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Intel CEO Tells Staff Windows 8 Is Being Released Prematurely
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Geek.com: "Intel CEO Paul Otellini may be getting an angry phone call from Steve Ballmer today after it was revealed he told staff in Taiwan Windows 8 isn't ready for release. Otellini's comments were made at an internal meeting in Taipai, and he must have naively thought they would never become public knowledge. We don't know if he went into detail about what exactly is unfinished about Windows 8, but others have commented about a lack of reliable driver support and supporting applications. For many who have picked up previous versions of the Windows desktop OS early, this probably isn't coming as a surprise."
Aero looks much, much nicer than a flat rectangle that is one color. It's too bad that the window chrome got bashed so bad. Of course a likely reason for it is that tablets will run primarily on battery and Aero might be a drain on that.
Driver support ALWAYS lags because some companies are lazy. The big guys, Intel, AMD, nVidia, all seem to have drivers out on time and Windows 8 is no exception. You can get 8 drivers from them, life is good. However more specialty companies often lag badly. There's no Windows 8 drivers for any pro audio interfaces I can find, but that's no surprise I remember that it took M-Audio the better part of a year for Windows 7.
There's just never going to be good driver support for a new OS on account of companies not wanting to bother. Even if the drivers don't need any changes, just testing and re-certification it can take time or just not happen at all.
Or here: http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/
Or here: http://www.lee-soft.com/vistart/
And I can say it's great, and it's terrible.
The great -- it's really, really fast. Boot times are under 10 seconds to completely usable, apps launch fast, and IE10 is really not as bad as I thought it might be. The snapping of windows to side by side and whatever work really, really well, and I find myself more productive by seeing my email snapped to the side and then browsing or whatever.
The bad -- the experience is really jarring. Most of my time is spent in the "desktop" which is a complete carryover from Windows 7. I would have thought that Microsoft would have taken the effort to re-skin that in a way better than they have (see here: http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/24/2822891/windows-desktop-ui-concept), but they didn't. It's a complete lack of effort. Not to mention, that things like battery life remaining, the time, are hidden into the OS and don't make appearances anywhere.
The ugly -- Media Center. Fuck man, that's probably the best app in Windows, and could really kick the crap out of the Apple TV or Google TV if it was properly developed. With Windows 8's API structure there could be a lot of integration here, making media center the "hub" for entertainment on the PC. So if you wanted Netflix, or Amazon, or whatever - you'd have to integrate it into Media Center. But they just booted it out because people weren't using it. Of course they weren't... when you treat it like a third rate product, it's going to get third rate attention.
Also ugly -- control panel. There are two of them in the OS. One is the 'desktop' version which remains unchanged from Windows 7, and then there's the Metro one that lets you work on settings for "Metro". Additionally multi monitor support with "hot spots" is a nightmare. I have two monitors and at work, I have 3. Trying to get into the bottom right or left to click on the start menu is extremely difficult, and in a remote desktop window, even harder. You can't use shortcut keys in remote desktop, but I've gotten used to using Windows Key + C for the charms bar, but realistically it's annoying.
All in all it's a mixed bag. Microsoft needs to step up development to complete the UI experience because right now it's a joke. The OS itself is fundamentally better too, in terms of speed, stability, resource usage, sleep/hibernate, etc. However nobody's going to care if it acts like a fucked up monster to play with. Most people will adapt, as they always do, and it's not terribly hard to get used to. But if you want to compete in a world of where Apple makes design a #1 priority, and people VALUE that, then you have to fix the UI experience in Windows. It's not all about usability.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Windows 8 Tablets with Intel processors will not arrive this year, unlike the ARM-based RT tablets due to surface before this year's holiday purchase season.
The marketing fire for Windows 8 will hotly blaze but most of the focus will be its advantage as a touch based tablet interface. You won't see the Today show demoing a mouse based computer for the masses.
Perhaps Otellini doesn't want market interest to be piqued until Intel tablets can benefit? Perhaps he's just positioning any teething pains of moving to this new OS to be blamed on the ARM cores? Certainly Intel doesn't lose the business of folks who choose to stick with mouse based Windows while biding their time.
I have no doubt there will be plenty of teething pains with Windows 8 (a major GUI inert ace change affects both user expectations and code integrity), but just remember that Intel has gains to be made by casting FUD around the early, non-Intel tablet release of Windows 8, too.
It has some definite elements of awesome, but it's interface is such a turd that it's hard to look past that. I've been developing a Windows 8 class for Support staff. There's been so many times when I exclaim "Cool! That should have been in Win7". Then I have to go back to that duct-taped construction paper and glue start screen and the mystique fades away. After using it for a few weeks, I don't hate it as much as when I started, but I still wouldn't load it on my personal machine.
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
Are you telling me that every time Linus makes a new point release he makes sure all the driver test cases pass for all drivers in the tree? From reading LKmL, it seems the standard for turning the crank is sometimes as low as "I tried it on two machines and it didn't crash. Let's unleash it on the rest of the world, who will QC it."
Apparently the Start Menu isn't working yet. I can't even find the Start Button.
My mom's in town and I ran an errand last night while she stayed at my place. I come back and she's using my Win 8 computer (I left it unlocked) and was in Metro IE (which is odd given that she would have been in the desktop when she started). I asked her if she had any problem using the computer and she said that she did have trouble trying to find out how to go somewhere (browse to a website), but then she right clicked and found what she needed. No big deal. I asked her if she noticed that the Windows Orb/Start Button was missing, and she had no idea what I was talking about. I re-explained a few times and still had no idea. She's been launching pinned programs from the task bar for long enough (~3 years) that she's completely forgotten about the Start Button. While I don't think that's typical, I imagine how since it isn't an issue with my computer illiterate mother, it'll be less of a problem than you think for many.