Ballmer Hints At 'Metro-ization' of Office

CWmike writes "Microsoft's CEO strongly hinted this week that the company will craft a Metro-style version of the next Office suite. 'You ought to expect that we are rethinking and working hard on what it would mean to do Office Metro style,' Ballmer told a Wall Street analyst. Metro, a tile- and touch-based interface borrowed from Windows Phone 7, would be a massive change for Office, one that would dwarf the 'ribbonization' that set off a firestorm of complaints about Office 2007's new look. The criticism died down, and Microsoft later extended the ribbon in Office 2010 and Windows 7. It will ribbonize other components of Windows 8, notably the OS's file manager. One analyst believes Metro Office is a done deal. 'I think they need something in Metro to enable people to work on documents on tablets,' said Rob Helm, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. 'They need something on ARM.'"

Comments

There's a patch

[ttong]

Luckily, there is a patch and you can download it here. (It's not really a library, btw.)

Re:There's a patch

[node 3]

Luckily, there is a patch and you can download it here. (It's not really a library, btw.)

And it's not really a patch, and it doesn't run on Metro...

Re:There's a patch

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's not really a patch, and it doesn't run on Metro...

.. and that was sort of the point.

Re:There's a patch

[node 3]

And it's not really a patch, and it doesn't run on Metro...

.. and that was sort of the point.

Which is absolutely no point whatsoever.

Re:There's a patch

[ttong]

Wow, the point is that it doesn't use Metro and that despite its name is not just a library. You mad?

Re:There's a patch

[node 3]

Wow, the point is that it doesn't use Metro and that despite its name is not just a library.

And how is that a point? It's the exact opposite of what the article is about.

You mad?

Lame.

Re:There's a patch

[theshowmecanuck]

A point in every direction, is the same as no point at all. -- The pointed man. The Point

Re:There's a patch

[afabbro]

(It's not really a library, btw.)

No, but parsing that as "lib re-office" is awesome.

Re:There's a patch

[mwvdlee]

You understand that in discussions, one can make a point opposing the original argument, right?

The point of the GGGGGP was that the "patch" fixes the new interface so it becomes the old interface again. The point is that he doesn't want a new interface, and if MS pushes it through, he'll just use the open source competitor. Obviously it's not a patch, an obviously it's not Metro; which is exactly the point he's trying to make; dump MS Office and use LibreOffice.

Re:There's a patch

[andrewa]

You do realize that "Libre" means "Free", right....?

"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to whom? On what evidence?

Metro is a pile of shite, the 'designers' are idiots who are simply trying to justify their positions, by ruining everybody's user experience.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[jwegman]

Exactly! I still loath and the ribbon and always will. It is an abomination of a UI element.

And Metro is even worse!

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[plover]

Two things. First, you personally are not their target market for UIs. If you don't like the ribbon, it doesn't matter because they won't change it.

Second, all the slamming of the ribbon is really tired tempest-in-a-teapot stuff. Find a more meaningful problem to worry about.. Right now, you sound pretty whiny because you can't get over something so trivial. Four years ago there was an insignificant change to a product with no more than a five year lifespan. Let it go.

In the grand scheme of life, do you really want to be known as "the guy who cried over the shifting of some menu items back in '07?"

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, the summary acts like the complaints dying down are all it took for Microsoft to continue the disliked interface. That makes it sound like the way to get them to stop this kind of thing is to continue complaining, constantly and loudly.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[NoobixCube]

A Metro office will probably just have the ribbon, but BIGGER! They probably sat around thinking "How can we infuriate Office users this year? We already doubled the amount of space the UI takes up while exposing them to less features..." and then some bright spark goes "Let's double it agaiiiinnnn! :D"

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for tidying up interfaces, and the ribbon is a good try; but that's as high as my praise will go. It's a try, not a success. It's a designer's attempt at trying to figure out what's relevant to you, contextually, and when something isn't deemed relevant, it gets hard to find when you DO want it. My solution is to bury things in menus, but not like the one you see at the top of your window now (if it hasn't been eaten up by designers). Something sort of like the Ribbon, but with less contextual awareness; one that makes less assumptions and gets out of you way. There's such a thing as taking away too much when you're trying to simplify.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree. There is no reason to whine about the ribbon when there are good alternative office suites out there. I am so glad I dumped Microsoft Office years ago.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ribbon is just fine if you have enough screen real estate, namely 1900x1200. Less than that and it starts looking worse and worse as resolution goes down. But the idea is good and it's very usable, the main problem is that you get accustomed to it pretty fast but if you then move to a machine with less horizontal resolution, buttons start to collapse to drop-downs and you never find them.

As for the Metro interface, you're clearly a troll that managed to get a score of 2 (happens only on /.) You should really try it for a day or two on a phone. When you'll go back, you'll be staring at all those icons in your phone feeling sad. The same sadness you can experience when loading a videogame from the eighties with all those blocky sprites. Oh, and for some time you will try pushing beside the central button to go back to something else you were doing. But unfortunately there will be only plastic there on your phone :)

Seriously, they really did a good job with WP7. Go, figure about usability. Besides, there's factually much more innovation in Metro than icons and group of icons. Really.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Sponge Bath]

...some bright spark goes "Let's double it agaiiiinnnn! :D"

You won't be laughing when they introduce Office NBR (Nothing But Ribbon) which has optimized the document portion of the interface away to avoid distraction from the hypnotic, all consuming awesomeness of The Ribbon (blessed be its name).

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

jwegman might not be the target market, but I sure am, as an employee in a Fortune Global 500 company with an IT department so conservative that we finally migrated company laptops/desktops to Vista and Office 2007 last year. That is not a typo. We migrated to Vista after 7 came out. This was allegedly because certain intranet applications were not certified to work with Windows 7, but anyway.

I am still not as productive in Office 2007 as I was with previous versions of Office, and neither is everyone else in my department. We grudgingly accepted the "upgrade" only because wey were receiving a bunch of Office 2007 files from customers that Office 2003 converter couldn't grok. If we have to go through another gratuitous change in UI so soon, I guarantee you that there will be upset managers with pitchforks outside the IT department. The IT department is aware of this.

So the consequence is that we will not get an upgrade beyond Windows 7 and Office 2010 until Microsoft withdraws enterprise support from each. Which will be a long, long, long time, if XP is any indication. A few slashdotters revolting may not get Microsoft's attention, but a megacorporation with 10,000+ licenses should. (And if it doesn't, Steve Ballmer ought to be fired. We're the customer segment paying for his lunch money, you know.)

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

jwegman might not be the target market, but I sure am, as an employee in a Fortune Global 500 company with an IT department so conservative that we finally migrated company laptops/desktops to Vista and Office 2007 last year. That is not a typo. We migrated to Vista after 7 came out. This was allegedly because certain intranet applications were not certified to work with Windows 7, but anyway.

Vista has one huge advantage over windows 7. With Vista, you can turn off the craptacular new user interface and go back to the "classic" interface.

With windows 7, MS made the craptacular new user interface mandatory.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to whom? On what evidence?

Metro is a pile of shite, the 'designers' are idiots who are simply trying to justify their positions, by ruining everybody's user experience.

Why haven't you been modded up to 500!!! Truer words have never been written on Slashdot!!!

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to whom? On what evidence?

Metro is a pile of shite, the 'designers' are idiots who are simply trying to justify their positions, by ruining everybody's user experience.

Still use File Manager? Or is that too modern for your tastes. Metro is an extremely compelling design language. Your cynical I-hate-everything-I'm-not-into doesn't change this fact.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[narcc]

Metro is a pile of shite, the 'designers' are idiots who are simply trying to justify their positions, by ruining everybody's user experience.

So first it's MS just copying Apple, now it's a horrible design.

I wish you trolls would just make up your minds. Failing that, how about changing the mantra to something like "They copied Apples horrible design"?

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[PopeRatzo]

I am still not as productive in Office 2007 as I was with previous versions of Office

If something that minor was all it took to make you "not as productive" you should start thinking about how you're going to live on the measly amount that unemployment insurance pays because you are not worth wasting a W-2 form.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[armanox]

Ummm what? Hypothesis contrary to fact? Windows 7 goes very nicely back to the Classic Windows Look-and-Feel (except for the start menu, which I'm ok with that). If you wanted something truly customizable maybe you should have gone with a customizable OS (like Linux)?

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[somersault]

WTF is a "compelling design language"? I thought it was a swooshy interface that doesn't make sense on anything but a touchscreen. Your marketing-speak doesn't change this fact..

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Says you. I and many others like the readability and simplicity of it. While other UI designers are slathering gradient fills, fancy bevels, and textures everywhere, Metro dares to actually focus on readability and cleanliness. I applause the intent and the execution, and won't be surprised when we start to see Apple and Linux begin to ape the style.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[ozmanjusri]

I am so glad I dumped Microsoft Office years ago.

Metro is basically the ribbon brought to the OS shell.

Where will you turn now?

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep forgetting, anyone who disagrees with you is a troll.

What's next? The infantile "a hater's got to hate?"

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[ozmanjusri]

While other UI designers are slathering gradient fills, fancy bevels, and textures everywhere

I haven't seen this - do you have examples?

Or perhaps it was just a strawman...

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Mashiki]

I suggest that they go for a "piss on a rope" design. You can just toss your table on the ground and aim. I mean it's entertaining and just about as useful as the new metro UI.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[grapeape]

No kidding...with my clients I had exactly 1 that is using office 2010, all of the others actually went backwards to office 2003 after the ribbon stuff gave secretaries fits. I had one spend nearly 10 grand only to go back to the old version about 6 months later, they just couldnt adjust macros were broken, templates had issues, it was a mess.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Bahamut_Omega]

I believe somewhere quite hidden in the OS, you might wind up finding the old style of the Win 9x/ME interface. Managed to have it in Win 7, through a little tweaking and works better than the eyesore known as Aero.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[tftp]

If something that minor was all it took to make you "not as productive" you should start thinking about how you're going to live on the measly amount that unemployment insurance pays

That's one good way to fire Albert Einstein; after all, he was less computer-literate than a modern secretary.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Yaur]

Linux if I'm forced to use it, but I somehow doubt we will be.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

its a fine design on a tablet or phone, Its an awful design on PC. Not that hard to understand...

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't be laughing when they introduce Office NBR (Nothing But Ribbon) which has optimized the document portion of the interface away to avoid distraction from the hypnotic, all consuming awesomeness of The Ribbon (blessed be its name).

I use OpenOffice. Of course I'll be laughing!

Unless Oracle gets some bright ideas, of course.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[darthdavid]

I'm out of a job right now so I was wondering, how much do they pay you to astroturf on slashdot?

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[mooingyak]

All glory to the hypnoribbon!

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm, that's weird though, since Office 2010 is selling like hotcakes.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[caywen]

Android.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[ozmanjusri]

It doesn't appear to be particularly "slathered" to me.

Lots of choice though, I guess that could bother some people.

http://www.google.com/search?q=honeycomb&oe=utf-8&lr=lang_en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1920&bih=1034#um=1&hl=en&lr=lang_en&safe=off&tbs=lr:lang_1en&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=honeycomb+android&pbx=1&oq=honeycomb+android&aq=f&aqi=g6&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=101411l104328l2l104440l8l8l0l4l4l1l405l1390l2-1.2.1l4l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.&fp=752cc44099da74f6&biw=1920&bih=1034

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[X0563511]

Yea, because we are all one person and we have a single mind to make up.

Here's a world-view shaker: people have differing opinions.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were the one in charge of the transition, then I'd say the problem is you and not really Office 2010. Except for my first client with whom I completely screwed the transition to office 2007, with all the others the transitions were quite smooth.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, coz everyone ALREADY BOUGHT office 03 in 03.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[St.Creed]

So Albert Einstein would not have used computers? I doubt that that would be the case. He never struck me (from his biographies) as a man who was afraid to try new and useful inventions. Unlike the people working in your company, I might say :P

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[St.Creed]

Macros and templates I can understand, but seriously, what has the ribbon got to do with that?

Office 2007 improved my personal performance *for the tasks I do routinely, 90% of the time* with at least 20%. Since I write down all my activities rounded down to 15 minute intervals (for tax reasons) it is easy to see how much time I spend on doing administrative stuff. And that really was faster. But the biggest improvement was not with me but with my (computer illiterate) wife. After installing Office 2007 the number of questions about "how can I do this or that" dropped to near zero.

So I suspect strongly that for a lot of casual/standard users the ribbon is a huge improvement in usability, but for power-users (that use loads of macros and other things they shouldn't be doing in Office perhaps), it's only a small improvement at best or they have lost some (rarely used) options that make their life harder.

Which means that I think it will probably be a very cold day in Hell before Microsoft will change products, because the ones who complain the most are also the ones who can easily move to other products (or already did so), and the ones who benefit most (and measurably) make up 80% or more of the target audience.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[RDW]

I am still not as productive in Office 2007 as I was with previous versions of Office, and neither is everyone else in my department.

It might be worth deploying one of these if you want your sane interfaces back:

http://pschmid.net/office2007/ribboncustomizer/featuretourpart3.php
http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/
http://www.addintools.com/index.html

The starter edition of the first one is free, and amongst other things includes a classic menu interface for Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The others need paid licences for business use, but also support 2010, and the third one has versions that support Access, Outlook, etc.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[rvw]

No kidding...with my clients I had exactly 1 that is using office 2010, all of the others actually went backwards to office 2003 after the ribbon stuff gave secretaries fits. I had one spend nearly 10 grand only to go back to the old version about 6 months later, they just couldnt adjust macros were broken, templates had issues, it was a mess.

You spent 10K while you can download a patch for $20? See http://toolbartoggle.com/ or google for a ribbon replacement.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

"the guy who cried over the shifting of some menu items back in '07?"

Unless the menu items shift back to where they were, it continues to be relevant. It's not just something that happened in 2007 and then went away.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Hognoxious]

Here's a world-view shaker: people have differing opinions.

No they don't.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't buy the "broken macro" excuse - Surprisingly few breaking changes were made in Office 2010 (from 2007 or 2003), and templates should be rendering the same. I'd wager it was simply users not knowing how to use the tools the same, so "oh, it's broken!" and not "oh, I don't know how to use this".

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm what? Hypothesis contrary to fact? Windows 7 goes very nicely back to the Classic Windows Look-and-Feel (except for the start menu, which I'm ok with that). If you wanted something truly customizable maybe you should have gone with a customizable OS (like Linux)?

False. You're referring to the window decoration, which is not important.

