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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."
Or we'll fucking kill you!!
Users will like it in the end. Just like people like Ribbon now, even if they were confused first.
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.
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.
Illiteracy still rules at Slashdot under new management.
If a geek like Paul Allen finds it confusing, I can imagine the plight of the layman user who upgrades from Windows 7 to 8.
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
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.
>But at least Windows allows you to switch back to the old style interface..
Until you hit the Windows key, then Metro slaps your face like a turgid cock in a bad gay porn film.
--
BMO
One hears the argument that a main reason for not switching to linux from Windows is the cost of retraining, especially when it comes to applications. The argument has often puzzled me. I hear tell that some companies are still using Windows XP because of the cost of conversion to other systems. The cost of conversion to Windows 8 will be pretty high, I would suspect. On the other hand, one of the nifty things about linux is that once you get it a you like, it can stay that way for a long time.
Although the underpinnings have changed over time (e.g., I moved from icewm to awesome wm), the "look and feel" of my "desktop" has only changed very incrementally since about 1998. The applications have got snazzier, of course, but, even there, the basic layout hasn't changed.
Best wishes,
Bob
. . . like mold.
"Learn to like" was a poor choice of words, considering the industry prefers phrases like, "Will bedazzle your balls off!" and "This new UI will make you cream in your jeans so often, that you won't need porn any more!" and "Our stuff sucks, use Nokia Maps instead!"
Microsoft is striving to be more like Apple now, with producing hardware, and all. So why don't they also do what Apple did, and bring back the original founder? He's tanned, rested, and ready for a new fight.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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();
I was going to write I actually have come to like it but my fingers borked at it and I realised it's not true. I've been using it for weeks now at work and have come to peace with the UI. I have learned how to work my way around its nuisances without circumventing it entirely (I made a concious effort to work within the Windows 8 framework rather than just avoid it altogether as I figured I need to at least know how to use it).
In short, I hate not having a start menu and I hate note being able to just start typing an application name to find it and run it (I know I can press windows+f in Win 8 but it's no where near as easy).
However, I will say this. Windows 8 and more importantly Server 8 is fucking brilliant -under the hood-. The ability to natively team NICs, ReFS, the *enormous* improvement that is SMB3, better clustering, better management of machines from one location, storage spaces, the improvements in Hyper-V etc leave me stunned - compared to Server 2008 it's like comparing Windows 2000 and Windows 98. The underlying tech is miles in front of the old architecture. It's just such a pity they put this bloody interface on at the same time and made it compulsory because a lot of people are going to skip on Win8 and never notice how damn good the underneath tech actually is, this time around.
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.
Surely its no coincidence that after Ubuntu switched to Unity Microsoft is releasing a confusing UI that nobody wants and saying "you will like it, really you will"!
Tell you what - try remote managing a Win7/8 machine purely via the command line (of course you'll have to install sshd since MS don't bother to ship one) then get back to me about how much "better" the windows one is.
You will grow to like it: not a prediction, a directive.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Almost everything MS has done to Windows since 2000 has been a mistake.
First the exceptions: 48Bit HD Addressing, 64 Bit Computing, and Cleartype.
Just off of the top of my head, here are a few things that went wrong with XP and W7.
XP's Melted plastic interface.
XP's and forward has different sized windows controls.
Visa/7's has huge memory footprint, too large for a phone, and delayed services.
W7's Computer logs are slow as molasses on my 3.4 2600k, with 16GB ram. It takes a minute to open and check the hardware log. Some logs cannot be cleared by the user through the UI.
The W7 small start button orb is too large for the rest of the bar, but otherwise the bar is good, that's why they will be changing it in W8.
Personal menus were a waste of user time. Menus are faster to use if they don't change.
In W7 many file properties like filesize are more tedious to retrieve.
Vista and W7 take a long time to boot.
Briefcases were a nice idea, but they crashed and were never fixed.
Too much indexing going on in the background. I cannot belief that W7 defaults to reading through every file you have.
