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Microsoft Blames PC Makers For Windows Failure
rtfa-troll writes "The Register tells us that Microsoft has begun squabbling with PC manufacturers over the reasons behind the failure of Windows 8. Microsoft is 'frustrated with major OEMs who didn't build nearly enough touch systems.' PC manufacturers have hit back, saying that they 'would have been saddled with the costs of a huge pile of unsold units,' claiming that customers actually avoided higher-end touch products which were available and instead bought lower-end, cheaper laptops while 'Microsoft is not blaming itself for' the failure of its own touch device, the Surface RT. The PC manufacturers' claims that touch is the problem seem to be backed by reviews, and some educational rants from users and opinions from user interface design experts. However, Microsoft sees this differently. Microsoft is planning to strike back at the PC vendors in February with Surface Pro; with a shorter battery life and much heavier than a normal tablet, this is being seen as a direct competitor to traditional laptops. By using its desktop operating system franchise as a lever, Microsoft will be able to enter the lower-specification end of the laptop market with a cost advantage which make make life difficult for former partners such as HP and Dell. We've discussed previously how some PC manufactures such as Dell have failed in generational change whilst others have diversified to survive market changes; Samsung with Android and the (still) bestselling Chromebook. ASUS with their successful Nexus tablets. We also discussed the ergonomic problems which are claimed to make touch screens unsuitable for PC use."
Last I checked Dell and HP are both very much still MS partners. This is more akin to a lover's spat than a breakup.
I flip out when people touch my screen. How do you think I'll react when *I* have to touch my screen.
Knock it off with the touch screen crap, already.
I see touch screen computers all the time at best buy, so the PC manufacturers are definitely making them. The problem is, they don't market them very well. All of the PCs and laptops are lined up in a row and you could walk right by one and not know it is a touch screen.
I think Microsoft is trying to create a market of PCs that act like tablets, when that market doesn't really exist. If people wanted touch screens, they could get them today. Most users either want a tablet or a traditional computer. The users who want both usually want them as separate devices.
Microsoft screwed the pooch on this one and it will probably mean the end for Ballmer. Hopefully the next OS corrects the issues and slashdot can find something else M$ to bash.
Johnkoerner.com
My ten year old daughter was in tears because she couldn't figure out her new windows 8 laptop.
Now the laptop was underpowered, but it couldn't play DVDs out of the box and she couldn't figure out how to run her software on it thanks to the removal of the start button. Also, Toshiba added its bonus software which seemed to take over the whole computer periodically since pop ups now take the whole screen.
I was frustrated trying to use it until I found a start menu hack and added it back.
I installed VLC so she can play DVDs and she has a start menu and now is very happy. Perhaps MS shouldn't have tried to do too much too soon?
The hallmark of those truly incompetent. To be found on the very left side in the diagram showing the distribution for the Dunning-Kruger effect.
How MS could mess this up so badly is quite astonishing. The only reasonable explanation is really, really bad leadership.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Vendors had a long time to move production to devices with a touch interface and for the most pat they did nothing. A few crappy all-in-ones and overly expensive laptops. Even bigger touch pads with faster interfaces would have made a world of difference. Meanwhile the market is proving MS correct and sales of tablets and small devices is booming. I track deal websites all the rime and every time someone posts a sub $500 touch notebook they sell out in short order . external touch pad devices seen real popular too. Face it, but Win 8 Sucks on a traditional notebook or PC.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Windows 8 is one of the best consumer products Microsoft has ever made. I've introduced 4 low level users to it, and after a couple months, without fail, they all love it.
Win8 is one of those things people will look back at after the fact and recognize that it was much better than everyone thought.
This is compelling evidence that Steve Balmer is a Republican. Does he also believe the President was born in Kenya? You'd have to be Republican wacko to believe the failure of Windows 8 is due to the OEM manufacturers. The PC manufacturers are the ones who should be suing Microsoft for tanking their sales with the insanity of Windows 8 as a PC operating system.. But what Microsoft is doing is another Republican tactic. Accuse others of what you've actually caused.
This ad space for rent.
This time is content creation vs content consumption. Everything from typing a quick memo to video editing falls under the content creation. They usually need a full complement of input devices, a full keyboard, a good mouse, larger the screen it is better. But content consumption does not need all these user input devices. Oftentimes, a tap, a touch, a click is all that is required to passively consume content. Ch+ , Ch-, Vol+ and Vol- buttons cover 99% of the usage in a TV remote!
Microsoft first missed the boat in creating a simpler device for content consumption. It had been shipping WindowsCE and other such "simpler" devices for ages. But its idea of simple was less functional PC. It never understood the split was content creation vs content consumption. Eventually Apple got on to that divide, with at least some of its managers who came from deep unix background.
Then it decides to attach OS with two completely different goals (consumption vs creation) with some band-aid and baling wire to create a rickety contraption and call it Win8. Consumers of one do not want to pay for the other. I would not touch, literally, a touchscreen and smudge it up if I am also typing a doc or code on it.
The hardware makers also remember the days when 90% of their revenue came from WinTel boxes and how Microsoft walked roughshod all over them. They eviscerated the hardware vendors and danced on their entrails with hob-nailed boots, to conjure up a vision from PGWodehouse. Now WinTel accounts for a much smaller percentage of their sales and even lower percentage of their profits. Now it is payback time for Microsoft from these vendors. What went around is coming around to Microsoft.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There is a NPRM coming out Monday from OSHA proposing the nationwide ban of non-handheld touch screens in the workplace while their ergonomic issues can be investigated.
A coalition of insurers that includes Aetna, Cigna, and others, plans to file the request with OSHA over concerns of the potential for repetitive stress injuries from use of full-sized touch PCs. The document will list several potential RSIs along with reports of injuries by touch PC owners that include:
- Torn or irritated rotator cuff injuries
- Back pain from disproportional development of upper arm musculature (gorilla arm syndrome)
- Elbow tendonitis
- Fatigue
Apparently this is a much larger problem than we all thought.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If Microsoft can solve Dell's problem of crappy, short-lifespan business PCs and abhorrent levels of customer service, then maybe perhaps that can effect a substantial change.
Businesses can no longer tolerate the forced premature obsolescence of PCs that have to be replaced in a "forklift-upgrade" manner every couple years. That is completely unsustainable. They can also no longer tolerate the shitty customer support, (getting the "Dell Dance") when brand new machines they've just bought break down and you call for support or warranty repairs, all you get is the runaround and the "blame the customer" treatment.
Why not just blame this on Bush too.
The Register article talks about squabbles over "underwhelming Windows 8 sales over Christmas", which isn't exactly the same thing as "the failure of Windows 8".
Words. They actually mean things.
Life needs more saving throws.
Windows 7 is stable, usable, and a sufficient progress over windows XP. WIndows XP dominated the last 10 years, and my prediction is that 7 will dominate on PCs in businesses the next 10 years. The company where i work has finished the Tests and adoption of windows 7 last year and is now rolling it out as the new standard system. And no - i dont belive that they will consider Windows 8. Reducating the employees to the Ribbon interface in office was already something they liked so little that they have their own solution for adding the old menus temporarily.
There is no visible advantage of touch in the office, and that is where MS truely domiates. The idea of touch-pcs is somthing which MS dreams about since at least the mid - 90s. Then they had an epic fail, now they hope they can ride in the waves of the ipad and android.
So my wife just got a Windows 8 touch machine from Asus, and I have to say that two weeks in, it is very nice.
The problem was in the first week. The first night of using the machine it seemed incredible how many usability problems there were. There's no real "how to use this machine" intro when we booted up and the key things you need to do are not intuitive enough that you can just "learn" them right away. Now you might think that's an immediate strike against the UI, but the principle of discoverability is routinely violated by Apple, and there UI's are universally loved (there are tons of secret tricks on Macs that you have to read about to learn and the most radical thing about the iPod was that it had no on button, meaning it wasn't even clear how to start it when you first saw one). Anyway, the lack of an intro was compounded with some software problems -- specifically, there was a bug with the app store so we couldn't download anything at first and had to drop into a windows troubleshooter to clear it up (thanks Google!).
