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Windows 8: a 'Christmas Gift For Someone You Hate'
zacharye writes "Microsoft is no stranger to criticism these days, and the company's new Windows 8 platform is once again the target of a scathing review from a high-profile user. Well-known Internet entrepreneur and MIT professor Philip Greenspun handed Windows 8 one of its most damning reviews yet earlier this week, calling the new operating system a 'Christmas gift for someone you hate.' Greenspun panned almost every aspect of Microsoft's new software, noting that Microsoft had four years to study Android and more than five to examine iOS, but still couldn't build a usable tablet experience..."
Not some blog that quotes the article
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2012/12/05/christmas-gift-for-someone-you-hate-windows-8/
way of expressing said sentiment?
I've always found Dog Crap in a Box(TM) to be both economical AND effective at communicate feelings of loathing and hatred. It's really easy to get book rates on the postage, too.
“Suppose that you are an expert user of Windows NT/XP/Vista/7, an expert user of an iPad, and an expert user of an Android phone you will have no idea how to use Windows 8,” Greenspun wrote.
“Suppose that you are an expert user of Windows NT/XP/Vista/7, an expert user of Windows 8, and an expert user of an Android phone you will have no idea how to use an iPad,” Greenspun wrote.
Seriouslt, playing around with settings,etc is frustratingly hard in iPhones atleast. The basic stuff is on the surface, the rest is 5 km below the surface
We do not even pretend to be impartial now?
The title obviously should be
> Greenspun: Windows 8: a 'Christmas Gift For Someone You Hate'
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
While Im not an advocate of Windows 8, miss information makes me mad too. In the article it said "Some functions, such as ‘start an application’ or ‘restart the computer’ are available only from the tablet interface". I took this to mean the Metro tiles, which if that's what he meant, he is completely wrong. The command prompt is still there. The standard desktop is still there. "Old style" shortcuts still exist. Of course, he complained about that too.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
At the end of his "review" he said he was using Windows 8 on a desktop, not a tablet. "This article is based on using Windows 8 on what may be the best current hardware: Dell XPS One 27 computer with a quad-core i7 CPU, 16 GB of RAM and a solid state hard drive accelerator ($2600). " Well there you go. We all knew there were usability issues on the desktop.
I've been using an Android tablet after I switched away from the iPad. It was TERRIBLE. Android is definitely the worst of all tablet UIs.
Stop using the 79 dollar chinese made resistive screen tablet you bought a Walgreens last Christmas and try a real android tablet or install Cyanogen Mod on an HP Touchpad. Then get back to me.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
RE: IT wasn't build on marketing
I used to say this years ago.
MS proved that you could sway IT decisions by wining and dining executives of organizations regardless of technical merits of the products.
Soon after, MS products were sold on the lemming effect, alone.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I really wanted to like it and bought into their promo deal to put it onto my laptop (like $40 for a legit copy of Win 8 Upgrade).
But I've run into the same gripes as him regarding the interface. If you were just in the Modern UI 100% of the time on the tablet it wouldn't be a terrible experience. However, it tries to switch back and forth from that interface to the traditional desktop interface and does so very, very poorly. Even on a tablet this transition is godawful. It's worse on a non-touchscreen laptop.
The new "start menu" just adds more work for me and adds very little value to the experience. This isn't a bad format for a tablet, but when you're on a laptop and not in the Modern UI - forcing the use of that new start menu is just absurd.
Now, it does seem to be a bit more responsive than Windows 7 and has a couple of neat features - for example the taskbar now extends across multiple screens and you can set its behavior to a couple of different methods. It seems to integrate nicely w/ the xbox environment but I'm waiting to see what its full potential will be for that.
Overall there are just a lot of things like "are you friggin serious?". In the land of UI the amount of mouse movement, clicks, and typing is how we define "work" and yet for some reason MS has been wanting to add more work to a lot of the user's tasks. This is something I still don't quite understand. (Look at the office ribbon - despite some of its nice features there are quite a few places where it just managed to add more work for the user to accomplish a task).