The start menu is a big part of the windows UI, so is explorer. In windows 7 you can't make them go back to the classic look & feel. With vista you could.

QED.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Tomato42]

If only software could display different GUI depending on set options...

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[gl4ss]

As for the Metro interface, you're clearly a troll that managed to get a score of 2 (happens only on /.) You should really try it for a day or two on a phone. When you'll go back, you'll be staring at all those icons in your phone feeling sad.

wp7 usability is fine only because they took the features list and threw it in the recycle bin and then threw the recycle bin to the moon. nothing to use, nothing to lose.

then they labeled it as a smartphone despite lacking all smartphone like features- it's a nokia s40 from 2002 thrown with touch, faster cpu and more expensive screen. really, the feature-set is the same, only it takes longer to navigate to them. they just went to the exact opposite end from windows mobile 6.5 and are hoping that carriers will eat it up since it's a platform where it's ideal to limit the user from installing aftermarket tethering, task managers etc(so if you'd bundle some crap - which will happen - it's harder to get rid). wm 6.5 was so hacked up it wasn't funny anymore to operators(really the aftermarket firmware scene for wm was only surpassed recently by android scene).

then on desktop they just decided that let's launch everyone to windows media center crapfest, delete all graphics from the skin and call it a revolution.

wp7 hypers consist of people who've invested what they think is a great deal of time to zune xbox live apps.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[PopeRatzo]

That's one good way to fire Albert Einstein; after all, he was less computer-literate than a modern secretary.

I didn't indicate that computer literacy was required to be productive. I was responding to the poster's assertion that moving from an earlier version of Microsoft Office to Office 2007 made him "not as productive".

Though I normally use openoffice, I've used every flavor of Office available. While I'm not saying interface design can't have an effect, none of the interfaces Office has used have been so horrible as to make you "not as productive".

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[kaizokuace]

where the fuck did this "metro" shit kick off?

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[MikeBabcock]

The massive overhaul of the interface with an application is not minor.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[MikeBabcock]

Its not trolling, its a consistent message; Microsoft can't innovate in the UI -- they either copy or fail.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[mwvdlee]

So basically they're like Gnome. Good to see MS finally catching up with the open source world.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[tftp]

While I'm not saying interface design can't have an effect, none of the interfaces Office has used have been so horrible as to make you "not as productive".

If you ever spent even one second looking for an item that you knew where it is in Office 2003 then you lost productivity, as long as you haven't gained elsewhere.

My experience shows that ribbons don't make you more productive to compensate for training time. The purpose of ribbons is just to reduce the interface to the level of pictographs of the type that you find on doors of restrooms. Once you do that, the IQ required to work MS Office is, in theory, the same as one required to use a bathroom.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[WaffleMonster]

Still use File Manager? Or is that too modern for your tastes. Metro is an extremely compelling design language. Your cynical I-hate-everything-I'm-not-into doesn't change this fact

LOL you stated an opinion and then asserted it to be a fact.

It is funny listening to people who make the argument you whine because you just hate change you hate anything new you are not used to and therefore we can afford to simply ignore your criticism.

It is more amusing over the years to watch the backtracking done by MS after they hear the market repeat some of what those same people had been saying all along.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help but admire how much ignorant snideness you managed to cram into that single sentence. Were you that psychopathic to begin with, or did the trauma of (re-)learning Office 2010 do that to you? Either way, I have to sympathize with you, because your lack of interpersonal skill will mean you'll need your unemployment insurance forms long before I would.

I used to have a job that required me to do extremely unholy things with Excel (including VBA). I also had a job in which I wrote PowerPoint slides all day. I knew every nook and cranny of both software. My latest job, though, is less tool oriented, and whereas I used to generate pivot tables, graphs, and complex slides every day, I may do that only once a month these days. So every command that was changed from Office 2003 to 2007 requires me to look it up, and I no longer get a chance to implant that into my muscle memory like I used to. So, while I'm not as productive, the amount of sheer practice I would need to get back to where I used to be is not worth the effort. This does not mean that I appreciate Microsoft's effort to make me less productive, though.

Before you flame me as being an atypical example, I should point out that it's quite typical for business analysts to graduate to management, and spend less time running tools as a result. They'll have just as much grief as I would over changes in how Office products work.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[narcc]

Microsoft can't innovate in the UI -- they either copy or fail.

Don't be ridiculous. It's just like the idiots who say "RIM isn't innovating" -- they're just parroting nonsense.

Just a few examples, look at the UI improvements in DOS over CP/M, or Windows 95 over 3.1 Hell, the start menu was such a popular concept you couldn't find a linux distro without a start menu clone!

Even the Metro interface, love it or hate it, is certainly not a clone. It's undoubtedly something new -- which is more than anyone can say for the iOS wall-of-icons UI. Just because you personally don't find it attractive doesn't make it any less innovative.

An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. It's like you're not even trying.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[PopeRatzo]

I used to have a job that required me to do extremely unholy things with Excel (including VBA). I also had a job in which I wrote PowerPoint slides all day. I knew every nook and cranny of both software. My latest job, though, is less tool oriented, and whereas I used to generate pivot tables, graphs, and complex slides every day, I may do that only once a month these days. So every command that was changed from Office 2003 to 2007 requires me to look it up, and I no longer get a chance to implant that into my muscle memory like I used to. So, while I'm not as productive, the amount of sheer practice I would need to get back to where I used to be is not worth the effort. This does not mean that I appreciate Microsoft's effort to make me less productive, though.

Oh, just learn the damn software. And for chrissake, improve your attitude. If this is how you approach every work day, you must be a real joy to be around.

It's not that hard to learn Office 2010. Stop blaming the tools for your decline in productivity. Take some responsibility.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[PopeRatzo]

Once you do that, the IQ required to work MS Office is, in theory, the same as one required to use a bathroom.

Great! I bet the original poster is extremely productive in the bathroom.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[PopeRatzo]

The massive overhaul of the interface with an application is not minor.

I'll bet, based on your low user ID number, that you once used WordPerfect in the days before GUIs. If you're like me, you probably learned all the keystroke combinations and got really good at formatting a document. Then GUIs came along and people started using MS Word. Productivity may have dropped off for a little bit and then for almost everyone it came back up, probably past the point with the previous application because now you could see the formatting on the screen.

In my case, I used a program called Nota Bene. Wrote my PhD dissertation on it and cursed to the heavens when as an assistant prof I was forced to use Word. I struggled for a few weeks and then I started to learn. Same thing happened when as a Mac user I had to use a Windows machine (a few years later). Struggle, then succeed.

I doubt very much that there is any professional software whose user interface is so horrible that it would cause someone to simply never again be as productive. Now I'll probably get a number of posts offering nominations for software that is indeed that bad, but I'll stand by my post.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[MikeBabcock]

Unfortunately, my ability to compensate for GUI changes does not reflect on the general population.

Yes, I miss 'reveal codes' ... and its a feature Word could use some days.

That said, when even I can't find the feature I want quickly in the GUI, a feature I know exists but is now hidden by silly ribbons instead of being categorized in the menus the way it was before, I get very annoyed and it slows my progress.

Being able to translate thought into product quickly and easily is hindered by these repeated interface changes, not aided.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[mcswell]

Pictographs, or hieroglyphics. There's a good reason hieroglyphics were replaced by alphabetic writing systems. The ribbon takes us back 2500 years to hieroglyphics.

(In case it's not obvious, I'm agreeing with tftp, just using a different analogy.)

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[mcswell]

I've been using the **** Microsoft software since our office moved to Office2003, somewhere around 2007 (and more recently to Office2010). I am still puzzled by the conversion from what used to be mnemonic, easy to use menu system, to something that I have to study nearly every time I want to do something that I haven't done in a few days. The organization of the ribbon makes no sense to me.

As for learning new software, I do that all the time. Most of it increases my productivity. Some of it I like (Python, jEdit, SFST = Stuttgart Finite State Transducer), some I find frustrating (XSLT, for its difficulty in debugging), and some of it I find to be just change for the sake of change (the Ribbon). I will blame the Ribbon for my lower productivity when using Office, just as I will credit Python, jEdit, SFST and (more grudgingly) XSLT for my greater productivity in other areas.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[pommiekiwifruit]

I think they must be trying out that idea on their Nokia division if the latest update to my phone is anything to go by :-(

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[shimpei]

you must be a real joy to be around.

I do tend to be a real prick around self-styled net pontiffs who give me unsolicited sermons about having to collecting unemployment checks, yes. Try not doing that sometime. It'll make your own life a lot more enjoyable.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, can you just step back, and look again: the ribbon is a menubar with an in-context toolbar beneath it. No more than that.

People went crazy about it because the familiar buttons had gotten a new position and that Office button was a weird thing.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[Tawnos]

The Size of Things

"Because the Ribbon consolidates the UI into one space, it pushes the document down in the window a bit--giving the illusion of there being less space than there really is."

People are notoriously bad about doing eyeball approximations of size. Our instincts produce results contrary to reality, because we are subjective, not objective observers. It's why you can serve a drink in a tall, skinny glass, and people will assume they are getting more liquid than the same amount served in a short, fat one.

Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really?

[MikeBabcock]

Umm, if your best insights into Microsoft's innovations are those they stole from third parties over 30 years ago, you should brush up on your tech news a little.

Hopefully, you're trolling and this is intended to be funny.

Unfortunately, I think you believe what you've said, and didn't notice that Metro is a wide screen version of Win7Mobile which itself is not dissimilar to Android's applet system with a fixed width.

I'm sorry, these gradual evolutions are not innovations. Microsoft has had many of these minor babysteps toward innovative thought in its time (like the much maligned tab strip system). The mouse and GUI were innovations (by Xerox, not Apple or MS), the Internet was an innovation, and so on.

Do yourself a favour and boot up a LiveCD of Gnome3, then an old version of Enlightenment, then tell me about how innovative Microsoft is.

It'll just be a simplified version

[Toonol]

'I think they need something in Metro to enable people to work on documents on tablets,' said Rob Helm, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. 'They need something on ARM.'"

Sure, but that doesn't mean that there will be no more desktop version of office. These will be two different office suites that can inter-operate: Traditional desktop Office, and Metro Office. Since it sounds like tablets will only be able to run the Metro-style apps, this is inevitable, and not a big deal.

Re:It'll just be a simplified version

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it sounds like tablets will only be able to run the Metro-style apps

ARM tablets will; Intel tablets will run both.

Re:It'll just be a simplified version

[Anonymous Coward]

It must suck to type on a screen.

Re:It'll just be a simplified version

[muindaur]

I'm hoping that, since it runs Windows 8, you will be able to set it up landscape on a reading stand with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Easy to get a smaller keyboard for portability; like the Apple one: with the detriment of no number pad. I'm not saying the Apple one is the solution, just that it's a good example of a compact keyboard. One I've tested before, and found it comfortable to type on despite my normally large keyboards.

For home use, if done right, I might just have only a Windows tablet so I can use office for the needed files. Other than Office, all I need these days is a tablet (only thing I do on a computer is internet, email, Facebook, and office.)

Re:It'll just be a simplified version

[shutdown -p now]

For this kind of scenario, I'd rather get an x86 Win8 tablet. That way you'll get the classic desktop for when you need it (which is when you dock it with mouse+keyboard). For all the talk about Metro unifying touch and mouse/keyboard, I can see it working well on tablets (one good thing about WP7 is its UI), but it's clearly going to be meh on desktops for any power user.

Re:It'll just be a simplified version

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that nobody actually uses tablets to work on documents. That's just insane. I can only think of one environment that would be a worse place for document editing - and that's a phone.

People trying to push tablets in the workplace like to pretend they can do that, to add justification for having a tablet at work. What they really want is for, however, is just to play Angry Birds in boring meetings.

This whole "PCs must become like tablets" bullshit has to stop.

MS ahead of the game for once?

[Anonymous Coward]

The trend in computing is pretty clear: outside of some small niches here and there, it goes: mainframe -> workstation -> PC -> mobile (tablets/smartphones). Ribbonization makes products more suitable for the up and coming mobile world, and it seems like about the only time I can remember that Microsoft was actually on the leading side of the curve rather than the trailing side.

Ubutu has tried this too with Unity, but their attempt at mobile friendliness is a bit of a disaster.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooops I meant metroization not ribbonization

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTH, you are not me, why are you correcting me?

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[node 3]

Yup, they are actually taking the lead... in the line of copiers following Apple, as usual.

The iPad has been around for almost two years now. Windows 8 is just now being publicly shown in its early testing phase. This is MS rightfully working to fix their tablet OS after someone else showed them how it's done. It's not done by tacking touch into their desktop GUI. It's done by starting from scratch with the UI.

MS is making a smart move, but they are by no means ahead of the industry.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I am. I think we should take our medicine now.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[macs4all]

The trend in computing is pretty clear: outside of some small niches here and there, it goes: mainframe -> workstation -> PC -> mobile (tablets/smartphones). Ribbonization makes products more suitable for the up and coming mobile world, and it seems like about the only time I can remember that Microsoft was actually on the leading side of the curve rather than the trailing side.

Ubutu has tried this too with Unity, but their attempt at mobile friendliness is a bit of a disaster.

Having had to deal with RE-LEARNING MSOffice pretty much from the ground-up due to "ribbonization", I have to ask: What is the difference between a "Ribbon" and a "Toolbar"? They both take up valuable screen real-estate, and in the case of the Ribbon, I don't think they are as customizable as the old Toolbars were (I might be wrong on that point, though).

Like so, so many of MS' "innovations", the Ribbon seems like change for change's sake. Now, instead of pawing through menus to find the command I am looking for, I now have to paw through Ribbons (plural) to figure out the icon I am looking for (not that the old toolbar icons were any better...)

So, tell me how MS was "ahead of the curve", since Toolbars have been used for at least a couple of decades now.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[Anonymous Coward]

> in the line of copiers following Apple, as usual.

This. The mobile ship is departing, and MS isn't on it. Apple is.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[Pino Grigio]

I think there was something like £100,000,000 spent on research to produce the Ribbon. Personally I like it. Intermediate and Advanced users are more productive with it than they were with menu/toolbar combination. Plus it's aesthetically pleasing, which is something I value quite highly in a UI.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[Anonymous Coward]

I also wanted to say that the ribbon interface is soooooooo fabulous and pretty. Lately, it's all that the boys talk about at the bath house.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[dbIII]

It's just a way for old users to feel even more superior. If you can get the job done in vi before they've even found the right ribbon there is something wrong. The same goes with older versions of MS Office and keyboard shortcuts.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, they are actually taking the lead... in the line of copiers following Apple, as usual.

