Microsoft Shows Off Radical New UI, Could Be Used In Windows 8

autospa writes "In a three and a half minute video, Microsoft may have shown the world what it has in store for the eagerly awaited Windows 8. In the video Microsoft showed a radically different interface from past versions of Windows — even Windows 7. Running on Surface 2, the touch-screen successor to the original Microsoft Surface, the device accepts input from a Windows Phone 7 handset (HTC HD7). Gone are the icons that drive Windows, OS X, and Linux operating systems of past and present. In their place are 'bubbles' that interact with files and post streaming information off the internet."

Comments

And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[G3ckoG33k]

And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use. The new Excel is a nightmare to learn well. And now, "bubbles"?

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Pentium100]

Well, it seems that MS cannot make anything better than Windows XP/7 and Office 2003, so the company will just make the UI different each version.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[tkprit]

ITA; very little added functionality, just everything's hidden in a new place and called something different.

I'd like to know a bit about the filesystem underneath these "bubbles". ....or, omg, is it all CLOUD BASED (that sky drive nightmare—worst implementation ever of 'net storage'.).

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

Aww... I love it when Microsoft employees show up on Slashdot.

The entire lot of you needs to die in a fire.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[binarylarry]

That's way off base.

Dying in a fire is too fast and painless for Microsoft employees.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Rude Turnip]

I would say that Office 2007 was the pinnacle of Office. Lots of people (including me) bitched and moaned about the ribbon interface, but it turned out to be a good decision that exposed all of the functionality of Office instead of hiding things in obscure and/or arbitrary menus.

The "Office Button" from 2007 was replaced by a "File" ribbon menu in 2010, but to me it looks like a half-assed step backwards to appease complainers. In the context of the new Office interface, the File ribbon doesn't really make any sense.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[LordKronos]

No, he's not below average. The problem is mostly likely not that he finds the new interface simply difficult to use, but that he probably has a decade or two of experience using the old interface. He's had all that time to learn where each feature was. When each new version came out, the old features were almost always exactly like before, and just a few new menu items and buttons were added each time. Each time he had to learn a few new things, but all of his old knowledge was still relevant. Now suddenly in one version, everything he's spent many years learning has been pulled out from under him, and he's instinctively looking in the wrong places for everything. Habits that are that well ingrained can be incredibly difficult to break.

I've been using the new interface for about 3 years now, and I still instinctively want to look in the wrong (ie: old) locations. What makes it even more difficult is that there are items in the new interface the mislead people accustomed to the old interface. For example, in the old interface of Excel, if you wanted to insert a new row into your spreadsheet, you went to the menu bar and picked Insert -> Rows. With the new interface, you go up to the top, you see a tab on the ribbon named "Insert" and you automatically think "that's where I'm gonna find the option to insert a row". So you click on it and, I'll be damned....you can insert just about everything EXCEPT a row or column.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[anshulajain]

Bubbles reminds me of the original vision for KDE4, except that "Bubbles" was/is referred to as "Widgets". Information flows to and from the internet into these
"widgets" in the KDE4 desktop. They have stuff like Facebook/Twitter feeds directly accessible and writable through these widgets and something like an OpenSocial framework for social interaction. Not exactly the same, but the idea seems to be very similar to KDE4.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[HermMunster]

Is it really going to take you forever to realize that the bubbles are the icons that they allegedly replace? So, the bubbles are bigger and may be animated or live even, and user created. Using a bubble, where clicking on them brings up actions/tasks that you can do to the bubble, is not any different than right clicking and bringing up a context menu. Using a cellphone or other such type device to control (as a touchpad), or stream to, isn't radical at all. Many systems support that. I've done it with Linux, the Mac, and Windows. That doesn't make them radical.

If they plan on designing this around surface PCs, well, that's just impractical. People aren't going to replace their current system with something that replaces icons with bubbles and more cash outlay.

As far as I'm concerned the desktop needs to be cleared of icons, especially in Windows, as too many slow the computer down, and as the desktop crashes (which it does for everyone) the automatic reload is irritating and slows us down. Change of this sort can be accomplished without a trick which changes the icons into circles (bubbles) while requiring new hardware to accomplish.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[CastrTroy]

Meh, I'd rather go back to word perfect 5.1, where all every feature was available with a single modifier + F key press. Sure it took a little longer to learn, but once you learned all the key shortcuts, you could get a lot done quite quickly. Most of the students in my highschool had all the important keys memorized. You never needed to take your hands off the keyboard. It was great. I wish we could go back to something like this. Also we didn't waste time messing with fonts and formatting, since it supported very little.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[jitterman]

I'm a professional developer and user; I've found the ribbon interface to be a good thing. We often hear a lot of complaining when the old way of doing things changes, even if those changes prove in the long run to have been an improvement, from those who cut their teeth on the old. For those who start their Office experience with 2007/2010, they will probably look at the previous generation and wonder, "how the hell did you put up with that?"

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Imrik]

Or above average.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you are referring to the ribbon interface that Microsoft introduced in Office 2007 and is pretty much unchanged in Office 2010.

In my view, the ribbon interface is substantially easier to understand and use than the previous menu driven system. In fact, the ribbon is just a larger and more descriptive menu system. Whenever there's a paradigm change there will be a period of relearning, but I'd hardly characterize it as a nightmare.

I've heard this type of complaint from some users (usually directors and VPs), but after I sit down with them for a few minutes they usually grok the way to use the ribbon and the advantages over the previous menu driven system. Whenever I have to go back to Excel 2003 I'm reminded about the advantages of the ribbon.

I see from your username that you claim geek status. If the ribbon is a nightmare for you, I humbly request you turn in your geek license immediately.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

..Bubbles which stream your Excel sheets on the internets as they "interact" with the files.. Your sheets will feel simultaneously violated and exited by this treatment.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[JamesTRexx]

For me it's the ribbon interface that hides everything.
At least with a menu I could just browse and read from the text what the option is. Now I often have to guess what that icon does and I'm not going to remember all those from the large amount of applications I have to support.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Dr.Syshalt]

Either this - or MS "usability testing" is flawed.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[man_of_mr_e]

Apparently, Every microsoft UI is the best it can possibly be, because any change is always complained about.

Seriously, do you really think the Windows or Office UI are so good that they can't be made better? Really?

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

Aww... I love it when Microsoft employees show up on Slashdot.

The entire lot of you needs to die in a fire.

#1 warning sign of zealousness: thinking that everybody who disagree with you are paid shills. Though it must be a very comforting selfsupporting world view to live in.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

You never know! It might be awesome. Judging by the video they seem really proud of the new interface. They almost showed us what it is!

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[michelcolman]

Surely it can't be?

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Knuckles]

We have looked into 2007 for deployment at our company (15,000 seats) and decided it's awful. To me, 2010 seems much better, if we take the ribbon interface to be a given. In 2007, you could not even edit the ribbon to fix the most awful decisions by MS (The Insert tab in PowerPoint has Buttons for "chart", "diagram", "image", "formula", and whatever else you may want to insert, but to insert a new slide they send you hunting you finally find it on the Home tab), and at least PowerPoint was awfully buggy, especially with regards to roundtripping files between 2007 and 2003/earlier. (I don't know about the other applications because I was in charge of PowerPoint)

I agree that the File ribbon button is weird in so far as all the documentation calls this the Backstage View, a term that does not appear anywhere in the UI. But in our experience users have much better success finding it than the weird round bubble that looks like nothing you have seen before.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[solios]

I HATE this about commercial software, to the point where my productivity applications are years out of date and only "upgraded" when I know I'm going to have a month or two of good solid downtime to effectively re-learn them from scratch. Losing a week (or more) to get back up to speed (warp speed, not plodding along) doing the exact same thing with a toolchain that now runs slower on the same hardware is extremely difficult to justify on a regular basis.

If Vim and Emacs pulled the same stunt with every new version, the userbase would grumble, fork or recompile, and keep using their editors the way they always have. In the event of a massive change-for-the-sake-of-change ejection from a major mac/win ISV, creative professionals get to grin and bear it, lose time (and in some cases money) getting back up to speed, or not upgrade.

Much of the griping about Office doubtless comes from people who use it At Work, whose work machines are controlled by a nebulous IT department, who came in to the office one morning to find the new version thrust on them.

Software change is a lot easier to embrace when it's willful and provides a clear benefit. For many people, the change in Office was neither of these.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[dosius]

Agreed, and I have 7 words for M$ to ignore or follow at their discretion:

IF IT AIN'T BROKE
DON'T FIX IT

-uso.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[muindaur]

In IT it's best to set the icons based on the domain group of the user. So the icon set is small, and only shows the applications the user needs for that row.

On my laptop I just have the recycle bin on the desktop, and the quick launch with my most common programs(IE Excel, Word, Access.)

As for the bubbles I imagine they will have a classic icon option like in Vista. I'm sure that could be set to a global policy. I'm a classic interface with no background image person: I don't stare at the background image so why bother?

At home I use it to browse the web, do finances in Excel, train up any new skills(Office, VB, and Databases), and the PS3 is for Netflix Streaming: I use the notebook for some Hulu/Channel site shows.

I'm an accountant. My work can't be done on a surface PC. So I'll be using laptops for many years to come. I don't think they are going away because we need them(unlike CNN Money that said they were last year.)

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[flimflammer]

Everyone has their own opinions on what they think is best.

I remember back when XP was doing its rounds, "Oh god! Fisher Price!!" - the XP interface was not popular by many. Same goes for Vista/7. I personally think Aero was a gigantic step up from XP, but many will disagree.

This video is NOT showcasing what "Windows 8" will be or even might be. I don't even know why they would try connecting the dots like that.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[quickOnTheUptake]

Okay, Time for an almost OT rant:
Who the fuck thinks it is a good idea to put the things we use most often or what always visible on the "desktop", the first thing to be covered as soon as we start actually doing something??
Widgets/wallpapers/desktop icons/conkey/whatever are absolutely retarded ideas.
When will UI designers realize that my computer UI is not a desktop, and I do not want it to mimick limitations of physical objects.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[quickOnTheUptake]

opps: ". . . use most often or want always visible . . . "

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[DJRumpy]

I disagree. All the ribbon did was move ALL the menu items onto the ribbon. It made no difference except things were harder to find among the cluttered graphics barrage of options. Whether you use a 'view' tab or the view menu, finding simple text in alpha order is still easier than hunt/peck amongst a ribbon full of icons with dropdowns.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[NJRoadfan]

Most people ran XP with the classic theme. Luna really didn't add any UI features like Aero does. You loose things like Flip3D and Taskbar/Alt+Tab window thumbnails when you turn off Aero.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[quickOnTheUptake]

I request you humbly shove your geek license up your ass; finding the ribbon a UI nightmare does not impugn one's geek status in the least.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[PNutts]

Ironically, that's what their customers wanted. Microsoft got feature requests for things people couldn't find in the menus. The goal was to make navigation "flatter". With that said, I don't don't use it enough to get to know it and what I do know I don't like.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

And let's not forget NextStep pioneered what KDE4 did, as far back as the early 90s.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[PNutts]

Better than any snarky comment I could come up with. Well done, sir.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[rainmouse]

For me it's the ribbon interface that hides everything. At least with a menu I could just browse and read from the text what the option is. Now I often have to guess what that icon does and I'm not going to remember all those from the large amount of applications I have to support.

Sorry I feel no sympathy for people who complain about the MS Office UI when theres a perfectly good menu-driven one available completely for free:-

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

I keep thinking that the DM and windowing metaphors really need an overhaul not to something new, but to a logical extension of what they already are.

For instance, to my knowledge, there's no way in Windows, *nix, or anything else to add a touchscreen to a desktop (convenient example) and use it only as a place to store widgets, such that it doesn't interact with the rest of the desktop--unless you use some sort of proprietary software that hides the display from the OS entirely. For all that widgets are fast becoming first-class citizens on the desktop (or in some cases already are), I've never heard anyone suggest they be differentiated, even though they operate differently.

As of right now I use Win 7 widgets, plus the start menu which is a widget in its own right, although I've also tried google desktop widgets and a couple others. I've used the previously linked product to cordon them off before, but critically, as long as there are multiple monitors shifting focus away from a fullscreen app (for example) will interrupt it, even if the processes are logically separate. A differentiated widget screen (especially a touchscreen that needn't capture the mouse) could easily be interacted with without stealing focus from apps.

I can understand it not being a priority but I think it'd be a killer feature, personally.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they're PLASMOIDS! ;)

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[geedubyoo]

Microsoft ought to take a leaf out of Autodesk's book. The ribbon interface was added to AutoCAD 2009; however there were two big differences. 1) AutoCAD's ribbon is fully customisable (as is just about everything in AutoCAD). 2) The ribbon can be turned off, and the menu bar and tool bars turned back on. In fact, it is possible to make AutoCAD look - almost - like it did pre Windows.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[PopeRatzo]

#1 warning sign of zealousness:

If only it was just "zealousness"

My guess is that these comments come from fans of Apple who actually find their identity through fandom of one company over another. It's like being a Cubs fanor a Republican. Your very identity requires you to have an "us vs them" mentality. I think it has to do with having a lack of human ties. They develop this "corporate tribalism" whereby they see themselves as the people in the advertisements. How many times a day, walking through Chicago's Near North or Wrigleyville area, do you see people who have dressed themselves out of one of the iPod posters? "That's me," they say. "I'm the cool hipster who sits on the park bench with my hair just so in that position from the iPad print ads.

Next time you see one of those iPad print ads, try to position yourself in the position of the hipster in the ad. It's extremely uncomfortable, yet the almost certain damage that's being done to the muscles in the small of their back does not deter the Kewl Kidz at the Intelligentsia cafe who take their java (in a mug, please) and settle in to work on their (sure to be a bestseller) memoirs, which all seem to have titles taken from lyrics by the Decembrists.

If you find yourself "rooting" for or against a corporation, it is almost a certainty that you will at some point in your life require anti-depressant medication because you have not found meaning in relationships or purpose in a deeply-held conviction. Your identity has been helpfully provided by marketing experts to maximize your spending habits.

It is about as pathetic as it gets.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are having trouble figuring out office, how the fuck did you find your way onto slashdot?!?

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anon E. Muss]

Let me know when your favorite MS Office alternative can open and flawlessly display every Office file that I have, or may receive from somebody else. I also need a guarantee that files I create with it can be sent to people using MS Office, and they'll be able to use them without incident.

The network effect isn't fair, but it is reality. I absolute hate the ribbon UI, but not enough to suffer the compatibility issues of switching to something else.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[SpryGuy]

I feel exactly the opposite.

I felt like the Office 2007 was not fully baked.

The Office 2010 UI is more refined, more usable, more customizable, and just plain easier to use, and makes more sense. Things are more discoverable, and more logical.

Transitioning from 2003 to the new ribbon interface can be frustrating. Many coworkers have been cursing up a storm. However, there's really only a few concepts you need to tell people and suddenly they "get it" and shortly thereafter are liking it better than the old way. Among these are "Old keyboard short-cuts you're used to still work in general", "Hold down ALT to see the keys to press to use the ribbon from the keyboard", showing them the "office button" or "backstate/file" menu for all the things they need to do with the document (metadata), and showing them where the hell they moved the Options to (the worst UI aspect of the 2007 was how it was impossible to find the damn options and settings!)

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is the UI for Win8, that gives me something of a deadline* for changing careers out of User Support. It's bad enough trying to explain to users that the "My Computer" icon is now called just "Computer" and it's located on the second column of the Start Menu, which by the way has two columns now, and oh by the way the button for this is no longer labeled "Start", it just as the Windows logo on it (which yes I know you don't realize is the "Windows" logo; you think of it as just the "flag icon"). And that "Network Neighborhood" is now "My Network Places", no wait now it's just "Network". And the buttons in Office have all been ditched in favor of the ribbon, and pull-down menus hide until you hold down the Alt key, and so on and so on. I have enough trouble keeping up with all of these arbitrary changes-for-the-sake-of-change; the users are going to hate it, and they're going to hate me for implementing them. I'm getting out of here.

*Granted, there's no telling when Win8 will actually ship, so it's a fuzzy deadline, but a deadline nonetheless.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[RulerOf]

Most people ran XP with the classic theme

Right. And I'm sure most people re-sorted their start menus alphabetically. And used the classic control panel.

Nearly everyone. Like, 99% of them. All dug into the settings and changed them. Right.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Grant_Watson]

Let me know when your favorite MS Office alternative can open and flawlessly display every Office file that I have, or may receive from somebody else. I also need a guarantee that files I create with it can be sent to people using MS Office, and they'll be able to use them without incident.

In all reality, MS Office doesn't offer that kind of guarantee.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[shaitand]

"This video is NOT showcasing what "Windows 8" will be or even might be. I don't even know why they would try connecting the dots like that."

Agreed. This is the same tabletop UI crap that Microsoft has been showing as 'the future of computing' for years now. Big table that you can touch and can interact with your cell, etc. Same old shit.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[shaitand]

Maybe but I doubt it. The problem is that like most of us in tech he has advanced knowledge of the capabilities of the application but spends very little time producing word documents. When he does produce one he is expecting to be able to utilize the consistent windows menu interface to find the advanced functionality he knows to be present. Instead he is presented with no menu interface but instead with a bunch of graphical buttons with unintuitive placement.