Now that we've got the app store thing ironed out and we've learned the swipey commands, the machine feels really graceful and fast to use. At least as simple to use as my Gnome shell, which I dearly dearly love. It actually has many of the same goals -- apps are always full screen, which is usually what you want, typing to search works nearly *everywhere*, etc. And the touch screen is fun. And if there are apps that haven't been app-ified, you have the old school Windows desktop mode to fall back on.
In short, Windows 8 manages to merge many of the conveniences of iOS devices with many of the conveniences with a full operating system. It's quick and easy to use once you know what you're doing. Slick packaging and attention to detail seem essential, however, and this is where Windows is at a disadvantage compared to Apple, since they don't in fact control the whole user experience. Do we blame Asus or Microsoft for the fact that our machine shipped with a buggy OS and a broken App store? Is Asus or Apple to blame for the fact that the one "intro" video Asus included was just advertising for the machine that showed us how beautiful it could look, and not anything that showed how to use the touch screen interface? It's not entirely clear to me.
You have obviously never used multiple windows at once. At work, I have two 24" screens and regularly have lots of open windows at once. If even one of the programs I use are a "metro" program, I am not able to use regular windows programs at the same time. This problem will only get worse with time, and is a showstopper for me.
Windows 8 is the solution to Microsofts problems, not the users' problems. That kind of disrespect for your customers never pays off.
1.) Bad Economic Times, 2.) Everyone has a fast system already (mostly - so NO NEED TO "RE-BUY" (especially in economic hard times)), & 3.) Trying to put a smartphone interface onto a device folks are 18++ yrs. or so used to using with the Win9x shell, alienating them.
* Were I to speculate WHY Windows 8 hasn't done well? It's those 3 things, with HEAVY EMPHASIS on #3... especially THAT one!
That's ME, practically the "poster child for 'Windows fanboy @ /.'", which makes me a minority player around here actually, but @ least I can be honest & state WHY I don't & WON'T use Windows 8!
Does it have good things in it? Yes, beneath the 'covers', ala:
---
1.) Self-Terminating Services (which I've been doing for decades now since Windows NT 3.51, albeit manually)
2.) Heap "chunk randomization"
---
However - that interface? Stinks... pointless on a PC Desktop or Laptop even imo!
Microsoft's coding time would've been BETTER SPENT producing Service Pack #2 for Windows 7 instead of just issuing hundreds of patches!
(Which SP#2 won't be produced, due to MS WASTING TIME ON BUILDING A SMARTPHONE INTERFACE ON A PC DESKTOP - without the option during install to use the 'classic desktop shell' we've all become accustomed to over decades now!)
APK
P.S.=> Mr. Ballmer - Face it: You screwed up, own up to it, & move on... you'd be best-served doing that much, rather than railing against facts & attempting to "argue with the numbers" passing the buck/placing the blame on others, projecting your own faults onto them, when it's YOU & YOUR DECISIONS that are part of the problem!
... apk
Bingo! We have a winner here. The guy several posts up that compared Ballmer and MS to Republicans was spot on.
Because is broke search. Because the start screen breaks workflow. Because it has 2 horribly disjointed user interfaces.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
If even one of the programs I use are a "metro" program
You say it hurts when you use programs from the Windows Store. So stay out of the Windows Store and stick to Windows 7 applications, and you'll still be able to put windows side by side.
...and trying to shove some unwanted, huge, expensive thing down America's throat (just like Obamacare) when America does not want it, and it changes everything to be a worse quality of experience, and costs way too much, and will ruin what everyone is already accustomed too. It's big, intrusive, and nobody still knows exactly "what's in it" yet, even after it's passed.... probably has secret "blue screen of death" panels in it too
Why are my IE favorites different on the desktop and metro?
GENERATION 24: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Hey Microsoft - I'm part of the problem. I've used Win 8, hate the interface and I'm avoiding it. I'm also telling people to stick with Windows 7 because 8 looks like a massive tech support problem for me. So I flat out tell people that I won't support Win 8. Use Win 7, Ubuntu, or buy a Mac. Life is better for me, and it sucks for you.
Your mistake is FORCING the new interface onto users, rather than making it an option. Had you produced Win 8 with a start button, and made Metro (or whatever you call it) something users could grow into, it would have been something I'd support. But you made it a Take-It-Or-Leave-It deal and what do you see users doing? Yeah - we chose to leave it.
I'd suggest you guys quickly come out with Windows 8.1 and add an option to put the old Win 7 interface on it. In my opinion, Metro feels unrefined, inconsistent and not ready for prime time. Make it an option and all will be forgiven.
And stop blaming others. Everyone else saw this coming a mile away. You make a bad decision - own up to it. Blaming others makes you look stupid and totally clueless. This is causing us to question your ability to deliver in the future, as it indicates you are not listening to your customers.
Place nail here >+
It's just so painful to flip back and forth between the classic desktop and Modern UI.
Also, the integration is half-baked: you have two Control Panels, two places to pin apps (taskbar and start screen), two Internet Explorers, and it ships with a mishmash of desktop/modern apps. It just feels more like running two virtual machines instead of one OS.
The live tiles are a fun toy to watch social media, that's all there is for me.
The telling thing about Windows 8 is that even the most rabidly pro-Microsoft people, when you look at their comments on Windows 8 as a desktop OS, they're basically saying "You can ignore Metro, and it's almost as good as Windows 7". I really haven't seen anybody try to claim that Windows 8 is a step forward over Windows 7 on the desktop. Since it was pretty obvious the Suface RT and it's expensive RT friends were going to be pretty niche, and not trouble the mainstream, affordable tablet market, it's a lose on the desktop and a lose on tablets, so I don't see how Microsoft can blame anyone but itself.
" By using its desktop operating system franchise as a lever, Microsoft will be able to enter the lower-specification end of the laptop market with a cost advantage which make make life difficult for former partners such as HP and Dell."
Yes, Microsoft won't have to pay for a Windows license. However since the Surface RT with keyboard is already more expensive than a low-end Ultrabook, and Microsoft will have to either keep a decent price differential between the RT and Pro, or withdraw the Surface RT from the market, I don't expect that the Surface Pro is going to be keenly priced enough to worry anybody. It will be priced up there with the mid-range 13" ultrabooks, but with worse battery life and a screen that's too small if you plan to use it primarily in laptop mode, it will be a niche purchase.
Oh no... it's the future.
"Microsoft is planning to strike back ... with Surface Pro ... shorter battery life ... much heavier ..."
Yeah! That'll show 'em!
apps are always full screen, which is usually what you want
Even if it's what you want, it isn't what I want, or what people who use a computer to do actual work want. I bought a 1920x1080 pixel monitor for my desktop PC so that I could view two 960px wide windows side by side using the Snap feature of Windows 7. Even my laptop with its 1024x600 pixel screen is wide enough for two 80-column windows (a source code editor and an output terminal).
And I don't want a bloody touchscreen, either on my laptop OR my desktop, thanks very much.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Windows 8 fails. Sez M$.
Man, Ballmer must be getting more pissed off by the month, he might actually explode in to chairs at this rate.
"The Register tells us that Microsoft has begun squabbling with PC manufacturers over the reasons behind the failure of Windows 8."
I'm sure there's lots of reasons. But last I checked, Windows 8 has only one manufacturer.
I wasn't even aware that it was officially acknowledged as a "failure" any more than, say, Windows Vista was.
A PC is half software and half hardware. OEMs need to make hardware that people want to own. At work many people request a mac, then wipe it and put Windows on it (or run Parallels). They want the nice hardware but they want the Windows 8 OS. They don't want some piece of plastic.