So yeah, it's that bad. I don't outright hate it but it's because I've modified a lot of it so far to fit what I'm after. I would absolutely recommend against it for a non geek to upgrade to.
What use would it be to invent something that duplicates iOS or Android?
People would just keep using the original and deny the copy.
It's smart to take features from these systems, but useless to repeat them. Technology is forged by people who find new ways to do useful things. That doesn't mean imitation, it means re-invention.
Microsoft also has a long legacy of Windows products and users to uphold, and has to merge these two.
I realize that liking Windows around here is about as favorably looked upon as non-ironically liking Bruce Springsteen at a hipster party, but demonization for not being a clone is undeserved here.
I converted my main workstation at work to windows 8 a week ago, mostly in order to learn and get used to it.
While there indeed is a bit of a hassle to change some of the habits from xp, vista and 7 to fit 8, and I really dislike the start panel that has replaced the start menu, it's not really a big deal.
I've put my 20 or so most used applications in the taskbar and pinned my most used folders and files into the respective taskbar icons and changed my "click start menu and open the file or folder"-habit into a "right click the taskbar icon and open the file or folder"-habit.
Also, I've installed regular windows applications as replacements for all the standard windows 8 applications, like vlc instead of the full screen windows 8 movie player, acrobat reader instead of the full screen windows 8 pdf-viewer, etc.
To be honest, I haven't used the start panel at all this entire week, except for going to the desktop after logging in.
On one hand, I've not really seen any of the horrible downsides with windows 8 that everyone talks about. On the other hand, I haven't seen many improvements over windows 7 yet. The new task manager and the new file-copy graph windows are awesome though.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
He's not a professor; far from it.
He's an "MIT affiliate" (search People on the MIT home page), which is the loosest form of connection to the Institute.
Note also that the blog he's posted on is at Harvard Law, which says:
"Weblogs at Harvard Law is provided by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University as a free service to the Harvard community. Anyone with an email address at harvard.edu, radcliffe.edu, or hbs.edu can sign up instantly and be blogging in minutes."
If you search his name in the directory at Harvard's home page, there are no hits.
In other words, he has no significant connection to MIT, doesn't show up at all on Harvard's staff list, and maybe for some reason has a Harvard email address.
The poster was just quoting the blog, which pointed to the original blog, but hey, is 30 seconds worth of fact checking too much to ask?
An Actual MIT Professor.
It seems like the number one complaint so far is "It's different, and I don't like to think". That's just lazy, and I tend to discount it immediately.
There are two fairly valid criticisms, however. The first is that by moving functions into various gestures and hidden panels, the discoverability is quite poor. I'm constantly forgetting that the search feature is buried in that "charms" bar, and instinctively look for a search field on the screen somewhere. I'm sure the Microsoft knee-jerk approach to "fixing" this will be to print tips and reminders on the display bezel, which of course won't make any sense when the screen is rotated some other way. Going back to the drawing board and completely re-engineering a concept doesn't seem to be their thing.
Second, the weird desktop/tablet UI dichotomy is baffling. Functions that were previously confined to a small number of places - chiefly the Start menu and Control Panel - are now spread across two "control panels", a hidden "charms" bar, a "Settings" button in that charms bar, and many of these functions bounce back and forth between the tablet or desktop UI, or even duplicate features of one another. Key functionality has also been removed entirely. Where does one view, edit, and reorder the entire list of saved wireless connections? Nowhere, unless you want to use the netsh command!
So while I can appreciate making finger-friendly design considerations, the way they've done it is disjointed and nonsensical. If I had to fix it, I'd allow "Metro" apps to run windowed instead of only full-screen, make it easier to scale up UI elements of "desktop" apps for touch use, get the Control Panel consolidated into a single point of access, and put some of the most common features of the old Start menu directly on the new one, without hiding them off-screen or in menus (Control Panel, Devices and Printers, Run, Computer, Documents, etc). If you change the window manager to act more like the Metro mode when a window is maximized, then you've got a reasonably successful marrying of the two concepts.