It is impossible for an advanced user to sit down with the new system and access advanced functionality without regular use of the application to learn where things are.

Microsoft broke the number one law of UI design which is consistency.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

If users don't know that the "My Computer" icon is now called just "Computer" they shouldn't be doing anything relating to them.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[tnk1]

I've run XP, Vista and Windows 7 with a more or less classic theme that you might have seen in Windows 2000 or even 98. The only thing I can't get to look like the classic theme is the task bar in Windows 7, but that's tolerable. It doesn't take very long at all to whip these OSes in to a Classic theme, so yes, many people certainly could be doing it. Takes me less than 10 minutes to have the Fisher Price UI looking more like something resembling a tool again.

Having lots and lots of software on my box does make me appreciate the changes they made to the Windows 7 start menu though. Compared to the ginormous multi-column monster Program menus of the past, it is a step up so I definitely wanted to keep that.

The rest of the 3D and thumbnail crap is mostly useless junk. I get more out of seeing the window's title in text than I do seeing a shrunken picture of it when I am alt-tabbing.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

The rest of us do not use it as a working area, but as an area to quickly see things and put shortcuts on. So it's perfect that way, thank you.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want a window manager. I don't want bubbles or widgets or docks or what the heck ever. As long as i have a window button bar and a "run" box I will be good.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

Radical and non-intuitive (unless you're self-delusional).

Another Microsoft Bob.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[daver00]

If you click in the lower right corner of the box containing the few most used icons, you open up the menu functionality in its fullest. You need fewer clicks to do this than before, since you would have had to go two menus deep.

Cascading menus are a dead/dieing paradigm which should be put behind us.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[conares]

Let me know when your favorite MS Office alternative can open and flawlessly display every Office file that I have, or may receive from somebody else.

Yes, I can provide that service. How much are you willing to pay?

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[conares]

FFS its saturday! You cant talk that shit on a saturday! Is nothing holy to you..

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[bored]

I totally agree, the problem is that apparently the new generation of people at microsoft want to leave their mark. So, it seems every couple years Microsoft tries to reinvent everything in their software stack. Some changes are better, some are worse, the net affect seems to be a lot of changes for nearly zero overall improvement. It seems that this has been going on since probably ~2003 or so when suddenly .net became the new way to do everything. Before that the one thing you could count on in a microsoft product, was that putting in on your machine in general wouldn't break to many things. The interfaces evolved very slowly (heck there was a progman that looked like windows 1.0 in windows until XP), and the APIs were always extended never replaced. This is probably about 1/2 the reason windows won the desktop wars. Everyone else was breaking crap left and right every time they released new software. Microsoft had an insane amount of backwards compatibility, so writing an application for windows might have a high upfront cost, but it lasted a long time. Now, M$ changes some fundamental thing in the API every OS release and its rarely 100% better. Look at the problems with sound latency in windows 7. Or for that matter the drawing speed for win32 (pretty much 99% of non game applications). The GDI benchmarks pretty much show that windows 7 is approximately 3 times slower rendering applications than XP on the same hardware. It also manages to consume anywhere from 2-6x the CPU resources while doing it.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[porl]

you obviously don't work in support.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[penguinchris]

I think the point he was making is that yes, those who read slashdot and use windows probably all did the things you describe. I use OS X on my macbook pro, and use linux on my other computers, but I have a dual-boot with Windows 7 to play games - although I don't actually play them very frequently so it's mostly a waste of space - and even though I rarely use it I went through all the settings to get it to look "classic" and work the way I want (although I like many of the changes in Windows 7 so I didn't make it 100% classic).

However, the millions and millions of people who *don't* read slashdot don't do any of those things. If you've ever helped a "typical user" with their Windows computer, chances are everything was left at its default - sometimes even the background image. How anyone can stand the non-classic Windows UI is beyond me - it looks absolutely awful - but most people apparently don't mind.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

Temper, temper....

I'd have agree, someone who finds Excel a nightmare isn't a shining example of geekdom :)

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

I only discovered/switched to KDE this week, and so far I'm loving it. I agree that most widgets are retarded, since they spend 98% of the time covered up by other windows, but it seriously helps me stay organized and speeds up getting to what I want. Instead of a giant disorganized "Desktop" folder, I have my desktop set up to show the generic desktop folder, the contents of my music folder, my work projects folder, my video folder, and so on. I've got an embedded terminal window that sits there for the occasional command, so I don't have to open/close a new terminal window, immediately see its history, etc.

Most importantly, none of those windows take up valuable space on my taskbar, and they are always in fixed predictable positions, sizes, and layouts. I'm one keystroke away (show/hide desktop) from seeing all the most important information to me. It works especially well with multiple desktops, I just hop over to a fresh desktop and immediately see all my most important info.

Again, it's just a wonderful taskbar-space-saver and predictable layout of windows and important information. I thought I'd hate it at first (and did actually, when I tried it several months ago), but it's actually more like you said than you think... your computer UI is not a desktop, unlike Windows or Gnome, it's not just a blank surface to be stuffed with icons, it's an area that can be programmed and customized to display what you want, where you want, how you want.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[scdeimos]

I would say that Office 2007 was the pinnacle of Office. Lots of people (including me) bitched and moaned about the ribbon interface, but it turned out to be a good decision that exposed all of the functionality of Office instead of hiding things in obscure and/or arbitrary menus.

The uber magical ribbon interface didn't seem to help Outlook at all. To resend or recall a message, which is not something uncommon to do in corporate environments, you've still got to go to the Sent Items folder double-click on the message to open it in a new window then hunt through Message tab/Other Actions to find the recall/resend options.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Tuan121]

And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use. The new Excel is a nightmare to learn well. And now, "bubbles"?

A nightmare to learn? You might, being able to right click and have every highly used feature available right away. A ribbon bar a the top that is nicely sorted by types so you just choose a tab and have everything you need to do visually available in case you don't know exactly the name?

Yeah, it's just a nightmare...

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[RulerOf]

You hit the nail on the head. It was a very flamebait way to say it, but I think the point stands.

Microsoft makes UI changes from version to version because they spend money researching how people use their products. New UIs are created and tested, and the ones that pass QA and so on make it into their products.

As someone who used to revert damn near everything in Windows to the "Classic" UI, I sat down and taught myself how to use the newer ones. Once you learn how to use the modern Windows UI, you'll probably come to the same conclusion I did: it really does just keep getting better.

Cheers :)

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[jvin248]

That's exactly why I switched ... MS changed the file formats with each version change so that when a top fortune 50 company upgraded then their whole supply chain was forced to upgrade versions. And this network effect then seeped into every crevice. It was upgrade yourself or you'd be left out.

Now it's install LO or OO and you can work with old and new MSO files.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[hvm2hvm]

So don't use Office, there are plenty of editors (WYSIWYG or not) out there that allow you to never take your hands off the keyboard, and they're especially good (TeX) if you're interested in writing papers (like for students).

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[tragedy]

But in the old days, you could drop down a menu and, at a glance, see all the menu items. That was always the first thing I did when learning a new program, spend five minutes or so going through the menus and learning what functionality was available. Anything I couldn't tell from the name, I clicked on to see what it does. You can do that with the ribbon interface too by moving the mouse around and reading the tooltips, but not as quickly or easily. For most of the icons, telling what they do just from looking at them isn't as easy as just reading the name of the item.

So from my point of view, the ribbon interface hides a lot of functionality in plain sight. It's not as intuitive and easy to learn and relies on you already knowing how to use the program and what functions are available and searching for them.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[tragedy]

Heh, what I remember from before Windows XP came out is how many people explained that, with all it's colorful window managers, etc. Linux would never be taken seriously like Windows because the window managers made Linux looked like a toy. Then XP came out with its default theme and all of a sudden those people changed their tune. Of course, they just switched to other reasons they felt that Linux would never be taken seriously and suddenly defended the toy look in operating systems...

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[thoughtsatthemoment]

the first thing to be covered as soon as we start actually doing something?

I use a 30" monitor and I found it's hard to cover the entire screen. I've seen people maximaize the windows all the time when they use Adobe Illustrator or something like that, but I'd think that sort of software is like a desktop in it's own right. So when the desktop is big enough, it's not really a bad idea.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[perryizgr8]

i dunno about you but office 2007 and 10 have been the most usable versions yet. they re-thunk the ui and created something that was better than all existing solutions. excel has become order of magnitudes much easier, with many functions out in the open, taking only 1 or 2 clicks to activate. earlier you had to dig deep into menus that are hard to use with a mouse.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[perryizgr8]

At least with a menu I could just browse and read from the text what the option is. Now I often have to guess what that icon does and I'm not going to remember all those from the large amount of applications I have to support.

what are you even talking about? below or to the right of every icon is text that tells you what the button does. so you're complaining that showing only text is better than showing icons AND text?

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[perryizgr8]

i've had an experience that is almost opposite to what you have had. i too turned off the blue theme in xp and reverted it to 'classic'. no functionality was lost and my pc was considerably faster. in windows 7, i turn everything on. aero, transparency, everything. that makes my pc faster. windows uses the graphics chip and relieves the cpu a bit. also the ui is fantastic. very non-cluttered, very intuitive and fewer clicks for everything.
in fact, a mac feels outdated and stuck in history when you come over from windows 7. i must make it clear that i'm not talking about beauty. i'm talking about usability. most people clutter up their dock with literally 60-70 programs. you can't find ANYthing. but usually, windows 7 users have only 3-4 programs pinned to the taskbar and the rest are tucked away. yeah, they have lots of icons cluttering the desktop but that is besides the point.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

OSX Lion has this feature.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[spauldo]

That's basically the same argument I use to get pico/nano users to switch to vi, except the "supported very little" part.

I liked WP5.1 too, but I doubt we'll be seeing a return to non-wysiwyg word processors (not counting TeX and the like) anytime soon. I wouldn't mind having common functions mapped to the function keys like that in something like openoffice, though.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[rtb61]

User choice is the new paradigm. More powerful computers should drive greater choice, want text based - used text based, want tabbed menus - use tabbed menus, want ribbon - use ribbon, want voice interface - use voice interface, want bubbles ? WTF.

let's be honest it is nothing more than a commercial for windows version 8. First the quick shameless theft of Xerox's graphical user interface and mouse and then nothing but imagine manipulation via touch screens and motion detection devices. Basically look and the pretty and be mesmerised by Mundies voice, you will obey, you will want windows 8, you will love windows 8, you will buy windows 8.

It was all rather meaningless and showed nothing that hasn't already by demonstrated in various sci-fi movies. Now back to reality, to get uniform output you must use uniform input. Once you turn the input into personal variables, you must now train the user and the device, the greater the variability, the greater the training required and ultimately the greater the frustration of failed attempts at input.

So unless windows 8 is coming out with a psychic interface, then it is just typical of the hype M$ comes out with for the initial launch of the pointless but you must by it version of windows, as long as it isn't as big a fuck up as vista. Next up will be the disappearing feature claims (all those features that never make it into the actual software sold.)

Hey M$, really want to impress me, write a better warranty, that actually guarantees something..

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[bill_mcgonigle]

Who thinks it is a good idea to put the things we use most often or what always visible on the "desktop"

Well, since KDE4 was mentioned, they do things a bit differently. There isn't a "the desktop" if you're using all the KDE features, there are different aspect-like modes based on different tasks.

Oh, hell, somebody who actually understands this gimme a hand here, I'm still trying to figure it out.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[dargaud]

I'm a professional developer and user; I've found the ribbon interface to be a good thing. We often hear a lot of complaining when the old way of doing things changes, even if those changes prove in the long run to have been an improvement, from those who cut their teeth on the old. For those who start their Office experience with 2007/2010, they will probably look at the previous generation and wonder, "how the hell did you put up with that?"

I put up with that by doing [File][Some menu][Some sub-menu]. Done. Now explain to me how to do the same thing in your damn ribbon ? "click on the 17th icon of the 3rd ribbon line, well, that is unless you are in such or such mode where it's the 2nd icon of the 3rd line... well anyway the icon looks like a slightly crushed oval with random lines across it". Yeah, how do YOU put up with that ?!? PS: I'm a pro developer too, and I do user interfaces.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[am 2k]

Well, in Mac OS X the widgets are in a layer above the windows, and you can show/hide that layer with the push of a dedicated button on the keyboard.

My problem with that is that I never push that button, and so the thing is never shown.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[boxwood]

The GNOME designers realised this and have a panel on the top of the screen which is always visible through which you can access all of your apps and files and folders. You can have lots of room to put app launchers across the top so you can open ythe apps you use the most in one click. There is a Places menu that lets you get to your most used folders in two clicks.

And everyone complains its bad UI design because its not like windows or MacOS.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[master_p]

Not to mention that the ribbon requires more clicks than the menu UI.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

reminds me of Microsoft BOB, we should call it BOBbles

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to that.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[TedTschopp]

I'm going to call BS. I work for a fortune 500 company, and we still run XP and I would say that 95% run in XP mode instead of classic. And I think that's a low percentage, its probably closer to 99.9%

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Thing 1]

I have recently discovered AutoHotkey. This allows you to do basically anything you want on an XP machine, using the keyboard only. Very handy.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Thing 1]

Exactly. And it changed all the keyboard shortcuts. This is Microsoft, increasing training revenue...

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

>A differentiated widget screen (especially a touchscreen that needn't capture the mouse) could easily be interacted with without stealing focus from apps.

sounds just like the next step up from the current "multi-media" buttons on some keyboards.

Either a dedicated numberpad sized item with graphical buttons (like one gaming keyboard that comes to mind - optimus Maximus (http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/)) or maybe more of a phone sized touch pad.

But if going to the phone sized on, just use a app on a old phone that has some sort of wirless to the computer to auto start programs.

No windows changes needed, just buy the app (Remote Program Starter). (NFI if it exists yet though)

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[T-Bone-T]

You cheated! Menues are more like: click on this menu, move the mouse down to the 5th item, move the mouse over to the submenu without leaving that row, move the mouse down to the 3rd item without leaving the submenu and click on it. I'm used to it and I still screw it up!

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[AmonTheMetalhead]

I did

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[AmonTheMetalhead]

Honestly, i hate the Windows 7 UI with a passion, if i could switch to a Win2k theme i would. The 'start menu' is unusable in my opinion, the UI does things like autohiding the other windows when dragging another window in a certain way (don't ask me what way, it just does), still no 'stick to top' options, you can pin items to the taskbar, but clicking on them eighter launches them or brings them to the front, you can't use it to launch another instance of an app... If i didn't have to use this horrid piece of shit for my job i'd have formatted it ages ago....

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[AmonTheMetalhead]

I can not disagree more with you, the UI is a frustrating nightmare, the taskbar has lost it's quicklaunch feature, for one. Sure, you can pin an app to the taskbar, but pin for instance putty to the taskbar and try to launch it twice with using only two clicks total without touching the keyboard. I don't care about transparency or flashy 3D effects, i want efficiency, and the way the Windows UI works hinders me more then it aids me, and i'll be danmed if i let a PC dictate how i should work, it's I who am the PC's master.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I work in the IT industry where people are more likely to run the classic theme and i don't think i've seen ANYONE use it. Citation needed my friend.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Rude Turnip]

All of the icons have text below them. Any icons that do not (the formatting buttons such as center, left-align, indent) didn't have them in the previous versions, either.

All I can say is that my telephone stopped ringing with Excel questions about a month after we switched to Office 2007. By that I mean I was dealing with support issues non-stop for every previous version of Office we've used.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[SomeStupidNickName12]

Seriously stop living with your head in the sand, the whole ribbon interface is design to change and display only what is relevant to what you are doing. Takes a bit of getting used to but it is much better and does actually work!

Its people you who would have complained that this new car thing was total waste of time and a horse was way better because it could go anywhere and you didn't have to fill it with petrol.

Change is something a good thing :)

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Hehe, that's why I set up my XP computer at work to have a desktop environment that almost perfectly mimics my Gnome environment at home. I hate Nautilus, but I find the rest of Gnome to be delightful.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't you just hit alt and get the menu to open up? Instant access to all that precious hidden stuff you're missing. Or heaven forbid, just right click on the ribbon and customize it the way you want.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you ever go to the menu when you can just right click on the row you're working on and hit insert? Or do you only have one button on your mouse?

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[sepelester]

I like the home screen idea used in most smartphones and mobile units today where they present snippets or the most critical information of an app in a widget. Expanding the widget would launch the full screen version of the app. I see these bubbles as this idea expanded to large screen devices. I like it, but it's up to you what you do with it. You could clutter your screen entirely or you could enlarge the most important widgets. This ofc only works if you view the screen at a glance more than if you're actually doing some work, but while working you wouldn't want to be distracted with minor notifications or irrelevant info anyway, right?

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[flimflammer]

You can launch new instances of pinned (or just running) apps easily by either right clicking the app and selecting entry with the name of the application on it or by simply middle clicking.

I've never had the issue with windows being auto hidden when you drag windows.

Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use

[AmonTheMetalhead]

Thx for this tip, i did not know this, it never occurred to me to middle click on them, speaks volumes for intuitive UI design i guess...

You ruined it

[Stan Vassilev]

The UI is interesting on its own. You don't need to spice it up with arbitrary easily falsifiable BS like "it'll be in Windows 8" to make it interesting.