If you have big investments in Microsoft or Microsoft products, you should be worried. The inability to recognize their failure means they will keep trying to ram themselves in to the ground.
This reminds me so much of the 98 Internet Explorer "Integration" fiasco. You WILL install it and you WILL use it regardless if you want it or not. The only reason they did it was to crush their competitor. But eventually they realized that even this was a mistake and somewhat backed down from it.
They even canned Microsoft BOB fairly quickly, and you don't see much of Clippy any more either.
But if they really don't realize they made a mistake here, then you will see no improvements in Windows 9/10/11 etc and further product degradation in to an even worse mess of useless crap.
Abandon the low-end? Yeah, right. Thanks for the advice, Microsoft, but your cut is the same whether the hardware manufacturers sell cheap laptops or higher-end ones, so I think the response from them would be something like "Shut up and take our money."
That would be awesome.
It's simple really. Consumers are moving towards tablet like devices. Businesses are sticking with traditional desktop/laptop. Windows 8 targets tablet like devices, which could be good for consumers, but that isn't where most desktop/laptop sales are occuring, which is the business market. Desktop/laptop sales in the consumer market are are very price conscious. Desktop/laptop sales in the business market are directed at productivity, which equate to lowering costs of duing business.
Windows 8 may be the next best thing since sliced bread as a technology (although I doubt that). However, it appears that it misses the mark in both the consumer and business markets for traditional desktop/laptop computing. Maybe Microsoft needs to go back and take a Marketing 101 course or two, because Microsoft has nobody to blame but themself. The hardware manufacturers are producing what the market will buy. It is simple supply and demand and there isn't a lot of demand for Windows 8.
After 20 years of MS dev (C++ MFC, ATL, DirectX / C# NET), Win8 screwup has driven me to Ubuntu.
Say what you want about Sinofsky, he did manage to kill Windows on time! ... yet.
They haven't blamed the consumers
> Touch is a nice extra, but as the main input for a system that needs to be productive it doesn't justify the costs.
And that is the big problem with touch. It is a waste of money. Why should I spend extra on a desktop monitor or laptop that has touch? I have no use for it, and it does not help get work done any faster/easier. It even gets nasty when finger prints are all over it! It looks cool? So what? The economy is still in the shitter and most people have to watch every dollar they spend.
when you point your finger at pc makers.... three fingers are pointing right back at you.
it's your own fucking fault that windows 8 sucks. the whole project should've been.....
captcha: aborted
Please don't use the word "Modern". It's an intentional trick to sow confusion, akin to "Office Open XML" when their biggest competitor was OpenOffice. We need a proper name, and with the lack of something official, "Metro" is the best candidate (as it was official).
This is Microsoft, remember that they act opposite to Hanlon's razor.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
We must blame them and cause a fuss
Before somebody thinks of blaming us!
Oh rly?
i think it has more to do with windows 8 machines shipping with broken drivers and some that are touch screen the touch lacks the driver and does not work had a buddy literary take back 3 laptops each one had some sort of out of the box driver issue. and of course the os its self is just a pile of garbage i had him go get a system 76 Ubuntu pc and after ripping out unity or xfce hes happy with it and everything works.
Good they've officially admitted Windows 8 failed.
Calling viewing works created by others "consumption" makes me think of tuberculosis. Anyway:
Consider three kinds of users: people who only view works, hobbyists who create works, and professionals who create works for a living. A dichotomy between devices for viewing works created by others and devices for creating works makes it harder for people to start creating for at least three reasons:
Having to re-buy If a viewer device is not suitable for creating, then someone who wants to step up from viewing to creating will have to buy a separate device. Lack of economies of scale Because fewer people will be buying devices capable of creating, they won't be able to take advantage of the intense price competition in viewer devices, causing a general-purpose device to climb far out of the price range of a Christmas present or something on which to spend an income tax refund. Gatekeepers Finally, once the sticker shock has scared away most hobbyists, certain gatekeeper entities will gain control over who is and isn't allowed to possess a device for creating. This gatekeeping has been seen since the mid-1980s in the video game market, with a dichotomy between "retail consoles" for home use and "devkits" for use only by professionals who have already proven their "relevant video game industry experience" and "financial stability" by moving to Austin, Boston, or Seattle for an apprenticeship of several years. Initially, this was needed to reassure brick-and-mortar retailers of the value of inventory and shelf space in the wake of a 1984 recession in the North American video game market, but as I wrote elsewhere, the constraints of retail aren't so important since the fourth quarter of 2006.Each of these three hurdles deters people from creating as a hobby in the first place, which tends to turn people into "sheep that passively graze on what others make available to them," as free software advocate Richard Stallman put it when he decried the word "consumer".
[Devices for creating works] usually need a full complement of input devices, a full keyboard, a good mouse, larger the screen it is better. But [viewing them] does not need all these user input devices. Oftentimes, a tap, a touch, a click is all that is required to passively consume content. Ch+ , Ch-, Vol+ and Vol- buttons cover 99% of the usage in a TV remote!
If a viewer device isn't artificially restricted, it's a doddle to upgrade the latter into the former by buying a $15 keyboard and a $15 mouse. But if market-segmenting cryptography is in play, people who want to step up from viewing to creating might not be able to afford dropping $700 on a Mac.
Microsoft first missed the boat in creating a simpler device for [viewing].
Then what's the Xbox 360 console? In countries where the law allows, Microsoft even established a public "Indie Games" route to market using the XNA framework so that anyone with a $300 PC can create games for the platform.
Wouldn't be that important fact? That people do not like change especially when it comes to computers. A phone redesign is different as long as they can text and make phone calls, but a system like a desktop where they are accustomed to find things exactly where they always were is infuriating. I spend twenty minutes trying to assign the desktop a static IP and I work as network engineer.
I was in a Staples store a few days ago. When I asked about sticking with Windows 7, a sales associate told me that a lot of other people had asked about downgrading, but several of the laptops on display had no Windows 7 driver for their Wi-Fi chipset, which means no Internet access.
I have lived to see it, the downfall of Microsoft.
Thanks, Steve.
The new CPUs are not faster for what 90% of the users do 90% of the time.
Now both Intel and AMD are promising another round of chips that aren't any faster.
They still can't understand why nobody wants to 'upgrade' their system any more.
Also, 2/3 of the gfx cards should be taken off the market and crushed and fed to the marketing people that keep giving them rip-off renames. The 2nd or 3rd time a person gets burned, they stop buying gfx cards - often abandoning PC gaming entirely.
Why on Earth would I want to TOUCH a turd?
Unless Microsoft changes its mind, it looks like the next version (Windows 9 or Windows Blue) is going to have the same interface as Windows 8. They're determined that Metro will the face of Microsoft - and what a butt-ugly face it is!
I would need an arm extension to touch my screens, as they're a couple of feet away on the desktop (while the mouse is sitting there right next to my keyboard). The monitors got bigger and farther away once I hit low 40's as I got to learn all about bifocals. Those who are farsighted might have known this distance/font size thingie all along.
Something in my lap I can touch. When it's standing on the table, it's actually harder to navigate the tablet but easier to, say, use it as a video display while I'm working.
The biggest issue for me is the whole "full screen only" apps and the context switching issues in Win8... and the waste of screen real estate.
Sorry, that got a bit "Spanish Inquisition" there...
Seriously though: whenever I 'let a coworker drive" my pc, they always go to full screen on each program - and since I run multiple 1920x1200 screens, it just drives me BONKERS to see that much screen wastage.
When I need to go to theirs, its amazing how many folks run their stuff in full screen - I don't know how they manage... it just doesn't work for me.
Doing developer support means that I often have 3 or 4 copies of visual studio running at once and am switching between them (customer's solution open in one and two or three boilerplates or other projects where I've solved similar problems for others open and copying/pasting or comparing things between them) along with a text editor and maybe two or three different browsers (esp. if I'm testing a web app) all the while with email and IM and phone queue management apps sitting on the side where I can see if they need attention.
