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CowboyNeal Weighs In On the Windows 8 "Metro" GUI
By far, the most visible new "feature" in Windows 8, is it's new UI, which takes inspiration from smart phone and tablet devices. The old start menu is now full-screened, with large icons for all apps, and apps run in full-screen by default, changing a desktop PC into a very large tablet minus touchscreen with a keyboard and mouse added on.
It's not surprising in the least that many users take issue with this. Early on, people have said something along the lines of, "Oh it's just for the early builds, surely they will allow some way for long-time users to disable it." However, now it would seem that that would be only wishful thinking, at least for the time-being.
This is a sharp turn for Microsoft from their previous UIs. Aero, found in both Windows Vista and Windows 7, allowed users to disable it if they didn't agree with it's aesthetic, or wanted to reallocate the memory from the UI to applications. Moreover, Aero was still functionally the same as older Windows UIs. It may look prettier, but it still fires up a Start Menu like before, still lets one dock things into the taskbar, and still lets the desktop get cluttered up with icons.
It's this difference that's key here. For companies that have Windows deployments with hundreds or thousands of seats, changing the way a Windows UI works is not an option. Regardless of how easy to use the Windows 8 UI may be, it's still not the same as what users have been trained to use since 1995. Sure, Windows 7 isn't Windows 95, but changes have been introduced gradually over time, making new features easier to adjust to. The Windows 8 UI is a fast, jarring change, that is likely to frustrate users as they adjust. With no clear path to turn it off as there is with Aero, it also makes it more likely that administrators around the world are less apt to adopt Windows 8 quickly. After the debacle around initial releases of Windows Vista, one might think that Microsoft had learned their lesson. Even Microsoft wasn't too popular to make an OS that no one wanted, and Windows XP lived on far longer than anyone ever thought it would. Windows 8 has already suffered from its share of bad press even before the official release. The logical thing to do here would be to be proactive in heading off user complaints.
That's why it's rather surprising to see them take a hard stance on the Windows 8 UI. Sure, undoubtedly some third party will create a drop-in shell replacement eventually. That's been done in past versions and will likely be done again for Windows 8. For a home user, it's an acceptable path. Home users of Windows are used to beating it into submission. However, for any company that has deployed hundreds of Windows seats, mandating the use of a third party shell replacement just isn't an option, much like Windows 8 isn't an option at present.
Short of opening the source to Windows, it's reconfigurability has, until now, been rather accommodating for users. Through the use of registry settings, or third party software, users have been able to configure Windows for themselves until they feel it's sufficiently usable. While still not "free" in the GNU sense, the UI has still allowed users this semblance of freedom, to do with the UI as they will. Since a normal user wouldn't hack at the source anyway, giving them the tiny bit of freedom to determine how they interact with their UI is what keeps them as a user. What Windows 8 is looking at here, is backlash not unlike the transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3, albeit on a much grander scale.
What will be the final outcome? That's hard to say at this point, as Microsoft could still change their stance and implement a way to bypass the Windows 8 GUI and bring up the legacy desktop. As it is, there are several keyboard shortcuts that allow this, it's just not possible to do so automatically at boot, which would seem to be what legacy users would want most. There's also an opportunity here. If people with large Windows deployments are faced with having to retrain their users, they may think about training them on Macs or Ubuntu or something else instead. The most likely scenario though, is likely the one that we saw with the release of Windows Vista, and that is that Windows 8's predecessor will be around for a lot longer than Microsoft planned.
At last.
The Windows 7 perpetuity machine is fully fueled, and ready to roll.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It's clear that Microsoft is terrified of Apple and feels the need to do "something, anything" to be seen as innovative. Of course, being innovative is not easy, and in my opinion MS lost their ability to innovate quite a while back. Metro is new, so MS is grabbing on to it like a shipwreck survivor grabs onto anything that floats.
Of course, "new" is not necessarily "good," and in this case I think the jury is definitely out on whether Metro is good.
All in all, this feels like a death rattle to me.
I have no way of knowing, but I would guess Microsoft expects Windows 8 to be adopted by Surface/tablet users first. Windows 7 will be the enterprise desktop of choice for some time. If things go according to Microsoft's plan, a few years from now users will be comfortable with the UI formerly known as Metro. Then the enterprise will migrate to Windows 9+ with whatever refinements it has. Whether this works or not, we shall see.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
We all learned this as kids.
Out right hiding dad's tools was unthinkable.
With Microsoft hiding the tools and forcing them to stay hidden... what are they thinking?!
When they forced the removal of "classic" view in Windows 2K8 it was insane.
I say it is insane because of the financial loss incurred by world business in lost man hours and down time just looking for the "new" way to do things you have been doing for more than a decade.
In man hours it is a simple salami attack taking small slices here and there from every user and admin.
In down time it gets scary. You have a site that is losing 100K per minute because it is down. The old way takes 2-3 min to fix the issue. once your tools are hidden you are on a 30 minute google session to find out how to do what you have been doing forever. 3 million dollars out the window for a single admin on a single outage. I had a site that cost that when it went down.
World wide, I would not be at all shocked if this causes more than a trillion dollars in hidden and obvious losses. I'm sure the R2 removal of classic did.
It maybe that in the future we just have to change the windows UI from explorer to Powershell so our tools stop getting hidden every new version of Windows.
Yup, I wont be using this polished turd in an office setting anytime soon.