(from article) "eagerly awaited"?

[haus]

by whom?

Re:(from article) "eagerly awaited"?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Federal Reserve has been asking for a bubble-based UI.

Re:(from article) "eagerly awaited"?

[healyp]

The Federal Reserve has been asking for a bubble-based UI.

HA, wish I had mod points.

Re:(from article) "eagerly awaited"?

[Securityemo]

Ghost in the Shell fans?

Re:(from article) "eagerly awaited"?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, microsoft research is quite cool. It is just sad that their research gets optimized for marketing later. For example making clippy more present and so more annyoing. Also the bubbles remind me of kde4's plasma widgets.

Re:(from article) "eagerly awaited"?

[omb]

Seconded, NO ONE

Re:(from article) "eagerly awaited"?

[haus]

Forget the bubbles or whatever they are playing with at the moment, it is highly unlikely that this will make the next generation of Windows. There will be an impressive list of technology that is going to be on the include list for the next OS. As we get closer most everything that gets anyone interested will be removed (DB based files system anyone?) and then we will eventually have the new windows that few will clamor for. It will sell well because it is simply on every generic PC that someone can buy at a box store.

Perhaps when it hits the streets it might be enough to get some companies to get around to installing Win7, then again maybe not.

In the end next to no one is eagerly awaiting the next Windows OS.

Re:(from article) "eagerly awaited"?

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Re:(from article) "eagerly awaited"?

[Anonymous Coward]

The FRNs already have the correct UI.

Re:(from article) "eagerly awaited"?

[Anonymous Coward]

By Surface computer users.

Re:(from article) "eagerly awaited"?

[mysidia]

The Federal Reserve has been asking for a bubble-based UI.

I hate to burst their bubble, but the bubble UI seems like vaporware, despite 20 years of research...

20 years to come up with vaporware.... oh well.

"eagerly awaited" ?

[richlv]

"eagerly awaited Windows 8" - say what ?
next version of grub might be more eagerly awaited than windows 8 or whatever.
ms hired a pr company to build up some buzz ? :)

Re:"eagerly awaited" ?

[intellitech]

ms hired a pr company to build up some buzz

Careful now, that's a registered trademark ;)

Re:"eagerly awaited" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wish they'd stop. Thing is, no one really wants new operating systems. People just want run their software. They should have just kept updating win2k. Rolling updates just like Linux. Imagine how sturdy that OS would be by now.

Maybe the profit motive really doesn't work for operating systems, maybe MS is still too much of a monopoly. All I know for sure is that every new windows version involves a period of me wanting to stab a windows user experience designer in the forehead.

Re:"eagerly awaited" ?

[Narnie]

They should have just kept updating win2k. Rolling updates just like Linux..... Maybe the profit motive really doesn't work for operating systems, maybe MS is still too much of a monopoly. All I know for sure is that every new windows version involves a period of me wanting to stab a windows user experience designer in the forehead.

Rolling updates seems to work for Apple. Sure they are a hardware company, but the fan boys and the regular users shell out for each update. From a business standpoint, a revenue stream of $30-100 dollars per update per machine every 6-months seems better strategic plan to me than $100-150 per new OS per machine every 2-3 years. Perhaps Microsoft should take more than just UI design ideas from Apple and the linux distros.

Re:"eagerly awaited" ?

[giorgist]

Did you guys realise that Windoes 8 existance was announced at CNET in January and ... nobody cared, nobody noticed.
It was all about Android and even Honeycomb which was a practical vesrion of the market speek in this MS video.

Re:"eagerly awaited" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No you silly person, MS doesn't have to hire themselves.

A Tragic Mistake

[kevinmenzel]

The fundamental problem I see with that UI, at least from the article, is that it is gadget based. Fine for my phone. Even fine for Surface, which isn't targeted at the home. But 98% of what I do on my computer wouldn't have a useful gadget sibling in any way shape or form. Not to mention, the utter waste of screen real-estate. To be fair, I've seen people assume that such concepts are new Windows UIs for years. It hasn't been true yet...

Re:A Tragic Mistake

[im_thatoneguy]

Let's be clear. There is NO INDICATION this actually for Windows 8 and not just a pretty looking tech demo. The article for some reason seems to latch onto the idea this might be Windows 8 but ignores every other tech demo in the movie.

Re:A Tragic Mistake

[Stevecrox]

I can see two uses where the interfaces shown in the video would make sense.

I've noticed monitors with in built Intel Atom boards having been appearing in shops, pretty much everyone of these is touch screen. Considering the market they seem to be aiming for (basic web browsing, university desktops, etc..) bringing in the bubble designed UI would probably suit a lot of people.

The video also has a camera system setup which tracks hand movement, so you can use your hand like a mouse. I'd love to be able to interface with my media centre pc that way. My biggest announce is Windows Media Centre's interface sucks and the idea of using my fingers instead of a mouse on that PC would be cool.

Re:A Tragic Mistake

[ChunderDownunder]

'gadget based' a mistake? This isn't about the desktop. iOS and Android dominate phones and tablets. Netbooks running Windows are yesterday's technology.

So, MS announces Windows 8 for ARM. This is the concept UI for capacitive touchscreens. Expect the same old Explorer shell for desktop 'power users'.

Non story - news at 11

[OzPeter]

I read TFA, I watched TFV, and I still can't connect the summary to anything of substance.

Re:Non story - news at 11

[andrea.sartori]

Also, that bubble interface is shown for maybe 2 secs, and it looks like it's nice to watch but utterly useless.

Re:Non story - news at 11

[maird]

There's the proof it's Windows 8 at least.

Re:Non story - news at 11

[sco08y]

There are bubbles... and they do stuff... in the cloud?!

Mundie thinks the computer needs to go from being a "tool" to a "helper." I guess he figures that after 20 or so attempts at this, from Bob to Clippy to whatnot, it's got to eventually work.

Maybe. What is conspicuously absent in the video, though, is anyone getting any work done.

Re:Non story - news at 11

[recoiledsnake]

It's cool to be snarky, but haven't seen many outlandish ideas as the main UI of Windows in any version, so how is this proof?

Re:Non story - news at 11

[hey!]

Well, it was TFA that was at fault, manufacturing a story out of a screenshot and an unrelated PR piece.

As far as the PR piece was concerned -- I don't see much that could be called controversial. People have been talking about "ubiquitous computing" for over twenty years now, and it *is* true that computing devices are getting more and more sensors. The Motorola Xoom will have an accelerometer, gyroscope, ambient light sensor, magnetic compass and barometer. And it's not like Microsoft has failed to deliver anything on what this guy's talking about. The Kinect is impressive, and it is a real product, not some tech concept we'll never see on store shelves.

In technological prognostication the hard part isn't necessarily predicting *what* will happen; quite often the difficulty is predicting *when* something will happen. We often don't understand what the prerequisites for success are until we've failed. I think most people could see the idea of a tablet computer was a pretty attractive one; the problem was the time it took to bridge the gap between the idea and the ability to make one the met peoples' expectations. I'm still not entirely clear on why cellular data service seems to be a necessity for these devices. Perhaps it wouldn't be profitable to sell the devices at the prices people are willing to pay unless the devices are bundled. Pricing can be a double edged sword. High prices discourage consumer adoption, low prices discourage vendor promotion.

About the only red flag in the PR piece was that it raised the ancient "agent/tool" argument. Should systems be well designed tools or intelligent agents? I remember people having this debate in the 1980s. The "agent" camp has always been the sexy one, attracting press and investment, but year after year, decade it has failed to deliver on its promises. The poster child for the failure of the agent approach is Clippy -- but only because Clippy gave us an anthropomorphic target for our frustration. In many other cases we didn't have a named character to represent the papering over of sloppy design with some half baked technology.

I've been in the "tool" camp for years. Build systems that are responsive to user intent in a predictable and useful way. But I would not reject a system that inferred what I wanted without my telling it what that was ... if it worked well enough. And as tools get more sophisticated and responsive to the user, they may become much more agent-like in their operation, so I suppose we're moving in the direction of intelligent agents every year. Eventually systems will commonly do what we want them to do even when we haven't bothered to figure out what that is but I wouldn't be prepared to bet on when that future will arrive.

Re:Non story - news at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/

Developer preview now available . . .

Re:Non story - news at 11

[Doctor_Jest]

It's more incremental.. things get moved around in the UI with nearly every version of Windows... what was once in accessories, is now a link to computer management (that's probably a silly example, but the changes are not so much overt as subtle re-workings of menu hierarchies, clustering of like items, etc.)
The start menu has changed quite a bit over the years... it "looks" like a start menu, but the way it behaves is vastly different from Win 95.

Re:Non story - news at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

They're advertising Apple's upcoming iMac Touch which will be out six months before Windows 8, and for sure will look much better.

Re:Non story - news at 11

[Tablizer]

There are bubbles... and they do stuff... in the cloud

Perfect for insomniacs. They really should call it "Windoze".

Re:Non story - news at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but there's no proof it's "eagerly awaited."

Re:Non story - news at 11

[sznupi]

There are bubbles... and they do stuff... in the cloud?!

In the fog (call it what it is)

Re:Non story - news at 11

[sznupi]

If something similar could be made "aware" of your total online history

Google Web History (and in the fullest extent, with a plugin / extension logging more or less every URL) - good after all? (not now of course - but the mentioned future rudimentary AI will need data...)

Re:Non story - news at 11

[RealGrouchy]

I think they're saying that Microsoft bought zombocom.

- RG>

bubbles?

[Anonymous Coward]

color bubbles? I guess, it does look more organic than plain squares...

Re:bubbles?

[The Wooden Badger]

Funny, I was thinking the brainstorming went something like this:

The iPhone interface is kind of cool.
We should do something like that.
If we do squares people will realize we are just copying Apple.
Let's do circles instead.
Let's do it!

Re:bubbles?

[conares]

The iPhone interface is kind of cool. We should do something like that. If we do squares people will realize we are just copying Apple. Let's do circles instead. Let's do it!

Where did you hear this? We had NDA's! Steve's gonna go haywire when he hears about this!

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

This has got to be the dumbest thing ever. Microsoft is just being different for the sake of getting attention, because they know they are quickly becoming irrelevant.

Well, so long Microsoft, it was a good run, but you finally have reached the limit of what you can steal from others and the ideas you come up with on your own are pants-on-head retarded. Goodbye.

Re:What?

[JWSmythe]

This has got to be the dumbest thing ever. Microsoft is just being different for the sake of getting attention ...

    That seems to work well for Apple.

Re:What?

[recoiledsnake]

Is this like a autogenerated comment by something like the IBM Watson? Maybe it studies the upmodded comments in previous articles and comes up with this tripe. But the best thing is that it will work with the moderators on here.

Re:What?

[RightSaidFred99]

Microsoft is just being different for the sake of getting attention, because they know they are quickly becoming irrelevant.

You know, people keep saying that like it has some kind of power, as if their saying it alone will make it true if they are self-assured enough. If it makes you feel good to think Microsoft is becoming "irrelevant", keep saying it just like people have been for the last decade. Maybe you'll have some kind of external placebo effect.

Re:What?

[0123456]

You know, people keep saying that like it has some kind of power, as if their saying it alone will make it true if they are self-assured enough.

When was the last time you saw people get excited about a new Microsoft product? Fifteen years ago people lined up around the block to get the next new Microsoft OS, now they don't give a crap.

That doesn't mean Microsoft are going bust any time soon, but it does mean they're irrelevant to the majority who'd have been quite happy to continue running XP. Forcing said majority to run some crappy touchscreen interface or use their phone to replace a mouse is not going to make them any more relevant.

Re:What?

[zombiechan]

"When was the last time you saw people get excited about a new Microsoft product?"

The Kinect

That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

You know if you use these Linux and such OS, there is so much of cost retraining the employees in the new system. You stick to Microsoft, you can rest assured that all the training costs you have spent will be investments that pay dividend over a long time to come. That is why you should invest in microsoft and stay away from those platforms that keep changing their UI.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[sconeu]

Dammit! I was going to post something almost identical, but you beat me to it with a better phrased version!

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[jollyreaper]

I'm no fuddy-duddy. I'm willing to change when an obviously superior idea comes along. What fucks me off about Microsoft is that they rearrange where you find the fucking things but they're ultimately the same fucking screen from the last four versions. But where do you go to configure network properties? It's a goddamn easter egg hunt.

Don't even get me started on that fucking ribbon.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Bengie]

WindowsKey->Type("Network Connections")->enter

There, now you can config your NIC :P

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Overzeetop]

Well, that's great, except that what if you wanted to see the status of your network conenctions - your method (which requires a lot of typing) doesn't work.

Even better, I decided to type "configure network card," and the only usable option that popped up was "Manage Devices and Printers," which, interestingly, doesn't even show my network card as a device.

Why, might I ask, do you need 3-4 different ways to manage the network, some of which are inaccessible from other areas.

Why, in the network and sharing area, does a right-click on 'Home Network" not allow you to change the relationship, a right click on "Joined" for he home group does not allow you to unjoin or change the home group, and a right click on "local area connection" not bring up status, ipcongif info, the network card properties, or anything else? Why not put all those single clicks to new levels of dialog boxes into a unified interface? Why does doubl;e clicking your wireless icon in the tray disconnect you?

I can only assume that this guarantees more training dollars for everyone that has to use this stuff.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

...which explains all the complaints about Office 2010, eh?

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Arlet]

My keyboard doesn't have a "Windows" key, you insensitive clod.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[recoiledsnake]

Maybe you should actually wait till its confirmed beyond a super speculative Slashdot post(any other news source calling this possibly Windows 8)?

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how you get to the list.... there's a few more clicks involved to actually configure your NIC. (At least three, IIRC... "network name", properties, TCP).
*grin*

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, you're no fuddy-duddy and willing to change. But then complain that interfaces weren't kept constant and say you can't even find network properties? There may be some self reflection in order here.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[countertrolling]

Yep, it's like when the supermarket decides to remodel.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Without really developing MS office, how else do you convince people they have something new with each release other than re-arranging menus? There is bugger all difference in office in the last 10 years+ except that ribbon - it made a noticeable performance drop for me since 2007. Now how do you "paste special" in office 2007? Oh yeah, CTRL+SHIFT+V...

AC

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

T H I S ! ! ! !

 

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Under Win8, the functional equivalent of the Network Control Panel will be called the "Sharing and Friends" wizard and be located under the "My Internet Communication Center" section of the new "Customize Experience" widget.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[vlueboy]

Without really developing MS office, how else do you convince people they have something new with each release other than re-arranging menus?

They don't. The automobile industry spends billions trying to convince the general public that expensive purchases must be made or what is basically supposed to be a lifetime purchase if the "product" isn't lemon-y. That is how most of the non-IT world analyzes purchases like that in the third world: because the kinda things money buys aren't gimmicky status symbols with expiration dates or yearly refresh cycles (except for the ever-evil ads for imported American cars).

The US is trying to push the idea that if it ain't broke, it's too old-fashioned next year, and the disposable-cash ADHD teens of today will be the buyers of tomorrow, pretty literally; today's older people don't "contribute" to the problem as much.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Narnie]

To add to that... Why does Win7 not save the network key on my sister's pc, but it does on my brother's? Same network, same os, but the profile on my sister's pc does not save the key. I would install ubuntu on there so I wouldn't have to deal with it, but she'd complain that she couldn't play the sims.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[daver00]

But where do you go to configure network properties? It's a goddamn easter egg hunt.

Right click the network icon, choose: "Open Network and Sharing Center", look to the links on the left, choose: "Change Adapter Settings". Its actually completely obvious and simple, it was an easter egg hunt in XP, it was an easter egg hunt in Vista. Win 7 is extremely simple.

Someone already replied with the search option, which is your alternative. Even better, search inside the control panel.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[porl]

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=16664

if you are referring to older versions, they may or may not work on current versions, but it's easy to try.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no fuddy-duddy. I'm willing to change when an obviously superior idea comes along. What fucks me off about Microsoft is that they rearrange where you find the fucking things but they're ultimately the same fucking screen from the last four versions. But where do you go to configure network properties? It's a goddamn easter egg hunt.

Don't even get me started on that fucking ribbon.

f*ck! you say

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Eskarel]

I'll agree with you that there's not a significant change in the core functionality of Microsoft Word(though there's still some rather nice changes in 2010) Word processors serve a relatively simple purpose for most of their users and are fairly well worked out. There's some better navigation and the integrations with things like Sharepoint are improved but not much else.

Excel however has improved rather significantly. Powerpivot is pretty damned cool for instance(it's not part of the default install, but it is free).

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Darinbob]

This way they can sell Windows 8 Certification Classes.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[aztektum]

your method (which requires a lot of typing) doesn't work.

Not a Linux user, I assume?

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Because they like fucking with you.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Narnie]

I tried sims2 three weeks ago and it did not work. Did not investigate sims3 as I don't own a copy. Good to know that it should work. Thanks!

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[dargaud]

I'm no fuddy-duddy. I'm willing to change when an obviously superior idea comes along. What fucks me off about Microsoft is that they rearrange where you find the fucking things but they're ultimately the same fucking screen from the last four versions. But where do you go to configure network properties? It's a goddamn easter egg hunt.

Don't even get me started on that fucking ribbon.