I'm sure Win8 is ok on a touch device or something, but the abysmal handling of context switching is a deal breaker for me on a desktop. Windows 2000 pretty much had the perfect (for me) UI except for a couple of the nice convenience features of Win7 like a New Folder button in explorer by default (Oh how I love thee), and the search built right in.
I've found taht taking Win7, shrinking the icons a bit, installing UltraMon and using Classic Shell and turning off all that Aero stuff gives me a perfect (for my needs) UI. And I don't mind that it takes a little time to get set up initially. What I care for is that I can hammer it into a great UI for the way I work, MS seems to be taking a "use it our way" mentality with Win8 which is just a giant deal breaker for me. I'm hoping that they'll come to their senses with Win9 and that Win8 is just MS Bob 3.0 (2.0 being Windows ME)
Hell, I prefer VISTA to Windows 8... seriously that should show how bad 8 is right there.
The Digital Sorceress
"Windows" itself is rapidly becoming meaningless. In a decade or less MS operating systems will be used mainly by businesses and hobbyists. Touchpads and "The Cloud" are much more appealing to regular consumers who are really only interested in using the internet. And there is really no reason to use the MS offerings for these purposes.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
People do not want touch PCs. It's really that simple. Microsoft is trying to move the market in a direction that it doesn't want to move, and the market tends to react negatively to that.
Metro on a desktop PC is fucking awful. It's best used like Windows 7, where you try and pretend that Metro doesn't exist. In that case, why wouldn't I just use Windows 7? It's not much better on a laptop. The UI is just not built to do real work. It's built for phones, and it works fine for that. When I'm trying to do my job, it's something to fight with as it decides that I really didn't want three windows visible at once.
"Windows 8 - almost as good as Windows 7!" isn't much of a marketing slogan.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
... that you need to make the OS relevant. After ditching PC for the console space they've done a lot to make the PC less relevant. Most average users don't need to upgrade. They don't seem to get that you have to provide value and something the customer wants, not just jam your product down consumers throats.
I remember when I was on a steady upgrade train relentlessly as PC gaming and Videocards advanced but we've slowed down the last 6 years big time. You can play most games decently with a core 2 duo and a mid range card. CPU power has slowed to a crawl given that only a tiny % of apps can really take advantage of multicore.
MS doesn't really grasp that it needs to solve some key problem for the customer or provide something that consumers can get excited about.
I was sort of thinking this exact same thing while reading all these comments.
I'm on a Windows 8 ultrabook right now and this thing is easy to use. It only took me about 1 hour to get fully accustomed with the new OS. Also, I'm not sure why there is a huge fuss over the start menu because you access the start screen in the same way (bottom left) and it does the same thing (only prettier).
Taking an existing and _good_ system (yeah Windows is a pretty good OS, really) and bolting on an inefficient subsystem that most of all get in the way of working with real world things is... Pretty fucking idiotic. Is there any Windows 8 power user that haven't installed Classic Start Menu or something similar in order to hide the resulting mess?
Now Windows 8 isn't all bad and even some Metro ideas are nifty but for the love of $deity making a product that irritates or even outright insults their core market is incredible...
I don't know why anyone expected this to be so wonderful. It's an even number release:
http://www.rationalskepticssociety.com/blog/2012/02/28/windows-8-cursed/
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
No one wants touch screen on a desktop, no one.
Using a mouse is faster, more efficent, easier and it doesnt make me take time to reach up to a monitor and to clean prints off the monitor vs. using a touch screen monitor. I have a 24 inch monitor and it takes 1/10th the time and effort to slightly move my mouse a tiny bit and click a button than it is to reach out with my arm fully extended and push in one corner of the screen then the other. Not to mention the mouse is far more accurate.
Bottom line is, no one wants touch screen on a desktop or even a laptop.
Touch screens are perfect for smart phones and tablets because of the small surface.
Stop trying to get more customers by thinking if you make all of your products the same more people will join you. People want to use a desktop because its a desktop, people want to use a tablet because of its advantages. They are completely different things and you cant force them to be exactly the same. Want to win customers? Then you make your desktop OS systems ones that are designed to take full advantage of a desktop and play to its strengths, do the same for tablets and such but stop this nonsense of trying to be the end all be all of software for everything under one umbrella.
Oh and as a bonus hint: If you really want to win pc users hearts, then start getting behind video games again. If micorosft really tried to be the video gamers friend on pc you guys would be kings. No games for windows lives isnt the answer, its a pile of crap.
...is that Microsoft has tried to cram two operating systems, which are used for very different applications, into a single OS. If they had just made Windows Metro or something for touchscreen devices and left Windows 7 alone, we would not be having this conversation right now. If Apple has done one thing right, it's that they have for the most part kept iOS and OS X separate.
My wife has a Windows RT tablet made by Asus, and if you stay within the Metro interface, it really is a pleasure to use. As soon as you go to make some changes to settings, or try to use Microsoft Word, you go into the traditional desktop and with a touchscreen that's a nightmare. Likewise if you try to navigate Metro with a pointing device – it just feels weird.
Everybody heralding the death of the desktop and the takeover of tablets has definitely jumped the gun, and Microsoft's attempt to shoehorn us all into their one-size-fits-all view of computing has without a doubt been a failure. They should have made a dedicated touchscreen operating system and forgotten about Surface or at least kept it simple.
Lord Ballmer: "We would have sold more of them if more people had bought them!"
Unwise Minion: "Uh, Lord Ballmer, sir, isn't that almost a tautology?"
[brief pause]
Lord Ballmer: "Get the cleaners in here. Some minion just died while eating a chair."
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
No, we've had 2 years of microsoft fanboys on slashdot telling us how great windows 8 is.
There are no Microsoft fanboys on Slashdot.
There are people who like some of MS' products - like Visual Studio.
But fanboy'ism like Apple's or Linux? Nope. Never happened.
And, no one that I have ever seen on Slashdot has ever - EVER - said great things about Windows 8.
Never.
Even the MS shills haven't done it.
Look there is a need out that for big screens / dual or more screens.
Also there is work flows where a mouse or even Digital Drawing Tablets.
Also games how many pc games are build for touch and even if they where do you really want to have a touch FPS game?? Even RST or TBS games need a mouse to make it easier to pick out what you want / most games have a left button and right button controls.
Take a FPS game with a basic wheel mouse you have fire / alt fire and change weapons.
Windows 8 still supports the snappy window mode in the old-style desktop
I mentioned that in another comment but was told that certain system administration tasks, such as network connection and power management, were moved exclusively to the Start Screen environment.
it has a way to look at two "apps" side-by-side in the new-world desktop (metro or whatever).
One problem here is that the well-known name of the Modern UI enviroment was dropped at the last minute due to a trademark conflict with someone else's Metro product, making it hard to find the right keywords when searching Google or Bing for information on how to tame Windows 8. Another is that according to this video, it requires a minimum screen size of 1366x768 pixels, meaning it won't work on netbooks (1024x600) or on a monitor size commonly seen in offices (1280x1024), and I'm not aware of any top-and-bottom mode for users of portrait monitors (1080x1920).
You could just go use your browser in the old-world desktop mode, but then you lose all the elegance of the full-screen task-bar-less experience.
I already had that in multiple web browsers for Windows XP with F11 full screen.
Even my laptop with its 1024x600 pixel screen is wide enough for two 80-column windows (a source code editor and an output terminal).
As to real coding work -- just use emacs fullscreen and divide your window as many times as you like, all from the keyboard.
Perhaps I was too specific by saying "output terminal." Using buffer management in Emacs as a tiling window manager is fine for people who create only text-based applications. But some programs I work on have graphical output. Or sometimes they're web pages or web applications, for which I want the HTML or PHP on one side and the browser on the other. For these, I'd probably want to stay in old-world, but the fact that power and networking have been moved out to the new-world environment makes the old-world environment in general look "subordinate".