For traditional desktop use, it's not at all horrible for an advanced user, and does have some nice performance and usability improvements here and there. For casual home users, it will probably be overly confusing, and leave them shopping for iPads even more than they are already.
You felt so strongly that the "cool" Windows 8 UI is the way of the future and that people who prefer the "old, lame way" are "lazy, old dogs" that you just had to register a Slashdot account today to say it. I respect the strength of your convictions.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
They have a habit of missing the boat on things and then when they realize it, they compensate by embracing it and over doing it. A perfect example was the Web. They completely missed the boat on it in the mid 90's and when they realized it, they reacted by reworking everything they could to be based on http/html and the result was a mess. This time they completely got it wrong on smart phones and tablets and now they are over compensating by trying to turn a desktop into a tablet.
Apple seems to be getting it right by moving the best features of the tablet to the desk top but doing it in a way that makes sense. For example, gestures are great on both, but when it comes to the desktop, you should use a proxy surface such as a touch pad rather than the screen itself. The first fucker that jabs his finger into my monitor to move a window is going to lose it :)
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Regardless of what anyone thinks of MS products, (and I use Win7 everyday, and think it's perfectly fine), my candidate for understatement of the decade.
What was once true, is no longer so
A simple Windows+D keystroke takes you into desktop mode and you can choose to remain there as long as you wish. I do hate the removal of the windows launcher in Desktop mode, but there are alternative options out there to get back that functionality.
This is what's really bugging me about everything I read that has to do with Windows 8, people are constantly making excuses for it.
Seriously, it became ok to remove a feature that seemed to be essential to the system because we can download a third party module that will fix it? Honestly, If there is such a demand for a feature that people have to download an extension to get the feature back, is that maybe something that shouldn't have been removed in the first place? and it's ok that it starts up in "tablet" mode a.k.a "Metro" on a laptop or PC because all you have to do to start getting work done is press Win+D?
To me this all sounds like utter intolerable insanity. Because people keep making excuses it makes me seriously think there's something else going on there and any positive message concerning Win8 needs to be taken with a mountain of salt.
My bet is the first change they'll tote in Windows 9 is the convenient new start menu where applications can be launched without having to use the metro interface. The next thing will be that it starts up in Desktop mode on Laptops and PCs by default and Metro on tables and phones.
What exactly about iOS is hard to use?
You mean aside from requiring reasonably up-to-date Mac or Windows machine to run iTunes on? (note that's two problems there, not one)
Every time I touch iTunes I end up wanting to MURDERDEATHKILL every single developer involved.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
No people are not complain about different, ios is different..Andoirsd is different, people seen not only to like these interfaces they LOVE them. I'm pretty much tired of blaming the users for bad UI choices. Its not just a windows 8 thing.
Since I've recently passed the 40 year mark, maybe that puts me in that "old dog" category now? But I still work in I.T. supporting multiple platforms and systems, and I think I'm still pretty good at figuring out new UIs and upgrades to applications.
Nonetheless, I absolutely agree with Greenspun's blog on this. It's not so much a debate on whether the old START menu or the new tiles screen is more useful. It's a design issue/problem, where the radically new tiled UI feels like it's crudely bolted onto the traditional desktop UI. I feel like in Windows 8, I'm really running two different operating systems in tandem on a desktop machine, except the integration between them isn't even as tight as recent versions of a product like Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion for Mac OS X gives you when running virtual Windows 7 sessions inside them!
For example, the tiled UI happily displays icons for apps like MS Office, which actually install and run from the Windows 7 style desktop side of things, yet it's possible to install web browsers which act completely independent of each other in the two UI's. To access them from both the tiles and the desktop side, you have to install them twice!
Innovation is generally incremental. The iPod was not the first MP3 player; they just perfected it. The same is true of many MSFT products.
Microsoft also unified the computer market with Windows back in the 1990s. Before that, it was sheer chaos and incompatibility. Windows and FAT32 gave the world a standard.
While many people dislike it, Microsoft Office was the first complete and integrated office suite to include all the functions needed in an average office. It took it some years to get good, but now it's the standard.