So what exactly are they copying?

Smartphones? MS Smarthphone was already around in 2002/2003 and it was quite a success. Apple made the step in the market in 2005 with the ROKR but that was Motorola. You have to wait 2007 for the iPhone. So no, they are not copying this.

Tablets? MS has been around since 2001 and please don't start stretching it with the Newton, a complete failure, as opposed to Windows CE on PDAs that was ubiquitous

Matrix of icons in the GUI? ROTFL...

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[SpiralSpirit]

ancient autocad users still tell me "release 14 was the best one ever". That was 1997. There will always be curmudgeons.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[glenstar]

This is why Slashdot needs a "Like" or "+1" button.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[dbIII]

Oddly enough that was the last version I could justify buying so I don't have a clue what AutoCAD looks like now. At least the "light" version has actual circles now and can draw tangents these days.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[PCM2]

They both take up valuable screen real-estate, and in the case of the Ribbon, I don't think they are as customizable as the old Toolbars were (I might be wrong on that point, though).

You're wrong on that point. In fact, in Office 2010 you can even export all your Ribbon customizations so you can configure multiple copies of Office exactly the way you like it.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[somersault]

The interface duh. The fscking article and whole of the discussion are about interfaces. Yes, phones and tablets have been around for a long time, but the interfaces sucked until Apple kicked everyone's ass with the iPhone. No, I will never own an iPhone, but yes I do appreciate that they were the first people to actually design an OS that worked well with a touchscreen.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[node 3]

Yup, they are actually taking the lead... in the line of copiers following Apple, as usual.

So what exactly are they copying?

Apple's tablet OS design ideas.

Smartphones?

This has nothing to do with smartphones.

MS Smarthphone was already around in 2002/2003 and it was quite a success. Apple made the step in the market in 2005 with the ROKR but that was Motorola. You have to wait 2007 for the iPhone. So no, they are not copying this.

No, but WP7's redesign is a direct result of Apple's 2007 entry into the market.

Tablets? MS has been around since 2001 and please don't start stretching it with the Newton, a complete failure, as opposed to Windows CE on PDAs that was ubiquitous

Like I said, the tablet design ideas. Those tablets that have been around since 2001 simply used the standard Windows GUI. That's why they were a market failure.

As for the Newton, not sure why you seem to think it doesn't apply, since you seem to be talking about the form factors and not the designs behind them.

Matrix of icons in the GUI? ROTFL...

What?

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[ozmanjusri]

Tablets? MS has been around since 2001

2001? They've been failing in the Tablet market since 1992! I actually have one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Concerto

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you're joking and never seen Metro on WP7 right?? If there's something on which everyone agrees is that Metro took a fresh approach to interfaces. Have a look at tell me what is copied: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wp7_musicvideo.jpg Interfaces are built on purpose being wider than the screen and the device flowing over it without the need for elements to fit completely on the screen. The whole usability experience is around it. Apple approach is pages you swipe left or right.

Besides, Apple approach with icons is so old I can't really see how you can say previous interfaces (which were also icon based) sucked. I must be some chromatic subtleties I don't get...

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[SpiralSpirit]

I've used 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2011. They keep changing the UI, not necessarily for the worse, but just moving stuff around. My employer apparently is buying 2012 soon, so I'll see if there's anything interesting in there. For the most part the improvements I'm noticing in latest releases seem aimed at 3d.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[Cico71]

So what exactly are they copying?

Apple's tablet OS design ideas.

Which OS design ideas? Be specific because it can't be the GUI which is completely different and follows completely different principles (yes I'm just talking about Metro, of course the fact that it can still run a Windows 7 alike desktop is completely different).

So what is it? Lower level OS architecture? Can't be. E.g. Apple managed to barely fix ASLR only in Lion. Microsoft has it working since ages.

It must be gestures then. Who would have thought that once touchscreen technology advanced, things could be operated touching a screen. No, it can't be, concepts have been around for a decade and something real was already around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface (besides all sort of other tablets, I refer to the surface because from a design concept standpoint has been by far the richest).

Uhm, maybe is the design concept of having a matrix of icons? Pretty looks like my Windows desktop since the last 15 years. Thanks, I'll stay with my Metro tiles that actively display something useful and don't look so Win3.1

No, but WP7's redesign is a direct result of Apple's 2007 entry into the market.

Yep, then they invented a time machine and went back to 2006 to release the Zune with an interface that looks like the genesis of Metro. But the point is another one, so, after all, they didn't copied, they were only forced to re-design? And the big part of that re-design of WP7 vs WP6.5 was the interface?

Like I said, the tablet design ideas. Those tablets that have been around since 2001 simply used the standard Windows GUI. That's why they were a market failure.

So now you switched from OS design to general tablet design. And the failure was the Windows GUI. Not that batteries lasted nothing. Not the weight (couldn't even be used to make a presentation, your arm would hurt if you had to keep it in hands for 1 hour). Not that they were slow as hell. Not that touchscreen technology was a joke. Nope. Nothing. Just the GUI. Everyone was waiting fur such an inspired GUI from Apple. Just swipes, pokes and tons of small apps.

I tell you what: iPads right now are good for coach surfing, watching some videos, reading books (although I prefer e-ink), playing a limited set of games, casually reading e-mails. That's pretty much it (ok, there are some niches like music composers and such, but I'm talking about the mass. If you want to write something seriously, you need an external keyboard. For some some other stuff, a pen would be very useful. We'll see what happens when MS tablet will be released on different form factors with the best of both worlds (Windows Desktop and Metro). I predict that once Excel and Outlook will ship on Metro, a lot of managers will throw their iPads out of the window.

As for the Newton, not sure why you seem to think it doesn't apply, since you seem to be talking about the form factors and not the designs behind them.

Because we are talking about who copied who and if we go back to PDAs then even there Apple was not the first one and the Newton was pretty much a failure. MS came later with CE devices and that was a lot more successful. Not even only in the consumer space, all over different devices (warehouses, hospitals etc.)

Matrix of icons in the GUI? ROTFL...

What?

You struggle to keep focus? We are talking about MS copying Apple, so where is the matrix of icons in Metro? You know, Metro tiles are not just square/rectangular icons. They actively convey information. Yet, in the iOS world a matrix of icons seems to be such an innovation (Apple even put it in Lion). How could MS fail to copy such a fundamental innovation! FWIW the ROTFL was a huge laugh at all the innovation from Apple. Icons. Lots of them.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[gumbi west]

There are ways in which it is less customizable, like there is only so much real estate in a ribbon, and it really isn't much when they use those huge, chunky icons.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[node 3]

Metro and WP7 before it were a striking change from the Windows GUI and Windows Mobile. The changes that they made were similar to the ones Apple made of getting rid of much of what makes a PC OS a PC OS.

Prior to the iPhone, MS's answer to tablets and phones was to shoe-horn in Windows. Apple was the first to make a tablet OS designed specifically *for* the tablet, and not just a PC OS with alternate input methods.

As for the Zune, it's clearly a media player UI. That Metro has that style is unsurprising, but the original Zune in no way portends Metro.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[arb phd slp]

Metamoderate more often. When I metamoderate, I usually get about 15 +1/Likes the next day.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that depends on your priorities.. I like getting things done asap, so works well > looks pretty in my book. don't waste my time with pointless animations and effects, dont' put my gpu into full power mode so my windows blur while dragging, etc..

the ribbon is fucking frustrating as hell.. some commands are big buttons, some are small, some are tiny ambiguous text drop down menus that are impossible to figure out without clicking on them... a straight bar of squares with icons in them is far more intuitive than this gay (or should I say 'metro') bs 'ribbon' or that new windows 8 start 'menu'.

this nonsense is just part of this asthetics > functionality trend. I want this excess rubbish out of my way. If I want to see effects, I'll play a game or check out some scene demos.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[somersault]

It's not the look or the colours, it's the concept of making the UI finger friendly

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[somersault]

*gets out a real keyboard*

As for previous interfaces, have you ever used Windows Mobile or CE? Especially in the Pre 6.5 days. The interface was basically just a small version of desktop windows - which also is horrible on a touchscreen. All the buttons are tiny. Stupidly simple things like that, for some reason nobody bothered to do anything about it until Apple released iOS. I knew that the interface was the weakest point in my smart phones, but Windows Mobile was still the best option for me until Android came out.

Capacitive touchscreens made a big difference too, and not just because of multi-touch.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[narcc]

in the line of copiers following Apple, as usual.

Sorry, I don't see where MS has copied Apple here. Metro is dramatically different from iOS.

Apple, it seems, is the one who's stopped innovating. iOS wasn't terribly innovative to begin with, and STILL stuffers from some particularly horrid UI problems (notifications stand out here).

Other mobile UI's have long since surpassed iOS it terms of usability. webOS was well ahead of iOS before HP killed it, as is WP7. I don't know that iOS ever matched BBOS in terms of productivity. With QNX improving on the best parts webOS, Apple looks to be way behind the rest of the industry in the UI department.

If you can accuse anyone of copying Apple, it would be Android. Though this isn't true in every case, it's only slightly ahead of iOS on phones, though not significantly so. On tablets Android is coming into it's own, though it's not really pushing any boundaries like other mobile OS's.

Apple can't live on the myth that they're the "best" and "easiest to use" forever. If they want to stay relevant, they need to start innovating again.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[narcc]

Capacitive touchscreens made a big difference too

They did -- in that they made touch-screen devices even less usable.

Sure, you can slide your greasy fingers across them to make gross ape-like gestures and "click" gigantic targets, but you can't do anything that requires more precision than jamming your finger into your nose.

Common tasks like selecting text and re-positioning the text-cursor (easy with a stylus) are extraordinarily frustrating on the wretchedly imprecise mess that is the capacitive touch-screen.

Thankfully, some companies offer an optical trackpad to make those sorts of tasks less-painful. Still, for many applications, you still can't beat a stylus.

If you want to blame Apple for this particular usability and productivity killing trend, be my guest.

As for nobody innovating in the smartphone arena before Apple, you're out of your mind. RIM offered new ideas year after year both before and after the iPhone. (The iPhone is still WAY behind RIM in terms of productivity. They don't even come close if you look at things like notifications -- which RIM has nearly perfected.)

That's just one company. There were MANY other innovators from Nokia to Motorola who offered new and interesting concepts.

The iPhone was a total joke when it first came out. I have no idea how a "smartphone" without MMS, extremely short battery-life, and lacking other basic features common to the cheapest dumb-phone sold at all. iOS 5 promises to bring notifications up to RIM c. 2003 standards. That's right, they STILL haven't caught up to RIM. That's pretty sad.

As for innovation, it's well known that Apple is far from the first with a touchscreen phone, nor even one with a capacitive touchscreen. And the wall-of-icons UI is hardly innovative. It's ridiculous that anyone could come to such an absurd conclusion.

Sure, they shook the industry -- but in the process, they set it back several years. We're just now starting to see manufactures break away from the touch-screen only horror show and offer REAL smart phones that actually enhance productivity -- and they're achieving that by copying a real industry innovator: RIM.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[somersault]

If you want to do work on your phone, a stylus could be acceptable I guess. For those of us that just want to use the phone generally, we don't want to whap out a stylus every time we need to add a contact or check our email. Capacitive touch with large buttons is much more pleasant for that kind of use.

I never looked at Blackberrys seriously. Any time I've had to deal with them or the desktop software for them they seemed very poorly designed. If it wasn't for the crazy cheap roaming costs, we wouldn't use them where I work.

Yes, the iPhone has always been a joke in one way or another, but it did force an improvement on the interface end.

There are still resistive phones out there if you want them. I don't understand why you would. Then again, my phone has a 5 inch screen so precision isn't really a problem.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[mcswell]

I was hopeful when I heard that the 2010 Ribbon was customizable. And indeed, I was able to get rid of that useless 1980s mail merge ribbon (or tab or whatever it is) in Word. But the customizability is very limited. There appear to be pieces you can't get rid of (they're grayed out in the customization dialog), and limits to where you can put new pieces in. So far I have not intuited the reason why some commands can be added/ deleted, and some can't.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[narcc]

If you want to do work on your phone, a stylus could be acceptable I guess.

That was the point, really. Then again, I thought doing work on the phone was the whole point of a smartphone?

For those of us that just want to use the phone generally, we don't want to whap out a stylus every time we need to add a contact or check our email.

I'll agree, though I think a physical keyboard is even better suited to the task.

I never looked at Blackberrys seriously. Any time I've had to deal with them or the desktop software for them they seemed very poorly designed.

Well, if you don't plan on using your phone for work, I can see how you'd get that impression. In actual use, they're incredibly well-designed. Things like email, contacts, scheduling, etc. are either immediately available or just a single keystroke away. The desktop software isn't really necessary, save for local backups and switching to a new device. Otherwise, BB Protect will handle most users backup needs. I very rarely use it, though I haven't noticed any problems with it so far. For music, you can use just about any music-manger you want -- treating the SD card like any inexpensive MP3 player

My wife, a huge android fan, recently traded in her new Samsung for an antique Blackberry 8500. She wanted the better battery life, and the improved productivity she's seen me get out of my phones. As her needs became more complex with her new job, she needed more productivity out of her phone. Sure, she can do all of the things she does now on her android, just not nearly as well. An overview of her schedule and all of her notifications are on the home screen, available at a glance. In two keystrokes she can check and delete or respond to a new message -- and far more quickly and accurately with the physical keyboard.

When her needs were less work-focused, however, she gained much more value out of her Android. It had better games, a nicer browser, and worked adequately enough for email, SMS, and facebook.

A phone like the Bold 9900 offers an interesting compromise, with a touchscreen on top, and keyboard & trackpad below. Touch when it makes sense, trackpad and keyboard for when it doesn't.

RIM does have a patent on a hybrid capacitive/resistive touchscreen, which I'd like to see on new phones. I would prefer to use a stylus when working with spreadsheets, for example, that the optical trackpad -- I already know that I can't manage the things with a capacitive touchscreen alone. It's just not well suited.

Of course, that's the point isn't it? The capacitive touchscreen isn't the end-all of the hand-held UI. It's good for a few things, but all-but-useless for other, common, tasks.