Windows update should have never been done in a web browser. What were they training people for?
W7 needlessly removes all but 2 power schemes.
W7 audio is abyssal, with huge lag and delay recording anything with preview.
System restore takes up too much space on large drives. 10% of 3TB is too much. I patch windows to fix it.
Windows 7 updater is so stupid it won't even take the service pack first.
Desktop gadgets failed and died.
The idea that you would separate 32 and 64 bit programs into 2 folders was just plain messy.
Local, Roaming, LocalLow gave too many places to look for stuff.
W7 backpadaled meaning we still have the word "My" in front of everything.
W7 networking is slow out of the box.
In W7 deleting or copying files is slower than XP or 2000.
W7 hangs all the time in odd places, such as when opening "My computer"
They removed Regclean for the sake of registry cleaning companies.
They made the defrag less informative and stopped freespace optimization for the sake of defrag companies.
Anyway, from what I have seen of W8 is W7+W7phone. Windows 8 looks like quite the pigeon-rat. It's too large to be a phone OS and too limited to be a desktop system. I feel bad that I have an expensive CAD program as well as Photoshop, and have only this crap of Apple's walled in garden of weak hardware to choose from. Maybe they will fix Gnome 3, and add the dual pane back into Nautilus. Perhaps they will bring back the minimize button.
I am very disappointed with Microsoft, Apple, Android, Ubuntu, and Gnome, and there is no where else to turn : (
I would think that if Gnome got rid of hot corners, un-dumbed Nautilus, and brought back multi-pane windows, it would be the best of the above.
I am not chattin, texting, and facebooking all day. I write books, whole 110,000 word books, and sometimes, I actually have more than open at once! I edit large photoshops documents, once again, more than one open at once.
The thing of it is: we need to work on these computers!
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Given Microsoft's dismal history with mobile platforms, the prospects for Surface's success seem questionable. It's entirely possible that a year or two from now the only significant installed base of Microsoft's tablet interface will be found on PCs, not tablets.
Once upon a time there was this great, new concept for an OS called OS/2 Warp 3 - it was object oriented and really cool; and it completely failed to win the customers over. Because it was initially very confusing until you figured out that you had to do everything, more or less, by copying template objects, IIRC. And of course, Microsoft offered something people felt more familiar with.
I just wonder - isn't this going to be the new Warp 3?
You have completely missed the point, since they are simply using proprietary formats when open ones are available solely to create vendor lock-in and squeeze competition out. Also, you are assuming that those format specs are 100% accurate and always adhered to my Microsoft. Over the course of a products life they change things as handled internally. Once lock-in is achieved they then document one particular state of the "evolution" of the format. You are acting as though they document everything up front, make it available to everyone prior to use, and then adhere to it religiously. The actual fact is that they implement it, change it on the fly, release outdated specs when it is too late for any competitor to use them to create a competing product, and just generally use it to leverage people into a deeper state of lock-in. Furthermore, they make sure their internal guys in the OS side have access to it (and other specifications vice versa) well before anyone else.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Seriously? You're linking to a computerworld blog post that discusses the actual blog post ?
"What are you talking about? Can you name any Microsoft data format not covered .. even the DOC, XLS and PPT formats are documented to the last bit"
Do you seriously expect us to believe that, using those links, anyone could construct a fully compatible Word Processor. These specifications don't cover the hidden schemas in the msOffice binaries. I recall reading where someone unziped a DOCX file edited one of the tags, zipped it back up again, and msWord refused to read it.
AccountKiller
Not even MS Office97 opened all MS Office97 documents due to a revision between the first release and a bugfix release. I, and a few other post-graduate students, had to reinstall it on an entire university engineering department's worth of MS Windows computers.
I think you've just failed the turing test :( I can't tell the difference between you and a bot that just throws out releated phrases when it hits key words with an amusing loss of context.
The example from the 1960s (segd) uses EBCDIC in the header but is still readable with this years software despite that. Old MS documents on the other hand are not always readable even with their own software.