Even Windows 8 Users Prefer Windows 7

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Even Windows 8 Users Prefer Windows 7

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 27, 2012 @12:48AM from the 7-is-prime-of-course dept.

judgecorp writes "Windows 8 is not proving an instant hit amongst the early adopters who have got their hands on it. More than half of them prefer Windows 7, according to a survey by a Windows 8 forum. Skeptics cited fears of price and compatibility issues. Meanwhile, Intel is busily applying damage limitation to criticism by CEO Paul Otellini. Apparently he did say Windows 8 wasn't ready — but added that it was still a good idea to get it out before the holiday season."

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Makes sense? by SirGarlon · 2012-09-27 00:50 · Score: 4, Insightful

How does it make sense to push a buggy product out the door before it's ready? It only makes sense if you want the product to tank.

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1. Re:Makes sense? by Joce640k · 2012-09-27 00:53 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Simple: Xmas is only 3 months away.
  
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2. Re:Makes sense? by gl4ss · 2012-09-27 00:55 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  it's _not_ buggy.
  it's the feature set which isn't ready.
  
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3. Re:Makes sense? by Sir_Sri · 2012-09-27 01:51 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Windows 8 isn't so much buggy (at least not on microsofts end), it's just badly designed. Those are two different problems. Deliberately choosing something to behave stupidly isn't a bug.
  Also, both of your examples (SEL4 and TeX) have no relationship to a full product. One is a single piece of the product that, as an isolated microkernel might be bug free, but is not a full OS, and the other is a typsetting specification. The core kernel in Windows 8 could be bug free or close thereto (I'll show some sympathy for compatibility with new hardware, but it would still be a bug).
  Windows 8 is badly designed. There will inevitably be some bugs related to the new UI, UEFI, new hardware, etc. But those are easily at the level of satisfactory. The problem is that it's just hugely inconsistent in how it behaves. It still runs 7 or 8 year old directx 8 code fine. But it can't figure out if it's 'metro' or a desktop, which one it should be in when, or how to just produce a list of installed software that I can semi easily navigate. No, metro is not easy to navigate, it tries, and it makes sense for 'apps' but it fails for serious software that has both applications and documentation.
4. Re:Makes sense? by mcgrew · 2012-09-27 01:55 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  it's _not_ buggy.
  Then it's the first OS ever released by anyone that wasn't.
  
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5. Re:Makes sense? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2012-09-27 02:16 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  How does it make sense to push a buggy product out the door before it's ready? It only makes sense if you want the product to tank.
  It depends on how buggy the product is, and how big you think that the first mover(or at least not-quite-as-tardy mover) advantage will be for the product in question.
  Given that (relatively) seamless online patch delivery is now an expectation, shipping a product in the 'rough but usable' stage can work just fine, no matter how much the purists loath it(and, unfortunately for the purists, that now seems to be the mark of a good launch, with 'overtly broken' being a distinct option).
  The thing that strikes me as somewhat insane about MS' Windows 8 push is not so much that it is on an aggressive timescale, they haven't released an OS that was properly baked out of the box in a significant number of versions; but that they seem to be pushing out Windows 8 more or less solely for the sake of 'metro' which really only makes sense on tablets and any other touch-focused quasi-PC oddities.
  It would seem totally sensible if they were to rush Windows RT/Metro out the door so as to get Wintablets on the shelves by Christmas(it's not as though iOS or Android started as terribly finished products, and 'ship now, then iterate' seems to have done them minimal serious harm). What seems weird is tying that to a push for Win8 on normal desktops. Rushing out a product where you currently don't have one isn't ideal; but that's how the world goes. Rushing out an unfinished product with negative buzz in the face of a (now reasonably polished) product that your customers mostly like? That's weird.
  And this isn't even like the 'XP 4 lyfe contrarians hate Vista/7 because it breaks their shitty software' problem that they had last time. IT departments have, mostly, worked it out and switched or are switching, and Win8 isn't, if you ignore the 'we shipped an entire separate shell because, uh, fuck you, that's why' part, nearly as much of an architectural break. It's just unpolished and offers nothing interesting to current Win7 users. With XP, at least, while the legacy investment was massive, XP legitimately sucked a lot and needed to go; it just wasn't going to be pretty getting there.
6. Re:Makes sense? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-27 02:31 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Not true, though it is imposable to prove a piece of code has no bugs there it is possible to verify that a subset of bugs do not exist within the code.
  You failed programming didn't you. This type of programming is NOT impossible, but it is extremely time intensive. NASA's systems are example where there is a mathematical proof behind every piece of logic (hardware or software) to ensure things work as intended (read: no bugs). Why else would they still run on 40 yr old equipment? You don't run tests to verify it works as intended because you can easily miss tests that would reveal bugs, but if you create code that has a mathematical proof to it, you effectively already tested ALL possible test cases.
7. Re:Makes sense? by h4rr4r · 2012-09-27 02:40 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Because Windows 8 hopefully makes you love tiles so much that you buy WinPhone8, and sign up for the subscription version of Office.
Windows 7 Will Be Around for A While by andy16666 · 2012-09-27 01:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