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[Pino Grigio]

As a UI designer/programmer, I immediately see the benefits with respect to applications I've been maintaining for years. It's so much easier to model/view the layout, and to present functionality to the user with a ribbon than it is with menu/toolbar. I appreciate that some people are used to and want to stick with the current way of doing things of course, but you know, people who use IT should take it as read that every so often they have to change their method of working. To be honest I had the same experience as you moving from SourceSafe to SVN :p. I find the latter annoying as **** compared to my previous way of working, but the nerds who manage the builds, branching and releases see it as a Godsend. I suppose you can't please everyone!

Re:MS ahead of the game for once?

[Cico71]

I will change a bit the order of quoting

As for the Zune, it's clearly a media player UI. That Metro has that style is unsurprising, but the original Zune in no way portends Metro.

How can say so it's beyond my comprehension. Have a look at this side-by-side picture of Zune V1 and V2: http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/13/zune-2-0-update-ready-for-your-first-generation-zune I'm pretty sure everyone can recognize traits of the same design language.

Metro and WP7 before it were a striking change from the Windows GUI and Windows Mobile. The changes that they made were similar to the ones Apple made of getting rid of much of what makes a PC OS a PC OS.

TBH, I think this is simply a common belief coming from Apple marketing department and channeled through Apple fan boys. If anything, I'd say that Microsoft GUIs are exactly what were already under change. Apple simply pushed the changes to happen (far) more quickly.

For example, have a look at these:

1. Zen Portable Media Center (announced 2003, release 2004). This is probably the most stretched example. However, it's the first one I could trace back regarding the shift to typography based GUIs as Metro. Interface example here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Media_Center
2. Windows Media Center (around 2006). This is the first clear example of where MS was hading to with GUIs for devices that were not regular PCs. Early interface examples here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Media_Center_Edition and here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn_WwstUIlE
3. Zune device and software (around 2006-2007). The first generation already headed to typography based UI, later generations are clearly Metro styled. Examples of the device OS here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune and here http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/13/zune-2-0-update-ready-for-your-first-generation-zune example of the software here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune_Software
4. XBox 360 (around 2008). Again, first generations (of the Dashboard) were only seminal, the new one is clearly Metro. Examples are here http://news.cnet.com/hands-on-with-the-new-xbox-360-dashboard and the new one here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1home30rock0531.JPG
5. Windows Mobile 6.5 (around 2010). With 6.5 you can clearly see similarities with Metro. Then again, the real Metro was around the corner. Still, you can see there's a continuity from the Zune (2007). Examples here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_mobile

Save all pictures somewhere, review the Metro design language article here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language) and then tell me again that Microsoft started changing GUIs after Apple push.

MS was already undertaking changes in various GUIs and I can clearly see the Metro design behind those changes. They may have not spelt out a name for it, and/or formally defined design rules, but I can clearly see the common roots. They already had the grounds and simply came up with the concept of tiles that was new.

Prior to the iPhone, MS's answer to tablets and phones was to shoe-horn in Windows. Apple was the first to make a tablet OS designed specifically *for* the tablet, and no

Boy did I misread that title

[betterunixthanunix]

Is queer eye for the straight guy still on? I honestly thought this was going to be an article about Ballmer bringing the queer eye team to Redmond and having them do some work on Microsoft's headquarters...

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[spud603]

what? what part of the title made you think of that?

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[betterunixthanunix]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrosexual

This might have something to do with the fact that I have not used any "office suite" software in so long that I no longer associate "Office" with "Microsoft's collection of word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software." Or the fact that I did not know that Windows Phone 7's UI was called "Metro," and thought that Ballmer was seeking to "metro-ize" his office (which I believe is in Redmond).

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's Queer Eye for the Straight GUI.

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Anonymous Coward]

iQueer

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Black Parrot]

What's funny about the word 'metrosexual' is that 'metro-' means 'mother'.

Not sure what we should make of that... just think it's funny.

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[spud603]

so: "metro-ization" > "metrosexual" > "homosexual" > queer eye
I get it now, but that's quite a few leaps :)

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[CAIMLAS]

... you DO know they're talking about the Windows 8 interface, right? Have you seen it? It makes the Apple interface look, like, totally boring.

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple Users = Homosexuals
Microsoft Users = Metrosexuals
Linux Users = Asexuals

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, because when I hear "metro" the first thing I think of is the train.

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Anonymous Coward]

Not much of a leap, when everyone should be keeping a look out against the evil fruit agenda.

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Anonymous Coward]

I used it for all too long. It makes MacOS (every other OS) look functional... almost as if it wasn't designed by a child.

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Anonymous Coward]

I honestly thought this was going to be an article about Ballmer bringing the queer eye team to Redmond and having them do some work on Microsoft's headquarters...

It is.

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Anonymous Coward]

Metrosexual ~ Kinda Gay

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[DMFNR]

Amiga Users = The only true Heterosexuals.

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes the Apple interface look, like, totally boring.

User interfaces are supposed to be boring, so you can focus on what you're actually working on.

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Chris Mattern]

Amiga Users = The only true Heterosexuals.

After all, they have a girl friend.

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the several root word meanings that can be associated with metro is mother.

Measure is one of the many others.
ie. metronome

Not saying you might be wrong about that linkage though ;)

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[jones_supa]

Yup. As an interesting sidenote, it's also related to the etymology of the word "metropolis" - "the mother of all cities".

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[gmhowell]

Didn't you pay attention to Andrew Dice Clay? You either suck dick or you do not suck dick. There is no in between.

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[gmhowell]

Amiga Users = The only true Heterosexuals.

After all, they have a girl friend.

Rosie Palmer, from Canada?

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Thing 1]

so: "metro-ization" > "metrosexual" > "homosexual" > queer eye
I get it now, but that's quite a few leaps :)

Was not to me; that was the first thing I thought of. Similar to when Microsoft's Server division had a new release which had an advertising campaign focused on "You're In Control". (Me, I always thought you'rein control was hitting the toilet with your stream...)

Re:Boy did I misread that title

[Anonymous Coward]

geez, did you even bother to check with a dictionary ? mother in greek is "mitera" (mee-Teh-ra).
Metro is NOT a word in greek. There's two words - "metron" (means "measure") or "metra" (means "womb") both of which found their way into western european languages as prefix "metro-" in scientific usage. The "metro" as a separate word became popular via the french, where it simply meant underground municipal transportation. In the context of windows 8 UI, the closest translation would be "urban".

Not beating horse

[UnknowingFool]

I'll hand it to Ballmer for not beating a dead horse and try to wedge Office into a form factor that worked okay but didn't get critical mass (Windows tablets). Now he's going to wedge it using a new UI that probably won't work on ARM tablets. He's clearly moved on to beating dead mules. ;)

Linux, still here, still free

[Anonymous Coward]

Come home.

First Bill, then Steve... ... you know these guys are no good for you baby.

I'll always be here for you.

- Tux

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[Anonymous Coward]

still mostly broken, and requires you read a 14 page document to install a video driver

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[node 3]

Still here, still free, and still being ignored by 99% of consumers.

As much of a train wreck Windows 8 is looking to be, I don't see how it will compel your average computer user to switch to Linux.

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[isorox]

still mostly broken, and requires you read a 14 page document to install a video driver

Sorry, I've used linux for 12 years. What's a driver?

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[Truekaiser]

not really.. all modern nvidia and amd hardware just works when you install the binary driver.

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why it takes 14 pages to install it.

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[pspahn]

...and still being ignored by 99% of consumers.

Someone will figure out how to attract the generic consumer at some point. Compare average user awareness of Linux five years ago versus today. People have actually heard about it by now.

The general perception is probably something along the lines of, "I know it exists. I don't know why I would want it. It's over my head."

Give users a reason to switch and they will as long as they remain comfortable with an OS switch. Android seems to be doing well. LAMP seems to be doing well (not really a consumer product, but it does have a consumer facing aspect since it is an option when purchasing web hosting, which many average people are doing today).

All Linux needs is a good spokesman. Someone with a marketing degree and not an engineering/CS degree. Or, what seems to be the most likely, a wrapper around Linux that tells the user a lot in a simple snappy name. Android did that and it's worked quite well.

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[Kjella]

Been there, tried that for 3.5 years after seeing Vista was the future of Windows. Win7 brought me back, if Metro is something I abhor then I got no problem making 7 the new XP and keeping it for many years to come. Besides, you typically get one generation of "classic" mode so I'd say at worst it becomes hopeless when Win8 support ends around 2020 or so. And there's Mac, but I figure they're heading down the same path Microsoft is, in fact a bit further up the road. Mostly I'm anxious to see what happens to Qt and KDE, because if Gnome 3 and Unity is any sign of what's to come then I'd rather become a grumpy old fart talking about how everything was better before.

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[Anonymous Coward]

Five years ago! Yay!

http://penguinday.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/the-eternal-five-years/

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[dbIII]

ASUS figured that out with the netbooks but they also have a large laptop section that depends on cheap MS Windows licences to be competitive. Thus at a trade show a few years ago the CEO was singing the praises of his linux netbooks in the morning and made a PUBLIC APOLOGY about them not having MS Windows in the afternoon, and then dropped the entire linux product line. He'd had lunch with some people from Microsoft.
There was an article about that incident here at the time.
The details of whatever deal or threats were made were not reported but the results were very clear.

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[That Guy From Mrktng]

Is not going to happen, you can't force marketing on a "product" thats not mean to be marketed. The trend that Apple started is the "dumbification" of technology, everything has to be easy and work 100% of the time, shit can't go wrong because users are clueless or have better things to do than to fiddle with config files in nano, ascii both ways.

Linux requires users with smarts, curiosity and free time and those are not common to a lot of people. Linux should focus in introducing itself to kids and education environments since, by personal experience, kids easily love Linux because they have the 3 things I mentioned above, also they have the motivation to pose as "teh 1337dude that uses Linux".

Android is a good example, everybody knows android and most of them know that it runs on that stuff called Linux, they see it working, they see it's cool and shinny and at least in the consumer mind Linux is not synonymous of bash prompts and 8 bit color GUI anymore.

Most of us would like Linux to have a relevant market share, but in reality what we'd like to see is more people smart enough to value Linux and with the motivation to learn it and tame it, is not going to happen unless you give them a strong motivation, a tangible motivation. _Freedom_ is not tangible, people ask themselves why using Win or OSX make them _non free people_ and then they realize it's a televangelist kind of discourse and could not care less.

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[Anonymous Coward]

Still here, still free, and still being ignored by 99% of consumers.

As much of a train wreck Windows 8 is looking to be, I don't see how it will compel your average computer user to switch to Linux.

I think people sometimes forget the users that Windows designs for.
I don't enjoy when the OS tries to make decisions about what I'm trying to do, I like to configure things myself. I use BSD unix, my wife uses Windows.
Most people using Windows would be pretty pissed off having to manually configure everything.
Let people use what makes them happy....... that interface will probably be welcomed by many right away, the rest will learn to like it or leave.

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[ConceptJunkie]

Apple and iPad are slowly, but surely, fracturing Microsoft's monopoly. When "does it run Windows apps?" becomes irrelevant, because you can do what you want to do and need to do on any platform, Microsoft's whole house of cards will start collapsing.

It will be years yet, but MS is losing its monopoly, and that's all it has. Being a cheat and bully is all they know how to do now.

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[node 3]

Someone will figure out how to attract the generic consumer at some point.

The only way this will happen is by changing Linux, not changing the message.

Android seems to be doing well.

Android isn't Linux. It merely uses a highly modified Linux kernel.

LAMP seems to be doing well (not really a consumer product, but it does have a consumer facing aspect since it is an option when purchasing web hosting, which many average people are doing today).

Exactly. Every single consumer success for Linux happens everywhere *except* the desktop.

All Linux needs is a good spokesman.

Linux's problem has absolutely nothing to do with marketing. People just simply don't give a shit about free (libre), because there's no practical value to them. And commercial operating systems aren't expensive enough to make people care about free (gratis).

What they care about is that the system works with their stuff, and is easy enough to use. Linux fails both criteria for the vast majority of consumers. Who cares if it's "better" if you can't use it?

Or, what seems to be the most likely, a wrapper around Linux that tells the user a lot in a simple snappy name. Android did that and it's worked quite well.

Right. Android was a success in no small part due to throwing out everything that makes Linux recognizable as Linux.

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[somersault]

What's wrong with Gnome 3? I've just had a look, and it looks pretty much the same as Gnome 2, but running Docky/Gnome-Do by default, and copying a couple of useful Windows 7 window gestures.

Unity is pants though, I'll agree.

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe you should expand your experiences outside of ubuntu

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[Truekaiser]

I run gentoo. wit the latest xorg and with no other drivers compiled or set up all i have to do to get either card working is just emerge either nvidia or ati drivers.

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[Anonymous Coward]

ya whoopie shit now try it on debian oops a 14 page document

thats sort of the point, of the 85 thousand distros how is joe blow going to know which 4 have binary installers for their video card, linux fail

Re:Linux, still here, still free

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had more NVidia/AMD driver issues under *buntu than under Gentoo, Suse, Fedora, Debian. Even Mandrake/Mandriva from 2003 had fewer issues than *buntu. So maybe YOU should expand your experiences outside of Ubuntu forums, where they say other distros are scary, hard and full of problems.

A dumb idea, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of those really dumb ideas that I hope catches on. Like... well... I can't think of another example.

The reason why it's dumb should be obvious: they're trying to port a program with an input that's 99% keystrokes over to a device that has no keyboard.

The reason why I hope it catches on is that it might encourage tablet hardware designers to start seriously considering adding some kind of hardware keyboard to their devices. No, the on-screen keyboard doesn't count. I have a touchscreen netbook and I still claim it's superior to tablets in almost every respect, but its weaknesses (shorter battery life, bulkier than a tablet, takes too long to power up) keep me from just keeping it in my pocket and using it whenever I have a spare 5 minutes.

Between the addition of a keyboard and a some of the tablet designers finally getting it through their heads that the only way to beat Apple is on price, I might just break down and buy a tablet.

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[unencode200x]

The reason why it's dumb should be obvious: they're trying to port a program with an input that's 99% keystrokes over to a device that has no keyboard.

I wish I had mod points!

Agreed on this one, tablets (at least the one's I've worked on) are not for authoring novels or creating spreadsheets. You can take a look at them and so forth, but, at least for now, they're constrained by their form factor.

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[zero0ne]

brain implant :)

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[DCFusor]

Ha! Yeah, all this talk about the PC is dead, tablets, phones etc being the way is just telling me that the larger bulk of the market create NOTHING USEFUL in the world, other than to hand money to corps for toys. Content creation, whether it be writing code or English -- stories or screenplays -- intelligent posts, economic analyses - you name it, if it's valuable transformation of raw data into useful information, it went through a real keyboard, or it just plain takes way too long to get done.
.

