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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.'"
Admittedly I tend to only read the tech related news sites but they all picked up on the same thing....
Windows 8 on a desktop just doesn't make any sense.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
I guess the Microsoft check finally cleared.
It's company policy at Gartner for the analysts give their website links to their mothers, so that someone will read their blogs.
Hold your arm out in front of you for 20 minutes and tell me how great that touchscreen interface is.
Windows 8 is full of fail, just like the Nintendo power-glove, and for the same reason.
saying it was taken out of context and only applied to using the desktop with a mouse and keyboard,
Mouse and Keyboard??? Isn't that how 95% of the population is going to initially be using windows 8?
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This is why we all need to say what we mean, and mean what we say. Otherwise we lose our credibility. Whether Berger didn't really mean Windows 8 with keyboard and mouse is "bad," or he did mean it and is now recanting under pressure, looks bad either way. He's not only harmed his own reputation, but his employer's as well.
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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.
Ding Ding Ding! Bob, we have a winner! E. Fish. ANSII. Touch is not and cannot be practical for most business/office applications. Yes, it rules for Angry Birds and Draw Something, maybe even for your calendar (provided you are only viewing). But it is an awful interface for anything that requires typing and makes multi-tasking nearly impossible. Copy and paste on touch is the gonorrhea of computing. Just look at how crappy Autocad has gotten over the last 10 years or so where they have tried to move everything to a point-and-click use paradigm. It sucks balls, I spend an hour everytime I install it disabling all of the new UI crap they put on it because it just isn't efficient. I can't wait to see the cesspool that they create for it on Win8.
I think touch it is fantastic on tablets, but not the friggin' desktop. And even there, the dozen or so people in my office that have tablets all end up getting keyboards and mice for them (myself included on my ICS Android tablet) because they simply can't get stuff done quickly enough with touch.
Leave it to Microsoft to finally get something right (Windows 7) and then throw it away.