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Microsoft: Windows 8 To RTM In August
nk497 writes "Microsoft has confirmed Windows 8 will RTM the first week of August, with general availability in late October. Steve Ballmer suggested Microsoft expected Surface to sell "millions" of the 375m Windows 8 PCs expected to sell in the next year — spending much of the keynote talking about partners' devices. From the article: 'Tami Reller, chief financial officer and chief marketing officer of the Windows and Windows Live division, confirmed the release date at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto today, as she showed off a host of Windows 8 devices created by the software giant's manufacturing partners.'"
Were journalists allowed to touch any of them this time?
Question: is there any reason for PC users to consider this OS, or is it only for tablets?
Microsoft has announced that the release date will be pushed out to Friday, December 21, 2012
1. Windows 8 was well tested by the masses. And I consistently saw the same complaints from most news shops and users.
2. Microsoft is still releasing Windows 8 on time rather than listening to any of the criticism levied during testing.
3. They have slashed the price really low. I do think they heard the criticism and know that consumers don't want Windows 8, but maybe if it is really cheap, people will buy it anyway.
Here's the problem. Why should I pay money to make my OS worse? Microsoft should listen to the criticism from testing and improve their product and then sell it for full price.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Released to WTF sounds more appropriate.
Four stories after a submission asking if grammar matters any more, we find this gem of a sentence in the summary:
Steve Ballmer suggested Microsoft expected Surface to sell "millions" of the 375m Windows 8 PCs expected to sell in the next year â" spending much of the keynote talking about partners' devices.
Comparing Win8 to ME or Vista is unfair to Win8.
The really sad part about Win8 is Metro. There is a LOT to like about the underlying OS (password unmask, much better taskmanager, and many other small improvements), and I have no reason to think that the OS itself will be unstable like ME or Vista.
If Microsoft would fix Metro on the desktop (It may be fine for tablets and phones), Win8 would be something I would like. However, as it currently stands, I won't "upgrade" until I have a good, stable way to disable Metro and use the other features of the OS.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
finally someone will Read The Manual
... of the discussion. You're as predictable as everyone else.
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2012/07/09/upcoming-windows-milestones-shared-with-partners-at-wpc.aspx/
I mean who uses the GUI to do much work in Windows anyway? Pfffft , cmd.exe is all I need!
Since when "RTM" has become a verb?
Was it that difficult to write " Windows 8 will be Ready To Market the first week of August"?
Release to market... didn't even think of that one. I assumed it meant release to manufacturing. A kind of crucial distinction.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Having dropped the Start Menu in the initial release, and cluttered the desktop with boring tiles, the first Windows 8 maintenance service pack will replace those tiles with a host of animated sprites. Click on the Pearly "Gates" to access the Cloud. Click on the lie detector sprite to verify your CD has been paid for using the Microsoft Trusted Customer Media Player. Click on the flying chair to register a bug report.
No one I know wants Windows 8. No one I know is even talking about it. I don't want Windows 8. I don't want Windows RT. I don't care about Microsoft products anymore. No one I know does. The last time I paid for an MS product was a promotional copy of Windows 7 Ultimate for $30 from one of their retail partners I worked at. I got a copy of Office 2007 from my University for $10. I will never purchase another MS product at full price. The only way they could get me to upgrade is by knocking 90% off the retail price.
I have decided to stop giving them my money, and I've switched almost entirely to Apple. I'd much rather use Mac or Linux, since nowadays there is more support than ever for comparable programs to run on those platforms.
MSFT will slowly fade into obscurity. Consumers, and even businesses, don't care about them anymore. The only people who will buy their products are big businesses, OEMs and college students who can already get the software for 90% off. And heck I don't even know any big businesses who have upgraded their systems from Windows XP. I know a small handful who have gone to Windows 7.
Ballmer is a clueless prick, and he doesn't care about providing good products so much as he cares about playing political games with Microsoft employees. Plus, he's an egomaniac, who refuses to believe that MS ever does anything wrong.
Metro is the result of a few "powerful" interests at MS protecting their collective asses. It's easier for them to just shove Metro out there, and then start pointing fingers when everyone hates it, than it is to risk the wrath of idiot managers like Ballmer and his cronies.
Ballmer needs to be replaced if MS wants to be relevant in the future.
Anyone else reading that as "Windows Millstones"? Just you, me, and all their "partners", I suspect.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I agree, but they don't do cheap. Give it a couple of years though and the ipad will take care of that. No, the tablet won't evolve itself so much, more that the apps that normal people actually want to use will. Grandma and Grandpa want to do their banking, shopping, organise their photos / videos, talk to their kids and read things on the internet. A tablet will do all that and more.
People/apps just haven't caught up yet - the vast majority of end users who want a cheap laptop would actually be better served by a locked-down (as in, secure) tablet, they just don't know it yet.
Sure, there's a niche of tech savvy users who want more for less money, but that market segment isn't statistically significant, imho.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I have been testing Windows 8 on my tablet PC for months now, and it's been a horrible experience. The interface is very cumbersome. It's difficult to find your programs and settings without a real Start Menu, and why have two different browsers (Metro and Desktop)? Also, any computer with an Intel Chipset of 865-965 is not fully supported (most PC's from a few years ago). Startup is fast, but some applications will not work properly unless you do a full restart. Oh, and the stylus keyboard only shows up when using the Metro Apps, you have to manually bring up the keyboad when using the desktop apps. And who thought of making it so hard to access the shutdown menu? What were they thinking?
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
RTM in August normally means that it'll be available for MSDN & Technet subscribers to download in August. "General availability" means boxes on the shelves, yes. It's pretty much always been like that (Win7 was pushed to MSDN in the last week of July, boxed versions available in October) - no idea why.
The Windows 8 UI is atrocious and probably will kill Microsoft, as well as Microsofts announcements they are going to screw over users from upgrading from older versions of Windows by deleting their settings. I think people would have to be insane to consider upgrading to Windows 8 considering the UI is unuseable and a disaster and so on. Microsoft is really committing suicide with this and is basically telling its users "fuck you" and deterring users who would actually buy an upgrade.
I would like to say Linux is a better choice, but Ubuntu has the same problems with its atrocious Unity interface. Yes, it can be disabled, but that sort of misses the point that Ubuntu is supposed to be user friendly, most users when encountering Unity will just give up on Linux right away as this is what they will think Linux is like, its those first impressions.
The start menu and task bar model "just works", is easy to use, makes sense, etc. It is clear, it is simple, it is not too obtrusive, it is categorized and easy to find things and so on. There are just things which you cannot improve on, where things have gotten to such a point of perfection that messing with it can only make it worse. I think start menu and task bar is such a point of perfection and trying to mess with it invariably makes things worse. Both Microsoft and Ubuntu appear obsessed with novelty, for change for the sake of change, which is very bad design motivation. They are more concerned with trying to be edgy than they are about being concerned with what the users need.