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."

Comments

Or else??

[composer777]

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.

Re:Or else??

[bertok]

It's ok that they go on this track for consumers of things; but for god sake, make something for the rest of us that are producers of things.

The sad thing is that they actually have done that, but then layered the stupid mobile crap on top, hiding the productivity-enhancing goodness underneath!

For example, PowerShell 3.0 is a pretty big step forward. I've been using the CTP and now the RTM build on Windows 7, and I love it.

The guts of Windows Server 2012 are better than the previous versions, but it's all hidden behind the new Server Manager that has been re-authored to have the "formerly known as Metro style, but not a really a Metro app, because Metro can't actually be used to... do things." The result is a hideous application that doesn't look like anything else in the operating system, and has a terrible control layout that's both confusing and slow. For example, after you open a "menu", you see about three items. About two seconds later, more items appear in the menu. That's just about the worst GUI design failure I've seen since I've had the misfortune of having to use X11 applications, where some buttons perform their command when the mouse button is depressed, and some perform the command when the mouse button is released.

The core: better than ever, better even than UNIX/Linux in many areas, including the command-line!

The skin: worse than ever, worse even than the inconsistency than UNIX/Linux is sometimes bashed for, but all within one operating system that I assume follows some sort of "design guidelines".

Re:Like he said

[Panoptes]

"Just like people like Ribbon now" Personal opinion presented as a fact doesn't really contribute much to the discussion.

Considering that there are standard data formats

[dbIII]

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.

Re:Like he said

[maxwell demon]

Sure. If I'll ever come across your software, I'll probably not complain either. I'll just not use it.

Re:Just like the new Office Ribbon interface

[bmo]

>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

I actually have come to peace with it

[Gumbercules!!]

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.

Re:Like he said

[Gadget_Guy]

I hated the Ribbon in Office 2007 for a few reasons.

1. I had to re-learn where everything was.
2. Microsoft's rule that an option could not appear on multiple ribbons meant that some things on the home ribbon were isolated from their related options on other ribbons.
3. It failed the telephone test because it became harder to talk someone through an unfamiliar operation to them.
4. The important ribbon that had the file open and save functions was hidden behind what just looked like a logo. They did fix this with Office 2010.

But having watched the staff at my company use Office 2003, I came to realise that the ribbon was an excellent invention for them. Most of them refused to use menus, instead prefering the toolbar for absolutely everything. Even when I stood next to them and told them which menu to choose, they would slowly hover over every single button on the toolbars trying to find the function they wanted. I used to find this extremely frustrating. But now they have got used to the new layout, the ribbon makes it much easier for them to navigate having to go near a menu.

Oh, and as a tablet user of Windows from way back, I can see the advantage of the ribbon when controlling the OS with a pen or your finger. It wasn't until I realised that this new system wasn't just replacing the menus, it was replacing the menus and dialog boxes. So while some things may take more clicks, other take much fewer. I now find myself less tolerant of large portions of the screen changing with a popup windows. Having most options available on the ribbon is a much more serene experience.

Which is why I hate Windows 8. Changing the start menu into a full screen popup is a completely jarring experience. And if I hated the ribbon that was hidden behind what looked like a decoration, you can image how much I hate having to click in the space where the start button used to be to access the horrible metro interface. How intuitive is that? Not very. It is as Paul Allen said: puzzling and confusing.

Re:Like he said

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Better than the unix command line? Seriously?

[bertok]

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.

Re:Better than the unix command line? Seriously?

[MachineShedFred]

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.