Windows 95 gave us real multitasking at a time when you could freeze a Macintosh by holding down the mouse button.
Come to think of it, the 'softies have done a lot of good things.
And then there's Microsoft Research and Microsoft Press.
Why for god's sake is Metro UI on Server 2012? I will never install this onto a tablet, and you can't pass tablet gestures through RDP. What the hell were they thinking? Praying that 2012 R2 removes this crap.
Selex
Do you know you can type the name of the program, or area of the settings you're after? Geeks should love this, since it's much easier to operate with the keyboard than previous versions of windows. Searching by typing a few letters vs hunting through menus is easier, period.
The exact same thing is available in Windows 7.
This is simply not true.
Speaking of which...
For those who have long enough memories, there was an MS versus IBM world, with MSDOS versus IBM's DOS (Disk Operating System, not Denial Of Service). IBM held the corporate IT guys. MSDOS had no one but the masses to appeal to. The MSDOS was just as good and was nearly half the price. IBM with their hubris thought the masses would stick with IBM because they were IBM. The MSDOS got good reviews so the masses went for the much cheaper DOS.
Microsoft won because Microsoft had a much better, faster and cheaper product. Sadly, that was then. This is now.
Nonsense. MS DOS succeeded so well because MS negotiated per-CPU licenses rather than per-install. Ergo, anyone who installed PC DOS or DR DOS on their shipping units paid double for the privilege.
That was then, and this is now.
Linux Mint impressed me. It's Ubuntu-based, so it still has the training wheels, but it has a sane interface (I prefer Mate to Cinnamon). It's still a little sluggish though.
Personally, I just use Debian. It's grouchy at first and takes a little time to get it how you want it, but after that it stays out of your way.
Microsoft had a great little OS on their hands. It works better on the same hardware than the rock solid Windows 7 and incorporates real performance and useability improvements.
All they had to do to have made Windows 8 a great success on both existing and next-generation devices was:
1. Default to the desktop on systems that don't have a touchscreen.
2. Bring back the start menu.
Simple! Yet, they but on the blinders, and said to themselves 'we can be like Apple too' and proceeded to completely alienate their existing user base in favor of a user base that hasn't been proven to exist (touchscreen device users who prefer Metro to Android or iOS).
For what it's worth, I happily use Windows 8 with the free Classic Shell utility that resolves Microsoft's blunders.
. Its as if they dont even care that windows 8 is more efficient and faster than windows 7.
Can't speak for the others, but I sure as hell don't. What's the point in squeaking out an extra 5% faster speed when idiotic UI design makes everything I do take 20% longer anyway.
There's a reason people use PCs for actual work, and not tablets. Trying to make the PC act like a tablet was a bloody stupid decision when Ubuntu did it, and it's no more intelligent when Micky does it. Even less so, since they've actually got something to lose.
...says the guy who has literally never posted anything other than about how Windows 8, Surface, and IE10 are much better than the competition (and the older products they're replacing).
Free tip to shills (and yes, I'm calling you a shill): mix it up a little. Talk about something funny at work. Mention a local restaurant. Make a car analogy. Just don't come in and make comment after predictable comment saying the exact same thing.
And in the unlikely event that you're not a shill? Get a hobby. Seriously. There is more to life than the most recent software releases of any megacorporation. Explore your other interests a little. It's a big world!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
What exactly was taken away? The start button?
Seriously. When you have a start button, you do the following:
move your mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen,
click it,
move your mouse to the app you want to open,
click it.
In Windows 8 it works like this:
move your mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen,
click it,
move your mouse to the app you want to open,
click it.
It's the exact same. I swear the people complaining about this stuff aren't actually using it. I always feel like I'm using a different product than the one people are reviewing.
But thats just it, it seems essential but its not!
If it seems essential, millions of users are screaming "we need it" and third parties are writing extensions to put it back, it was essential. The start menu is a nicely organized hierarchical structure where it's easy to find applications I might not necessarily know the name of off the top of my head.
