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Microsoft Co-founder Dings Windows 8 As 'Puzzling, Confusing'
CWmike writes "Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has called Windows 8 'puzzling' and 'confusing initially,' but assured users that they would eventually learn to like the new OS. Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975, left the company in 1983 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. In a post to his personal blog on Tuesday, Allen said he has been running Windows 8 Release Preview — the public sneak peak Microsoft shipped May 31 — on both a traditional desktop as well as on a Samsung 700T tablet, designed for Windows 7. 'I did encounter some puzzling aspects of Windows 8,' Allen wrote, and said the dual, and dueling user interfaces (UIs), were confusing. 'The bimodal user experience can introduce confusion, especially when two versions of the same application — such as Internet Explorer — can be opened and run simultaneously,' Allen said."
Almost.
They'll hold your hard work hostage in the guise of proprietary application and data formats instead.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I see this mistake being made all the damn time and, well, it's STILL "sneak peek." A peak is e.g. the top of a mountain or a sudden, high jump in a graph whereas peek is about taking a quick look at something.
Or they will keep bashing it and refuse to have anything to do with it... Kind of like Vista. If it's anything like Vista, Windows 9 will be a much more refined OS based on Windows 8 and everybody will like it.
For me it's quite simple Windows 8 interface doesn't make me more productive.
Looking at my physical desktop, I don't have fancy clocks, tons of post-its, shinny gadgets... No, just a couple of books, some papers. I don't want distractions. I want to be focused on my work.
I'll leave Windows, I'll return to GNU/Linux now that it's more matured, tons of great applications an a solid OS.
I find it pretty sad that even Allen is finding problems with it. I can't say I understand the necessity of making a workstation OS easy-to-use on a phone. They should have been focusing on making it work better on, you know, workstations. For example, I have 3960x1600 pixels of resolution on my current workstation, and windows is a complete dog in terms of window management. How exactly does Windows 8 address this? It doesn't, but gee, it works great on a cellphone/tablet, which maybe I'd care about if I actually ran Visual Studio on a fucking cell phone. As it stands, this UI is an inconsistent piece of garbage, whose sole purpose seems to be to force me to waste my time learning how to use their mobile UI, in the hopes that maybe I'll be more likely to buy one of their tablets.
Right now, the great majority of people don't have a choice. Corporations need Windows, and when MS says "jump", they fucking JUMP. But they're tired of it.
Google, with a beefed-up ChromeOS, could truly disrupt the status quo - include WINE so that it can run a select few Win32 apps - notably MS Office -, make it manageable remotely, and a lot of desktops will migrate to ChromeOS.
Not easy, but Google is the only who can pull it off. And should - since Win 8 is a walled garden environment, about to shut the others out.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Considering that there are standard data formats readable today that date back to the 1960s - they are so old that they have EBCDIC headers instead of ASCII - Microsoft really have no excuse for their hidden, shifting then obsolete data formats. When you can't even open a file with the newer version of the software it was written on that is a bit bit of a kick in the nuts of your previous customers.
I love the ribbon and use it in all my (commercial and oss) applications. Never had a single complaint about it.
Well, the developers of Linux desktop environments are working hard to change that. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I mean there are some people that actually like it and have written so but you wouldn't know it coming here. That is unless we're only interested in hearing bad news.....oh right....
throw new NoSignatureException();
And enter the new hell where you need to support 12 different browsers across 25 versions. Nothing says love like having to support Safari (Mac users), Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer (6-9?), and so on users these days.
I'll take the fights with the local libraries over this nonsense. Three platforms? Only a few versions to each? I can live with that. It's when you write your app in HTML5, and someone's browser doesn't support it, that you hear it.
I am John Hurt.
Never had a single complaint about it.
Quickly: I need to check the routing headers of an e-mail I've rececived in Outlook.
Without looking or checking, explain where I'd find that option on the Ribbon.
Remember, the Ribbon is semantic. So I'd want to VIEW the HEADERS.
Proceed.
Honestly who really cares about what Paul Allen thinks? He hasn't been relevant in 30 years.
Like they did with Vista? Oh wait, nobody bought it so they had to go back to the drawing board and give the people what they wanted with Windows 7.
Back to the drawing board? Hardly... Windows 7 is as close an OS to Vista as XP was to W2K. Some minor UI tweaks, less offensive UAC, and most importantly the fact that by the time Windows 7 rolled out there were actually working drivers for most hardware due to Vista development.
If anything, people thinking that Windows 7 was some kind of major remake of the OS means that Microsoft marketing really did their job in providing damage control. It could have been deployed as a Vista Service Pack, but likely would not have been able to get the buy-in from consumers that somehow Windows 7 did. So Microsoft Marketing gave people what they "wanted", which was simply the perception that they were not getting Vista.
Fear is the mind killer.
The Ribbon compared to a traditional menu system is much like comparing a McDonald's register to a regular cash register: A significantly simplified interface with pictures / icons instead of textual menus.
Read into that what you will. For some of us, it's a tear-your-hair-out, dumbed-down experience. For someone else it's nirvana because they are clickers, not typers and reading that many words hurts their brain. As someone who's been using office software since it was created -- think GEM desktop and others -- and who has used many many systems, this change is unwelcome and feels wrong. It's slow to use and takes up too much room.
If you want to have the same skills as everyone else, go clickie at the pictures. And now it's much harder for you to use any other system because your "hamburger" button isn't there.