Yeah, at least on Linux you can easily experiment with strange window managers without breaking everything, you can have different ones for different users, and you can even run them simultaneously (gnome apps under KDE). And finally, for system configuration there's always the reliable command line. So I don't hold much hope for Windows UI changes.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[joelleo]

er... its pretty straightforward

click windows icon, start typing the subject in the search box

netw

pops up several categories - programs, control panel, documents and pictures, each showing a count of that substring somewhere in the properties (name, content) or the metadata (tags for pictures etc) and containing the most likely choices based upon defaults or previous clickage by the user

continue on with

network

and the results get finer, but are still roughly the same. Move on to

network st

and the results get pretty sharp - I get "view network status and tasks" under the control panel section, amongst others.

That same paradigm works for pretty much everything - its very, very easy to get to apps, documents (even the ones that haven't been recently accessed,) control panel settings etc. Of course you still have to click stuff here and there and there's still a bit of a learning curve (typing network conn will not get you to network connections, but typing network ada will, for instance,) but overall it makes dealing with the computer significantly easier.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Overzeetop]

No, not generally. But, just to pull out my geek credentials, I learned to program assembly language on a 6502 processor before I could afford an assembler, so I hand assembled my code into machine language. I worked with command line OSes for almost a decade before "modern" windowed environments showed up on consumer machines.

In Linux, it would be a three or four letter command followed by about four hundred switches, three hundred of which are not covered in the man page.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[phoenix_rizzen]

Windows XP:
    Start menu --> Control Panel --> Network icon

Windows 7:
    Start menu --> Control Panel --> ??? there are no icons, just a bazillion text links you have to read through

How again is it an easter egg hunt on Windows XP?

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[TheThiefMaster]

Then press ctrl+esc.

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

WindowsKey->Type("Network Connections")->enter

There, now you can config your NIC :P

So you're essentially saying that after all the millions spent on developing GUI's, the best way to use Windows is via a pop-up CLI?

Re:That is the greatest advantage of Microsoft

[jarlsberg71]

My only thought on the Ribbon other than the shock one gets the first few times they use it, is placement. From how I see it, displays on Laptops and Desktops are becoming even more HD, meaning that the vertical space on a monitor is becoming less and less for the same size on a 4:3 display. Now you're going to take up an inch or so of space across the whole screen? It doesn't go sideways, and yeah you can "Hide" the Ribbon, but what good does that get you?

worst feature removed yet?

[magarity]

With every new version of Windows since 95, I ask: did they get rid of the %^$#ing registry yet? If no, it's not much improved.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[black3d]

Every OS has a registry - an accessible record of cross-application settings and references. Unless we go backwards (ie, DOS), you'll never see an OS without a registry - even if it's not called that.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Pentium100]

Well, it seems that GP just wants to have hundreds or thousands of tiny text files all with their own incompatible formats, like it is in Linux (mostly).

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love to see that

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Mashiki]

Sounds like it. If it's one thing I don't miss from the old 9x and Win3.x days is everything being stored in text files. Sure it was easy to find and edit something(with a basic text editor), even in DOS. It was an organizational nightmare if you wanted to do something else like reference something in another non-hived registry(I mean random text file).

The current registry system has it's faults, and hive registries can nuke the OS because of corruption really easily. But right now? Much easier to work with, at least until someone has a brain wave and comes up with a better system.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[robmv]

and that is bad? when did you need to open a registry file on Word, Paint or another program that need to understand a single file format? Settings files are not documents, are not videos, are not pictures that must be of a known format because you feed them to different programs, yo give them to other people, settings file doesn 't. Writing all system settings in one .DAT file is technically wrong, it is a single point of failure for all your system

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Writing all system settings in one .DAT file is technically wrong, it is a single point of failure for all your system.

So is a partition, and a hard drive.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because even that is better than one opaque blob that can get trashed beyond repair. At least with all the text files, if one gets garbled the system doesn't become unusable.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

and that is bad? when did you need to open a registry file on Word, Paint or another program that need to understand a single file format? Settings files are not documents, are not videos, are not pictures that must be of a known format because you feed them to different programs, yo give them to other people, settings file doesn 't. Writing all system settings in one .DAT file is technically wrong, it is a single point of failure for all your system

Well, would you rather have 1000 separate points of failures? That happens too.

BTW, .reg files (the things you can use to automatically edit your registry) are basically text files, and their syntax is as easy to use as any Linux config file.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[guruevi]

But those you can make redundant. I like the way Mac OS X does it. The Unix-way with individual files for individual programs and the Mac-way with each individual file following a certain format (XML) which is well-documented. The Windows-way is to take all those individual files the old-Unix-way (each program using their own format), stuffing it into a singular file and making it utterly unreadable (using GUID's, allowing proprietary binary code and very deeply nested trees) then giving everyone, everywhere access to it. And then still applications (Office, Internet Explorer) make directories and files in hidden folders with settings, caches etc. so it's apparently not the best solution even for Microsoft themselves.

Ever tried to delete every trace of a program out of Windows? It's nearly impossible. In Linux or Mac you just go to /etc and ~/.program or ~/Library and do a find and delete.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[HermMunster]

Yeah, let's stay with one freaking file (though there may be 3 it only takes one) that when it becomes corrupt it takes everything down. A better system would be one that decentralizes this task and only affects one or a few programs (and not the OS). If you aren't aware of it, and it really makes your argument seem silly, is that every program writes tons of files to their folders. Some write them all over the place. To look at what there was (with .ini files) and what we have today (the registry) and you consider that programs can place hundreds if not thousands of files on your computer in various folders, one would have to admit that them putting their little .ini file into their folder isn't going to add much to the complexity. The registry is a poor solution that was never improved and it is a single point of failure on the whole system that causes more than its share of grief for users.

And, as far as how Linux accomplishes the same feat you appear to be clueless about the configuration files. I actually see no detriment to being able to show hidden files and to locate the ones that correspond to the program in question and to rename them in an effort to debug issues.

And, as far as incompatible formats go, why would my photo editor need to know the file format of my CD player program's configuration file? And since when do we not have total incompatibility, even in the Windows registry, amongst programs? Why would my photo editor need to know what's happening to the registry settings (or configuration file settings) of my CD player program? They don't know anything about each other nor do they need to know.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[HermMunster]

This isn't entirely true. What's the OSX registry name? The Linux one? The Android one? The unix one?

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[RightSaidFred99]

Wow, people are still complaining about the registry? Why?

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[drsmithy]

Writing all system settings in one .DAT file is technically wrong, it is a single point of failure for all your system.

You mean just like putting it all in a single directory ?

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they have to feel superior to *something* to feel good about themselves.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Pentium100]

Ever tried to delete every trace of a program out of Windows? It's nearly impossible. In Linux or Mac you just go to /etc and ~/.program or ~/Library and do a find and delete.

Unless the program wants to hide, then it could hide itself anywhere. Now, some of that may be limited by permissions etc, but if, say, Autocad asks for root access so it can hide itself and you need Autocad enough to pay for it, you will give the access and it will be able to leave traces anywhere on the system.

So, for both OSs the only real way to delete every trace of a program is to monitor what it does.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Pentium100]

And, as far as incompatible formats go, why would my photo editor need to know the file format of my CD player program's configuration file?

No, but if the program has some settings that can only be altered in the config file or registry, I'd rather have compatible formats, that is, so I would not have to google every singe program to find out if the server IP is called "IPAddr" or "Server_IP" or "Server IP", whether to put "=", ":", " " or some other symbol between name and value and so on. Oh, and where the file is - is it C:\Program files\Program_name\program.ini (best on single user computers, so, my favorite), C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Program\Settings\Program.ini or C:\Windows\Program.ini.

Not ot mention the OS itself - on Linux, the various configuration files for system services are very different (some are text files in /etc, some are in /proc and some somewhere else), at least on Windows I can find the system settings a bit easier.

For small programs, the local (meaning in the same folder as the .exe) settings file may be better (so I can have the program on a floppy disk or a removable HDD and use it on any computer I want), but for big programs that distribute their files all over the system anyway and the OS itself, set it into the registry.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that Windows left behind its registry corruption issues long ago suggests that it's more robust than you think - and that's probably because it's far easier to implement a self-repairable database file, compared to the headache of a self-repairable filesystem hierarchy. Delete a crucial file and it's a bitch to debug - delete a crucial registry key and it's immediately traceable.

I don't like how Windows populates its registry hive, but that's another story.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[mobets]

/etc

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[the_womble]

I certainly want thousands of text files for config. Its simple, its reliable, its easy to tweak. I would much rather edit a text config file than the Windows registry.

What is the problem with incompatible formats? Does Digikam need to read my Sylpheed config all of a sudden? Do Windows app work better together by having a common registry?

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[DAldredge]

And why is the registry so horrible?

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it is a POS. As has been mentioned here, removing all trace of an app is next to impossible without some 3rd part tool.
It is also a security minefield. How many passwords are in your registry today?
What protection is there from almost every frigging app from getting them? Then sending the encrypted pwd to the mothership for cracking.
Different files in different directories can be protected or even encrypted by the specific app.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[maxwell demon]

Or maybe many tiny text files with a common format, like in Windows 3.11?

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people are idiots and would rather have a slew of different and incompatible config files tossed all over their hard drives rather than a transactional* hierarchical database with cascading ACL security and simplified cross-domain synchronization.

* Yes, ACID transactional. Some fuckers seem to think Microsoft is still shipping Windows 95 or something.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Pentium100]

I meant the incompatibility as in "I need to google every program to know the format of the settings file". Now, this is amplified on Linux by most settings only available in the text file, if the program allows all of its settings to be changed from the UI, I do not care how it saves them, in that case, I would even probably like the separate files, it would make the program and the settings portable.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Nimatek]

GNOME's gconf is a Linux registry. I'm sure KDE has something in that direction too, just more obscure and difficult to navigate.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget: trying to debug some 3rd-party program's behavior regarding unknown / malformed configuration entries. With non-standardized file-based configs you have to literally attach a debugger and step through the entire program, looking for strcmps. With an abstracted config API, you just log the function calls (e.g. with Process Monitor) to instantly find exactly what, how, and where it's looking for.

Downside of each program doing its own basic I/O.

BTW, this scenario happens A LOT on Windows. Not so much with OSS platforms. Although, I remember hunting for obscure config values for ATI's proprietary Linux driver.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[conares]

I dont think the registry is such a bad idea at all. The problem is devs write programs that save settings there.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you blathering about? What's wrong with a human readable text file that can be edited with any common ASCII text editor? I know that's not the type of compatibility you were referring to but it it doesn't matter anyways because programs and services don't need to read each others config files in the first place.

I would think that the Windows registry was solution in search of a problem if I did not already now that it's purpose is to obfuscate.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[Fri13]

Duh... they are not on own incompatible formats... They are all plain text files!
Do you know commandline tools? Did you know that you can actually very easily grep data, change it and push to any other wanted location in any other wanted format you just wish? So much more different possibilities and features than what the register allows.

Register is not same thing as punch of config files in plain text format.
Register is a single file what has multiple different application configs, it can be a binary or XML but still it is a register and flawed one (all eggs in one basket)

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[joelleo]

The registry is awesome, once you really look at it and what it does. A few examples follow.

The registry is backed up automatically, even outside of scheduled backups. Check %systemdrive%\windows\system32\config\regback. The actual registry files are in config and the backups are in regback. They can be attached to a functional machine, loaded, edited and saved if you really need to dig deep on a repair.

Fsck the registry up in one place and its almost trivial to fix, especially if its under the CurrentControlSet - the Last Known Good boot option rolls back that portion of the registry, which includes service configurations, device information, driver information and a ton of other stuff - stuff that is most likely to make your system unbootable, to the last time the system booted properly (ControlSet002, if you're rooting around in the registry right now - ControlSet001 is the source copy of CurrentControlSet while the system is booted normally, and is copied to ControlSet002 or higher once you've successfully logged in.)

In addition, the registry is loaded into memory at startup. Rather than apps having to parse configuration files off the ms access time hard drive they can access the information in nanoseconds, leaving your disk subsystem free to load up your por^H^H^Hcontent in whichever application you launched.

Hrm. You could just say "st00pid registry" and continue on your way though =)

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[HermMunster]

The /etc folder has nothing to do with a registry in any way.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[HermMunster]

Clearly because it is a significant point of failure. It is also an overly complex system that could be better handled in other ways. The debate still rages over whether individual configuration files work better. Other operating systems besides windows clearly show that individual configuration files are not a detrimental way in managing configurations.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[HermMunster]

Gnome's registry does exist, but gnome does not maintain the settings for Linux and the various program. It only maintains settings for itself, the desktop manager.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[DaVince21]

This is true. I only have one gripe with the registry myself: don't make it so fucking important that your system becomes unbootable if it's wiped.

Re:worst feature removed yet?

[mobets]

Maybe, but it is the only place I can think of as a centralized location to store system and application settings in Linux.

Bubble Buddy

[DreamArcher]

Sponge Bob will love this.

Prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 8 will look like a slightly shinier, flashier Windows 7, with gimmicks added in an attempt to play catch-up with MacOSX. As usual.

Radical

[Anonymous Coward]

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means":
http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/nokia-experiments-with-bubbles-interface-on-symbian-cell-phones-2011024/

Re:Radical

[mehemiah]

thank you, i thought I would have to look for that. I saw it when they announced the ... strategy change.

How is a row of bubbles

[rsilvergun]

different from a row of icons? Except maybe they're not well organized? I didn't see anything in the video I hadn't already seen a million times though. Is it just a slow news day?

Unless...

[drwhite]

I am technically stupid (which I'm not), I don't see TFV! All I see are pics. Shit article.

Re:Unless...

[maxwell demon]

I am technically stupid (which I'm not), I don't see TFV! All I see are pics. Shit article.

You might have some blocking extension which disables seing the video.
I also didn't notice that there's a video until I read it in a comment. Temporary allowing the site to access youtube fixed the problem.

You can also get the video directly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaWFivMjJG0

The UI was not interesting.

[microbox]

I didn't see anything interesting. The promo-video was a waste of time. Someone could have said the same things 10 yrs ago.

Re:The UI was not interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed

Re:The UI was not interesting.

[Kral_Blbec]

but not with demos of them doing it.

Re:The UI was not interesting.

[recoiledsnake]

I didn't see anything interesting. The promo-video was a waste of time. Someone could have said the same things 10 yrs ago.

promo-video? Err, even MS wouldn't make such a promo video. It's just a research tech preview demo.

Re:The UI was not interesting.

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention why in the hell would they suddenly shitcan everything for Windows 8 when finally, after all these damned years they got the UI right and made a major leap forward for the masses with Windows 7.

I have to say, and this is coming from an old Win2K guy that HATED the "fisher price UI" of XP, that Windows 7 UI is fricking brilliant. The new taskbar gives me instant access to my recently used folders in explorer automatically, no fiddling, jumplists gives me access to just about everything I'd want to do when launching an app, breadcrumbs makes it trivial to dive several folder deep in ANY direction in the time it takes me to make a single click, it all "just works".

And the best part, and I still haven't figured how they pulled it off yet, is that while they made it trivially easy for a guy like me that has been using Windows for years to get my tasks done faster and easier, at the same time they made it simpler and more intuitive for those like my dad who have never been good with computers. I gave dad the second beta of Windows 7 and after using it for just a couple of weeks pre-ordered the family pack so he'd "have a computer that made sense" as he put it. He has found and used more features in Windows 7 the very first week of use than he did with 9 YEARS of XP usage.

The integrated search bar is so much more than just a finder as it will give you related concepts such as me finding out and using the new performance center when looking for good old perfmon. Finally it helps the user find things they don't even know they had, such as dad plugging in his headset to chat and finding out about Windows 7 voice recognition.

So they'd be insane to just shitcan all that work when they finally have a winner on their hands. Both XP and Vista users whom I've let try Windows 7 have been quite happy to switch and never look back, it allows your older apps to work without needing the crazy constantly having to run as admin anymore, the UAC works without being clippy level of irritating like in Vista, frankly for the first time in ages they "got it right" and I just don't see them shitcanning it when Windows 8 is supposed to be released next year IIRC. My prediction is the next release will be all under the hood and an attempt to make web integration better, such as making it easy and seamless for folks like my dad to have their work and home PCs always interconnected and controllable anywhere he is.

Re:The UI was not interesting.

[daver00]

I wish I had mod points, so I'll just post here to say I completely agree with everything you've said. I actually go so far as to say that MS have hit the ball into Apple's court this time as OSX is actually less intuitive and more difficult to use (I do dumb-user support for both).

And I completely agree with your comment about how they pulled it off, I am utterly dumbfounded myself. The most impressive thing I find about 7 is the rock solid stability, the UI is great (going back to Vista is a stark reminder of how far they came, let alone XP), but the underlying OS is ridiculously solid, and secure. It blows my mind.

Re:The UI was not interesting.

[NoSleepDemon]

I'd mod you up, but there's one thing I have to get off my chest with regards to windows 7 and Vista, although admittedly it's also the partly the fault of developers that don't check for invalid pointers. The sound interface. It drives me up the fucking wall! As soon as I unplug my earphones from my workstation to play some media on the speakers, it disables then re-enables my sound interface. This completely screws with applications like chrome or winamp that lose their sound device context. For instance, sometimes this will cause youtube to stop playing sound, and pretty much every single instance of flash player will screw up.