Mobility seems cool to some people, but I don't really move around that much, and frankly find all these people pretending to be productive on their mobile devices are really just using them as excuses for impoliteness to those physically present around them. I'm perfectly happy to sit here, maintain my forums, trade stocks, write articles for publication on a good old fashioned box PC (well, yeah, it has displays that would shame the matrix, and 512 cuda cores along with an i7, so not that plain or that old fashione). I RUIN keyboards at no longer than 6 months intervals, typing way way over 120 wpm if I'm excited, and looking at this one (about 4 months) no numbers/letters on the keys, yet some big dips where my nails have actually eaten away the plastic. I will never, ever, be happy with a little texty keyboard, a touch screen one, or even my fairly nice laptop, which I do no creative work on whatever - it's too hard to type fast on that tiny thing (made for midgets?) and you're always accidentally clicking it's little smear-screen "mouse" when it's least handy. To hell with that. Just gimme a regular box.

Now that I'm (wisely, I think) back to zero mobile devices, when I do go out, my time is my own - I don't even know the onstar phone numbers for my cars and would never give them out if I did. Why is it that anyone who has your phone number is alright assuming you want to talk to them whenever THEY feel like it? Send me an email, I'll call you when *I* feel like it. Or see you F/F if possible - quality over quantity of mindless babble. These "mobile productivity enhancing devices" are an epic fail for actually getting anything done other than *talking* about getting something done. /rant

I won't mind seeing the end of that brain dead bloated office suite. Haven't used it for years anyway. When I wrote my digital signal processing book, the publisher requested I NOT use junk like that -- just get the content right, we have people to make it pretty as we like - and we don't like having to deal with the junk most authors think makes their work better looking (in error). So, being a windows guy then, I used notepad(!). Of course, for the last decade, I don't run windows anymore anyway, sucks hard compared to linux. If I need it for some reason, there's virtual box...windows in a sandboxed window is about right for that piece of utter crap.

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[somersault]

Use a bluetooth keyboard. Or just don't get a tablet if you really want a keyboard. I have both a netbook and a tablet, and though there is a lot of overlap, the tablet is great for reading, web browsing and youtube videos. It sucks for Slashdot though - the latest JavaScript stuff in Slashcode is really slowing things down..

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[shutdown -p now]

The reason why I hope it catches on is that it might encourage tablet hardware designers to start seriously considering adding some kind of hardware keyboard to their devices.

The device that you want has been on the market for several months now.

Now we only need to get software that can properly use it. Honeycomb itself actually supports trackpad (and USB/bluetooth mice) and displays a mouse pointer that you can move around and interact using it. They've also updated their APIs to provide more fine-grained mouse events - hover, for example, distinct buttons, and so on. The stock OS itself is also somewhat keyboard-aware in that you can do Ctrl+X/C/V in text fields, tab between controls, and so on.

Problem is third-party apps which, for the most part, completely ignore this - especially mouse, which they treat just as a touch device - no hover etc, and layout is of course all touch-optimized first and foremost. About the only exception I can think of is one RDP/VNC client which properly tracks and propagates mouse movement.

But yeah, I'd kill for a Transformer-like device with Win8. Preferably x86, too, so that old software can run if needed - if ARM version gets 16 hours of juice with dock attached (and I know that it does from personal experience), then Intel one should get 12-13 even with current CPUs, and I can live with that.

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, the only useful creative pursuits of mankind are text? You sir, have a narrow view of the world.

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep - Metro is a fine U/I for casual use and pure consumption; where you're not creating content (or creating hardly any, like short emails, or facebook/twitter updates).

For creating complex things though, it's rather limiting. (Disclaimer: Based on experience with Windows Phone 7 -- on there, even simple things like 'copy and paste from a web page into an email' turn out to be rather dificult).

The same's true for iPad's U/I.

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[gweihir]

Best comment so far! This really captures it.

To me, MS is not so desperate to be different that they has started not only to screw it up by incompetence, but intentionally. There is some method to their madness. After all, if you look at what Office (and Windows) users routinely put up with and, judging by the fanboy comments here, actually believe works well, MS can make it a lot worse before people start to realize what an abomination this stuff really is. This is utterly evil of course.

I just hope they overdo it. Personally, the idea to use a stateful interface like the ribbon without dire need is enough to make you fail UI-Design 101. Add to it that is consumes more of the most precious commodity on a screen, namely vertical space. Then add to it that it displays less than an easily opened menu, after about the same effort to get to it. Then add that things are harder to find. Make sure you break the user's flow of thoughts as often as possible. The result is a mild torture-device. And don't tell me to use keyboard-shortcuts. I am already doing that for things I use frequently.

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that I'm (wisely, I think) back to zero mobile devices, when I do go out, my time is my own - I don't even know the onstar phone numbers for my cars and would never give them out if I did. Why is it that anyone who has your phone number is alright assuming you want to talk to them whenever THEY feel like it? Send me an email, I'll call you when *I* feel like it. Or see you F/F if possible - quality over quantity of mindless babble. These "mobile productivity enhancing devices" are an epic fail for actually getting anything done other than *talking* about getting something done. /rant

Personally, I like my Android smartphone. I've used it to find restaurants to feed the kids, ATMs when I needed one. It doubles up for navigation for business and pleasure. When I'm out and about, it's a portable little computer. The main thing is not to be a slave to these things. I'm not tweeting when I go out to dinner with it (nor do I take client calls on a weekend).

But I really don't get tablets at all. It's like all the functionality of a smartphone combined with all the portability of a laptop. Anywhere you can take a tablet, you can take a laptop. Home? Yes to both. Work? Yes to both. Theme park? No to both. And because you have smartphone functionality, they're a rubbish laptop. I watched a guy trying to drag an image into a presentation on an iPad, and he had to keep doing it to get it to "snap" properly, something that would work no problem on a laptop.

I'm still not ruling out that they're a fad that's waiting to unwind.

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

How is the life of a basement dwelling Aspergers case? Oh and buy a quality keyboard and cut your nails.

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It sucks for Slashdot though - the latest JavaScript stuff in Slashcode is really slowing things down..

Funny... Firefox on my 1.3 GHz Core Solo handheld (Vaio UX) handles it just fine.

Not to say Slashdot 2.0 doesn't suck; it does.

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[sourcerror]

As if it was easier to edit video on tablets ...

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[somersault]

I think it's something more to do with the browser than the hardware specs (dual core Tegra, 1GB RAM). The software keyboard really sucks on JavaScript heavy pages.

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[Stuarticus]

We finally have a volunteer! Just slip on this straitjacket, I mean robe, and we'll be off.

Re:A dumb idea, but...

[DCFusor]

Yeah, mostly. Taking pictures of something and then maybe editing them is real creative -- tons of people see that value, and are fed by it, right? Movies have to be written. Software has to be written....and my computers can't weld or hold a milling tool (but if they could, I'd have to put in the instructions), so they make nothing physical. I suppose it depends on what you consider of true value.

Dear Microsoft..

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell?

Sincerely, every single pc user on the face of this planet.

Re:Dear Microsoft..

[phreakincool]

Not me. Ubuntu FTW!

Did he run around screaming

[unassimilatible]

"Developers!" when he said it?

Sorry, someone had to risk the OT karma hit.

Re:Did he run around screaming

[shutdown -p now]

The whole BUILD conference was basically everyone running and screaming "developers", when you get down to the basics.

Re:Did he run around screaming

[t2t10]

No, "Developers, Developers, Developers" is out of date. The new motto is "Advertising, Advertising, Advertising":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTkA9L2J2gY

It's the "monkey see, monkey do" approach to business.

Behind the game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering nobody sane uses windows mobile, I feel like they're behind the game.

Metrosexualised

[MrKaos]

So the interface is sooooooo Metro-sexsual, darling

Re:Metrosexualised

[Anonymous Coward]

So the interface is sooooooo Metro-sexsual, darling

A preview of MS' ad campaign:

My Tablet or yours, baby?

Re:Metrosexualised

[formfeed]

That was my first thought as well. The colors will all be tone in tone. But just how do you get a Kashmir scarf onto an office suit?

Re:Metrosexualised

[X0563511]

Metro this, Metro that. Am I the only one fucking tired of hearing about Metro?

Thanks to Microsoft, the next person who says metro, in any form (including metrosexual or metropolis) is going to be filing an assault charge on me...

Re:Metrosexualised

[MrKaos]

Metro this, Metro that. Am I the only one fucking tired of hearing about Metro?

Thanks to Microsoft, the next person who says metro, in any form (including metrosexual or metropolis) is going to be filing an assault charge on me...

You sound like a metronome, duude!

Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't "Metro" just slang for "pretty gay"?

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's slang for "I'm gay, but I'm afraid to come out".

Riding on the Metro

[gstrickler]

I remember a feeling coming over me
I was hoping you might change your mind
I remember hating you for changing things
Riding on the Metro

with apologies to Berlin

Re:Riding on the Metro

[Anonymous Coward]

An awesome song!

20 years of menu bars and buttons and MDI ...

[hardtofindanick]

...was going to be boring at some point. Apparently that point is now.

On the bright side something good may come out of this "dumb-down-the-product" approach made popular (and commercially perfected) by Apple. It worked great for them so since MS is trying to re-invent themselves, why not follow the same paradigm.

On the other hand, the pro users (a slight super set of the little crowd here at /.) think that the old one worked just fine, why mess with it, rightly so

I think noone is really wrong or right here. Only time will tell if MS can pull this off.

Re:20 years of menu bars and buttons and MDI ...

[Microlith]

It worked great for them so since MS is trying to re-invent themselves, why not follow the same paradigm.

Indeed. And they get to follow Apple's lead in getting users the world over to accept DRM'd hardware and walled gardens. They can convince users that mobile devices need to be meticulously managed by the OS vendor, and allowing you access of any kind below the shiny, barred exterior is bad and will lead only to bad things.

This is something Microsoft has dreamed of for years. Apple beat them to the punch with iOS, and now Microsoft is following along. I expect the restrictions being placed on access to Metro will grow and eventually encompass all software that touches the Windows platform. Much like drivers, you will eventually be unable to install software without getting a Microsoft signature (for $hundreds) and you'll only be able to sell through Microsoft's app store.

Re:20 years of menu bars and buttons and MDI ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I expect the restrictions being placed on access to Metro will grow and eventually encompass all software that touches the Windows platform. Much like drivers, you will eventually be unable to install software without getting a Microsoft signature (for $hundreds) and you'll only be able to sell through Microsoft's app store.

I bet they LOVE you down at the tinfoil store...

Re:20 years of menu bars and buttons and MDI ...

[avatar139]

Indeed. And they get to follow Apple's lead in getting users the world over to accept DRM'd hardware and walled gardens. They can convince users that mobile devices need to be meticulously managed by the OS vendor, and allowing you access of any kind below the shiny, barred exterior is bad and will lead only to bad things.

I think I'd be happier if there was a middle ground between the two, but right now the two largest install bases are iOS and Android; both are extremes at opposite ends of the spectrum from each other.

Right now, I'll take iOS over Android any time because it means having to avoid recommending to Clients to get a freaking anti-malware software installed on their phones! :P

This is something Microsoft has dreamed of for years. Apple beat them to the punch with iOS, and now Microsoft is following along. I expect the restrictions being placed on access to Metro will grow and eventually encompass all software that touches the Windows platform. Much like drivers, you will eventually be unable to install software without getting a Microsoft signature (for $hundreds) and you'll only be able to sell through Microsoft's app store.

For me the real issue here isn't Open vs. Closed it's the fact that Google needs to make at least some sort of token effort to crack down on their Marketplace to enforce the because it's been filled with Malware pretty much since they started opening up the payment system!

Say what you want about Apple, at least they make a concerted effort to weed their closed wall garden!

Umm

[jader3rd]

Metro doesn't give you ARM. The two aren't related.

Re:Umm

[Toonol]

Metro doesn't give you ARM. The two aren't related.

They kind of are, in that if you're a windows app on ARM, you're going to run using Metro. x86 apps can use Metro or the normal Desktop. While there'll be cross-platform Metro apps, their primary use will be for portable ARM devices.

Re:Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they are. Win8 ARM devices will run Metro apps only.

Re:Umm

[jader3rd]

Win8 ARM devices will run Metro apps only.

Given that the previous Windows on ARM demo's didn't involve that I'd like to see your source on that. The previous demos showed a normal working desktop running the desktop apps.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny you say that. I feel the exact same way about the last 3 Ubuntu releases.

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

Miguel De Icaza has announced a new open source reimplementation of Microsoft's Metro interface, built on the Mono platform. This reimplementation will run on any operating system supported by Mono, unlike the official "Metro" implementation.

The new open source UI has been dubbed "Homo," which means "self" in Latin.

More information can be found the Homo website: Homo project.

Kudos

[Arancaytar]

After Ribbons, it has become extremely difficult to think up ways to make MS Office worse. Continuing to do so shows an unbelievable level of commitment and effort.

Re:Kudos

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a freebie...

1. Put it in the cloud
2. Cloud services taken down by worm
3. When services are restored, everybody has unrestricted access to everyone's documents
4. Julian (still in Swedish prison) is inexplicably blamed for classified documents being downloaded by internet at large

Re:Kudos

[avatar139]

After Ribbons, it has become extremely difficult to think up ways to make MS Office worse. Continuing to do so shows an unbelievable level of commitment and effort.

Yes, no matter how low Microsoft sets the bar for themselves, if there was one thing that Vista taught us all, it's that they can always go lower!

Re:Kudos

[hibiki_r]

I'd take Microsoft over Hermes Conrad at a limbo competition

Re:Kudos

[MonsterTrimble]

After Ribbons, it has become extremely difficult to think up ways to make MS Office worse.

Sell it to Oracle?

Re:Kudos

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel another "BOB" in the making.....oops.

Re:Kudos

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that WOULD be funny.

Re:Kudos

[satuon]

Perhaps Ballmer is a closet Linux enthusiast and is just trying to help the cause.

Re:Kudos

[Anonymous Coward]

They can always take a look at OpenOffice/LibreOffice/WhateverIsCalledNowOffice for a few pointers...