The problem is not Win 8 in itself. The OS is fine. Its that MS and pc vendors are pushing the metro side of it as if that was all there is to it. Were I to design a commercial for MS it would show the range of products 8 works on (even including phones though that is perhaps not technically accurate)... basically a progression of typical users using typical products and ending with the regular desktop user who uses the standard desktop rather than metro. "One OS that works for YOU across ALL devices"
Too many people have the misconception that you cant use 8 unless you have touch or that it is somehow beholden to it. Thats not true. Whether the improvements in the core are enough to get someone to upgrade just the OS from 7 to 8 may be up for debate but on new hardware nobody should hesitate to use 8 in desktop mode.
This whole escape is both delightful and amusing for any student of history to witness. The root cause of all Microsoft's problems is the proud arrogance of it's emperor, Ballmer. How many empires (both political and corporate) have collapsed due to the hubris of their emperor? Nearly all of them, it seems.
The era when Microsoft could dictate people's desires has long since passed. They are simply irrelevant today and are rapidly becoming the next dead man walking (such as RIM, Nokia, Intel, etc.) Good riddance, I say. Change is long overdue and maybe we can look forward to a day when Windows and Office are but distant memories of a grossly erroneous period in our history.
I simply have no desire to touch my screen - GET IT M$???
I teach Seniors PCs (I am a Senior) ( also retired IBM customer Engineer (service technician)). When the first W8 user showed up looking for help, I figured , great!, a look at W8. After 3 hours, I realized the only way I could use this thing was to use keyboard short-cuts to get to control panel , the desktop (sort of), run dialogue, etc. As soon as I can clone this thing (back-up for when she sells it) it's going backward to a pirated XP or (forward) to Ubuntu.
I get that you don't like Win8 but you can use regular apps on the same screen with a metro app pinned to the side. I do this with the Hulu app and it works great.
Worse yet, the name "Modern UI" is downright insulting to anyone who knowns anything about user interfaces. Full screen applications? One application at a time? Just like the good old DOS days of the 1980s! And even back then people were trying like crazy to escape that with character based multi-taskers like TopView/DESQview or GUIs like Visi On, the original Mac/Lisa, GEM, Amiga, and a little program from Microsoft called "Windows".
It's always someone else's fault.
Childish! As usual!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
:) Win98 :( WinME :) WinXP :( WinVista :) Win7 :( Win8
Is there some kind of Peter Principle at work over at MS? Do a good job, get promoted out of your depth and bomb miserably, then clear out to make room for a back to basics approach to make another winner? Go ahead, slashdot, keep piling on the venom, you're greasing the wheels so the cycle can repeat once again.
it's that simple.. Yes Windows 8 is an terrific OS for tablets, I won't argue that, but for desktop it's just crap.. Why would I want to limit myself to only one screen? Or why would I have to use the small scrollbar on the bottom of the startscreen to scroll left and right with the mouse, even there is soo much unused space around the tiles for the mouse to use (you can use it with your finger, so why not your mouse)..
Why use so much space for showing the data as large blobs, it's a complete waste of resolution. In a lot of examples they show for Windows 8 store apps you see the old way and the metro way, but with the old way I see much more data..
And why the removal of aero, let people who want to have al the bling bling, have their bling bling, as even with windows 7 you can get the bland look of windows 8 'legacy' applications by turning it off, at least with windows 7 you have a choice... Who cares if it uses a little bit more resources, it didn't seem to care with previous windows version's when resources where even more scarce, why would I even care on a desktop PC about batterylife... Hell even on my laptop I really don't care most of the time..
Nah, all Windows 8 is about is trying to get the mentally distorted taste of MS designers stuffed down our throaths..
Hey Ballmer, nobody wants your garbage anymore. Please keep losing money, PLEASE.
.
Microsoft needs to remember that this is 2013, not the second half of the 1990's when the PC OEMs existed purely to support Microsoft and Intel.
The computing world has moved on (e.g., into mobile computing) and guess what, Microsoft missed yet another paradigm shift (the first being that Microsoft famously missed the onslaught of the Internet in the late 1990's).
So Microsoft is whining that they are being left behind by their PC partners; the very same PC partners, by the way, from who Microsoft has schemed and managed to suck nearly every last dollar of profit via the quasi-legal leveraging of the Windows monopoly.
Now there is a new means in town for the PC hardware OEMs to make money, and it does not require continuous bowing towards Redmond.
While the OEMs are trying to assure that they will not be subjects of Microsoft ever again. Microsoft is yelling at them, "follow us, we are the leader." But it is falling on deaf ears.
I can see why Microsoft is whining. Microsoft is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Why would they pull Apple down with them? Apple has made quite a healthy profit and its products are selling well..
What about Microsoft?
Blaming partners does nothing to improve sales or Microsoft's image.
This excuse has been released to the media/public so Microsoft now has a valid reason to start selling hardware under their own name. "We're forced to since our partners aren't selling the ultimate user experience".
The system is identical to Windows 7 only the boring "Start Menu" has been replaced by the "Start Screen" with "Live tiles". It's turned one of the drab features into something cool.
People trying to do real work don't need "cool".
They need fast, functional, and familiar.
I blame the current state of humanity, no one seems to thinks for themselves anymore. Everyone seems brain washed by media and accepts other's opinions without discovery for our selves. I am amazed when I hear people almost brag about not being able to work windows 8. When did it become cool to be stupid? I'm not saying win8 is perfect but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to start up an internet browser on it and let's face it that is what most "average" computer user do.
You have obviously never used multiple windows at once. At work, I have two 24" screens and regularly have lots of open windows at once. If even one of the programs I use are a "metro" program, I am not able to use regular windows programs at the same time. This problem will only get worse with time, and is a showstopper for me.
Windows 8 is the solution to Microsofts problems, not the users' problems. That kind of disrespect for your customers never pays off.
Wow! They really ARE copying Apple verbatim! I mean I know Apple still has their regular desktop but they are pushing launch pad pretty hard, which is exactly like a tablet interface. Not to mention the fact that when you run a Mac OS App in fullscreen mode (again like you would on a tablet), your second monitor becomes a giant paperweight. It's awesome that we're seeing such unity on the user interfaces.
I started reading about Windows 8, or what was going to be Windows 8, years ago. When the first consumer (beta) versions were released people again said yuck, don't want, I'm not switching to this interface, from that we were sure that MS would give us the option of turning off the "new" features and go about using the new file systems and even newer memory allocation system which would make this version faster. They must have been in a 'see no evil' mode because none of those reviewers, pro nor amateur were listened to. Is that how you're supposed to make money these days?
easy tech = high pressure sales no way that they are win 8 only drivers and they should still work on 7 as well. Even if you need to do some ver hacking.
metro needs to run in a window at least on bigger screens. You can't take a smartphone UI and make it work on a 17-19++ display.
Good luck with that. Microsoft will still be stuck with custody of the retarded kid (Windows 8).
Have gnu, will travel.
This is low even for Microsoft. It's not the PC builders who are at fault, if Microsoft released a new OS that takes advantage of features most PC's don't have then it's 100% there fault. This would be like Linus blaming PC builders for the reason Linux isn't the number 1 desktop OS. Basically Microsoft designed a new OS that wasn't planned out well, didn't fit in the current market and wasn't needed and is mad that people aren't going to upgrade. Given the performance of the Microsoft in the last 15 years it's not surprising. Me, Vista and 8 now all settle as major failures for Operating Systems, It's no wonder people don't want to upgrade.
This is because you have two OSes on your PC. One is Windows 8 desktop and one is Windows 8 Metro. Yes it is that stupid.
You got the touch!
The only touch device I like using with my computer only gets used when browsing for porn..... :)
Seriously, it's bad enough to not be able to touch-type through a form without having to leave home-row and use the mouse or touch pad. I certainly don't want to be gorilla-swiping my screen in between fields just because Microsoft wants to make more money. WTF!