Re:The UI was not interesting.

[Eskarel]

The new UI isn't necessarily Windows 8, they never say it is. What it is is Windows Phone 8 and probably Windows Tablet 8. The current interface of Windows 7 is excellent, but the paradigm is all wrong for touch screens.

Re:The UI was not interesting.

[Darinbob]

It's like concept cars. The initial mock up may wow a lot of people and it's intended only to impress, because there's no practical use ultimately.

Re:The UI was not interesting.

[perryizgr8]

let me tell you that is a problem that is unique to you. does not happen on any of my machines.

Re:The UI was not interesting.

[egranlund]

I've noticed my new creative card does this but my integrated card didn't. Check out your creative card control panel and disable headphone switching - fixed it for me

Re:The UI was not interesting.

[hairyfeet]

Creative? Sadly Creative which I used to love (Still have SoundBlaster and Audigy sound cards sitting in my closet) just haven't put anything out but total shit drivers in the past 4 years or so. Hell the Audigy is brand new and was given to me free by a customer who got tired of beating his head against the wall with the shitty drivers. I helped him load the updated Realtek drivers for his board and tada! All his headaches just magically went away.

So you can't really blame Windows 7 for that one, as they have no control on QA for third parties, especially if they bypass having the "Designed for " Windows logo. Your best bet is to either run the onboard Realtek (nearly all the boards have decent Realtek onboard now) or pick up one of the nice ASUS prosumer cards. They are a little pricey but the sound quality is unmatched and the drivers "just work" without any BS or bugginess like the Creative ones.

But if you have no control over the hardware, since you didn't say if this is a personal or company workstation, and you can't change/toss the card there IS a way to get around the problem. Just use the headphone jack on the speakers and if they aren't easy to reach a little cheap headphone extender cable (Monoprice has them for something like $4) will give you the extra length and will bypass the buggy driver issue. I had a customer that needed his Creative for the extra I/O and by running his phones this way it solved the buggy driver issue, since the Creative manager never saw any switching in the I/O no matter whether he had headphones in or not.

Its a bit of a hack I admit, but when you have no choice sometimes the simplest solution is the best. With my customer he is now able to switch between headphones and speakers to monitor sound quality without risking causing a glitch and screwing up what he's working on. So if nothing else this WILL fix your problem, its just like I said a bit of a hack to get around the driver bug.

the summary is for a different video

[inkscapee]

Because the "bubbles" got about two seconds of attention. The rest was airy-fairy 'Minority Report'-style handwaving.

BSOD

[Ice Station Zebra]

Bubble Screen of Death.

Re:BSOD

[alostpacket]

Somewhere Clippy is sitting unshaven, disheveled, and hung-over -- blowing soap bubbles and popping them in symbolic, disgusted jealousy.

Re:BSOD

[Sanat]

Where are the mod points when you need them.

Icons drive Linux?

[siwelwerd]

"Icons drive the Linux OS"? Really? I don't have any icons on my desktop (Fluxbox), and one can run Linux just fine without any sort of GUI.

Re:Icons drive Linux?

[calmofthestorm]

Icons? Is that the thing at the far-left of the shell prompt?

Re:Icons drive Linux?

[koolfy]

Most of Linux GUIs (window manager/desktop environment, etc) either disable Desktop icons by default, or allow to disable them easily.

In fact, most of linux innovative GUIs (yes, by windows' standards, 2007 Fluxbox is innovative.) are built around a minimal-to-no-desktop-icon paradigm, using the desktop as a menu generator, or widget emplacement

the only ones still using this 1998-ish idea of letting you flood your screen with a shitton of pointless icons with no organisation whatsoever are those who admit imitating windows' interface to make the transition easier for noobs.

I haven't used a single linux GUI that didn't organize launch icons in a logic and structured menu for like 5 years.

Gone are the icons that drive Windows, OS X, and Linux operating systems of past and present.

Seriously GP, try harder. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment#Gallery

Re:Icons drive Linux?

[Deep Esophagus]

I would sell my children into slavery if MS would let me ditch all their idiotic UIs and replace them with Fluxbox. Windows would finally be usable and much less of a memory sinkhole!

Re:Icons drive Linux?

[TeknoHog]

http://talkingincircles.net/2008/05/19/how-to-make-windows-xp-look-and-act-like-fluxbox/

As if (Windows 8)

[DavidR1991]

MS are so risk averse that the likelihood of this UI showing up in Windows is as likely as them moving the Linux kernel.

They won't do anything drastic because they're in the pockets of their business customers: Who need everything pretty same-y to avoid retraining, software changes etc.

 

Re:As if (Windows 8)

[Gonoff]

Sometimes, I wish they were more in those pockets. Office 2007/2010 changes are the biggest waste of time I have ever seen on a computer.

link to the actual video

[godrik]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaWFivMjJG0&feature=player_embedded

Research stuff

[diegocg]

Microsoft research does really cool things, but somehow the bureaucracy always kill them. I don't think it will be different this time.

Re:Research stuff

[Foredecker]

Dude, that is complete and utter BS. Did you just make that up? Or do you have first hand knowledge?

I actually have first hand knowledge: Many, many things make it from Microsoft Research directly into products. Im aware of many that are in Windows. We are really good at this.

Were not perfect, if you are going to be derisive about Microsoft, at least be original and accurate.

-Foredecker

Re:Research stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

And if they get things right, all this good stuff will wind up on the Xbox.

Re:Research stuff

[Goboxer]

I think you are right. Microsoft does do some amazing and awe-inspiring things but tends to go in the wrong direction with them. It seems like the Kinect was the closest they have come to one of their wonder-toys going in the almost right direction. Once they saw where the consumers were going with it they said "Oh, that's actually a great idea" and are now going to put out SDK's and functionality for computers. If Microsoft would make more of their innovative stuff available to people I think they could really strike gold.

Re:Research stuff

[sydneyfong]

Care to name a few?

Not rhetorical, just genuinely curious, though the disclaimer is that I generally share the same impression as the GP.

Re:Research stuff

[shutdown -p now]

You have to understand that, when people outside refer to "MSR doing cool things", almost always (unless they're CS students) they refer to some "oh wow" demo - and those rarely make it into products (or keep the "wow factor" when they do).

Only the few in the same field can appreciate the theoretical CS research, for which the only manifestation are published papers. And when, say, Windows gets an improved scheduler with a very interesting new algorithm based on that research, no-one will pay attention. They're all staring at Kinect at best (for us), or at iPad at worst.

Re:Research stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

...at least be original and accurate.

Fuck your ribbon interface for wasting time, cost and effort due to retraining users? Oh oops, that's not an original criticism at all is it...

Re:Research stuff

[Foredecker]

Sure. Here are a few that are not obvious - or officially published - like Kenect.

• Boot optimizations
• Speech recognition algorithms and data structures.
• SSD performance measurement
• Power optimizations
• Performance modeling (used to improve the product, not actually in it)
• Time Travel debugging
• Office grammar checker
• ClearType
• All kinds of stuff from the Seadragon folks

II think some slashdotters assume that if its not some big earth shattering high PR value block buster thing, then it must not happen. My point is that this happens all the time. The benefits Microsoft Research brings to our products are many, but not necessarily highly visible.

Remember, we are a company. Our goal is to make money - great heaping gobs of it. MSR is a key part of this. MSR does exists to benefit our products. This often takes time and not everything MSR does gets into a product. But we learn a lot even from the things that dont help a product directly.

But, you are missing my other - and most important - point: Diegcog - very likey just made that statment up. Its called lying. Ill be interested to read his respsonse, if any.

-Foredecker

Re:Research stuff

[blincoln]

I'm pretty sure Kinect is something that came out of MS Research. But now that I think about it, you're probably right - the only reason Kinect made it out the door is because for some reason, the only sane management at MS these days are in charge of the Xbox division.

Radically new

[gmuslera]

Unless you noticed that similar approaches were already used in things like this (of course that their new minion will sue them, but still)

Why get excited?

[vampirbg]

Don't you remember all the promises about Vista and all the fancy changes etc? Not even half of those made it and we're using Win7 now... I suppose it'll get cut at the last moment for Win9... Maybe it'll be in Win10 or Win11 provided M$ is still functioning :)

Re:Why get excited?

[UnknowingFool]

Exactly. After all MS has been promising a db based file system since the 1990s and hasn't delivered. WinFS was the 5th instance of this.

Plasma

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me or does the whole bubble thing just seem like a really poorly thought out version of the KDE plasma idea?

And I'm sorry but there was nothing else in that article that Microsoft wasn't touting as "revolutionary" 4 years ago or we haven't seen from various other companies in the past 5 years.

But its Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

And therefore can't be good. . .

I want my 3:46 back

[jfengel]

There's nothing here you haven't seen before. It's the usual Microsoft Surface things, drawing Fantasia-y colors by waving your hands and rotating 3D objects, which you've seen before. Add to that a lot of vagueness about how everything is going to change and a soundtrack that could easily have come from any HR video on sensitivity training or proper timecard procedure.

Maybe these features will be nifty when we get them. But this video is the worst kind of marketing speak.

This is NOT Windows 8...

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me a break, what a nonesense article. There is no way this is Windows 8. The video showed a combination of the already on the market $10,000 touchtable device (used in a lot of high end demonstration rooms for companies such as medical device makers,etc), knockoffs of the Wii, and things stolen from the iPhone.

And what the hell is that guys actually saying? The computer is no longer a tool, but a "helper"???? What a bunch of baloney.

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I've pegged Steve Ballmer as being a similar type to the halfwit David Cameron. He can't see beyond his own closeness to big business and thinks talking your way through is everything. If this is anywhere near true, and I suspect something like that is, this is Microsoft's answer to the "Big Society". Think George W. Bush and "Compassionate Conservatism."

If things turn out the same and I have no reason to doubt they will the idea that software architecture, usability, and value to the customer has anything to do with it is blown out the door. It will be a lot of plausible flip-flopping waffle and a massive media campaign. People will buy it in their droves but it will eventually crash the company. We're entering the final stage of Microsoft's inevitable death.

If Steve Jobs is on the way out (and part of me hopes he is) then there's a possibility that Apple can get ahead of the curve and enter the marketplace to replace Microsoft. That means lower prices and accessibility. It means letting go and looking at providing products that incentivise the bottom of the market. It means getting back to their roots before they got greedy.

THIS is more one the lines of new Windows 8..

[recoiledsnake]

That's gobbledygook.
I don't see anything but speculation in TFA. Hell, if we are speculating, here's something that's better and a lot more believable to be Windows 8:

http://www.vimeo.com/13580196

Re:THIS is more one the lines of new Windows 8..

[Kell Bengal]

Sigh. Yet another minority report style interface. It always astounds me that conceptual designers really think that holding your arms outstretched to interact with anything for an extended period of time is a good idea. Anyone working in human-machine interface design and ergonomics should be able to tell them that it's a load of crap. People sit with their arms in a rest position over the controls because it's the lowest-energy means of interacting. I cringe in anticipation at the coming wave of multitouch-only interfaces that require pinching and other large motions of the hand - it's just asking for RSI. Sure, there's no reason why some of the better ideas being developed can't be adapted to low displacement/strain finger motions, but those interfaces won't look especially different from a keyboard-mouse combination anyway. On some level, it's change for change's sake.

And while I'm hating, I'm also going to hate on designers who consistently conceptualise every gawddamned visual interface as being a bezel-less, zero-thickness sheet of image. It's a wonderful vision and we're all terribly keen to build such things, but in the meantime, why don't they design something that doesn't rely on that form-factor for practicality? For example, the smart bookmark shown in the parent's linked video - it's cute, but nobody is going to be building such things for a while yet. Yes yes, it's fine to think about the future before we get there, but it would be nice to see them come up with some novel ideas and improvements that can actually be implemented with existing technology, for a change.

Bubbles

[KagakuNinja]

It's bubbles, all the way down...

Name change?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess "Microsoft Windows" will become "Microsoft Porthole"...

Re:Name change?

[Sanat]

or pothole

How about they just improve it....

[Hans Lehmann]

Some of us have to actually use computers to, you know, make a living. We don't want or need yet more fluffy widgets to keep us from getting our work done. For every improved driver in Windows 7, there were at least two annoyances that were added to the mix. Transparent overlays?... useless. God-awful search tool that doesn't even recognize a tilde (~) character?...even worse than useless. Completely arbitrary user interface when trying to copy files (probably depending on which serf wrote that piece of code), absolutely infuriating. Hey, Microsoft, how about you try making your OS better, rather than just putting more lipstick on the pig that is Vista.

new VRML ? Not!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it would be some new kind of vrml like a take off on Oracle of the 90's.

How is this any different than image slicing, crap wrong term. I never can remember what you call it.

I'll guess at it.

bubble_hoover()
bubble_click()

I have to admit I didn't watch the video because it's in an iframe. But, I will bet it's something I either already have the capability of, or don't need.

Wild speculation! I did not hear/see Windows8.

[Barryke]

People, please watch that video. The article is wild speculation. I did not hear or see anything that ought to be how Windows 8 looks. Its just MS saying what they recently did with Surface and Kinect.

Those bubbles some speak about (which where in visibly only for seconds, not even showing how interaction would actually work) are not represented as being how Windows 8 would or could work.

Not that i appreciate the idea of such a big company thinking really hard to remove that hassle of having to use a mouse and even then perform verbose, repetitive actions that could be represented with a single voice command. I'd love that.

Re:Wild speculation! I did not hear/see Windows8.

[blueworm]

I agree -- It's definitely not Windows 8. Windows 8 will not run exclusively on touch surfaces; Microsoft can't sell Windows 8 by asking people to go out and buy a touch screen for untold multiples of hundreds of dollars.

Re:Wild speculation! I did not hear/see Windows8.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeh imagine how much fun it would be to have 200 call center staff all trying to talk to both their customers on the phone and their computers at the same time whilst gesticulating like mad with their fingers on their surface control panels to control bubbles on screen....

There's a good reason why we still use Windows XP in the call centers, it just works, it just does it's job.

Re:Wild speculation! I did not hear/see Windows8.

[Bieeanda]

The very thought of voice interaction as a cornerstone of the UX makes my heart go out to people with thick, non-American accents. Just watch this cautionary video.

Rise of the machines

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife points out that she can picture this video playing on a jumbotron in Times Square. The camera zooms out to reveal a hellscape of burnt out vehicles and bodies while the few remaining humans run from animatronic mannequin terminators.

This works, if EVERYTHING is streamline, the world

[SmallFurryCreature]

This works, if EVERYTHING is streamline, the world isn't streamlined.

[.jpeg] [.jpg] [.jpe] [.jpg] [.gif] [.] []

The above where ALL extensions I found for jpeg images. Yes, the last one is empty and the gif? Just one of the many wrongly named ones. How do you deal with this uniformly? How do you write a super smooth UI that shows images if even determining what is an image is already that hard.

Link the weather to my airplane ticket? That only works if somehow the ticket data exposes location data in a way the weather plugin can understand AND if then the ticket plugin can understand the weather data. My airport is Eindhoven, my weather plugin only knows about Amsterdam (Schiphol is NEAR to it but NOT the same). So how does that work? Ah, only unified services work... nice lock-in you got going there then. This kind of stuff is a chain and chains are only as strong as the weakest link.

It is not like this kind of stuff hasn't been tried before, it is the intelligent home dream.

The dream where you put a carton of milk in your fridge and it tells a phone that it is getting old. My local supermarket has four brands of milk at least. That is ONE supermarket. If my carton I picked up at a new supermarket on the way doesn't register, the entire service is useless and I might well end up drinking spoiled milk trusting that my intelligent home would have warned me.

My flight can not be just delayed because of the weather at departure airport but also by weather enroute and arrival airport or indeed whatever area my plane is coming from in the first place. My ticket doesn't have route information or where the airplane is coming from, how can my PC check this info if even the airline company can't? And does any of this check the road conditions? How about public transport? Does it KNOW whether I will be driving, a friend, a cab or I will be going by train?

Another one, language and subtitle choices. this should be trivial as long as everyone and every coded uses ISO encoding and then agrees on how many letters. Should be trivial, it isn't. Nobody can ever agree on someone elses standard.

Oh, your services are ALL going to MS supplied? Better hand in that iPhone then, just give it to me, I will take it off your hands. GIVE IT... geez, you expect a Windows 8 experience to work out of the box with iOS? No? Then what is the point.

We can't even get MS to smoothly discover various makers MP3 players. They going to bother with any services that don't pay through the nose for it and share all their data?

There is a reason we don't have integrated services that could power such a UI. The world is filled with individuals who all like to do things their own way. See Google and its chrome window that doesn't work the same as every other window on Linux.

This kind of UI is limitted to the movies where god, the writer, knows exactly what is going to be needed to get done next.

Citations and plagerism

[bussdriver]

The academic world worries about citations and plagiarism in their works but the commercial world never bothers or usually takes credit for others work as their own; the marketing departments go even further.

