pro will probably be too small and hard to see.

While these issues may seem nitpicky to some, they are practical considerations in buying a computer nowadays. And they are totally new considerations. You are buying a computer that will also be your tablet, which you never did before

Microsoft has indeed done something great by putting a tablet and laptop in one device. In typical Microsoft style, however, it’s complicated but powerful. The next generation Surface Pro will hopefully be easier to hold in your hand and its interfaces will be less klunky.

Windows 8
Surface Pro really has two interfaces: desktop and touch. Microsoft does a poor job of telling its users this. The first time you boot up Surface Pro, no explanation introduces Microsoft laptop users to the touch interface. Microsoft just expects you to figure it out.

The user interface of Surface Pro is the Microsoft Windows 8 operating system (OS). The main page you use on the Surface Pro is comprised of 30, 50 or 60 square and rectangular tiles. Each tile is a window into information in your life and business. Some tiles are “live,” streaming Web news from your social networks and displaying news feeds from your favorite sources. That’s nice. But bungling the introduction of the touch interface makes for an awkward handoff between the two interfaces.

Surface Pro As A Tablet

To be clear, touch apps look totally different from desktop apps. When you use Surface Pro as a tablet, you use one set of apps that are optimized for touch. Touch apps have a few big buttons on a page and simple navigation.

Microsoft has developed a touch version of the desktop Office Suite called Office 365 that you can try out for free. It's great.

Office 365 and touch apps offered in the Microsoft Store work well. The Windows 8 touch interface of the Surface Pro is as easy to use as an Apple iPad’s iOS interface. (If it were not not a half-pound heavier than an iPad, I’d like the Surface Pro as a tablet as much as an iPad.) Point is, Windows 8 on the Surface Pro works great for touch use but the “form factor” of the Surface Pro is inferior to the iPad, which, at 25% lighter, is much easier to hold in your hand.
 

Surface Pro As A Laptop
Then there’s the other interface on Surface Pro. When you use Surface Pro as your laptop computer, also called n ultrabook, you can use the old mouse-driven interface that made Microsoft famous. Moreover, the desktop version of Word, Excel, and the Microsoft Office suite run on the Surface Pro.

If you plan to run the desktop version of Office, pay the extra $100 for the 128GB solid state drive rather than the 64GB since Office takes up so much space.

Desktop apps like Office require more processor power than running Web apps, but the Surface Pro has enough power for running most of the programs advisors use. If you want to edit videos, Surface Pro is not for you. But if you want to use Excel, Word, Publisher, Adobe Acrobat Professional—the apps advisors use—Surface Pro has enough processor speed to work just fine. Surface Pro technically meets the requirements to run desktop portfolio management software, such Schwab PortfolioCenter. But you would probably want a more powerful computer than Surface Pro to generate client perfromance reports quarterly.

If you use your laptop in bed or anyplace where you won't have it hooked up to a monitor--if you plan to use Surface Pro without a monitor to work on spreadsheets and documents when you're not sitting at a table with the device right in front of you--then this may not be for you.

Summing Up
Transitioning hundreds of millions of users from desktop software to touch interfaces is a huge move. Apple has not figured out all the answers. It has no device equivalent to the Surface Pro, which brings together the ability to create content using desktop software with a better way to consume content on a tablet. With a video port that lets you attach a high-definition monitor, a slot for adding a memory card, and a USB 3.0 port for attaching external hard drives and other devices, Surface Pro has revolutionized tablets by making them useable as laptop computers.
 

What users really need is one interface for touch and desktop. That’s not easy to do, however, and it won’t come overnight. In the meantime, Microsoft must do a better job of melding the two interfaces of touch and desktop apps. Some touch apps in the Surface Pro ask you when access a file if you'd prefer to open the file using the desktop app rather than the touch app. That button should be on every file.
 

When Microsoft said it was going to manufacture a tablet-PC, it lifted the hopes of Microsoft users. By taking a page from Apple and making its own hardware as well the user interface, it raised hopes that Microsoft would better connect its software to these revolutionary new tablet-PCs. It’s not worked out like that so far. But the next version of the Surface Pro will probably be lighter. And maybe one of Microsoft’s hardware partners will one up Microsoft.

The Lenovo ThinkPad Helix, which is slightly lighter than the Surface Pro when used as a  tablet and comes equipped with an Intel i7 processor, is far powerful than the Surface Pro as a laptop, features a display that’s an inch larger than Surface Pro and has twice the four- to five-hour battery life of the Surface Pro. It's the next step in the evolution of tablet-PCs and just became available for pre-orders.
 

Surface Pro is a good first effort but far from perfect.