Re:Kudos

[hawk]

So after hours inside primping, Ballmer comes out of the closet, gasps at being spotted, and exclaims, "No, mom, I'm not a linux enthusiast--I'm a metrosexual. Let's go get our nails done!"

hawk

Credit where it's due...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's taken straight from the Ars Technica forum comments, attached to the story. Unless you're the same guy, attribution would be the right thing to do.

Captcha: biters

Re:Credit where it's due...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right, because nobody could have possibly thought of it except that one fucking rocket scientist from the Ars forums.

Re:Credit where it's due...

[Anonymous Coward]

That must be the kind of thinking that leads people to believe patents are a good idea.

Re:Credit where it's due...

[Anonymous Coward]

well ideas come from god and god gives them only to one guy at a one time, clearly.

the others are satanistic mindreaders.

Re:Great

[couchslug]

"and good job MS, you cant even settle on a standard UI anymore, you have classic, ribbion and now metro all fighting for our mouseclicks, how the hell does that help anyone when every freaking window has a gd new U I!?!?"

And they say that Windows developers learned nothing from Linux!
(runs)

Do they understand GUI design?

[zoffdino]

Does Microsoft understand that different form-factor requires different GUI design? They try to shove the one-size-fit-all approach to all the devices that they design, that's why they fail so hard. You can't take a PC interface, with mouse and keyboard, and copy it directly over to a tablet, where an icon is too small to be touched precisely by a stylus. You can't do serious document editing or spreadsheet on a phone / tablet so design those apps with a "good enough" feature set and let go. You can't copy a panel-based interface to a keyboard and mouse environment. Apple knows how to do those things: they have a scroller for the phone, a pop up for the tablet, and a plain old drop down for the computer. They make them "consistent" but far from identical, cause your interaction with them are different.

Re:Do they understand GUI design?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Microsoft understand that different form-factor requires different GUI design?

The entire BUILD conference was on exactly this topic and they are on top of it. I went to BUILD feeling very skeptical, I now believe they have at least an even chance of blowing the fucking shit out of both Apple and Google if they pull this off. Feel free to spell doom for MS, bitch about them, whatever, but at least go watch some BUILD videos before spouting ignorant shit

Will tablets bring back handwriting?

[blair1q]

Tablets are more amenable to handwriting than desktops, and less to typing than desktops.

Can they bring back handwriting?

Will it be more efficient for input?

Can conversion to typed text be made error-free?

And what of hybrid concepts like Swype?

Re:Will tablets bring back handwriting?

[Osgeld]

handwriting sucks

1) its slow
2) its different for every person on the planet
3) its typically unreadable

Re:Will tablets bring back handwriting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tablets are more amenable to handwriting than desktops, and less to typing than desktops. Can they bring back handwriting? Will it be more efficient for input? Can conversion to typed text be made error-free? And what of hybrid concepts like Swype?

To answer your questions in order: Yes. No. For certain values of 'error-free'. It's stupid.

Re:Will tablets bring back handwriting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the -1 Ignorant mod?

Microsoft has been trying handwriting on tablets since they started working on tablets, which was before anyone else. If handwriting actually worked well Microsoft's probably in a better position to take advantage of it than anyone else. The problem is, it doesn't, so that idea has been scrapped for the traditional 'copy Apple' strategy. Diverting from this strategy rarely seems to work well for Microsoft.

Re:Will tablets bring back handwriting?

[Missing.Matter]

Handwriting and typing each have their place. Typing is typically done at a desk or on your lap. Handwriting is good for when you're standing up or in the field. Further, you can handwrite things you can't type. Ever try to type an equation or a chart?

Re:Will tablets bring back handwriting?

[cbhacking]

Windows has supported handwriting recognition for years, and still does in Win8 (assuming you have a digitizer that can recognize a stylus). Whether Word will support handwriting recognition within a doc directly, I don't know. OneNote already does, though.

Re:Will tablets bring back handwriting?

[Anonymous Coward]

As slow as touch keyboards are, handwriting is even slower, even with a stylus. Although, I suppose it has the advantage that you can do it without looking at the screen.

Re:Will tablets bring back handwriting?

[blair1q]

The Apple Newton had "handwriting recognition," and it almost killed Apple. It did kill one of the Newton's engineers.

So far, padlike interfaces have been losing text-entry business to keyboards.

But the new generation of pads since the introduction of the iPad are much better at things. My question is, will the input tide turn?

Re:Will tablets bring back handwriting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7 does handwriting recognition fairly decently if you use a stylus.

Re:Will tablets bring back handwriting?

[MikeBabcock]

Cursive writing isn't taught in grade schools here anymore. My daughter asked to be taught at home and we picked her up a couple books to work through because she was annoyed she wouldn't learn how to read or write handwriting. Welcome to the keyboard.

Re:Will tablets bring back handwriting?

[dargaud]

And what of hybrid concepts like Swype?

Swype is so much faster than handwriting... And after 20 years of using computers I can't even read my own handwriting anymore anyway, so how could a computer do it ?!? I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years some Swype successor gets faster than the keyboard...

Port the C++ code

[s0lar]

Well, I doubt they would ever port the massive codebase to their new C++/CX dialect. Does anyone remember the C++/CLR thing and all the talk about Office.NET? Yeah, right.

However, I am sure there will be a small tile-based viewer.

Re:Port the C++ code

[shutdown -p now]

You don't need to use C++/CX to write a WinRT application - WinRT is COM at heart, after all. It helps a lot, because you don't have to deal with a clusterfuck of smart pointers like CComPtr<T> and CComQIPtr<T>, or macros like COM_INTERFACE_ENTRY to implement your QueryInterface, or checking HRESULT return values after every call for error codes. But for an old code base, you're good as is.

Matter of fact, even for the new apps, the official recommendation is "use ISO C++ for all your code that doesn't directly call WinRT" (from Herb Sutter's talk). That way most of it is immediately portable.

Re:Port the C++ code

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll never port the C++ Office code or compile it as "managed", except for maybe extra-value web-related stuff. The main reason is simple: .NET (or Java) bytecode is trivial to reverse engineer, especially with the built-in language support for reflection. A (distant) second reason is performance. Throughput of Java/.NET bytecode might be comparable to native code, but class loading overhead is still quite noticeable.

.NET was released in what, 2001? They've had 10 years to port their code, and I think MS has the resources to pay the few dozen engineers it would take to do the job.

Stacks

[MikShapi]

So here's the thing. Big tech is all about the verticals nowadays. Here's my future.

Apple showed us how it's done - having the CPU, the iDevice, the OS, developing carrier relations, an app store, a lot of apps and a developer community, and now a cross-device cloud service. Apple makes most of its money from the devices by the way.

Google's not letting down. After Eric Shmidt and Larry Page had their disagreement on whether Google should be fleshing out its own stack or consolidating around its "core business" (see Yahoo for why I believe that's a BAD strategy), Eric left and Larry went to work. They thought about their stack - same stack as Apple only top-down and with only part of the components - the cloud services, the OS, the app store and developer community, and its minor foray into the device business.

So they bought all the stack components they were missing in one lean and mean acquisition of virtually all 'things' Motorola - the solid carrier relations worldwide, a device making capability, the "defensive" patent portfolio - and they even one-upped Apple - they got another rung down - they now make the baseband too.

And here's where the big surprise rolled in.

Microsoft Windows 8.

Windows? In the mobile space? Weren't they late to the party? Aren't they dragging their feet with some distant relative of PocketPC? Wasn't their buddy Nokia about to be decimated and dismembered with cheaper ~350$ iPhone models and cheap Androids in some 100 countries with no carrier subsidies? You know, those places where Nokia still sells more phones than everyone else in the world combined? Those places where nobody buys 500$ phones?
Apple and Google are still going to take them to pieces, right? You know, Apple driving a cloud software package and "Cord-free" in those same countries where many people don't have enough money for both a PC and a phone?

Well... just hang on for a second and let's think about it like rational geeks who pertain to understand why Android and iPhone changed the market.
So don't sell your microsoft stock just yet. Looks like they've been thinking it through. REAL hard.

Remember how in 2007 a "phone" was a device? As was the music player, the GPS and to some extent the camera? Today, just like the others, the phone is an app. Sure, we call the device a "phone", but that's just legacy that stuck. Almost like calling a computer a typewriter. It's a rabidly multi-dimensional device. It's a web node, a tricorder, a content delivery platform and a bank terminal. And so much more. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

All this to say, a phone is an app.

So it's 2007 all over again, only now it's Microsoft actually doing something /different/ for the first time in 24 years. It's their defining iPhone moment.

It's all in the PC, stupid - it got commoditized, all but forgotten, but it still does al the heavy hauling of our actual work.

And on the new breed of mobile devices - "phones", tablets and whatever follows, it is, if Microsoft have their way, going to become, plain and simple, an app.
And not just any app mind you. It'll be the killer app that will allow a lot of people to drop their desktop or laptop.

You'll hook your phone or tablet up to a screen and a keyboard (with or without cables), or not, launch said app, and do your word, excel, visio and other work stuff. When you close this app, under it all will be a mobile OS UI on-par (one would hope) with iOS and Android.

Cute, but where's microsoft going to conjure the entire stack needed to pull this off? It ain't a single-layer market anymore where you can get by as a big player making just the OS or just the device....

Microsoft isn't as bad as you'd think in their stack. They have handsets, basebands and carrier relations covered by their now best buddy Nokia, both them and Nokia have access to CPUs, they have a mobile OS that unlike Blackberry, webOS etc is actually competent, with a new kernel and the

Re:Stacks

[Un pobre guey]

Apple can do this in a blink by the way. They have a powerful desktop OS they can just integrate straight into their mobile stack. They're already laying out the groundwork in fact - notice how you can show your iPad screen on an external display wirelessly? Notice how the "PC" was demoted below the cloud? Or how iDevices no longer require a PC tether? Think how useful it'll be when your iPhone is running real desktop stuff in an app. And driving an external 30'' display and keyboard wirelessly.

Interesting scenario, but it is more likely that the phone will be a slave rather than a master. People lose phones and they get stolen, and there will always be terrifying pressure to extend battery life. It is more likely that everyone will have a a compute appliance of ever increasing horsepower somewhere in the relatively secure perimeter of their home or office to which their growing horde of devices are wirelessly connected, at least when their are nearby. More and more horsepower and storage, and damn the wattage. Many people do things like play games, create and edit digital content, and other things that continue to soak up compute cycles without any foreseeable limit. Google isn't stupid or shortsighted. I suspect they and Apple have a very good idea of what role phones will play over the next 20 years or so.

Microsoft, however (those dedicated stock price masturbators), are almost certainly clueless. If anyone is going to screw it up and forcibly, tenaciously extract failure from the jaws of success, it will be them.

Re:Stacks

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw a demo a while back where someone ran X to a monitor from their Android phone with a USB hub going to a keyboard and mouse. It was a bit slow, but Android seems closer to your scenario than the others.

Re:Stacks

[MikShapi]

X is just a conduit to stream a console over a network. Doesn't actually which apps you intend to stream and where are they going to come from.
Google docs is a decade behind.

The big question here is "can you meet, or at least approach, the 'WinXP, MS Office and misc X86 apps for windows' bar on Android running on ARM?"
It's the hardware to drive it, the OS to drive it, the applications and in many cases a way to tie into legacy stuff.

Re:Stacks

[MikShapi]

The slave and master analogy is a bit misleading because it lumps document storage and processing together and creates this false dichotomy of dumb powerless nodes vs thick clients. Reality just doesn't look like that anymore.

The phone will have processing (needed for an acceptable snappy UI, and because we need some form of CPU to drive it and even the cheapest/smallest ones are plenty powerful and growing by the day), will have local storage for OS and cloud-cached local storage (needed because the device cannot be assured to always have connectivity) and have authoritative copies of their data backed up to a cloud backend (beacuse, as you rightly pointed out, people lose phones).

The trick is to offer the cloud not as a per-app thing (where my contact list app accesses and locally cache my google address book) but integrated below the filesystem access calls (tho perhaps above the filesystem itself, or perhaps not)

If you've watched the June Apple keynote, Apple is driving in exactly that direction - extending the local filesystem and file storage API's given to applications to extend to their cloud. Expect Google and MS to follow, both know about OS kernels, datacenters and pipes and can do this easily enough, and they'll need to feature-match it.

 

Re:Stacks

[Cico71]

Interesting post, wish I had mod points.

Re:Stacks

[Anonymous Coward]

Storing your data remotely is dangerous though, maybe just skip the cloud part.

Re:Stacks

[Kjella]

There's some good points here, but the current productivity apps are almost all written for x86. It'll take a huge effort from Microsoft to convince all of them to make an ARM version for applications that 99% would like to use at a "real" desktop with monitor and keyboard. And it'll take even longer before the people who've already bought and paid for their software to buy those versions. I think you'll still have an ARM tablet and a x86 cpu for running desktop software for a looong time to come.

I think most people would be happy with those living a bit separate worlds because the touch interface is so completely different than the keyboard + mouse interface. Of course some of those will exist in both worlds, but I don't see myself using a touch interface on a laptop/desktop nor a PC interface on a tablet - the latter is what Microsoft tried years ago and it was a total disaster. That there's an Office for tables and an Office for desktops that read the same files, share icons and such yes but not the UI as such. I think most people would be happy enough with a good synch, I'm not sure that what Microsoft is trying to do here will add value.

Then again, this is one of those areas where I really feel that I - and pretty much everyone here on slashdot - is not very representative of the market. I'm not sure what the "average user" wants or needs. I don't have a tablet and I got no particular interest in getting me one, I have a smart phone which is handy because it's pocket size but honestly prefer my nettop which is about the same size over the tablets. The sales figures aren't lying though, someone's buying them....

Re:Stacks

[MikShapi]

Some points here -
1. A VERY substantial part of the productivity apps are made by microsoft. If they can compile Windows for ARM, they sure as hell can do so with Office, Project, Visio and what not. And once they move, well, vendors will too. Remember what happened when they turned UAC on by default on home PCs? Initially some chaos ensued, the vendors that were doing stuff outside your filesystem userspace miserably broke, and MS had to herd them all to step back in line, because Hey, grandma's computer now had permissions and sudo. They've managed this kind of thing in the past and can do so in the future.

1.5 When there's a windows for ARM, Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE has windows-arm compilation target and your clients want ARM variants of your software, why wouldn't you give it to them? (yes, more QA and another branch to maintain. Big whoop.)