We (the community) should be pointing out and calling BS to this heavily marketing driven society that has created a world in which smart people and educational institutions lack their due respect as the true innovators and instead we are told to worship the mighty corporations; its no wonder so many Americans are anti-intellectual and pro-corporation -- they see new technologies like this Microsoft PR and think Microsoft "innovated" all that stuff when I didn't see anything there that they innovated other than perhaps the bubble thing which they didn't show much of (and I likely just missed some paper somebody did on the concept 10+ years ago.)

Re:Citations and plagerism

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Everything Apple's done was done by Microsoft and others long before Apple did them, and everything any of the companies of today have done appear in Leonardo DaVinci's notes or in some science fiction novel. We need to put a stop to all the plagiarists' implementations of the things we've been dreaming about for centuries, and we especially need to put a stop to Apple's "innovations". My favorite "innovation" is the clone of Handango as an "app store". I also like the scroll wheel on the iPod (which is similar to the scroll wheel on my Kensington Expert Mouse).

Actually, my favorite of all was the ripoff of Xerox's GUI. Apple scum like to pretend that what they saw at Xerox was half-baked, but the videos prove that the GUIs we use today are essentially the same as Xerox's down to the context menus. And OSX is a ripoff of BSD.

So basically, everything Apple has done or will ever do is a ripoff of Microsoft or Xerox or Kensington or Handango or the mp3 player makers who preceded Apple by many years, and all research and development and production of everything needs to cease because someone during the past 10,000 years has imagined just about everything that'll ever be implemented.

Let's just all agree that that Dick guy is the only one allowed to invent anything because presumably he's had at least one original idea.

Re:Citations and plagerism

[Ltap]

h.264 is a good example of this. The compression algorithms were mostly developed by academics. I recall hearing one gloating startup exec who had got a piece of the h.264 pie talking about how he had "monetized" a particular video compression algorithm. In his mind it was him who deserved the money for selling it, not the academics for inventing it. After all, they might have released this important technology for free and for everyone to use rather than adding it to the witches' brew of the MPEG-LA patent pool! You know... "Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble..."

Re:Citations and plagerism

[thoughtsatthemoment]

They added it to the pool because they used patented technology already in there. If only they could invent a way to fry the fish without using the pan.

KISS

[woboyle]

These are people who have obviously never heard of the KISS principle... Yet they will force these new user interfaces upon the world at a huge cost, to that world. As much as I dislike Apple's business practices, I have tremendous respect for their interface designers. As far as I'm concerned, MS failed that class.

who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

eagerly awaited? you sound like a MS marketing flack. nobody is eagerly awaiting windows 8. what could any new version possibly have to offer other than lobotomizing your dual 6 core machine that seemed fast last week before you installed windows 8.

Building a more annoying interface

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason Windows was so elegant is text is laid out in rectangles. All bubbles do is make poorer use of the screen real estate. Now that we finally have screens that can display text properly and on some monitors even multiple pages properly you want to eat up most of the screen with graphics??? Microsoft is famous for system bloat and now they are tackling the last frontier with screen bloat. What's next 250 key keyboards? Hey why don't we add keys for capital letters! I don't need more crap on the screen I need it organized efficiently. I'm still annoyed they fucked with a perfectly good filing system. It was the one thing they had that blew away Mac. At least Mac when they do something like this, say widgets, they stick with rectangular shapes. I'd be far more excited about multiple customizable tool bars. Make them optional for the love of God but give us top, bottom and side tool bars and add in those lovely expanding menus Mac has in Snow Leopard for displaying open files. That would be efficient and not bloated. Just make the tool bars go away and expand when moused over and no lost real estate. The problem is OS makers worry about the OS not how people work and use them. The very best OS is one you barely notice. It should work seamlessly with the software.

Re:Building a more annoying interface

[JamesTRexx]

Excuse me? Finally screens that display text properly? Only on high end laptops and monitors but not on the vast majority of retail equipment with their HD formatting.
We sell used monitors (ex-lease) because they have decent vertical resolutions to use with text.
Try to get a decent laptop with screen real estate and you pay big bucks.

But I agree with taking away useful space by screen bloat. I get irritated every time I open the event viewer on Vista and 7 because the current version wastes so much blank space (not to mention the useless action pane).

Not that impressed

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

While MS have been mucking about with concepts, Apple have actually added real and useful features to their next OS upgrade.

Re:Not that impressed

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

If Windows has versioning and autosave built into the OS, then they haven't made it easy to use, because it's the first I've heard about it. And since when does your average user run VMS? Program manager is not that different to shortcuts in a folder, IIRC. LauchPad has a very different GUI, and it's the details that matter here. And what about the other features?

Apple does the only real innovation that average users actually notice and appreciate.

A Steve Jobs copy?

[JoeCommodore]

Didn't it look like the guy was trying for that Steve Jobs look?

Re:A Steve Jobs copy?

[Sponge Bath]

"Didn't it look like the guy was trying for that Steve Jobs look?"

You're right, he does look like a condescending douchebag.

Ideas without apps

[JoeCommodore]

Like most of the other MS innovations of late, they seem to have a lot of very cool ideas, bit not really any great apps that utilize them.

Looks like Prezi.com applied to the OS interface

[Anonymous Coward]

At first blush, that looks an awful like like the paradigm behind the presentation software the Prezi guys have championed (www.prezi.com). Seems like it can be a really effective model for presenting information so it *might* be pretty cool for an interface, too, assuming you prefer GUIs. I hope those guys got paid well for the use of their IP.

On the other hand, I'm kind of in the same camp as some of the Linux guys. (I don't use it at home yet, but I'm thinking about it.) Windows Vista and Windows 7 kind of pushed me over the edge--2+ GB of RAM just to boot the OS, for crying out loud?! I'm having a hard time buying into that model and I'm having a hard time believing that this new interface is going to reduce that trend.

Party poopers, the lot of you.

[gfizeek]

A bunch of IT and linux curmudgeons poo poo a UI redesign? Shocker!

Maybe, just maybe, MS would like to recapture some of interest of the recreational users rather than the sticking to the grudging loyalty of the corporate machine while Apple scores all the oohs and ahhs. What fools! They should just re-release XP every few years to save everyone the hassle of figuring out how the new alt-tab works.

God, you guys are boring.

No...it ruined itself

[BonquiquiShiquavius]

Did you watch the video? I found the summary's weaknesses much more palatable than the ridiculously vague video in TFA, which was filled with corporate-speak, and showed off a bunch of interactivity projects without demonstrating how any of these would be used in real world applications, let alone how they would improve the way we currently interact with computers.

Re:No...it ruined itself

[blincoln]

Did you watch the video? There were plenty of examples of how the interfaces would be used in real-world applications:

Walk around an object, letting your camera take pictures at intervals, and the software builds a 3D model of the object for you that can be examined from any angle on a touchscreen by swiping around.

Take a picture with your camera, place the camera on a Surface device, and it automatically transfers the photos to the larger system for display.

Interact with a 3D UI using simple geometric physical objects placed on a Surface-type device, while wearing 3D shutter glasses that overlay an augmented reality-style view on top of those simple objects.

Use a Kinect as a facial puppet-controller, so your online avatar has facial expressions similar to yours and lip-syncs as you speak.

Etc. The Kinect stuff is probably already in use with that product.

I don't know that I'd want any of these UI concepts on a desktop workstation, but I like a lot of them for phones and Surface-style tabletop devices that are supposed to be more like appliances and less like traditional workstations. I just hope MS have realized that it's OK to have *different* UIs for different classes of device, instead of trying to force one UI on all of them, like they did when they made Windows CE/Mobile/Phone/Tablet.

Re:No...it ruined itself

[BonquiquiShiquavius]

Actually, I think your post does a great job of reinforcing the point I was trying to make. All the examples you cite are kinda cool little projects in themselves, but why are these game changers? All I saw was a bunch of half baked UI projects, but how do they come together to significantly improve the way we interact with computers?

To cite an opposite example, take similar Apple PR videos. I'm no Apple fan, and own no Apple products, but I can't ever remember watching a promo video from them and not grasping the point right away. It is immediately apparent why they consider their product/feature to be a game changer.

Not the case with this video. I'll admit there were a couple "neat" moments, but between the half baked projects, the recycling of features they have been showing off for years (e.g. Surface), and the ability of the narrator to make zero points while prattling on for over three minutes ("we're ready for the future" How? "By having a vision" What fucking vision?), I was left with a big fat "SO WHAT"?

Re:No...it ruined itself

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly what I felt. Especially the vagueness and the corporate-speak aspects of the video. I kept waiting for him to say "and here's how this is better than before in a word processor" and be blown away by a unique idea implemented in a clever way. And that didn't happen.

Re:No...it ruined itself

[egranlund]

I agree with you - this video had nothing new that I hadn't seen in their countless other Surface videos.

It was radical and new in 2006

[l0ungeb0y]

Yeah, it was radical and new in 2006, before the iPhone came out with a multitouch display.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89sz8ExZndc&feature=player_embedded#at=61

Once again, MS is talking about how bleeding edge they are and showing off half a decade old tech.
While that may be radical and cutting edge for MS, it'd be hilarious if it weren't so sad.

Let the fun begin

[Anonymous Coward]

who did they steal it from? I am sure that other companies/individuals will soon be coming forward with loads of proof that MS stole something else.

Message to Apple

[Computershack]

Dear Apple...
This is what you do when you release a new version. You don't just release one that looks pretty much the same as the previous 6 versions but with a different wallpaper.
Dear Ubuntu... Please take note of the above.

Re:Message to Apple

[RazorSharp]

Obviously this is the reason for all of Apple's hardship as of late.

Knowledge Navigator?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd still rather have this kind of interface, as shown in video.

Sell your MS stock now

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft just "jumped the shark" . Looks like they are putting to good use the hackers work on their Kinect and making something that looks like a Wii game.

too mancy changes

[josepha48]

If you look at mac, they did it once and have made improvements but the UI has not changed much over time. Even since prior os x. People get used to the way it works and it woks fine.

MS changes each os release, people get confused and some people need retraining on it. I don't see the benefits in all their changes. It just confuses people.

MSR is actually pretty good.

[Anonymous Coward]

For all it's shortcomings, Microsoft Research is actually a brilliant research organisation. They work on implementing technologies many, many years ahead of the time. For instance, the amazing touch screen which Apple keeps getting credit about, MSR had the product much before them. Too bad they didn't ship it.

I applied for a position at the Speech and Natural Language division, but didn't get through. :(

Already done, and useless...

[HalAtWork]

This doesn't sound like a "radical new UI", more like re-thinking widgets, or just simply getting rid of the classic monolithic application and providing the user with a deluge of specific-task-oriented programs. It's just bringing apps that we know from mobile phones (i.e. specific software for specific functions) to the desktop. Which we already have, it's called "widgets," and apart from the weather one, nobody uses them anyway. We also have it on the browser, in the form of iGoogle and Yahoo's main page, and others. Will starting a new activity on your computer require you to sift through a ton of different titles, or to start selecting keywords to narrow down what you want to do? In Windows, you already have a search feature on the Start menu, but do you want to start using that for everything you do? Or will you use voice detection and start shouting out keywords? Good for a kiosk, but kinda lame for the desktop.

In the article, they mention: "Bubbles are auto-generated in various categories (personal, entertainment, gaming, etc.) and can also be created by a user." So that means they provide you with a bunch of default activities, and you can also create your own... but does that mean you have to start choosing what functionality you want and then specify the workflow to tie together that functionality? That sounds like too much work for the average user, and it's getting close to programming.

"Clicking on a bubble brings up a program or interaction item. For example clicking on a bubble for an upcoming flight will display alternate flight times with weather-based probability for delays. Users could use the interface to switch their flight, should the desire."

You could do that pretty easily on a web browser... Same with email, looking up news. Apart from some weird concept art, they're not really showing anything radically new or advantageous.

Change not always good...

[CFBMoo1]

My mother is the farthest thing from computer literate that I am with her horse riding interests. While I could adapt to this interface grudgingly with all my computer experience she'd be blown out of the water trying to find anything or how to do anything. It was bad enough getting her from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Not about Windows 8

[hcdejong]

The link at the end of the video is to the Microsoft Research website, where they explain most of what you see in the video. The 'bubbles' talked about in TFS don't appear there though.

Re:Not about Windows 8

[roc97007]

Agreed. To think that any of this will find it's way into Windows 8, or 9, or 10, is optimistic at best.

Drop the bubbles and just copy OS X Lion

[dirkdodgers]

This is wildly unexciting. Want to build excitement about an OS, Microsoft? In my opinion at this point in MS's life the best thing is to go back to the playbook and lift some ideas from Apple.

Launchpad: An overlay of application launch icons right, sorted how I want them, just like on your mobile device. Not buried in menus or folders. Proven interface. Just give me a touch screen in my macbook now.

More Gestures: Unlike Windows that ships to most users on 2nd and 3rd rate hardware with a USB two button mouse, OS X ships on high quality hardware with an amazing multitouch gesture pad, or available to desktop and home theatre users via the bluetooth magic trackpad. Windows will continue to be built for the least common denominator hardware until MS gets a clue.

Air Drop: Finally. Transferring files between devices without cables and without a fucking "Sync Wizard"

Built-in Version Control: Finally. Integrated RCS for your documents at no cost to you in a consumer OS. Yes, its been done on Linux but never this end user friendly and never this well integrated.

Resume on Reboot: Finally. Done right in a consumer OS. Yes it was done on Unix 20 years ago, but application support for it on Linux was mostly allowed to fall into disrepair over the years where application state really wasn't saved as part of your session. No more spending 20 minutes to get all applications and windows back how they were after work after rebooting for a security patch or turning it back on after being packed away for a trip.

Mission Control: Better than Expose, task bar, and alt+tab combined. No MS, stacking task bar windows is not an improvement.

Re:Drop the bubbles and just copy OS X Lion

[Anonymous Coward]

Resume on Reboot: Finally. Done right in a consumer OS. Yes it was done on Unix 20 years ago, but application support for it on Linux was mostly allowed to fall into disrepair over the years where application state really wasn't saved as part of your session. No more spending 20 minutes to get all applications and windows back how they were after work after rebooting for a security patch or turning it back on after being packed away for a trip.

Windows 7 already does this, and apps which support whatever API is behind it work with it. I know off of the top of my head that Firefox and Word do it, as over the last few weeks I've taken a few updates that need restarts, and when I click restart, word quits without even asking me to save, firefox quits as well, and the system just reboots, and as soon as I log back in my word document and my firefox session with all of my tabs are sitting there waiting for me.

I've had this happen three times since I installed SP1 (installed it on the 11th when it first hit RTM) and twice I just needed to click restart and everything closed and reopened automatic. One time though I had a text file I changed in notepad, and I had to tell it to save before the restart happened. Not a big deal.

Re:Drop the bubbles and just copy OS X Lion

[caywen]

Oh, but Windows 8 will indeed have huge UI improvements. For one thing, there will be more gradient fills. And, the desktop wallpapers now can have different transitions between them! And incredibly, the Start menu will now *slide* in. This is going to change your life, I'm telling you.

Re:Drop the bubbles and just copy OS X Lion

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

You forgot the improvements to the Blue Screen of Death. Now it is not simple plain blue. No siree bob. It is going to be an opalescent iridescent luminescent effervescent phosphorescent incandescent fluorescent electric coruscant Blue screen of death!

Re:Drop the bubbles and just copy OS X Lion

[Tuan121]

Launchpad: An overlay of application launch icons right, sorted how I want them, just like on your mobile device. Not buried in menus or folders. Proven interface. Just give me a touch screen in my macbook now.

There is nothing buried in menus or folders if you don't want it that way.

More Gestures: Unlike Windows that ships to most users on 2nd and 3rd rate hardware with a USB two button mouse, OS X ships on high quality hardware with an amazing multitouch gesture pad, or available to desktop and home theatre users via the bluetooth magic trackpad. Windows will continue to be built for the least common denominator hardware until MS gets a clue.

Yes, everyone must be forced to buy high quality hardware instead of being able to buy a ridiculously cheap Dell or whatever that does what they need.

Built-in Version Control: Finally. Integrated RCS for your documents at no cost to you in a consumer OS. Yes, its been done on Linux but never this end user friendly and never this well integrated.

You mean like in Windows where you right click on the file and then go to "Previous Versions"?

No more spending 20 minutes to get all applications and windows back how they were after work after rebooting for a security patch or turning it back on after being packed away for a trip.

Please oh please explain how it takes you 20 minutes to get your applications restarted. When I reboot Windows 7 (which I do maybe once every other month- yes, it is extremely stable but I'm sure you don't believe that) any applications I normally use are at the bottom and I click a few times to open whatever I need...

No MS, stacking task bar windows is not an improvement.

Yes, it is. See how that argument works?

Re:Drop the bubbles and just copy OS X Lion

[Anonymous Coward]

Half the stuff you mentioned had to do with hardware, not software, even if Windows included better touch support that wouldn't help anything if Acer forgoes the better touchpad so it can make a profit off a $200 laptop.

And have you ever heard of hibernation?

Mod Parent Up

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the main issue here. Interoperability.

I could make a nice flashy UI prototype, that's not the hard bit.

Making a UI prototype and then spouting your dream computer system is just pathetic.

Show us some AI that interprets a protocol it's never seen before from a device it's never heard of...

