Slashdot Mirror
Even Windows 8 Users Prefer Windows 7
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."
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.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Tried to figure out where the "I prefer Windows 7" button moved to and gave up.
Not what Micros~1 needed. Then again they've always had big problems with adoption. A dollar's worth of free advice -- Stick to Xbox, mobile, and your business segments.
I'm one of the people that will use Windows 7 for the future in my office and in my house....
Will give a try in the pad field but with both fingers crossed...
Don't hate me - but I like Win8. Takes some getting used to but there are a lot of nice power features. Just the fancy new keyboard shortcut Win+X alone will get you a long way toward adjusting.
Isn't it pretty much established that, like Star Trek movies, only every other version of Windows is any good?
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
So new users before the old, safe choice they're familiar with instead of something radically new and different. How does this surprise anyone?
Look, I had the same inclination when I switched from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. I was one of those early adopters who bought it launch day and ran home and installed it. I, and many others, had the same feelings when the Ribbon debuted for MS Office. And yes, I thought the same thing trying out Windows 8. There is always that moment of "panic" when you realize you don't know where things are anymore like you did with the previous version.
But, each time, if you stick with it for a bit, you get familiar with new interface. You pick it up just as you did with the old one--and you even start to realize the advantages of the new layout versus the old. Sorry, Slashdot, but this is FUD and you're guilty of spreading it.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
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.
There's plenty of people on Win8 already. It does work, it is different (faster for one), people don't like change, and Windows has changed of course. If you don't like the metro UI don't use it. Where's the news here?
throw new NoSignatureException();
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.
From the article:
Right. Around 35% of Microsoft fanbois on a Microsoft fanboi site would prefer Surface to Android of I pad, and that's good news for Microsoft? If they can't get more than 35% of their own fanbois on board, it's dead.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
The notion that many or even most users of a new and largely untested (insert any-fracking-thing here) would prefer the one they were using and were comfortable with previously over this new and unfamiliar experience, is nothing short of blatantly obvious. Likewise, the notion that any new complex system is going to be completely perfect on day-one of release is utterly ludicrous. Crud... I'm a Mac user, and I'm not in the slightest surprised to hear that W8 users might want to go back to W7, any more then I would be surprised when any given Windows user who has migrated to a Mac expresses certain regrets over that move, now and then. Growing pains always suck... and in the case of W8, there's not really any seasoned users around, who might be able to help navigate through this new territory.
The real test of W8 will be to conduct the same type of survey a year or two from now, to see if switchers who have been using it for awhile still want to go back. Vista very (in)famously failed that test, which is what kept XP around for so long... but trying to conduct such a test now, on W8 early adopters is basically the same thing as testing to see if water is still wet.
This is the same paradox Microsoft struggled with on Windows XP: if you make a really good product, people will buy it once and buy nothing else.
If you wonder why Microsoft makes its money selling Windows with new PCs, this is why. Buying a new PC is the only time most of us buy an operating system.
Look for them to go to a subscription model soon, with different UIs being options on a constantly-refined code base. It's about the only way to make money outside of new PC OS sales.
I imagine this is the same reason that every car manufacturer hasn't re-tooled and started making those old VW bugs. A car that runs forever is a bad product.
What, Creative Labs can't release a decent driver for a new version of Windows? There is NOTHING new there since they couldn't come up with a decent driver for Windows XP for the SB Live cards, and actually drove me and many others away. Creative has NEVER been good about drivers.
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!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
So.. give it a shot.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Just yesterday I installed the final version of Windows 8 from DreamSpark to a netbook just for fun. The result? It actually ran smooth, but none of the Metro apps could be run due to the 1024x600 resolution. Not a big loss, but I was slightly surprised that they actually completely skipped us netbook-connoisseurs.
As a sidenote, it was funny how in W8 many of the texts have been changed to a casual, "user-friendly" style. "While we set up your stuff, please enjoy a pizza. Meanwhile we'll send some info to Microsoft, but you can change this later."
This new ver of Windows introduces many new features. So many, in fact, that we're still finding and counting them.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Most of what I see in Windows 8 is a touch screen-centric interface. If you have a tradition desktop with a keyboard and mouse, it looks like a Pre-School, Fisher-Price interface.
Microsoft sees tablets and touch-screen devices as being the way of the future and desktop PC not shipping the their previous volumes. This may be true, but dumbing down the PC even more to accommodate touch-screens is not the way forward.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
installed win8 the other day. thought i had installed Ubuntu with Unity by mistake. Unity is much more polished and user friendly than win8. the upside is win8 is a little more responsive than win7.
Users experience the most radical UI change since DOS added Windows. And shockingly, 53% percent prefer the older more familiar Windows 7.
You know what this really means folk? Microsoft actually succeeded. If you can get 47% (or just shy of half) of users to prefer a new completely radical UI experience. You've done something really really right. As I'd expect 80% to prefer that which they're familiar with and have used since 1995.
Let's use our brains, and look at this data for what it really is. A measure of a decent amount of success. 50/50 on a new experience is good. Heck, probably didn't have that much higher support when XP or Vista came out. And those were incremental changes.
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.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Or... maybe someone else should come up with a new better OS and get people to try it? KDE is a joke. Pretty much every Linux GUI is a joke. MacOS is actually pretty nice these days (though pre-10 it was a joke too), but the whole trying to be a walled garden thing is a bit of a turnoff. Ok, yes, the more of a joke Windows becomes (and Win8 is a pretty big joke too), the more people might feel like trying some flavor of Linux, as it could hardly be -less- useable... but still. Anti-trust commissions of various places can't exactly regulate into existence a new non-sucky OS if none actually exist, or regulate that people have to use it. They have merely to regulate that if someone -did- create a new OS that was better than Windows, Microsoft isn't allowed to smash them to bits with frivolous lawsuits until they died or anything. Which I wouldn't put past them to try.
Too bad OSes are kind of a monolithic undertaking to design... I think we're kinda stuck with the ones we have.
What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic, and a dyslexic?
Someone who lies awake at night, wondering if there really is a dog.