2. I agree in that there won't be one UI to suit both touch and KB/mouse at the same time. It doesn't make sense.

3. The UI is not as thick a layer of the overall software as you imagine. You can have an ARM rig running an OS and/or a piece of software that has two UI's - one for touch, the other for KB/Mouse. KDE 4 has been doing this for a while. Your device will run the program, give you a (more cumbersome) UI if you're on a train and looking at your Win8 phone, but fire up into a UI that resembles Win7 once you slap it in its dock on your desk in front of the big screen and lay your hands on the keyboard.
Like KDE, I think an OS will be able to switch to and deliver the appropriate UI on whatever device it runs and making it capable of switching depending on the hardware in play at any specific moment is not, as a colleague of mine likes to say, rocket surgery.

4. You can also get creative. Like have the OS vendor's IDE compile every program or library twice to both targets, lump them together in a single universal binary and ship that to be everywhere. And have the OS break it down at runtime and only load to RAM the appropriate part. Diskspace taken up by your binaries is the least of your concerns. Then you can be running on either ARM or x86, have hybrid rigs that carry one of each CPU, hybrid CPUs/Soc's that can be either big-rig x86 or ARM depending on the environment and all manner of other cool stuff.

 

Re:Stacks

[Anonymous Coward]

tl;dr

Re:Stacks

[shutdown -p now]

Interesting scenario, but it is more likely that the phone will be a slave rather than a master. People lose phones and they get stolen, and there will always be terrifying pressure to extend battery life.

Extending the battery life is easy - you just stuff dock with extra batteries which drive the system when phone is plugged in. Asus Transformer already does it with a tablet - dock it, and it gets twice as much battery life.

As for lost/stolen phones - by which I think you imply losing data - that wouldn't be a big deal in the "cloud" world where everything's automatically backuped to said cloud anyway.

It is more likely that everyone will have a a compute appliance [slashdot.org] of ever increasing horsepower somewhere in the relatively secure perimeter of their home or office to which their growing horde of devices are wirelessly connected, at least when their are nearby.

It's essentially what we have today with home WiFi. Problem is, it breaks down once you go outside the house. And until we have cheap, widely available cellular connectivity, I don't see a way to properly fix it.

Then also, there's also that magical cloud at play here. Why do you need an "appliance of ever increasing horsepower" at home, when Apple, Microsoft, Google etc will race to provide you with one "for free" (i.e. for the ability to track you and mine commercially valuable information)? Privacy? Bah, 90% don't care about that at all, as evidenced by the number of Facebook and GMail users.

Re:Stacks

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like what MS is doing in Windows 8. If you watched the Keynote you would've noticed them demoing the evolution of "libraries" of documents. In Windows 7 they are limited to a set of directories that you select on the file system, but in Windows 8 they become basically a series of generic interfaces that can enumerate documents from seemingly any source. If you wanted to browse through your photos you would see all of the image files on your device, but you would also see those on your Facebook account, or Flickr account, or SkyDrive account, or any trusted device configured to share image files, or anything else that implements the appropriate contract to provide those files. The location of the file becomes abstracted away and the only thing that is important is the content.

Re:Stacks

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the mainframe guys of the 90s. You're wrong.

Re:Stacks

[Anonymous Coward]

It appals me that your well thought out and insightful arguments have (at the time I read it) only has a score of 2. Cognitive dissonance.

Re:Stacks

[Xyde]

What a load of nonsense. My iPad 2 is powerful enough to do everything I've thrown at it: HD gaming, video editing, Facebook, webcamming, email (what 99% of the population presently has a computer for) with a fluidity and grace completely absent on hardware orders of magnitude more powerful.

Isn't it amazing what throwing away 40+ years of legacy will do? The iPad 2 / iPhone 5 hardware (as an example) is fine right now for this proposed use. Certainly almost perfect with a few inevitable software refinements. Losing your device or having it stolen will be inconvenient but with iOS 5 and automatic transparent iCloud backups now far less catastrophic for the end user than even the inevitable HD crash. The concept of forced OS maintainence (filing, backing up, software installation wizards, uninstallations, antivirus/antispyware, registry cleaners and other nonsense) being has been rightly eliminated. What a fucking mess. Battery life is now a 15+ hour non issue if you're not within reach of an ubiquitous iPhone charger.

This is happening right now.

I will cede you the possibility of a local bulk storage cache for media (the AirPort extreme or Time Capsule could already do this in theory). Besides very specialized tasks I can't see how the PC industry will manage to avoid a complete collapse in the next decade; the hemorrhage has already begun.

Re:Stacks

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice to see that you're smoking crack. I really admire that in a blathering 8.6 KB post, punctuated by single sentence, three word paragraphs that give the stunning effect of a sound bite. It's clear that you work in marketing (or maybe you've only been brainwashed by it).

Spout your buzzwords. See if I care. The style of Vertical Integration you allude to is simply an attempt at monopolizing an individual customer's brand loyalty. I'm not buying your bullshit. It's not in my best interest to be monopolized.

Microsoft isn't going to die in a decade, but hopefully it will in two.

Re:Stacks

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed 100%

OP is totally gay.

Re:Stacks

[sourcerror]

"Microsoft, however (those dedicated stock price masturbators), are almost certainly clueless. If anyone is going to screw it up and forcibly, tenaciously extract failure from the jaws of success, it will be them."

I think, Microsoft made the most sensible thing: by enabling Metro in desktop Win8 users of Win8 tablets can use the same application if there's no desktop equivalent, but of course there's nothing that could stop developers to produce a desktop and tablet version of their application, like MS is doing with Office.

Re:Stacks

[Un pobre guey]

That's great for your iPad. I doubt that you can be productive with Maya, computational chemistry, or a wide variety of other profession-specific applications that people use at work and at play. This is software that can take hours, days, or weeks to run even on an i7. Maybe you don't use it, maybe you don't know anyone that does (although you almost certainly do), but powerful software requires powerful hardware. iPads are not intended to replace them nor capable of doing so. Also, you will not just have an iPad, but eventually scores and further ahead hundreds of autonomous devices of various types in your home or office. A local compute node is the answer for security, although most will probably hook up to their cloud motherships sending all sorts of dangerous info out of your control. Imagine a Roomba with a kinect-like system constantly sending scans of its surroundings to a cloud datastore and compute server so that it can figure out whether an object is trash, an obstacle, clothing, a living being, etc. Privacy concerns go to a new level when your little robot is constantly sending ever more detailed scans of your house to an offshored data center god knows where. Many devices in your home, office, or on your person will be doing this.

I agree with your post with regards to uses like iPad web-browsing, watching videos, and playing lightweight games (i.e. that don't have numerous AI threads and rich 3D environments with millions of shaded polygons and hundreds or thousands of moving objects), but there's a lot more that computers are used for.

baffling

[Un pobre guey]

Why people not only continue to use MS Office but are willing to pay 200 bucks or so for it is beyond me.

Re:baffling

[St.Creed]

Because if it saves me one hour of work, it saves me the 200 bucks (after taxes). And it saves me much more than that. So no complaint from me. Even at ten times the price I would still lose money going to Libre Office. Really, the initial investment is just meh. Only private individuals worry about that and they're not the biggest market for Microsoft anyway so prices are greatly reduced for that audience anyway (buy a license from a student who bought his license for 10 bucks, or buy the Home Office thingy for 99 dollars).

For businesses, it's the upkeep, training and general productivity of the majority of its workforce where the real money is spent.

Re:baffling

[gweihir]

Basically nobody that would have to pay those 200 bucks themselves is using it. And most people that use it are not given a choice.

Re:baffling

[spasm]

Because they don't pay for it. In my workplace full of academics, 'software costs' are written into every grant we all write. As well as new computers. So my colleagues all buy top of the line Macs every two years, install parallels and the latest *windows* version of office, and never leave the virtual window (because they use some windows-only statistical software as part of their actual work). Its an odd mix of status (hence the macs and the 'must have the latest version of all software') and not giving a shit (because they're not really paying for it). Further, the $200 for office (or whatever it is after an educational bulk discount) is tiny compared to the costs associated with the specialized software we use for our research (thousands per year per install in licensing fees) let alone relative to the total amount of money involved in the grant (USD$10k for 'three laptop computers and base software' is nothing in the context of a USD$2.5 million grant..). So my colleagues are unlikely to ever have any monetary incentive to do things differently. If someone convinced them that using LibreOffice was the sexy high status thing to do, or the granting agencies started insisting on the use of .odt files for all communication or something, then maybe. But until then..

No way!

[Trillan]

Microsoft is pushing Metro as their new UI, and (possibly, it sounds like Microsoft hasn't even decided) their only ARM SDK. Of course they have an Office port in the works. Otherwise, Office would be unsellable.

Insightful comment

[jamrock]

Damn, where are mod points when you need them? Insightful comment indeed, and I agree with everything you said, particularly about a home compute appliance to which your mobile devices connect. And it's interesting you should say that Apple and Google have given the future of mobile much thought. Remember it was Jobs who coined the term "Digital Hub", and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it unspool very much like your prediction. I personally envision something along the lines of a Mac mini/Time Capsule-type hybrid device to fulfill the role of network storage, wireless router, and media/application server, with Thunderbolt ports to connect monitors and peripherals. Kudos. Sharp thinking on your part.

Wha.. what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if they introduce a completely new interface, I'm sure they'll offer a "classic" Ribbon mode as an option for people who don't want to switch to the new one.

(har)

Windows 9 All the way

[Anonymous Coward]

Given Micro$oft's record of OS blunders/wonders (Windows Me boo, Windows XP Yea, Windows Vista boo, Win7 Yea), I think I'll hold out for Windows 9. They should have it right by then.

Good advertising for OpenOffice and LibreOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonderful! Microsoft saved lots of people a good wad of cash when they pushed the awful ribbon onto everyone's neck - more than a quarter of the people I know now use either OpenOffice or LibreOffice thanks to that clusterfuck. And I expect that ratio will increase as it becomes more mainstream.

Re:Good advertising for OpenOffice and LibreOffice

[shutdown -p now]

Don't be so self-righteous - I have no doubts that Ubuntu folk are going to integrate LibreOffice with Unity in no time at all.

Re:Good advertising for OpenOffice and LibreOffice

[westlake]

more than a quarter of the people I know now use either OpenOffice or LibreOffice thanks to that clusterfuck. And I expect that ratio will increase as it becomes more mainstream.

It is always a quarter of the people you know.

But six of the top twenty-five software bestsellers at Amazon.com for the PC and the Mac are current versions of MS Office, retail boxed.

That is an enormous vote of confidence in The Ribbon.

Re:Good advertising for OpenOffice and LibreOffice

[dargaud]

But six of the top twenty-five software bestsellers at Amazon.com for the PC and the Mac are current versions of MS Office, retail boxed.
That is an enormous vote of confidence in The Ribbon.

Right. And how much would that have been without the fucking ribbon ?!?
As an IT executive I refuse anything to do with 'ribbon' office nowadays, and that includes 'users'. Open/LibreOffice can do the same things a lot more simply and if you receive an unopenable docx, it's perfectly allright to tell the sender to grow up (in other words, to fuck off).

Please don't change anything in the UI

[mapkinase]

Enough. Please.

Re:Please don't change anything in the UI

[shutdown -p now]

Your comment is too late. 15 million of sold iPads late, to be exact.

Another insightful comment.

[jamrock]

As you said, of course Microsoft is working on a Metro version of Office. They'd be crazy not to be. Office is Microsoft's cash cow, the castle that all their other ventures serve to protect, and it's probably the number one reason why people continue to use Windows. They, and everyone else (including Apple), were caught flatfooted by the runaway train that is the iPad, and I'm willing to bet that its incredible success sent deep chills through the executive suites in Redmond, when they realized that an entire vast new market was developing and they didn't even have a toehold in it. People want tablets (the argument over whether they want "tablets" or iPads can wait for another day), and Microsoft is faced with a twofold challenge: to have a viable tablet OS; and to develop a version of Office that can run on it.

Forgive me for not recalling the source, but I read a piece sometime last year about the severe political infighting inside Microsoft, and as an example the writer gave an anecdote about internal discussions concerning the creation of a touchscreen version of Office. The discussions came to an abrupt screeching halt when the head of the Office division at the time flatly refused to have anything to do with it. Try to imagine anyone at Apple telling Jobs that.

The article painted a portrait of a deeply dysfunctional company, riven by rivalries among the various divisions, and of Ballmer's part in the creation of a nightmarish corporate culture where backstabbing and naked ambition rule. One gets the distinct impression that Microsoft under Gates was like the former Yugoslavia under Tito, with only a strong personality holding together a loose confederation of rivals. With Gates's departure (Tito's death in the case of Yugoslavia), all the bitter divisions came bubbling to the surface, and not only was Ballmer incapable of controlling it, he seemed to actively encourage it in order to weaken potential rivals, similar to Milosevic's misrule in Serbia. Now it's biting Microsoft in the ass, as they find themselves culturally ill-equipped to respond quickly to an external threat.

As I said, they're faced with a twofold challenge, to succeed with a touchscreen device, and to have a version of Office that can run on it. Each by itself is an extremely difficult proposition. Success at both may prove to be an insurmountable problem.

Re:Another insightful comment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only in Slashdot would anynone compare MS corporate culture to that. You only missed the Hitler comparison.

Re:Another insightful comment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Redmond? Yeah, just like Sarajevo.

Drier Climate, thought.

ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Just make a fucking tablet OS. Why combine this into one SKU?

Re:Great

[Walt Dismal]

Hi, this is your new car. The controls are dynamically adaptable! The radio station display is large and bright and shiny but the stations have no numbers or text labels. And the gas pedal is mouse-driven. Now, if you want to accelerate, use the 'accelerate gesture' with your hand in the air and move the cursor on the windshield forward, unless it's rainy, and then you have turn on 'rainy day cursor' which makes it about a foot wide at the top of the windshield. If you have any problems, click the "Ford Office' icon at the upper left corner being careful not to cause an accident in the process. Sometimes people outside may think you're giving them the finger, hahah. But our marketing department says 9 out of 10 people think this is cool to do 20 times a day, hahah. Okay now, if you have to brake, 1) don't click the 'Brake' tab, that's not where we put braking, instead, click the 'Alter Velocity' tab and select the unlabeled small 'Reduce Gas Flow' Icon and then select either the 'Handbrake?' button or the 'Footbrake?' button. Now move the braking slider which is located under the passenger seat. If this does not work, click "Ford Internet Help' and go online to see how to brake before you reach the end of that offramp.

Ford Bob: I see you're trying to avoid an accident. Do you want to write a letter?

Dumbed-down indeed.