Re:Mod Parent Up

[dirkdodgers]

Why is interoperability so important? You're putting the cart before the horse.

Let's figure out where we can go and where we want to go, and only then worry about standardizing to let competitors and the little guys play.

But why should we wait for competitors and the little guys? Let's go now. Let's standardize later once the state of the art is a commodity.

bullshit

[FuckingNickName]

I remember when the WIMP GUI was so new that everyone had to be trained in it. Now older users have been trained and younger users have been brought up with it, so it seems natural. If you did the same thing with a decent command line, you'd end up with every moderately educated person being a wizard on the command line too. Put another way, computers didn't become popular because of Windows but because of DOS. The Mac, despite its "for the rest of us" tagline and mature GUI way before Microsoft's offering, wasn't the machine everyone ended up buying.

I used to think that computers needed some natural UI. One of my earlier academic projects in the '90s involved all the bullshit with the spinning 3D objects which you could open/close/put under/otherwise manipulate, and I thought I was so clever. Now I'm seeing this sort of thing attempt to reach mainsteam and actually look quite fluid, and I think the same thing now as I concluded back then: it's not worth a miniscule reduction in learning curve to be so restricted and drowned by eye candy. Contrary to popular belief, most people have wonderful brains which can accept new instruction and traning to a good old age. All they have to do is think and concentrate a little, and they'd be much better off with a powerful interface rather than a "natural" interface.

Of course there's a balance, and nothing inordinately hard to learn will ever reach mainstream. But look to a few hundred years ago and even reading and writing was regarded as something that only the elite could do. Yet at some point we managed to unify the planet on the notion that being able to read and write is a reasonable goal for everyone without serious physical or mental difficulties. Why must we dumb things down again?

You can have my command line

[RightwingNutjob]

when you pry it from under my cold dead fingers!

If I wanted to interact with bubbles...

[Diesel Dave]

...I'd eat taco bell and sit in the bathtub.

Media Appliance

[nurb432]

This makes it look like Microsoft is trying to move towards being just another media content provider and drop the 'business' market.

Of cousre there might still be a more traditional desktop for people who actually use computers for work...

Re:This works, if EVERYTHING is streamline, the wo

[dirkdodgers]

I'm going to disagree.

If sticking to a small set of Microsoft endorsed products is what it takes for them to deliver that kind of integrated experience, then I want them to go for it. Because the alternative is not being able to offer it at all in the next 3 years.

Everyone's still trying to figure out what the right ecosystem of devices, products, and services is. Until that comes together, and in order to innovate, big companies or tight networks of partners are going to have to deliver top to bottom ecosystems themselves and not worry about whether Manufacturer X or App Developer Y are going to come to the party. Don't wait for Sony and HP to agree. Don't wait for Walmart's house brand television to support your vision.

If Microsoft can offer this, then I'm happy to go out and buy a Microsoft phone, tablet, laptop, htpc, router, and cloud services.

But right now Apple looks nearest. Although Aitrix looks like the start of something important.

regular people will never get to touch it

[roc97007]

My first impression watching the film is that (circular) bubbles don't stack very well, (too much unused real estate) but let's assume this is the greatest thing since sliced milk. It might be. The Surface group have done some really innovative stuff.

Based on past experience, the chances of these concepts making it into Windows in any meaningful way are practically nil. You'll see this stuff in episodes of Hawaii Five-O and other TV shows that have a technical aspect, but it'll never make it off Surface, and Surface will never make it to the rank and file. It's too bad, really.

I don't even think it's a technical issue. The issue I suspect is that the people managing and promoting the Windows code base are very strong and very ingrained within Microsoft, and this regulates really innovative stuff like this to expensive specialized applications. And dazzling effects on film and tv.

How does this help my work day?

[stimpleton]

I bash out docs and code. How will this not make things worse.

From the video, all I could think of was a severe case of gorilla arm..

From wikipedia: "Designers of touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans are not designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized—the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen "

Re:How does this help my work day?

[tsa]

Try to write on a board and make neat characters. You have to be a teacher with lots of experience to be able to do that.

Re:This works, if EVERYTHING is streamline, the wo

[urusan]

I think you're missing the point. The article is completely speculative and the video is basically about Microsoft's AI research. The guy in the video is talking about making systems that can adapt to the very problems you are talking about.

For instance, a dumb system will just give you an error when the filetype is wrong and stop there. An intelligent system on the other hand can decide that it needs to look at the file more deeply to determine what type it really is (using something like the Unix command "file") and then act on this information. We don't even need a particularly smart system to do something like this.

As for collection of unknown information needed for decision making, there's the same kinds of sources that humans use. Much pertinent information is available in standard formats online. The machine may have its own sensors to collect data. Oh, and of course the device can just ask the user, which is needed for details like which basic method the user plans to get to their destination.

Will MS try to lock us in? Sure. Will they exploit open sources of information while making their own sources impossible to use without their products? Probably. Will there be problems and mistakes? Of course. Is the idea of incorporating AI into a UI to make it easier to use ahead of its time? Maybe. Are these problems insurmountable? No. Maybe it won't be MS, but one day machines will be able to navigate most if not all of the hazards you've laid out...and in fact the idea laid out in the video is to attack these very problems head on.

Bubbles...

[Anonymous Coward]

...blows.

MS Bashing Ala Carte

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheesh. I've been reading Slashdot for most of it's life and for those years have been using Linux, OSX and Windows for those periods in various capacities professionally.

Windows 7 is a very good operating system. We're still waiting for desktop Linux to make any kind of tiny dent in the Desktop World, but due to interoperability problems with the various versions of *everything* it makes it difficult if not impossible to acheive anywhere near the fairly seamless integration that the commercial offerings have. Windows 7 is preferable to both desktop Linux and OSX if you want the most versatility in attempting to actually get... something... done... on the desktop.

Sure you can try to do it on Linux, but depending on what the need is, your luck will vary. Sure there's a bazillion apps available of varying qualities for Linux, and Ubuntu does an OK job of attempting to eat the universe while not blowing up. Sometimes it works.

Windows 7 and OSX with it's more limited app range are almost always a better choice for the average user. In fact I can't think of one person, except a techy friend that I would recommend Linux to over Windows 7 or OSX if they preferred that.

Now Android... that's another story. Super-duper-coolness-scooper - but they don't give you root to your own computer phone... that's not good, but I understand where they are coming from.

The MS bashing that goes on in discussions at Slashdot gets very old after years and years, even after Microsoft has changed a lot of their game, and Windows 7 is just plain good. People theorizing on what the next UI for Windows will be, then complaining about the possibly problems with something that doesn't exist? The 3D stuff is in Microsoft Research. Do you think everyone is suddenly going out and buying the special experimental displays they have?

Blind assumptions built on top of blind assumptions, fueled by bias. I became operating system agnostic years ago after Ubuntu didn't, in my mind, fulfil it's calling. When you look at available OSs with a neutral eye, you begin to see what's really useful and what's not. I've learned that words as to why Linux rulez are not sufficient. It's not a religion, it's a bunch of 1s and 0s.

Whooppeee

[MightyMartian]

Active Desktop meets Workplace Shell

No thanks

[bobjr94]

I have 2 24" monitors and sit about 2 feet back, it would be a pain to try to use a touch screen interface

Pull my finger

[Anonymous Coward]

Pull my finger and you'll hear the sound system that MIGHT be used in Windows 8!!!

Seriously, this post has as much credibility as TFA. One picture and a video about Surface, which MS has been pimping forever, but never went anywhere with it.

(CAPTCHA: contempt. how appropriate.)

Copy *.IT *.MSFT /v MSFT_Innovation.DOC

[VennData]

dir ... 02/26/1991 01:49 PM 1024 MSFT_Innovation.DOC 02/26/2008 01:49 PM 1024 MSFT_Innovation.DOC 02/26/2009 01:49 PM 1024 MSFT_Innovation.DOC 02/26/2010 01:49 PM 1024 MSFT_Innovation.DOC 02/26/2011 01:49 PM 1024 MSFT_Innovation.DOC

And I still...

[stealth_finger]

...have no desire to 'upgrade' from xp.

People always hate change

[Dails]

I remember when Leopard came out I saw no end of forum threads about how much people hated the little softly glowing white spot under running applications. "I WANT MY BLACK TRIANGLE BACK." So many hacks to get that done, so many workarounds, so many complaints about how dumb it was. The fact is that it looks way, way better. The only reason people didn't want it was because it was different. Complain about change all you want, but it's almost always a caveman-level knee-jerk without any real thought or experience.

Grrrrrrr

[BudAaron]

The poster has a severe case of rectal caranial inversion. And with Microsoft bashers, flamers, trolls and all the others making mostly useless comments I found it necessary to write a blog here. http://geekswithblogs.net/GGBlogger/Default.aspx Craig Mundie is simply pointing out potential futures for end user interfaces. There is NO WAY this is going to be the LOOK of Windows 8. It will evolve over time as computing hardware gets more powerful and less expensive but folks I think we're stuck with the mouse, keyboard and non-touch displays for another 10 years.

whoosh: the dissection of a joke.

[mevets]

andrea noted that the interface was: .... nice to watch but utterly useless.
which inspired maird to assert:
There is the proof....

You see, maird was saying that the demonstration of something pretty but useless stands as proof that its in the new Windows. The implication is that Windows releases have been dominated by attractive, but worthless items.

By responding to andreas comment with this statement, maird successfully introduced a discontinuity, which the reader may perceive as a delightful surprise, sometimes reacting with laughter. In the traditional world, where this discourse may have occurred around a fire, Mairds companions may have slapped him affectionately on the back, making cooing sounds about wittiness and "bons mots". In this disconnected world "+5 funny" is the depressing equivalent.

Some interpret the delightful surprise as a confusing consternation; often spurning an irrepressible desire to resolve the ambiguity. While this activity in itself is also quite funny, it is more the sad kind of funny.

Re:whoosh: the dissection of a joke.

[sznupi]

Sarcasm?

Nokia Beta Labs bubbles

[Anonymous Coward]

Check this also, please.

http://betalabs.nokia.com/apps/nokia-bubbles

Not exactly that original regarding Nokia Beta Labs already demonstrated the same on Symbian.

Christ on a stick!

[Legal.Troll]

Will there be an expensive third-party mod I can use to preserve the traditional GUI scheme that's been working great for me since roughly 1989? As much fun as a giant re-learning project sounds, I'm a bit busy this decade.

Rubbish video

[tsa]

That was the most useless video I have ever seen. What does this guy want to get across? Who are his intended audience? I lost him after about 5 seconds because he was only talking bullshit.

Microsoft Bob 2?

[gilesjuk]

Didn't they learn from Microsoft Bob?

Have you noticed cars all have a similar interface, pedals, steering wheels and so on. There's a good reason for that, it works and people are familiar with it.

Re:Microsoft Bob 2?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? What about controls for: Drive/Reverse, 1-6 speed shift, windshield wipers, high-beams, cruise control, radio, mp3, navigation/GPS, heat, air conditioning, mirrors, seat heaters, steering wheel heaters, fog lights, backup camera, etc?

My freaking new car doesn't even have a key anymore!

Re:Microsoft Bob 2?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well every once in a while somebody invents a car with a joystick or other different interface.

Where's the video showing off that interface?

[he-sk]

All I see is Craig Mundie talking about how great the stuff is they have in their lab. But no demo!

Straight to Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

We have 10 XP machines on site, the new box that is being delivered next week with Win 7 is going to be wiped clean and have Fedora 14 installed as will all other computers that come after it. Problem solved.

One hand doesn't know about the other

[Anonymous Coward]

If you know anything about how Microsoft's internal politics work (see: fiefdom), you'll know that whatever MSR comes up with, cool as it may be, will not be the basis for Windows 8.

New UI? Sure. New UI from MSR? Doubtful. It's like "not invented here" syndrome, where MSFT is multiple companies competing with itself.

perhaps I have said too much

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard bubbles are the next 'big thing' in tech.

Wow. Windows + Kinect = Windows 8. SNORE!

[Chas]

Seriously. While some of the stuff looks cool, most of it wildly impractical for every day actual use.

Anyone remember the old Microsoft demo of speech recognition?

Dear Microsoft

[grasshoppa]

Stop moving things around or radically changing the interface. STOP. You are a business OS, and businesses like known costs...not having to retrain their employees every couple years because you want to be "new" and "different".

Speaking of which, when you include a "classic" interface, it's recommended to actually be "classic". As in, "from previous versions". Classic does not mean "different from the default". When I select classic, I somehow expect to find icons where they were, not a wildly different interface from before. Call me crazy.

all this has been said before

[Weedhopper]

blah blah blah metaphor shear blah blah blah documents blah desktops blah "files" blah blah blah butter churning blah blah automobiles blah path lock blah.....

Until someone comes up with a better metaphor for interactions on a two dimensional screen that most people understand on an intuitive level, we're stuck with what we've got.

On the whole, there aren't a lot of metaphors that are on the whole better than the desktop metaphor for what we have in terms of human interface devices.

Re:all this has been said before

[TwistedPants]

I'll take a zooming user interface on the desktop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface) - this already works quite well for things like google maps (more zoom = more information); I can see it working well for other things as well. I'm talking more about Jef Raskin's archy mockups rather than the current smartphone ZUI controls we get; which simply make text bigger without having other content available.

Re:all this has been said before

[am 2k]

In my opinion, the "single purpose device"-metaphor of iOS devices is a pretty neat new idea, and accepted to work very well in the broad public.

I'm not that sure that it works for desktop machines though, but we'll find out in summer when Mac OS X Lion is released.

Re:all this has been said before

[sznupi]

Maps are a special case - they are basically fixed (yes, they do change; nowhere often enough for that to matter in interaction), each and every one instance essentially the same; mapping to our movements, to environment. I can see how building general UI as ZUI will make hunting positions in menus and option dialogs look good.

Re:all this has been said before

[sznupi]

"new idea"?...

Re:all this has been said before

[am 2k]

Well, newer than the desktop metaphor, as far as I know. Not that anything of that is really new.

Re:all this has been said before

[sznupi]

Maybe quite the contrary. Not only early word processors (at least early DTP or CAD/CAM systems were certainly similar) can be seen a bit like that (even if "fixed") - most importantly, don't forget how in the early days (8-bit home computers, DOS, also Amiga apps to large extent) it was quite typical for an application to "take over"

Closer to home - also so called "feature phones"? Most / all of the UI always tended to disappear after loading some j2me app.

No reason to change at all..

[Paracelcus]

From XP, period!
MS keeps trying to sell "newness" for "newness" sake!
It'll just make me boot into Debian or open SUSE.

Cannot wait to say...

[dmomo]

Windows 8 my pc

Answer

[Adam Appel]

Lawyers and patents. Sad but probably true.

Microsoft and "Radical" is ALWAYS terrible

[dafing]

I personally dont like the "bubbles" idea, I dont like Sony's NGP things icon scheme, seems like wasted space. If you wanted to go "hey, lets make something people are used to, have used every day of their life radically different, wacky!", why not use triangles instead? Have them fit together like scales when you're "multitasking", able to be spun out of view or not, and easily detached. Much nicer than "bubbles". But thats a personal opinion, perhaps just societal norms, what I'm used to, square or rectangular windows.

Poor, poor Microsoft. Everything they do turns to shit. I especially HATE when they try and act "edgy", or "cool", dude, you're not cool, ok? You're a older bald guy, bouncing about the stage screaming "developers developers developers" with pit stains. If they handled these "radical new ideas" in a more mature way, surely they'd be more successful? Without all the FUD about competitors, "ho, that i-phoney, it'll never sell, its too expensive! We're going to be aggressive with our ZUNE and really compete in the market..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U&feature=related

UGH! "Zune", what were they thinking? It "squirted" too, perhaps little "bubbles". You know, the Zune? Came in poo brown? In the like, one country it was available in, before JUST coming out in Canada, who share a border? And is not Mac compatible, ha, because it would have been a great idea for Apple to be Mac only with that little "i-pod" thing, right? When you're the underdog, and in Microsofts case, almost universally hated, why bother making a tiny effort that could really change your critics into customers?

Look at the shadows cast on the Surface, who the hell wants that, the detail obscured with wriggly dark shapes? Your fingers, your own body is one thing, but odd, quickly moving shadows? And putting your phone on a glass surface all the time? Who wants to do that? I generally prefer keeping my phone in my pocket, rather than leaving it on some souped up coffee table. Think of the stress over time, and you just KNOW people will be dropping their devices onto Surface all the time, scratches, chips, shattered glass, its going to happen.

The most glaring example of the The Typical Microsoft Frig Up is the URL shown at the end of that video, no kidding,

"microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/RethinkingComputing"

You gotta be kidding me! Why not just use goddamn bit.ly Microsoft, or havnt you guys heard of that yet? "but, if you had a Zune, we coulda "squirted" it to you all! Wanna buy a Zune????"

No thank you.

Nice troll, but let's slap it anyway.

[Penguinisto]

One small problem with your post:

From a business standpoint, a revenue stream of $30-100 dollars per update per machine every 6-months seems better strategic plan to me than $100-150 per new OS per machine every 2-3 years. Perhaps Microsoft should take more than just UI design ideas from Apple and the linux distros.

Every six months?