-- L8R, guitardood
Well yeah, kind of. Microsoft managed to pick the very worst UI choice Apple has made in the last year and doubled down on it.
They have reached a well-known stage in project management. After the project is launched, and fails to reach its stated goals, we enter the blame stage. Microsoft blaming the PC makers, PC makers blaming Microsoft, is proof that Windows 8 is a failure. Success has a thousand parents but defeat is an orphan.
"A metro app" being the keyword. I regularly use ten applications at once, keeping most in the background with a little bit of the window visible so that I can see state changes. Metro breaks this usage pattern.
I think your sarcasm detector is broken.
GENERATION 24: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Perhaps Microsoft's "Stack Ranking" review process (where every unit must declare certain percentage of employees top performers, good, average and poor performers) has infused the entire organization with a tendancy to shift blame when anything goes wrong?
It almost looks like a child wrote it but even a child would get a word like "chainges" [sic] right. Lay off the booze.
If even one of the programs I use are a "metro" program, I am not able to use regular windows programs at the same time.
This annoys me as well. But on the bright side, there isn't a single "Metro" program... er... "app"... that I actually want to, or need to, use. And I doubt that there will be any for a long time... They lack the ability to really ever fill the role of a serious "desktop mode" program.
It does hit the main flaw of Windows 8 on the head though; the jarring disconnect between "Metro" and traditional Windows. It does feel like to operating systems tacked together, and not a unified whole. No matter how good the two base systems are, they suffer from the way they are joined. Windows 8 has schizophrenia.
I still don't mind it, but every once in awhile this disjoint hits me in the face.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I like Unity. I've been a Linux user since Slackware 1.0.
Don't use it if you don't like it, but STFU because you sound like an old woman.
Whatever the problems of Windows itself, the fact is that PC hardware makers haven't done a very good job of producing attractive and functional systems. I am in a situation where I have to run Windows and I want some non-Apple hardware. What systems out there aren't consumer-grade crap? Perhaps the Thinkpad Carbon X1 is nice for example, but I ordered one in early December and have yet to receive it due to "quality control problems" according to Lenovo.
People that want tablets, want that tablet to be an IPad.
Its an IPad market, not a tablet market.
The OEMs learned this when they tried to push Android tablets. Windows tablets won't fair any better.
Microsoft thinks their tablet can succeed where Android failed because they can somehow leverage their desktop monopoly.
It is a flawed strategy but it explains why you see the cognitively expensive mess that is windows 8.
My company was using a touch screen add-on for Macintosh's back in the early 90's to allow them to be put in Kiosks so we could hide the keyboard/mouses. It was a simple film you put on the monitor and would act as a mouse. Despite this technology being available, I haven't seen any proliferation of touch screens in a box for people to use for their computers and laptops. How does MS come up with the idea that everyone wants this on their pc's/laptops?
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
I only have 2 friends that installed Win 8 on their home desktop PCs (no touchscreens) and they both hate it and are going back to Win 7. That was enough right there for me to pass on it. Both friends are MCPs
Google calling Microsoft,
as the second most valuable tech company giving advise to 3rd most valuable
tech company in the world, we find we are activating 1.5 million Android on Linux
devices PER DAY just on Google Play alone generating vast profits
for our Far East manufacturing partners.
Is that your new chair Chairman Balmer or are you just pleased to see me?
Steve? Is that you?
Since Gnome did a complete redesign, equally stupid, of the basic interface paradigms. This is displayed in its full horror in the new Fedora 18 release, and this is what you get when people have "great new visisions" and a growing cluster of management fanboys who are no longer able or willing to say "this is nuts, let's not do it".
Too bad, Windows 8 could have given Linux a real boost this year. As it is, I see people fleeing to MacOs in droves.
Mr. Ballmer is the BEST thing to happen......to APPLE in a LONG time.
I wonder how apple would react if there was serious talk of getting rid of him?? I bet they would find a way to sway votes on MS board to keep him around.
Seriously, if he left, Apple stock would take a hit
If you have a monopoly, it never matters either. The reason they're hurting is their monopoly is hurting. They actually might have to innovate for a change. A cheap ripoff of what others are doing isn't going to work this time around. Innovation is hard... why do you think our patent office has no fucking clue what it is?
I would therefore have suggested judging Windows 8 based on how well it works on the Surface, except that I still haven't seen one.
It seems that they ran a very successful ad campaign which got people interested, but then only sold it from their own website, which is out-of-touch with how the average consumer buys laptops.
People want to try something new out before they buy it, and there is nowhere for them to try it out (that I'm aware of, at least in the UK), so it doesn't sell.
If the Surface was a success, but people were complaining about other Windows 8 machines, then Microsoft would have a ligitimate complaint, as things stand, they appear incompetent and whiny. My two cents.
Please...
I hate Windows 8. My wife or kids can't figure it out and I have spend too much time in tech support. I usually have to kill some die-hard full screen app via the task manager. Pure stupid.
Seriously, the Windows Key + X shortcut is the best thing since sliced bread. Also, given the ability to customize the Start screen and pass that out as a default means I can put shortcuts to all our business apps and deliver a useable start menu for everyone. It's also forced users to learn the "press the start key and start typing to find what you want" trick which has started solving the "I can't find blah" calls. The full screen metro apps can feel free to go away. Those suck. Windows 8 is my new OS currently being deployed on all new boxes and old boxes are being reimaged as time permits. By summer I should have over 500 Windows 8 desktops in production.
// TODO: Witty Signature
Windows 8 is a bust. Windows 8 phone is a bust. Surface is a bust. Surface RT is a bust. Vista was a bust. Online Office in the cloud is a bust. Bing is mediocre. Xbox has never made money. More than a quarter of Windows desktops are still XP. If it weren't for Office, SQL server and Windows Server Microsoft would no longer exist.
This is fundimentaly a mindset of user interface design, 'Describe' the user interactions or 'Prescribe' the user interactions. The first makes the interaction follow the natural actions a user currently uses, either using non electronic 'objects' like turning the page on a book, to familiar user interactions for electronic devices, like tuning a radio. the latter simply creates a usre interface, and forces/precribes how the user maked thing happens. Microsoft choose to prescrive the UI expecting their market dominance would be enough. It wasn't.
I guess dictionaries were not available in the early '90's
And how many years did the anti-trust thing bite them for? So getting 95% market share for a product that makes them nothing worked out how well?
I'm surprised that MS isn't being watched closely for anti-trust on the whole windows 8 thing. Win8 is a crappy interface for a non-touch PC, and a terrible change for anyone who's used to a traditional OS. What it is good for, is getting people used to the same interface as on MS tablets etc. Since they're late to the tablet market, it seems that "unifying" the interface is really an attempt to lock people into MS's metro interface and app-store etc, so that they can push more into the tablet market as it replaces the PC market.
However, I thought that leveraging a monopoly in one market to gain an advantage in another is one of the foundations of anti-trust. Can somebody explain that?
Yes, I did! I love my Asus $550 Win8 laptop. Well, I don't love Win8, but I love Asus' laptops. I'd buy another Asus laptop in a heartbeat. I wish I had gotten a 17-inch screen, Core i7 now. This is the first Asus laptop I ever bought, and got it only because it was cheap and had the specs to run Visual Studio 2012. I am not about to commit $1100+ for a 10-inch screen touch Surface Pro. (As far as I know, the Surface RT can't run Visual Studio.) Until Win8 has proved itself viable, and people start buying WinRT tablets like iPad minis, I will not commit my financial resources beyond a cheap Win8 device and a few books. Microsoft - if you want developers to be all-in, give them a reason to!
Here's what happens when an enthusiastic adopter of new technology tries to use Windows 8.
Basically: The new interface sucks. So people are avoiding it. Makes sense to me.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
AIO's are perfect for touch. Windows 8 makes sense on them. The problem is that the choice is constrained due to low availability of touch screens. Laptop and desktops do not need touch screens and in fact touch sucks on them.