Something tells me that Windows 7 is here to stay, at least for the next decade or so. I can't see a lot of people switching any time soon.
Well this time there's merit to it by Sycraft-fu · 2012-09-27 01:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

I find 8's new Metro UI to be genuinely worse for desktops. I gave it a chance, just like I did 7's new taskbar, but it has failed to win me over. It is not a good way for working with a desktop. My desktop is not a tablet, I do not use a touch screen. So a start menu replacer (Start 8 is my choice) gets installed.
Also I'm sorry but it is ugly. It is a step back looks wise. 7 looks pretty slick. All the desktop composition is put to good use making it look nifty. In 8, it is just ugly. The desktop composition is still there underneath, and is in fact even improved, but it is used to render a very ugly UI. Worse still, the UI changes make it more difficult to navigate, it is hard to tell if something is a window for a separate program, or just a window under the current one. They all look the same.
It's sad because technically, 8 is quite competent. It is very fast. Cakewalk found basically across the board improvements in Sonar (http://blog.cakewalk.com/windows-8-a-benchmark-for-music-production-applications/) and this is just their release software, not a special 8 build. So it looks like under the hood, 8 is a good OS. However its UI is truly a step back and the UI is the first thing most people notice.
It isn't a horrible OS, but it is worse than it should be, all on account of them wanting to try and use their desktop and server OS to push tablet sales.
Gee, maybe if they had listened to their users... by gestalt_n_pepper · 2012-09-27 01:53 · Score: 5, Insightful

And just extended the Windows 7 shell so it had a "Tablet" mode with some sort of auto-detection, they might have kept the desktop people happy AND the tablet crowd happy - just like the actual users suggested on the Windows forums, again and again and again....
Microsoft, missing the obvious since the 80s.
Next up? Microsoft ignores 3d printing until Linux dominates the field!

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Re:And the other half... by Sarten-X · 2012-09-27 02:04 · Score: 4, Insightful

Windows 8: Emacs edition

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Correction... by HerculesMO · 2012-09-27 02:46 · Score: 5, Insightful

Windows 8 isn't buggy... it's unfinished and unpolished. What is there works well.
The desktop and metro side by side experiences make you feel like Microsoft put a lot of effort into getting the system running fast, smooth, and seamless, and then forgot to do anything with the desktop, or bring over any of the options. I posted about this yesterday, but suffice to say, Windows 8 is really great in terms of technical prowess, but the UI is unfinished, unpolished, and jarring, to say the least. And this is coming from somebody who actually *likes* Windows.

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Re:This Poll is Dumb by Lucky75 · 2012-09-27 02:55 · Score: 5, Insightful

This might be blasphemy, but IMO windows 7 is far more polished than *any* flavour of Linux.

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