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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.'"
Seriously! I get pissed when my kids touch my monitor screen with their sticky fingers. Now if I have to do it my screen is going to be covered in Cheetos dust.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
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.
Frankly though, I don't really care about the UI, I've been using the Win2K classic mode since well..win2K.
There have already been user mods and themes to restore the classic interface.
I'm interested more in the kernel and stability/updates and underlying parts of the OS.
I've never liked Aero, or the ME or Vista interfaces or bloated junk like the OSX interface.
I'm not curmudgeonly enough to work purely in a CLI environment, I don't want my OS to look pretty, I want it to run applications, preferably faster and more stably than it's previous iterations on the same hardware.
A fine Chianti?
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.
Ah, Grasshopper, you fail to understand the zen of Gartner.
In order to be taken seriously, that they base their statements on nothing more than what people want to hear from them. Because they therefore illuminate the inner brilliance that every CEO knows must exist inside of them somewhere, Gartner becomes the top research agency in technology today.
It is not sufficient that Gartner, like a stopped clock, accidentally be right from time to time. No, they have achieved release from the wheel of torment that is reality. They strive never to be right. Gartner, my child, is the apotheosis of Wrong.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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.
Let's face it, most of us are scoffers. But moments before zero hour, it does not pay to take chances.
When the Lumia is capable of doing advanced things like have Skype receive calls without being a foreground app, then maybe I can take this seriously.
As it stands right now the Lumia and WP7 are just lousy phones. They're not up to par with the competition. They got better reviews then they deserved considering how many reviewers adored the thing, but the market didn't care.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Why would anyone bother running modern software on 12 year old hardware?
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.
In a previous job, where I was a tech manager, the management above me swore by Gartner. Nothing was done without their blessing. Unless, of course, the recommendation disagreed with one of their deep-seated "religious" biases.
In any case, dealing with Gartner was an interesting experience. I would call them and speak to an analyst about some product we were thinking of getting. The analyst would make vague pronouncements about "industry standards", and "best of breed", and "best practices", and usually vaguely recommend whichever product happened to be the front runner in that particular niche at that time. Then I would outline my reasons for choosing whatever product we had determined to be best for our needs. I could hear the analyst hanging on every word, and I just knew our reasoning would make it into the next round of recommendations.
They never gave me anything useful, their sole function seemed to be to validate whatever decision we had already made. In the couple of cases where they did make a serious recommendation in conflict with our plans, the company tended to ignore them and do what it pleased anyway.
What about Android on the desktop? I bet Google could make a lot of money selling PCs with the ad: "Works just like your phone, with the same android interface you know and love."
Why is everyone so obsessed with unifying interfaces? Sometimes, different interfaces are *necessary* to achieve wildly differing functionalities on the desktop and portable devices.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.