The Metro interface looks like my daughter ate a box of crayons and barfed on several place mats. There are so many issues I could literally type a fifty page document on how not to do usability when designing an interface for human computer interaction.
Not to mention from what I've read and seen demonstrated the Metro interface could possibly be used as advertising platform by constantly updating tiles to display new sales, promotions, etc... You know marketing firms will take full advantage of that. Who wants to read dozens of advertisements when you're trying to find an application to do work with?
Please don't go around tell everyone out there the start menu isn't essential to them because you don't use it. I might as well go around saying cars don't need blinkers because my father-in-law doesn't use them.
In windows 8 it works more like this...
You poke at the bottom left corner for the square to pop up and click it. /r /t 0' rather then poke around to get the shutdown menu to show up.
You look for the app you want to open it's not there???
You ask a friend about it...
You now know to right click.
You right click on the desktop
You drag your mouse from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen to click all apps.
You click all apps.
The app you want is closer to the left side of the screen now, so you drag your mouse back to the left side and
click it.
You make a shortcut on your desktop so you don't have to deal with that shit again.
You also make a batch file on your desktop containing 'shutdown
I'm guessing you are using a different product then I'm running. 'Cause I just described the Windows 8 I am using.
Ummm.... yeah, you're full of shit. Very aggressive shit, by the look of it, but still shit.
Right-Click in the lower left corner (where Start appears), select Control Panel. Behold, the control panel appears (you can do this from anywhere, but it's typically something you'd do on the desktop since it's a right-click). There's a ton of other stuff on this menu too, including some that are harder to reach in Win7, such as an Admin command prompt or the Programs and Features (add/remove programs) control panel. It can also be used to jump straight to the desktop from any app, incidentally.
There are so many ways to shut down the computer it's crazy. Alt+F4 on the desktop. The Ctrl+Alt+Del screen shows the Power button. Lock screen shows the Power button. If you are an "expert user" like this idiot in the article is ranting about, you'd know how to use the Shutdown[.exe] command; you can call it from the Run dialog or add shortcuts to it (on either the Start screen or the desktop, of both if you want). In fact, you can even add a shortcut key chord (Win+Ctrl+S, perhaps) to trigger those shortcuts. If you can tolerate the presence of the Charms bar and just don't like the ever-so-offensive concept of a tablet-like gesture to display it, try Win+I to display Setting immediately, at which point Shutdown or Restart are two clicks away.
Seriously, did your brain calcify or something, resulting in frothing at the mouth without even *trying* to look for the things you claim "ARE NO LONGER" present?
Other things that your so-called "absolutely correct" review got, in fact, completely bone-headedly wrong:
Let's start with this beauty, from near the top. First of all, Microsoft requires the presence of a hardware Start button on RT devices. Call it a "Home" button if it makes you happier; I've heard even a few Microsofties do so (I live in Seattle; there's a lot of them here; I'm not one myself). Second, you can always access Start from anywhere with at worst a small gesture. If you're using Touch, swipe in from the right side of the screen and tap the Start button that probably appeared right under your thumb. If you're using the mouse, move down to the lower-left corner (where the Start button would be on the desktop) and lo and behold, a Start button appears!
Perhaps it slipped this... enlightened gentleman's notice, but the App Bar (that thing that appears on the bottom of the screen when you swipe from either the top or the bottom) is context sensitive. It's intended to be a more graphical and touch-friendly replacement for context menus. I don't think it's as good an implementation of a context-based interface, personally, but it's not missing.
We've mostly been over this ground already, but I wanted to point out that starting a program totally doesn't require using a tablet interface. If you like icons, put some on the desktop or put them on the taskbar (exactly like in Win7). If you prefer the keyboard, tap the Start key and type the first few letters of the program name, then hit Enter; you can be launching the program (and back on the desktop) before that oh-so-offensive tablet interface finishes its half-second fade-in animation. You can also use Run from the desktop, via Win+R (as before) or right-clicking the Start button or hitting Ctrl+X to bring up the menu, then selecting Run. You can certainly use the command line interfaces too.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...