You could've been less obvious with your trolling, especially when one considers that OSX 10.6 came out in 2009, 10.5 came out in 2007, 10.4 came out in *2005*, and 10.3 came out in 2003. Come to think of it, it's the same timetable that Windows used to keep (until that long hiatus between XP and Vista).

That's some screwball "every 6-months" schedule you got there, sport. ;)

Re:Nice troll, but let's slap it anyway.

[Narnie]

Sorry, did not do my homework. *removes head from ass*

Anyway, the point was consistent smaller updates at a lower prices is more financially stable than large updates at infrequent intervals. Especially when the users initially resist adoption.

Hopefully, Vista was a positive learning lesson for Microsoft and they keep the releases closer together, consistent, and keep the UI close enough to the previous versions to keep from having to retrain the user base. I'd sincerely hate to see Microsoft fail, because then I'd need to find another OS vendor to troll.

Drop OS X Lion and just use Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

Come oooon! This is Slashdot, right? Why the hell would you need bubbles, some funky pad or icons when you have a keyboard? Don't you know that the command line is the only true way to digital salvation?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:This works, if EVERYTHING is streamline, the wo

[Anonymous Coward]

"I might well end up drinking spoiled milk trusting that my intelligent home would have warned me."

Let's make computers intelligent, knowledgeable, and ubiquitous so people aren't bothered with the pesky hassle of having to think.
I bet we could even balance the budget by firing all those unnecessary and greedy teachers!

What's that? People are already blindly following their navigation systems? Teachers are getting laid off by the thousands?

We're well on our way to UTOPIA!!!!

yay

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

So much hatred

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, so everyone complains that Microsoft "never innovates". And here's a team trying to do *something* different, and all you can do is hate, hate, hate.

My...my buttons!

[OwP_Fabricated]

*smugly posts about Linux/Unix/OSX*

*Doesn't understand a pretty simple UI change that just moves some buttons around*

*unironically complains about it on Slashdot*

Please ditch the avatars

[Sirusjr]

I realize advancement is important and all but could we please get rid of the ugly avatars that showed up with recent xbox updates? I don't want to be represented in a digital environment by such an ugly thing. Characters I created for online games years ago looked better than the avatars we have now on xbox.

Just wait

[mrwolf007]

And now, "bubbles"?

till the bubble bursts.

I hear thats what allways happens sooner or later.

Re:This works, if EVERYTHING is streamline, the wo

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with all points except the first:

$ ls
something.jpg
$ file something.jpg
something.jpg: JPEG image data, EXIF standard 2.2
$ mv something.jpg something.gif
$ file something.gif
something.gif: JPEG image data, EXIF standard 2.2

Extensions should have little to do with how the format of a file is determined.

Stealed from 3 month old QT/Linux N900 demo

[Anonymous Coward]

Look the video...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWawBt8cXVU

That is hideous

[rebelwarlock]

Is their user base sporting an average age of four now? Did we decide that rounded corners were too dangerous, or do users just giggle while they play with the round bubbles on screen? Have fun getting people to use that mess.

Got puke?

[justthinkit]

Did anyone else puke all over their monitor when they saw the screenshots for Windows Bubble, or what it just me?

All this is going to do

[Lanteran]

Is make getting your hands dirty with the command line a good deal harder.

Re:This works, if EVERYTHING is streamline, the wo

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer to first one is to use magic numbers: on linux, type file foo.jpe and it will still know if it is a jpeg. Most file formats except text have magic numbers. Even text can be identified using the file command.

It's ALIVE!

[Jerry]

It first appeared as Cairo, full of hope and LOTS of promises, but then it died.
With some PR electricity it was brought back to life as LongHorn, but then died again.
Now, with jumper cables from its baby brother, Win Phone 7, it gets another jolt of PR electricity.

But, alas, I fear this new re-incarnation of the perfect desktop/laptop/notebook/netbook/Dag will die just like the rest.... A touch screen laptop is out of their budget, so how many people can afford a 10 foot touch screen/scanner/camera? And, how many of those devices can any corporation afford to buy? CEO's aren't going to learn how to use them, since most of them don't even know how to use a laptop and Dag could never understand their corporate-speak.

Wii + iPhone = Microsoft???

[J-Haru]

Come on, this is one of the worlds largest technology companies, and their spokesman has the gull to come up with drivel like claims that they are now offering us a revolutions by providing, not tools, but "helpers"? And this all comes in the form of stolen Wii Avatars, and a ripped off iPhone touchpanel interface? It would be one thing if it was actually implemented well, but it appears to be a kludge that has been glued together with various other research that they are looking into. Did anyone see the episode of "The Wire" where they used a copy machine to as a "lie detector" to fool some kid into confessing? That is what this video looks like to me.

Re:This works, if EVERYTHING is streamline, the wo

[Anonymous Coward]

mplayer can figure out just about anything you throw at it, regardless of the name.

If a human do it, then a computer definitely can; humans are just computers.

Why not ...

[PPH]

... just call it the Eye of Sauron and be done with it.

Baseball bat ...

[RockDoctor]

Finally I see a good use for a baseball bat - beating the balls of MS GUI "designers" repeatedly while screaming at them "die you miserable fucking bastards, just fuck off and die and stop making people's lives harder and shittier"

In the unlikely event that there are any women who have whored themselves down from crack'ho to "MS GUI designer", then I'd have to modify the use of the baseball bat, probably involving 10cm nails. But to be honest, I'd expect most women to have more self respect than to lower themselves that far.

Oh, I'm glad that I dumped Windoze.

That reminds me ... portable LibreOffice yet? Seems so ; need that for the memory stick for work.

Fixing the wrong problem

[MichaelPenne]

To improve Windows, MS should make it stabler, make it faster, and more exploit proof, and for goodness sake actually implement W3C standards in IE.
Otherwise the UI of XP/Win7 is adequate, thats not the problem - the problems are:
1. It crashes frequently (compared to other modern OSs like MacOS and Linux),
2. IE is a huge timesink because of lack of full standards support (though in my last big web project, IE8 was almost not a problem).
3. It is tragically vulnerable to exploits
4. It requires an incredible amount of processor and ram to run - and doesn't seem to really do much more with all that hardware than NT did with much less.

Recently used folders

[Compaqt]

Win7 has a list of recently used folders?

Gnome devs, are you listening?

I want that, please. Normally, you're working with a number of projects during a week, or aspects of various projects. You don't necessary want to open up the same files you opened recently, but rather other files in those folders, or make new ones in those folders.

(Don't say "just code it yourself". Since opensource doesn't have testing labs like Microsoft, one of the most valuable things users can do is give their feedback.)

Re:Recently used folders

[hairyfeet]

Yes it does, and it is fricking brilliant! All you do is right click on the Explorer icon in the Task Bar and tada! There is a list of the last 10 folders you've accessed, no matter how deep in the file system, all listed by folder name. Lord you have NO idea how damned handy that is, when you need to get back to something you were working on the other day it is just click>>there it is. Man that is just wonderful!

I know you're a Linux guy but you should really try dual booting with 7 (you can get a 90 day trial of business for free at the MSFT website last I checked), it will change your mind about Windows and usability. And this is coming from a guy that hated XP's fisher price UI and absolutely loathed Vista. In fact I had already compiled a list of "how to make 7 act like classic" because I was THAT sure I'd hate it, but almost from the first day of Beta 2 I was like "Wow!" everything is SOOO much better and it all "just works".

All the little things just come together so it is all smooth and seamless, it makes it easy for both the noob and the long term users, it has a ton of easy to use tools like Windows DVD Maker, it is just soooo nice. You can burn MP3 data discs by just drag and drop in WMP 12, the breadcrumbs feature makes it trivial to drill several layers deep in ANY direction with a single click, the search feature built into ALL of the UI components makes finding anything trivial, it is rock solid stable (been pushing it hard since Beta 2 and not a single BSOD or lock up) and has to be the quickest and easiest to use OS I have ever used! After trying 7 you look at XP/Vista like being stuck on a Win9X machine, it is that far ahead.

But don't take my word for it, download the free trial and give it a run. Hell Windows has never been cheaper (you can get the family pack online for $100, that is $33 a piece for 3 installs) and if your hardware is less than 5 years old it will all "just work" without hassle. How they made an OS that is great for noobs while still being faster and easier for power users and those with PC experience I don't know, but it all "just works" and I won't be going back to XP, hell no!

Re:Recently used folders

[AmonTheMetalhead]

I still say it blows, the Quick Launch is gone, the taskbar & it's pinning mechanism blows, the UI does things like minimizing all apps when dragging a window in a specific way, there's no 'pin to top' option, you need a 3rd party app for such a simple functionality... It breaks my flow of work, forcing me to do things in two, three or more clicks while it used to be doable in one, sure it might look better then Windows95, but that doesn't make it better. I f'cking hate it.

Re:Recently used folders

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...you DO know you can go back to Win95 look and appearance if that is your cup o' tea Yes? Here is a handy list that gives you step by step on turning anything off you want and putting classic back if you really want Win98. Why you would want to go back I'll never know, but the nice thing about Windows is it can always be done!

But if you use the above list with Ultimate Windows Tweaker you can customize Win 7 to YOUR way of doing things in just a couple of clicks. like some things but not others? Keep what you like, toss what you don't. This isn't like Apple you know, where you don't get a choice. Hell turn everything off and go back to the Win98 GUI if that makes you happy!

Good for TV sets

[pmontra]

I don't think this new interface is good for writing documents or programs or for working in Excel. But it looks good for controlling a media center TV from the couch. Gesturing with hands at icons or bubbles (or whatever they'll be) should be easier than using a 100 buttons remote. So I don't believe this interface will replace the desktop metaphor for doing office work but it might be good for about everything else. Maybe they'll find a way to make Windows 8 a double-interface (task oriented?) system. More likely this stuff will find its way only into Windows 9 or 10 or some special purpose device (XBox, TV, etc).

Microsoft's business model is under threat

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has a severe problem regarding two of it's main products: the operating system itself and Office.

Unless Microsoft can carry out some genuine innovations to these products, there is simply no reason for people to buy new versions. Either they will retain the older versions, or use open source ones. Microsofts answer to the lack of real improvements to these products has been to mess around with the user interface.
It may well be that by many important metrics these new interfaces are better, but the hassle of having to learn a new interface, along with the likelihood of it changing again in a couple of years time, is likely to be an experience that many customers will be happy to pass up.

It strikes me as very unlikely that Microsoft are going to hit the jackpot again as they did with Windows. I'm sure they'll still produce software, but they may have to get used to some serious downsizing.

Check out this Treknobabble in the comments

[Travoltus]

"Anonymous said...
in short: "Microsoft is in an optimal position to enable 'something' that may be 'better' in the 'future'"
Great now if only they could leverage the cloud to seamlessly align an integrated, next-generation dynamic response user experience ensuring a paradigm shift in cost-effective best practices while maximizing ROI. "

WTF!!! Can someone gimme the universal translator rendition of that?

Re:This works, if EVERYTHING is streamline, the wo

[Anonymous Coward]

MS research realizes Gates dream of the subscription OS.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, pay MS for that never ending beta OS v.+ 1.

I half expected something like DOS ...

[Lazy Jones]

... then I clicked on the link and saw something that looked like a mediocre Winamp skin. Not as good, but still quite funny.

'Natural' BS

[damnfuct]

All of these statements of "natural" interfaces are garbage. There's nothing more natural in touching a monitor to control a cursor than there is using chopsticks to hold a fork. If we could manage to achieve a functional BCI (brain-computer interface, and not the scalp-electrode-based systems), then all these touch devices would be considered crude and simplistic. Everyone's vision of the future is always touch-screen tables or white rooms with floaty transparent screens that people touch to navigate menus; it just reminds me of the same in-the-box thinking when imagining how 2010 would be like to people in 1940. Touch screens are great for moving a zoomed-in picture or finger-painting, but not much more. If we could directly use our brains to control computers (moving objects like moving your arms/hands, writing messages like speaking words), then this would be a huge improvement over control systems now. If one had a BCI, then it would probably be reasonable to think that they would also want some sort of visual overlay in their eyes, and a portable functionality. The end result is somewhat like an implanted smart phone running on your body's fuel, with no screen or controls aside from integration with the person; this is a good bet on the future, since we're already half-way there.

Adaptive Path Aurora

[Anonymous Coward]

That "bubbles" stuff reminds me strongly 2008 Adaptive Path's Aurora concept (Mozilla Labs project): http://www.adaptivepath.com/aurora/

Fool

[bussdriver]

The problem with trying to argue anything on a spectrum is that fools will jump to extremes and then strawman you lowering the conversation down to their level. (There is a nice Ben Franklin quote to this affect.)

As far as I know the iPod wheel was actually new. The touch screen stuff apple and microsoft have been doing is almost completely a rip off of previous works i personally have witnessed and read about in research papers a good ten years ago! They literally added NOTHING with their touch screen interfaces. And gesture work is over 10 years old; just because you put it on a mouse or screen with a finger doesn't make the same action new merely by changing the place where you do it--- including any new tech you do actually invent to detect that gesture (which is not relevant; just another place to make the same gesture.)

FYI: apple bought xerox's stuff.

Its all a matter of degree and the parent apparently is emotionally upset I stepped on his feelings for some corporation. Religion is bad enough when it gets into economics do we need to start spreading it into corporate brands?

People don't care WHO innovated

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think Microsoft "innovated all that stuff", nor do I care who originaly innovated. The thing I care is that it works for me, and it helps me do that thing easily. It's the same thing as cars - I realy don't care who innovated the wheel, brakes, ABS or other stuff, nor would I buy the car directly from the one who really did invent those things; I care that all that stuff's there, how it looks and does it suit my needs.

in linux, gui filemanagers have no trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

there is a unix command with the name 'file' which identifies a files' type using various types of tests upto actually checking the header for magic numbers or even determining the language of a document (eg spanish vs english text). this is used in a modular way to determine mime types and produce previews in eg nautilus. try it out, it might surprise you. nautilus has some other great features like that the previews can be the same aspect ratio as the actual document/image they represent, and that the layout can be made more compact allowing far more to fit into a given window dimensions. eg try turning on compact, and navigate to a window with many images of various sizes and dimensions. then say, sort by size, and then reduce the magnification level until the names are hidden, for a nice eg of the way this differs from windows explorer.

Nokia Bubbles anyone?

[Rexdude]

I saw the article and Nokia Bubbles came to mind - a bubble driven UI that lets you perform certain functions like viewing SMSes, using the screen as a torch, responding to missed calls etc without having to unlock the phone, released for their Symbian^3 devices recently.

Pathetic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not half as pathetic as your inferiority complex. Three paragraphs whining on and on about a made up group of people who don't really exist, making up a stereotype that you can aim all your bitterness and self loathing at.

Who wrote this crappy article about the video?

[blefler]

Uh... The 'bubble' UI was shown for about 2 seconds in that video which mentioned NOTHING about it being a possible interface for Window 8. Window 8 wasn't even mentioned in the video.

Who came up with the crappy title for this article?

Nice Try Microsoft

[Ramin_HAL9001]

Yeah, nice try guys. Even video games require warm-up levels, and video games are about as simple as you can get. Now, try to make an interface that can do real work, not just play games, and people get will get frustrated very quickly. If you have ever tried to get someone less than computer literate to learn a new user interface, you know that they throw fits and give up the first time something unexpected happens. Unless Microsoft intends to force all of their customers to give up the same tired-old interface they have forced on us for the past 25+ years (even though Microsoft is quite experienced at forcing their customers to do things that the customers don't want to do), they will not get past the use pattern of: double-click icon, wait for window, repeat. If it were that simple to get people to change, Linux wouldn't have so many problems picking up new inexperienced users.

Then, this Microsoft guy claims their goal is to "eliminate the learning curve?" Give me a break. The fancy interfaces expo'd in this video would definitely require some training and getting-used-to for even advanced computer users. For example, learning how to relate physical wooden blocks to objects in 3D to do 3D arrangements -- unless your computer knows how to read your mind, you must have some method of mapping the blocks to the avatars in the interface. No matter how intuitive this mapping process is, it will take some time to learn.

As seen on Hawaii Five-O

[freezin fat guy]

You'll see this stuff in episodes of Hawaii Five-O and other TV shows that have a technical aspect, but it'll never make it off Surface, and Surface will never make it to the rank and file. It's too bad, really.

Microsoft is a major sponsor of Hawaii Five-O. This interface should look familiar to watchers of the program.

Probably the first crime fighting show I've seen that regularly includes advertisements for an unpopular smart phone in the dialogue.

Re:As seen on Hawaii Five-O

[roc97007]

> Probably the first crime fighting show I've seen that regularly includes advertisements for an unpopular smart phone in the dialogue.

Agreed. But have you noticed that those Win7 phones magically turn into iphones whenever they have to do something hard, like take a fingerprint with the phone?

Screen-centered photo scanning

[Geminii]

The only item that looked even half useful in the real world in that video was being able to place a plain ordinary photo on the screen and have it be automatically scanned and displayed ready to be worked with.

Considering the number of users who have tried to "show" things to a computer by holding them up to a monitor, this might actually work. Scan an image, OCR a document, you name it. Just press it to the surface of the screen or tablet. A phone-based version could involve 'wiping' the phone back and forth over the document to build up an image, or simply centering it on the camera viewfinder.