If windows 8 hasn't failed yet, it will. It is certain to fail. It is such a dreadful experience that it makes even (spit!) Vista look good. It's been forced out by manufacturers, and bought by rote, not by people choosing it. I have an install for a 17.3" screen that thinks it's on a mobile phone and has a minimum of 5 consecutive menus to navigate before you can do squat. I couldn't abide it even as the other os on my box. And then there's that EFI B.S. locking people out of their own PCs - plenty of fun to be had there yet. I've seen M$ shoot themselves in the foot before, I have never seen them do it with such a large canon
The last thing I want is a keyboard shortcut that shuts down my computer -- something I almost never do (maybe once every 3 or 4 months, when I vacuum the dust out of it).
Similar to my learning, early on, to not automate deletions.
I come here for the love
Muscling in worked well for M$ in the business community for a long time. Sell the product to the highest bosses, who then forced M$ products on the employees. I remember having to have an 'Exchange' account. What a tragic affair that was. Everyone logging in between 12:45 and 1:15, bogged down the servers for an hour or more. Complaints, complaints from high on on how 'we' IT were fucking up the Exchange server. It never occurred to them when we moved from a four cpu Sun Sparc to a two cpu Intel processor box we'd suffer degraded performance. All this to save a maintenance contract. But when the program was running, it sure looked pretty. Naturally you know the solution. Put the bosses on their own exchange server, complete with licenses and yes, you guessed it, another maintenance contract. That that 'solution' didn't solve the problem, that didn't exist before, with several hundred people logging in to check their mail just after lunch was no biggy anymore as the boss's mail worked just fine. Naturally, as a Unix IT guy, I put a forward in the exchange server for myself to a decent sparc server that was just serving files. That solved my problem as people expect IT to respond, like now, when they have a problem. Waiting till two-ish before getting a task meant I'd have to stay longer.
Metro is the solution that Microsoft wants you to have - the desktop is "legacy" now
Let me know when Visual Studio is completely ported to the Modern UI, and then we can call the desktop "legacy".
Most of my "cloud" applications are running Java and could easily be used on a convertible tablet (with keyboard dock).
What does a "convertible tablet" do that a "netbook" doesn't, other than the arguably artificial discontinuation of netbooks in favor of higher-margin tablets?
The speed difference alone (vs 7) makes it highly desirable on my new, under $300, Lenovo "pack around laptop". I want that thing up and running, and shutting down, in seconds and Win8 does this to perfection.
I come here for the love
Actually, you can do anything you want in Windows without a mouse. Just use MouseKeys and use your numeric keypad as a mouse.
It's a little hard to believe that the company that has kept the worst browser in existence alive through 10 generations of crap is ready to throw in the towel on Win 8 only a few months after its release.
They'll just have to do what they've done in the past- load Win 7 up with so many "updates" that break it, or cause reboots every 20 minutes, that people will switch to Win 8 in desperation.
Meanwhile, Ubuntu with E17 is pretty nice. Take out that Unity crap and you can pretty much just pretend it'd Debian.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I am the perfect target of Windows 8. I use a touchscreen laptop (Lenovo x220t) and I love it--I work with the pen as much as possible, even when typing would be more efficient, simply because I like it.
I and users like me have been complaining since Windows 8 released that it's simply not a good touch/pen interface. Windows 7 had an excellent pen input system. Microsoft scrapped it and replaced it with a much less useful and less practical input interface in Windows 8. It was a bafflingly stupid decision--they dumped the best interface in the industry for something that's barely functional.
Reviewers haven't paid much attention to this problem because, I think, relatively few people are using the pen as a significant input device. But Microsoft is trying to change that. If they want Windows 8 to succeed, or PCs to move towards a touch/pen interface generally, they need to ask some hard questions of whoever is currently in charge of those design decisions. (I'd recommend, "Can you name any single way in which the Windows 8 pen interface is superior to the Windows 7 interface?", "Then why did you change it?", and "Have you been drinking on the job?")
Probably 75000 years ago, tool makers started making just tools and started trading the tools for other necessities.
True, it benefited humankind to allow some people to specialize in tool making. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it benefits humankind to erect artificial cryptographic barriers to entry for tool makers.
Look, it is better for millions of people who have no talent to stop creating content and reducing the signal-to-noise ratio in the contetnt universe.
Then what's the democratic, free market way to most efficiently discover who has talent and who has the potential to develop talent? Or to discover talent that appeals to a niche even if it doesn't appeal to the mass market?
trust the free market to find cheaper better gate-keepers.
As long as gatekeepers hold overly broad patents, there will be no free market in gatekeeping. The market is trying to choose Google and Amazon, but Apple is trying to use the legal system to make sure it is the only gatekeeper.
MS sounds a lot like my ex-wife - it's everyone else's fault and she is not to blame.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I think the main reason MS does both things is because there are going to be many excellent apps that will only work with js libraries and touch. Making it easy to port those additional apps to the windows platform (pc,tablet,phone) is just sensible.
Yeah, exactly. The designers of some popular modern GUIs are crap.
Any crappy OS can run one process well at a time. A good OS lets you run 1000 or more processes.
Any crappy UI lets you do one task at a time. A good UI lets you do way more than one task at a time.
If your GUI isn't much better than "gnu screen" or "DOS" in task management it really sucks.
win8 is crap... give us the old interface and it will be fine
I was ready to spend up to $1000 for a new gaming laptop to take with me for a year of overseas duty.
Everything I wanted came with Windows 8 and had reliability or availability problems with chipset drivers for downgrading to Windows 7. I ordered lenovo Y500 for a great price. Ended up canceling the order due to Lenovo's asshattery in construction choices (no switching to onboard HD4000 gpu when 2D) and because the stress of dealing with SecureBoot UEFI and Windows 8 just was too much work if I wasn't getting paid for it.
MS should pay users for the sysadmin work they have to do to make their kruft even function halfway.
Yes, exactly. I've been using Windows 8 for about a month now. The experience is jarring, with frequent context switches and poor discoverability. I have so far resisted installing one of the start menu replacements, as I really want to give it a try. Maybe there is something to it, but so far it's just additional cognitive load with no actual benefits.
I'm quite prepared to try new things. I hated Ubuntu Unity when I first interacted with it, but I gave it a determined try. Two weeks later, I decided I really quite liked it, and now I actually prefer it to traditional desktops. It's calm, and what I'm working on is the focus, not the operating system. Windows 8 is almost the exact opposite experience.
I assume they have a volume license for Windows 7 for all workstations right? If it is tiny it would be a much less hassle to order a copy of Windows 7 pro for $139 at Fry's. There should be room on that budget as 3x2 = 6 hours driving = $50 worth of gas. Half the price of an OEM version of Windows 7!
Speaking of Business edition. Windows Blue is coming out next summer. Thats right Windows 9 or 8.1 will be out in beta in a few months. Every year a new version will be released. You might as well get used to it as MS will surely not make the mistake of XP and IE 6 where it stinks and sticks so long people can't leave and vendors and users get used to it and locked in!
Windows 7 will be around in 10 years and I am sure Balmer will make sure WIndows 7 will be the last XP style OS that sticks around that long. How this will work? Who knows? MS should not do transitionairy releases to foce users to get used to Windows Phones they do not want as this is what MS admitted what caused the choice of the removal of the start menu.
My only hope is Windows 8.1 or 9 will address its shortcomings by keeping Metro but including a hybrid start where it wont eat up the whole desktop and resizable tiles and a taskbar for screens bigger than 7 inches. If MS did this then it would be usable for tablets and desktops alike but I will wait and see.
http://saveie6.com/
Anything fancy nowadays is just short-lasting sugar. Sure, some idiots like Apple stuff, but in all honesty, Apple hasn't made that a big contribution to computing as both Microsoft (sorry to admit that as a OSS/Linux guy) and Unix, nowadays Linux has. Yes, I'm serious.
