Gartner Analyst Retracts "Windows 8 Is Bad" Claim

nk497 writes "A Gartner analyst made headlines after describing Windows 8 desktop as: 'in a word: bad.' After web reaction, including one story asking why anyone bothers to listen to the consultancy firm anymore, Gunnar Berger has now yanked the offending sentence from his blog post, saying it was taken out of context and only applied to using the desktop with a mouse and keyboard, and that overall Windows 8 is a good thing. 'If you look at my blog, I've gotten rid of it,' he said. 'It's upsetting me that it's being taken completely out of context.'"

Comments

Re:Was it taken out of context?

[bigstrat2003]

I thought exactly the same thing. He has nothing to apologize for, Windows 8 is bad. It has one of the worst UI designs I've ever seen.

Re:Was it taken out of context?

[kdogg73]

In the shadow of my main Mac tower (desktop publishing), I have an old Dell XPS B866 in my office running Win2k as my lowest common denominator, so I can test .doc, .xls and .ppt files in Office 2003. But talking about Windows UI? It was no frills, quick and to the point interface. I still think it was Microsoft's best OS. All it needs is some protocol updates and other under the hood stuff, it could last longer. Unfortunately, 12 years old, even Firefox developers wont throw it a bone.

Pretty much

[Sycraft-fu]

I have to say I actually agree with him both ways, that it is bad, but not completely.

So from a technical standpoint Windows 8 is great. It is fast, stable, and efficient. Cakewalk tested Sonar X1 on it and found an across the board performance improvement. They didn't recompile for it or anything, just used the current one, and in all tests 8 did better. They really seem to have done a solid job improving the technical aspects of the OS which is great, but 7 is already quite good.

The problem is the UI. Not only is it ugly, which maybe shouldn't matter to people but does, but it is not well designed for mouse+keyboard. They are trying to whack a tablet UI on to a desktop and for some reason they think that won't piss people off. So it isn't as pleasing to look at, and is less efficient to use than Windows 7.

So over all I think it is a "bad" OS in that people are going to hate it, and it is going to create this situation of "Windows 7 is the last good OS EVAR!" and it'll be harder to get people to upgrade than it normally is. However it is only bad because they are trying to use it to flog their tablets, the technical aspects are quite good.

For personal use I don't care, I'll just replace its UI with something else, but it annoys the hell out of me for work since it is going to make life more difficult. Users are going to hate it (they hate any change but they'll really make hell about this one) and then decide they never want to move off of 7.

Re:Was it taken out of context?

[Aenoxi]

Sigh. This old canard again? Every mouse and trackpad sold by Apple since the mighty mouse and the glass trackpad has had right-button functionality built-in. OSX has supported right mouse clicks since forever.

Of course modern Apple pointing hardware only has one microswitch and relies on capacitance multi-touch technology to identify if the user is clicking on the right hand or left hand side of the device.

Being charitable i'll assume that's what you meant by one button. Why not try using the hardware to discover its actual functional capabilities? You never know, you might like it. I did despite my initial prejudices (as a dremel-wielding, cryo-cooling, case-modding hardcore PC fan).