'Gorilla Arm' Will Keep Touch Screens From Taking Over

Hugh Pickens writes "With Windows 8, Microsoft has made a billion-dollar gamble that personal computing is taking a new direction and that new direction is touch, says David Pogue. It's efficient on a touchscreen tablet. But Microsoft expects us to run Windows 8 on our tens of millions of everyday PCs. Although touch has been incredibly successful on our phones, tablets, airport kiosks and cash machines, Pogue says touch will never take over on PCs. The reason? Gorilla Arms. There are three big differences between tablet screens and a PC's screen: angle, distance and time interval. The problem is 'the tingling ache that [comes] from extending my right arm to manipulate that screen for hours, an affliction that has earned the nickname of gorilla arm.' Some experts say gorilla arm is what killed touch computing during its first wave in the early 1980s but Microsoft is betting that Windows 8 will be so attractive that we won't mind touching our PC screens, at least until the PC concept fades away entirely. 'My belief is that touch screens make sense on mobile computers but not on stationary ones,' concludes Pogue. 'Microsoft is making a gigantic bet that I'm wrong.'"

Comments

Windows 8 Is Failing on It's Own

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

It doesn't need assistance from physiology. ;-)

Re:Windows 8 Is Failing on It's Own

[erroneus]

Microsoft simply has no idea what its customers want or need. Worse, they keep adapting what they have instead of building something entirely new. Please spare me the nonsense that one or another version of Windows was completely re-written from scratch. That's bullshit and we all know it. Even if it was re-written from scratch, it still does everything the same way it has for quite a long time with loads and loads of backward compatibility mucking things up and slowing things down.

And Microsoft still thinks it all about the user interface? Bright colors and all that? The problems are so complex it would be impossible for anyone to list them all here. But the failings are many but perhaps just a few in category: Trust, (perception of) Stability, Security, (broken new tech) Standards compliance, Exclusion of other devices and software, User Interface, Is unaware of customer needs. There could probably be a few other broad categories, but it's not hard to think of examples for each of the ones I thought of on the fly.

This is more than Microsoft can address with the new release of any one product. They are at a point at which they need to re-invent themselves. In my opinion, the only thing they have consistently done right is XBox but they keep making that slightly worse over time as they are making it all look, feel and act like Windows 8 as well. And surprise-surprise! They made an Android app to work with XBox Live! Crazy right?

It's past time for Microsoft to start over. They definitely need to dump Win32 and all that. Do it right instead of piling on thing after thing after thing for decades. Start with a hypervisor and build your new platform there and let things intermingle with Windows 7 running in another VM. DUMP DRIVE LETTERS for god's sake. Multiple file system roots is ridiculous and stupid. And please. No More backslashes!! We know why you did it. It wasn't good then and it's bad now. And it's not because I'm a Linux user I say this, it's because I support Windows all day long and I can NEVER get people to understand the difference between a backslash and a slash! And these people have been using their computers for decades. It's a failure. So when you make things all new again, don't forget to go to slashes.

Well there I go... ranting. Microsoft is simply failing and everyone else is excited about and using other things. They just don't know how to re-invest their billions and billions of dollars into themselves any longer.

Re:Windows 8 Is Failing on It's Own

[UnknowingFool]

Microsoft simply has no idea what its customers want or need.

I don't think this is true. I think MS has heard plenty of what customers want or need. I don't think they care in the case of Windows 8. Many here think that MS is completely inept but I think MS has a strategy. The way I see it most consumers don't upgrade Windows until they replace their PCs. A few of them actually purchase a new OS but I don't think most consumers really do that.

What is plaguing MS and the computer industry these days is that people simply are not replacing their PCs as often as did in the past. Part of the cause is that their older PCs work fine for most tasks; upgrading new hardware is not going to give most people a noticeable boost when they are surfing the internet. Part of the cause is that smart phones and tablets are starting to supplement a consumer's need for computing. Since most consumers really need basic functionality like Facebook, email, etc, most are turning to more mobile devices to supplement what they have already. I think MS understands this trend; the problem is that their competitors had products in the market for this need while MS fumbled around for years on their lackluster offerings.

