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Celebrate Your Next Birthday At the Microsoft Store
theodp writes "Chuck E. Cheese, meet Bill H. Gates. A leaked PowerPoint posted at Gizmodo provides a glimpse of what Microsoft's retail shops may look like, noting that you'll even be able to pay to celebrate your birthday there. Some of the stores that were profiled for ideas were Nike, Nokia, Sony, Apple, and AT&T. Microsoft's take on the Genius Bar is the Answers Bar (aka Guru Bar, Windows Bar)."
Wait... you think the Vista UI is broken?
I actually think it's a bit better than XP was.
Oh, you must dislike it because it's different!
I bet you use TWM as your window manager with some classic Motif widgets straight out of 1985!
Down with change!
This idea will fail, no one really -likes- MS. I mean, how many people actually go out of their way to make sure that Windows comes with their computer? Its just what comes with it. Similarly, I don't think there is an informed person who actually thinks MS innovates anymore (well, not like they really innovated in the past but they've been more obvious in the past few years). Its impossible to see the Zune as anything other than a rip off of the iPod, Bing as a rip-off of Google/Ask/Yahoo!/Wolfram Alpha/etc. and its impossible to see the MS store as a pathetic attempt to stay relevant in an era where the OS doesn't matter. Apple computers are more or less "luxury" computers, they cost more, in general have better specs and have a (in most people's opinion) better OS. On the other hand PCs got marketshare for being dirt cheap, available anywhere and easy to program with crap code. MS is attempting to reinvent itself as a "luxury" brand similar to Apple. However, it fails because of a few reasons, number one, other than the Zune with questionable design, the 360 with its ability to kill itself with the Red Ring of Death and a few keyboards and mice, MS doesn't have much hardware. Compare this to Apple with a very popular MP3 player, decent laptops, decent desktops and other visibly "Apple" products. Number two, Windows isn't that great. Other than for legacy purposes no one really uses Windows because they really -like- Windows itself. Some people do like Windows only programs but for the OS itself, no one but a few programmers tied into various MS languages really care. And third, MS has -no- competition yet. They -are- the low end of the spectrum. Linux, while gaining momentum is tied into low-end hardware when supplied by an OEM in a big-box store. You can't walk into Best Buy and get a desktop with Linux pre-installed, you might be able to get an EEE with the awful Xandros distro on it if you are lucky, but your not going to find any decent hardware running Linux. So how can MS compete when it has no competition?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'd say it's more that Apple is Geek Chic and Microsoft is more like a bunch of fucking nerds.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
It made me want to post a nigger joke just for contrast.
Menus with modal dialogs are inefficient and stupid. And they always were. Button bars are even worse for software where you mostly use the keyboard.
You are just being used to that horrible joke that MS Office used to be.
The new concept is a bad copy (as usual) of the InfoBox of Lotus SmartSuite programs (like WordPro). Not as bad as what they had before thought. But still worse than the original.
The idea is to see menus, icon bars and property dialogs as one thing. So you make them one thing. Which means you can change the state of your selection, run functions on it, etc. All with just one click. (Here is where it is bad, and where Lotus did it wrong too.. switching to the mouse? in a text editor? wtf?)
Not three clicks and then a stupid modal dialog. Not this pointless separation of menus, buttons and dialogs.
Of course, somehow, the MS Office variant still is some mutation of a menu concept, with everything thrown in there without a proper basic philosophy behind it.
But hey, at least it's a step into the right direction. I bet OpenOffice will imitate it soon. Just as unfortunately every open source software is imitating existing products. (KDE and Gnome both are nearly indistinguishable from Windows if you do not look closer, Firefox is taken from Opera, OpenOffice is the son of what MS Office imitated but nowadays it's the other way around, Amarok is a copy of iTunes, Thunderbird wants to become an Outlook, Compiz was made to get the visual FX of MacOS X and Vista, etc, etc, etc. Don't get me wrong. I love open source and fully support it. But that argument, to make it "more similar, so users will understand it" sickens me, because of its needy, weak, non-leading-and-never-will-like and chode-like (the PUA term) mindset.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Wait, what? You have a very poor grasp of history.
In any event, I don't even own a Mac, I'm a Linux user.
You know, a fucking nerd who lives in their parent's basement.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!