[elijahu]

Readers of Slashdot use WYSIWYG word processors? I thought we gave only grief and ridicule to anyone who wasn't still using ed to write TeX for all of their office documents. The idea of using various too-brightly colored squares to interface with text does strike me a ludicrous, but then I've been criticized before for using LaTeX (a real geek wouldn't rely on someone else's macros, but would have rolled their own).

Re:Dumbed-down indeed.

[gweihir]

Still? After trying to create a good-looking report in Word (and failing repeatedly), we went back to LeTeX. They cannot have had a single typesetting expert involved in the Office design. The results really look horrible. And forget about using a version-control system with them.

Utter crap.

What is the Metro?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should read the Wikipedia page to find out what this is all about. It's more frightening than you think!

Not a big deal

[badatnicknames]

This is not that big of a deal. They'll probably have both a metro and desktop version. It's the same thing they're doing for Internet Explorer. The metro version can then be used on windows phone and tablets.

Hooray!

[Alex Belits]

Ballmer and other idiots are firmly at the helm, Microsoft finally has a good chance destroying itself without any outside help.

Use Case

[pavon]

The target use case for something like this is CXOs tweaking their Powerpoint presentations while on the plane, or proof reading and correcting reports while on the subway. No, you wouldn't want to make the whole thing on the tablet, but being able to make minor changes on the go is a useful feature.

MS Office is Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

While Microsoft has a good chance of saving Windows as an operating system of the future, I see MS Office in its present independent incarnation as dead. The only way MS Office can survive is by being bundled as part of the operating system.

Cash cow? I doubt it. In my territory, MS Office is selling at a slightly lower price than Windows. And not only that: it comes with 3-seat license, so it's effectively less than one-third the cost of a Windows license. Sure, this is the vanilla version that comes without the "enterprise" goodness of Access and the groupware tools, but for most people and small businesses having something to print out a quick report or do a spreadsheet of the week's expenses is more than enough.

Will this call for another round of scrutiny from anti-trust regulators? Perhaps not. They can always claim that what they've included is an enhanced version of Windows Write, one that's a notch better than Google Docs.

Re:MS Office is Dead

[shutdown -p now]

Cash cow? I doubt it.

You don't need to doubt it, just read the financial statement. Windows brings in $12B/year; Office+SharePoint+Exchange is $14B/year.

. In my territory, MS Office is selling at a slightly lower price than Windows. And not only that: it comes with 3-seat license, so it's effectively less than one-third the cost of a Windows license. Sure, this is the vanilla version that comes without the "enterprise" goodness of Access and the groupware tools, but for most people and small businesses having something to print out a quick report or do a spreadsheet of the week's expenses is more than enough.

Thing is, a single large business that buys several thousand, or even ten thousand, seats of enterprise edition "compensates" for a lot of those small home/office users in terms of income. And there are very few businesses with users in thousands that don't license Office for a significant proportion of their employees.

Re:MS Office is Dead

[gl4ss]

man, you just described that it's bought by pretty much by most businesses and YET YOU DON'T THINK OF IT AS A CASH COW WTF? have you no regard for scale? not to mention those which do pony up a sum - any sum at all - for the enterprise stuff.

Re:MS Office is Dead...Long Live MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

While Microsoft has a good chance of saving Windows as an operating system of the future, I see MS Office in its present independent incarnation as dead. The only way MS Office can survive is by being bundled as part of the operating system.

Cash cow? I doubt it. In my territory, MS Office is selling at a slightly lower price than Windows. And not only that: it comes with 3-seat license, so it's effectively less than one-third the cost of a Windows license. Sure, this is the vanilla version that comes without the "enterprise" goodness of Access and the groupware tools, but for most people and small businesses having something to print out a quick report or do a spreadsheet of the week's expenses is more than enough.

Will this call for another round of scrutiny from anti-trust regulators? Perhaps not. They can always claim that what they've included is an enhanced version of Windows Write, one that's a notch better than Google Docs.

MS Office is a billion dollars a year business unit *and* growing. If they are losing anything in margins, they are clearly making up for it in volume.

And, then you contend that another round of scrutiny from anti-trust regulators? Which canard are you shooting for in this thread? the "evil Microsoft is a going to suffer the fate that I feel it is compelled to suffer" or the "evil Microsoft will be quashed by the righteous hand of big government"?

As someone who has tested Win8...

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

Metro is absolute garbage on a desktop with a mouse. That being said, it's also no worse than anything done on iPhones, Android, or Windows Phones. But it should be only for touch-screens, preferably smartphones. Just as long as they KEEP IT THERE.

Only marketing would ever want Office to be run in Metro. But the Windows 8 devs on msdn, if you read their blogs, are very in-tune with things. Whatever culture that was spawned after the Halloween-documents in 1998 (yes, 13 years ago) is very much active there, and they're neither close-minded nor stupid. They hate things like IE6 and love jQuery as much as anyone here would. Not surprising, considering MSFT have hired a lot of smart OSS-minded people in the past decade.

My guess is that they're only trying to vet unifying the interface part of Windows 8 as hard as they can currently. Despite the new DX9-level graphics requirements, Win8 is otherwise seriously fast enough to be run on modern smartphones. If you stripped out that crap, it'd be faster than Win7, probably faster than XP.

And since ribbons were brought up, Office 2007's ribbons sucked, just like Vista did. Office 2010's actually worked and is what it should have been. Digging through tons of 1980s-Macintosh style menus in Office2k3 or OOO to do things like data bars or text-to-columns a spreadsheet plain sucks. Tabbing through common tasks is far nicer. Four tabs and nothing's buried in Win8 explorer.

Re:As someone who has tested Win8...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except when what you want to do isn't a common task, and you STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHERE TO FIND IT.

Re:As someone who has tested Win8...

[Anonymous Coward]

Only marketing would ever want Office to be run in Metro.

Apple has a version of iWork that runs on iOS. Given that Metro is fulfilling the same function as iOS (touch-optimised interface that's simple for inexperienced users), and Metro already has its own version of IE (which would probably have been described as "bringing IE to Metro" if the announcements had been ordered differently), why would having Office functionality available for it be a bad idea? Obviously a straight port would be insane, it would have to make available just what's needed and works with touch in a way that works with touch, just as happened with iWork.

Re:As someone who has tested Win8...

[Anonymous Coward]

Metro is absolute garbage on a desktop with a mouse. That being said, it's also no worse than anything done on iPhones, Android, or Windows Phones. But it should be only for touch-screens, preferably smartphones. Just as long as they KEEP IT THERE.

As Microsoft so elegantly put it at BUILD, a screen without touch is a broken screen. Same sort of bitching happened when apps that pretty much required a mouse for certain tasks first started to come out. Oh my god, you might have to spend a few bucks on a touch screen and enter the 21st freaking century, poor you.

It ain't smoke and mirrors, I have one of the tablets. You know how much it fucking rocks to be booting Ubuntu in VBox on a Windows tablet? And flipping between them? And playing Doom II on your tablet? Yeah, MS is going to stomp the fucking shit out of their competition. No question.

Re:As someone who has tested Win8...

[Anonymous Coward]

Until your looking for an option in Outlook, expect to find it hidden somewhere in the options menu, only to find it can only be found contextually when you open a new email. That is where the ribbon fails I want to dig into an options menu somewhere and see all the choices.
Specifically I needed to see bcc in a reply and found that I have to open a new email find the option and then close the new email and that irritates me because it doesn't make any sense.

Re:As someone who has tested Win8...

[rdnetto]

Metro is absolute garbage on a desktop with a mouse. That being said, it's also no worse than anything done on iPhones, Android, or Windows Phones. But it should be only for touch-screens, preferably smartphones. Just as long as they KEEP IT THERE.

Agreed. Whoever thought that unlocking the screen by dragging the screen up could make sense in any way on a desktop was retarded.

My guess is that they're only trying to vet unifying the interface part of Windows 8 as hard as they can currently. Despite the new DX9-level graphics requirements, Win8 is otherwise seriously fast enough to be run on modern smartphones. If you stripped out that crap, it'd be faster than Win7, probably faster than XP.

This is less a praise of Win8 and more one of modern mobile phone technology. Tegra 2 chipsets (which will be obsolete soon) easily meet the minimum requirements for WinXP (apart from having the wrong architecture). Tegra 3 chipsets easily meet those of Win7/Win8. The real comparison will be how it performs compared to Android and more mainstream Linux distros.

Gates as Borg? Still?

[phreakincool]

WTF?!? Still with the "Gates as Borg" icon? How long has Ballmer been in charge of MS now? I'm no fan either, but you have to admit his ball head makes a better Borg. He looks like a Borg without implants.

FIRST!

[Anonymous Coward]

...

I thought Metro...

[justforgetme]

...sexualism is on it's way out?
Bravo Microsoft for consistently beeing out of touch with trends ;-)

WTF does Metro mean?

[Nyder]

What does metro actually mean?

Some say under ground bus system in Washington DC, some say it's the bus system in Seattle Area.

Some say it's a non gay man who tends to dress good or sort of guess like a gay man, without being a gay man?

So, it's like a good looking bus/subway system?

So the interface of Windows 8 is Metro, which means it looks gay, but isn't gay, and will take you to destination via the long way, crowded with all sorts of others, and some of them smell. Oh, and over charge you. I almost forgot, it's never on time, and when your running a little late, it's early. Always slow and usually a horrible ride.

Okay, now that i work out the details, i understand.

Do NOT WANT.

thanks

Re:WTF does Metro mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is Greek, and it means "mother".

Re:WTF does Metro mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

did you actually bother to check in the dictionary, genius ? I doesn't mean "mother", you idiot.

Specifics, not MS bashing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Commerce - Microsoft's change could drive laptop makers to produce touch screens by default. This would be good for laptop makers, as people would seek to buy new computers. "Casual gaming" 99 cent metro apps can be developed quickly and deployed via Microsoft market place.

One big change with Windows 8 is the phone-like memory management. Apps not in use get suspended completely in five seconds. The result is that apps start up much quicker and are more responsive.

The other big change is that your Windows 8 log in can use your Windows live on-line account to store app settings and preferences.

Users without a touch screen use a few new shortcuts. Generally, most new shortcuts involve the Windows key.

A big interface problem that potential interactions are not revealed. The Start and settings menu shows up in a Metro app only if you hover the mouse over the lower left corner. In the start interface, you can start typing the name of an app to launch it, but there is no indication in the menu that you can do this.

Lock screen, log in - press the up key or page up key.
Metro app menu - right click
Start menu is always available - tap the meta key
Shutting off the computer or Settings - meta I
You can drag and drop the Start menu "icons" so that your frequently used apps are on the screen when you log in.

If you are an app developer, the big change you need to be aware of is that your app may get terminated by the system when it is suspended. If you want your app to behave gracefully, you need to incrementally save user data and the save state of your application when the app is suspended. Big apps like video editors have a greater risk of being terminated when suspended.

Re:Specifics, not MS bashing...

[gl4ss]

A big interface problem that potential interactions are not revealed. The Start and settings menu shows up in a Metro app only if you hover the mouse over the lower left corner. In the start interface, you can start typing the name of an app to launch it, but there is no indication in the menu that you can do this.

well.. in chrome, or in new firefox, you can't know that ctrl-f will bring up the find dialog, unless you just assume that it will beforehand.

gestures and magic key combos. wasn't that shit supposed to be for vi and emacs?

This actually makes sense as a strategy

[satuon]

The whole point of Windows tablets is that they use the same OS for tablets and PCs. But they couldn't push that same OS for tablets because people chose to buy iPads instead, because the desktop OS isn't optimised for tablets.

But making the desktop OS use Metro means that customers will have to become acquanted with Metro once Microsoft stops selling XP and Windows 7 licenses to OEMs. And then their tablet offering will come with the 'familiar Windows experience', only now in addition to using the same OS that's on your desktop, it will be suitable for tablets.

If they can't shove a desktop OS in a tablet because people can choose not to buy that tablet, they can shove a tablet OS on the desktop and every office worker has to buy that.

Ex Microsoft fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft made the wrong decision in bringing Windows 8 to tablets instead of WP7 and they are going to pay heavily for it in the desktop and the tablet space.

I didn't think they could find anything worse then

[toddmbloom]

The Ribbons but, I see, that they did. I think we can safely say that Windows 8 is the new Windows ME.

Please explain.

[porky_pig_jr]

From what I've been hearing and seeing, it seems like the current built of Metro interface is heavily skewed toward touch-screen based interaction. As to keyboard and mouse input, it's harder to use than Windows 7 GUI. As I type this message, I sit in front of laptop, using keyboard and mouse and external monitor, in fact I can't even reach that monitor with my hand. And I believe most of the people using laptops, even without external monitors, would agree that the keyboard and mouse
(or touchpad or trackpoint) is preferred way to input. Touchscreen belongs to iPad-like devices and tablets. So what does Microsoft is hoping to achieve? That with Metro people will start buying tablets/convertibles, as an opposite to having two separate devices, laptop and, say, iPad? I have my doubts. And, in any case, I use Windows primarily because of the number of applications available for it (and for hardware compatibility as well). Lots of legacy applications, all are keyboard/mouse type of input oriented. So what's going to happen when Windows 8 appears? I just hope that by the time (at least) beta version is available, the traditional keyboard/mouse interface will be on the same level as it is in Windows 7. If not, IMHO, Microsoft will be shooting itself in foot.

Re:Please explain.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's as simple as: they are not removing the current Desktop Interface.

Just what we need

[brunes69]

It has been 4 years now and the few times a month I have to use an Office product, I still can't find common things in the damn "ribbons" that I used to be able to find in the plain-jane menu.

Microsoft: Still clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Micro$loth. Users, businesses and well, practically everyone with a brain can see what an enormously expensive exercise retraining half the #@@$# world on a new UI is. We DON'T want it. Particularly if it's going to be as munted as the abortions that are the server2008R2 GUI and the exchange 2010/Powershell/GUI/Random accumulation of broken and non-consistent chinese whispers.

Only the IT shop gets any value out of scripting and headless configs which is ... (as a random wild-ass guess) going to be 5% of your customer base. So if you want to piss off 95% of your customers go right ahead. Keeps IT managers like me in business and Apple/RedHat laughing all the way to the bank.

If I'd wanted to make things in server land slower and stupider I'd have bought an apple.

How about you give people the old version look and feel as well and then gather some stats as to which version people are actually using. Isn't that (gasp) marketing research????? I'l lay million to one odds that I know which UI version will win.