So realizing that they would be very late to the game when it came to changing their mobile devices, my contention is that MS isn't incompetent; they are just being evil. They know that if they had designed a new separate mobile OS (like iOS or Android), they could not have competed. They do offer some differentiation but like their Zune product (and their WP7), it may not translate to wide adoption. So rather than have their tablet/mobile UI compete on its own merits, they decided that they will force the new UI on consumers so they will have no choice. Later when these consumers buy tablets, they will already be familiar with Metro/Modern.

Re:Windows 8 Is Failing on It's Own

[ByteSlicer]

It's past time for Microsoft to start over. They definitely need to dump Win32 and all that. Do it right instead of piling on thing after thing after thing for decades.

The only problem is that "Win32 and all that" is exactly what keeps people at using Ms Windows. It's less now for ordinary people because they spend most time on the web playing flash games and on Facebook. But at work they still need to be able to run their Win32 software.

Re:Windows 8 Is Failing on It's Own

[beelsebob]

On the contrary – apple's biggest market share gain of recent times was getting techies who wanted a good solid UNIX with a UI that works, and a bunch of useful commercial apps to adopt their platform.

The premise - are you kidding me?

[fnj]

So what large vertical desktop displays even have touch screens? Sounds like they are talking about hardware that shows absolutely no sign of happening.

I don't want crap smeared on my screen

[Naatach]

Since you're on Slashdot, like me, you have no life and you probably eat lunch sitting at your desk with crap on your hands. I have no need to smear all that over my monitor. With tablets and phones, it's ok because you can grab a corner of your shirt and clean it off. I'm not going to flash my monitor to wipe off my burger grease.

Re:Pain

[Mr0bvious]

Why must we consider our input devices to be mutually exclusive? We didn't ditch the keyboard with the introduction of the mouse...

On the desktop I can see a touch screen complimenting my current setup - it won't replace my keyboard and mouse any time soon but I would certainly get some use along side them.

Don't touch my screen!

[Opportunist]

I already get irate if someone feels the need to molest my screen with his greasy, grubby paws. Now these imbeciles should have an excuse for it? No way.

Seriously, that's more a reason to avoid touch screens at all cost more than gorilla arm syndrome could.

Re:Pain

[Electricity Likes Me]

No you can't.

Ribbon takes a layout which can fit a wide range of tools, and shrinks the total usable space, in the interest of - for some mysterious reason - drawing attention to the most common set of features which everyone uses, despite the fact that everyone already used them.

It does this at the cost of being able to keep multiple features on screen at once - with Ribbon I can't have styling and fonts, drawing, and reviewing all on screen at the same time whereas in Office 2003 I could and it worked perfectly well.

Instead with Ribbon I have to click between multiple tabs to reach the same features, all for the benefit of making - again - features I already knew existed and could easily access, bigger and more prominent.

This is a user-interface revamp so big you can make money selling products that give the old functionality back.

How does data showing the rates of use for various features winds up with the conclusion that you should less commonly used features even harder to access I will never know. Why not just delete them from your damn product if you think they're that unimportant? What they managed to do instead was sit down and say "I think our business users are not the core demographic which does productive work".

Re:Does Microsoft make bad versions deliberately?

[JMJimmy]

It's not accurate. It's that Microsoft blindly follows metrics and doesn't care that it makes assumptions about them. I had a conversation with the UX designer of Windows 7 and he explained some of the decisions that went into Windows 8...

Full Screen as an example. The metrics told them that users spent 95% of their time "in full screen". By this I think he meant maximized. This is why metro apps are full screen. This seemingly minor distinction between maximized and full screen apparently means nothing to Microsoft, but has a lot of implications for the user.

Maximized you have access to a fair amount of information and control:
  - Clock
  - Start menu
  - System tray icons (volume control, network status, battery state, IM messages, etc)
  - Start bar (program state info [think Skype or file transfer progress], program switching control without the need to touch the keyboard, etc)
  - Minimize/Exit control
  - Desktop peek/minimize all

Full screen gives you the benefit of...
  - maximized space for apps?

And what about the remaining 5% of the time?

I could go on but it's really pointless. Metro isn't about touch, it isn't about making more money on the next version of Windows. It's about apps. Microsoft wants a successful app store so that they get a piece of every software sale on their platform. They make apps "easier" to use (or access) than desktop "programs" and try to force people to convert. The more difficult they make it for open source software, the easier they make it to buy apps, the more money they will make without having to put in expensive hours developing a product.