No one does a full screen "launch apps" except OSes that cannot handle multi-tasking.
No, nobody is going to move to Macs or Linux on an enterprise desktop. They will stick with Windows. Windows 7 will not sunset on support for quite some time, and in the interim people will wait and see what Microsoft is going to do; either Windows 9 will be a better benefit to them, or they will figure out how to make Windows 8 work for them.
The one thing people know about Apple is that they do NOT support enterprises in any meaningful way. Look at XServe, which was pulled from its product line, and OSX Server which is basically an equivalent of Windows Home Server. And Linux? Comon... the arguments for retraining users apply for Linux and Mac TOO. The amount of investments made around the Windows platform are for many companies, quite large, and nobody's going to throw them away because despite the new interface, its enterprise pinnings are still pretty good on the client desktop.
I'm in the "wait and see" crowd. I don't particularly think the new interface is appealing, especially as a keyboard/mouse user, but given how little I use my start menu as it is, maybe it's not such a bad change... I really don't know. I do know that when we got preview copies running on PCs, all the Mac users came running by and told the IT teams how much they liked it. Go figure, eh?
Technology changes. And for many non-IT users of computers, Windows 8 is going to be great, simple, and straightforward to use. Viruses won't happen as easily because of the App Store, IE can't have any plugins/addons in its metro form, so all in all, it will be a boon to those folks. The IT folks who resist change will be the same people crying about the MS Office ribbon, or whatever else they got stuck on and didn't want to adapt. You're IT people -- you're supposed to adapt and change. Granted this change may not be the best, but you use it as a tool rather than a religion and you may find it better. Or not. In either case I don't think Metro is going anywhere, and the Surface tablet, if it does as well as people think it might, will just reinforce the fact MS made the right decision.
I on the other hand, will just wait and see.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
It should take 0 clicks. That's the problem.
Imagine Windows 7 where the start menu opened at login and took up the whole screen. That's it.
And that sounds terrible.
The idea that "modern" apps are all going to be fullscreen and tablet optimized (ie, only interacts on click, no cursor hover effects) is asinine.
That's actually correct, at least in my case. Only it would be "Different is Bad. GOD DAMN THAT FUCKING MICROSOFT! Damn it, I'm trying Linux!"
Which is what got me to Linux ten years ago. Change for the sake of change is stupid. Change to improve somthing is good. From DOS to Windows? That was a good change. Changing the placement of "options" in every version of IE from 1 to 4? Just fucking retarded.
When my shop migrated to Excel from Quattro ten or fifteen years ago, I took a class in Excel. It was on my desk for a week when they upgraded to a newer version of Excel, and the money my employer paid for my training and the time I spent attending was completely wasted. The newer version of Excel was more like Quattro than it was the older version. Microsoft has been bad about this ever since Windows, they weren't guilty of this with DOS.
If I have to learn a new thing to be able to do a new thing, that is a good thing. But having to relearn how to do somenthing I've done a thousand times before is just idiotic.
Free Martian Whores!
"they're trying to unify the interfaces so that the tablet experience mirrors the desktop experience"
You have it back to front. They're modifying the desktop to expose PC users to their tablet/phone product UI. Not because it's a good UI for PC. Not because any user ever asked for the same UI on such different devices. Certainly not because anyone wants this shitty UI.
This is leveraging a monopoly to support a failed product. They cant sell phones so they need to train users on the phone interface so the sheep will all choose Win8 on tablet and phone.
They also need to ditch the traditional desktop because it's too open, so open MS cant tax users on every app sale like Apple and to a lesser extent Google can.
This is monopoly abuse as a form of marketing and it has no benefit for users. It remains to be seen if it benefits MS profits or if the backlash sinks Win8 as well as their phone business.
You're right of course users will ultimately choose. I think the thing with evernote (haven't used it) or Skype(have) which are on multiple platforms is that just because you work on multiplatforms doesn't mean your interaction style needs to be the same. While start menu search is what I use to find things quickly usually, sometimes if I can't remember what a think is called I'll click through the startmenu to see what's there. With Metro it is a big pain because the tiles are big and clunky requiring more motion on average to see everything. Not to mention privacy issues data in the "find an app" area means that your data is visible to anyone in the room whenever you use your computer, even stuff you aren't currently using.
Realistically for the next few years at least Windows phone isn't going to be the most familiar UI for people coming from a phone anyways so why mimic it on a desktop? They might drive market share of each other up but the common design is more of a "make devlopers happy" decision I my opinion. Maybe users will like it. I can definitely see it pulling in the types of people that like Mac for their closed eco system, this is even a better model for them I think because they are much more likely to get a matching app for both phone and desktop than on Mac because the underlying framework is the same (and the Windows store will kind of make it a no brainer to just publish the app to both the desktop and the Win Phone stores I think).
I used it extensively at a job I had until recently, and I am unashamed to continue to call it the "Playskool OS". I wouldn't have a copy of this piece of crap if you gave it to me for free -- unless you gave me the receipt as well so I could return it and use the cash for something actually useful. It's a dumbed-down OS for a dumbed-down world. it treats all users like idiot children, it goes out of it's way to hide anything powerful or really useful from you, it smacks your hand when you try to do anything powerful or useful. I'm actually surprised that they didn't completely erradicate the ability to access a command-line interface, too, that would have completed it's descent into complete idiocy.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!