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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."
Users will like it in the end. Just like people like Ribbon now, even if they were confused first.
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.
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.
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
. . . 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 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"!
You may be unaware of this, but Powershell supports remote operation, and can be used to completley administer a machine (recent versions of Windows Server ship without the graphics subsystem, relying on Powershell for full administration). People do what you derisively suggest that somebody "try" all the time.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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
No, this site is about what people with an anti-Microsoft bias tend to think. To be honest I don't know why I'm complaining; I might as well ask Fox News to write about something good Obama's done.
As for the rest of your post; I read it, but yet couldn't find any actual information. Yes, I think that about best describes it.
throw new NoSignatureException();
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.
This is actually an advantage that proprietary has over FOSS, if you don't like Win 8? Don't buy it and if enough agree with you and don't buy it they'll have to go back to the drawing board or watch the company go down the shitter. Don't like Gnome Shell or Unity? Tough fucking shit, they don't owe you a damned thing and don't give a shit WHAT you think. its their personal playtoy and if you don't like it you can go piss off.
So if you hate Win 8 join us that aren't gonna buy it, or machines running it, we'll see Win 7 rushed out by the OEMs who'll just drop a Win 8 DVD nobody will use in the bottom of the box to give Ballmer some bullshit numbers and everything will go back to normal. Hopefully the board gets tired of Bill's little buddy and punts his ass like a 30 yard field return and the next guy actually listens to the customers, that's how it works. All you can do in FOSS is play the distro shuffle and hope the part you have a problem with isn't a core component everyone uses because again, they don't owe you a damned thing, its free, like it or lump it.
Personally I'll stick with the OS where I can skip 2 major releases (XP and Vista) and still be supported with updates until I decide they put out a product I liked with Win 7. You could go straight from 2K to 7 if you wanted and been under patch support the entire time, you just can't do that in FOSS land unless you have the money for a major support contract.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What rock have you been living under?
Upgrades and installations have been doable as a 100% unattended task for over a decade now, with Microsoft tools only! Not only can you do it remotely, it's possible to power on a machine over the network, have it upgrade itself, and shut itself back down without any human intervention whatsoever.
PXE boot, reliable network broadcasts, image-based installation, pre- and post- installation scripts, driver injection, update merging, various upgrade scenarios, backup and recovery of user data, etc... are all old hat. Most of those don't even require any additional licensed software such as SCCM, which just provides a GUI and a database for tracking progress.
Tada: Windows Deployment Services and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. Just because you aren't aware of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
On top of that, Group Policy shits all over the desktop fleet management systems available in Linux, because it's based on a hierarchical policy engine instead of flat text files, which have poor support for things like rollback.
For example, I bet every Linux admin here can tell me a dozen ways they can set arbitrary values in configuration files across 10,000 machines, but not one of them can give me a good solution for undoing various random subsets of those settings years later! For example, you may want a site-specific setting to revert to defaults when the computer is moved out of the site, without undoing other settings in the same file that are relevant to all sites.
Good luck implementing a general-case solution for that problem in Linux, because the text-file configuration paradigm just doesn't work that way! You'd have to convince the entire Linux community to switch to some other paradigm first, and that's just not going to happen.
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.
I'll go one better.
The company I work for is starting our mass rollout of Windows 7, upgrading from Windows XP. The team I work on has fully automated this process to the point where a site technical coordinator goes to a web page, clicks the assets he wants to migrate, selects "roles" for the machines (what application package sets they get for the user's responsibilities) and then clicks a button to execute. The XP machine then does the following:
1. Check to see if there's enough free disk space to complete the migration
2. Download a RAMdisk image of WinPE to boot from
3. Swap out the bootloader for the Windows 7 version, which allows booting from the RAMdisk image
4. Update the firmware on the device (BIOS / uEFI)
5. Reboot to the RAMdisk image
6. RAMdisk image detects if the device has an encrypted file system (laptop) and retrieves the unlock key from the encryption keystore server, and unlocks the filesystem
7. Create a virtual hard drive file from the network that contains everything this system needs to remotely reimage, minus applications.
8. Data is migrated out of user profiles to a temp folder
9. Old OS and applications are moved to a backup folder
10. New OS image of Win7 SP1 is dropped on the disk around the migration store and backup folder, from the VHD created before
11. Drivers specific to the device are injected into the new Win7 install, from the VHD created before
12. Reboot back to the hard disk
13. Drivers are found and installed
14. Applets and agents necessary for hardware (Laptop power management, Lenovo "craplets" necessary for hardware features, etc.) are installed, from the VHD created before
15. Antivirus is installed and updated
16. Encryption agent is reinstalled if it's a laptop (no mandate for desktops to be encrypted at this point)
17. Reboot
18. User data is migrated forward from the migration store temp folder
19. Applications are delivered by our software deployment infrastructure
20. User is presented with "Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to login".
21. When they log in, they find all their stuff is still there, and all their applications are freshly installed. Total time on hardware that isn't an antique? 40 minutes.
All kicked off from a web page. On an 11 year old Windows XP. Don't knock what you don't know, or haven't spent time to learn.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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