OSses should boring, useful, fast, easy, simple, clean, small, stable, cheap, customizable. Win8 is none of that, and that's why it's failing. Win7 was a big win due actual (and boring) improvements over XP.
The "next big thing" just isn't happening with that clunky touching thing. Keyboard and mouse have been with use for that a long time, not because there isn't something better. Currently it's the next best thing, and it's the hell practical, reliable and cheap, too.
Obama is taking mediocre expensive American medicine and getting it to more people. More expense. More mediocrity. More, frankly, crap. If he were really a liberal, he would have sought a govt based solution like single payor and been done with the atrocious 3rd party employer linked private insurance that we put up with now. But no, he gave in, compromised or caved at every turn, and thus we have more crap for more people when we could have had transformative change. Not a Democrat, not a liberal. --JSt
Remember the Segway? That's touch. It's great if you're just trying to zip about at 7-12 mph, and don't mind looking like a giant, fat, lazy goober. If you're trying to get from LA to San Fran, you take a fucking CAR. Or a bus, train, or plane. You could even take a boat if you don't mind it taking a while. But you don't ride your fucking Segway there, you throw that in the TRUNK!!!
Microsoft, and 8 are unsuccessful because they're essentially trying to ban cars, and require people to use Segways instead. Can you picture the 5 freeway, at 5 PM on a weekday, but instead of cars, it's all a bunch of fruitcakes on Segways?
Actually, you'd probably get home faster that way, at least you'd be going over 5 miles per hour!
But you see my point, right? Touch is fine for mobile phones, if you like that sort of thing. I prefer buttons because I'm old, and I know what works. I would love to see some M$ exec., Balmer himself for instance, have to type a whole book, or a business proposal or plan, or something, using one of his stupid tablets, or using some other "touch" device and his crappy Windows 8 pain in the ass operating system.
I can actually see Microsoft firing him, and begging Gates to come back, but I can't imagine what they'd offer him. What do you offer Bill Gates? Not that that'd be a huge improvement, but at least Microsoft wasn't a sinking ship while he was running it.
At my repair and custom builds shop, I refuse to build a Windows 8 PC. Too much training, followup questions, and angry users. I wonder if they factored in manufacturers like me outright refusing to sell it because it's so fucking awufl. Then I guess they're half right to "blame" PC makers, lol.
It reminds of a couple of fat Americans at a hotel in Cancun, Mexico, who had a misunderstanding with the hotel staff in connection with a shower malfuntion in their suite. At 10 pm she was yelling in the hallway: "This wouldn't have happened if they 'speaked' English!"... The nerve.
As Apple's products become more trendy the "Micro$oft is evil and dumb" meme will continue to grow. There's just too much momentum behind a story that has been going around since the 90s. Microsoft really needs change customer perception, I wish I knew how cause I'd sell the idea to them.
I guess what's most frustrating about all this is that Microsoft is capable of solid engineering. While Windows 8 devolves and is an intensely frustrating to use debacle, Server 2012 is actually a pretty nice product with some cool features in it (block level deduplication, easier clustering, and the site to site VPN over SSL (DirectConnect) for example).
It feels like the server team largely listens to their users and generally improves their product, while the consumer teams just releases these absolute dogs every few years. I suspect the reason why is that the server team has credible competition in the form of Linux, VMware, and others, the desktop and office teams really don't have a lot of competition in the corporate desktop/productivity market.
-matt
What XP was to ME
(I would've said 95 to 98, but honestly pre-USB 95 was excellent as long as you didn't have misbehaving apps and rebooted your computer once a day. Although honestly back in those days nobody I knew left their computers on, mostly due to the lack of any serious power management.)
Maybe the reason that the H/w mfgs didn't commit heavily to Windows 8, is that they learned from the Novell WordPerfect disaster that you are a fool if you trust MS advance info. I can just see a mfg committing big money to a Windows 8 based touch machine, only to find out that MS had to change the API at the last minute to accomodate their own Surface Product. MS are perfectly capable of getting the industry to ramp up the hype for a Windows 8 based tablet, and then try to scoop the market by a) releasing their own competing tablet, and b) crippling those mfgs credulous enough to believe their advance specs by changing the API at lhe last minute. They have done it before.
softcoder.
Try supporting an office full of average, run of the mill, people sometime and your perspective might change. "People" are not you or me. Even if they are experts in some other area, the majority of them will need training for any major computer related change. Most of them are afraid to change even the most simple settings because they think they might break something or might get in to trouble. And in some environments many settings are often locked down anyway.
... Who do you work with? In my experience, what you describe is not an aptitude problem, it's an attitude problem.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
Please don't use the word "Modern"...We need a proper name, and with the lack of something official, "Metro" is the best candidate (as it was official).
Retro UI?
See subject-line above, & answer that question...
* ;)
(If it WAS directed MY WAY? Boy - have I got an answer, just for you!)
APK
P.S.=> I'll be waiting...
... apk
I purchased a number of desktop systems after confirming that I had downgrade rights to Windows 7. (I like the hardware and price, but did NOT want Windows 8). I found out that exercising those rights is far from straightforward. I ended up having to pay for Windows 7 recovery media and wait for it to be delivered.
Naively, I bought a new Lenovo i7/6GB/1TB because it was cheap *and* it was one of the few laptops in the entire store that would still boot Linux from a usb drive without jumping through unknown hoops. All the others I tried with similar specs (many better laptops and all also with uefi boot) had some problem booting from usb - usually no 'legacy' boot setting or equivalent in the boot screen (no longer called BIOS settings). It came with Windows 8, which I assumed could not possibly be as bad as what it was said to be. Boy was I wrong.
Windows 8 is absolutely, abysmally, shockingly awful on a keyboard laptop. I have installed Classic Shell to give me back a start menu. I have learned to use ctl-alt-tab to get between the awful rubbish 'apps' and a quasi-desktop experience. I worked out how to get a command prompt. It's still only just bearable. I want this shit gone. Dead. Buried.
I had a talk to a guy in a small pc service shop - he says he gets at least two requests a day from customers begging him to remove Windows 8 and install Windows 7, but he tells me it seems it isn't possible on some new laptops to do this. He took a hard drive out of one machine, wiped Windiows 8 and installed Windows 7. When he put the hard drive back in the laptop, the motherboard would no longer recognize the drive. Perhaps he doesn't understand UEFI boot, I dunno. I am just tempted to send this shit back to Lenovo and say: give me my money back or give me Windows 7 on this machine.
You're on crack or have never used Vista. Windows 7 was Vista with a new taskbar and couple bug fixes. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo.
So Microsoft finally admits it. Windows 8 and the Metro UI is a failure on traditional desktop computers. And not only is Microsoft not at fault in any way for creating such a bad Frankenstein OS, according to them the OEMs are to blame for not completely transforming their business overnight to tiny touchscreens and pissing off all of their customers who want to do real work with real keyboards, mice and decent sized monitors.
Wait... what? How the fuck did they pull that out of their asses? Seriously? Did they really not expect almost everyone to revolt against their hybrid from hell? News flash to Microsoft: Release something that sucks and people will want nothing to do with it.
"Nobody is buying my oompa band records because discos don't play enough tuba music!" I know it's unthinkable to MS, but maybe the reason win 8 isn't selling is because it just plain sux!
It's like a rapist claiming it's the victim's fault.
Intel is announcing the end of the socket for their processors and is getting out of the mobo business; motherboard manufacturers will now taken on tremendous sales risk.
Microsoft is releasing a tablet to target the low-end laptop market.
This squeezes Computer manufacturers from both ends, and not just on the consumer market; servers are also being targeted.
How do you undercut Microsoft? You Talk with your competitors and align your manufacturing empires to build Linux-compatible devices. With UEFI this is very do-able from the get-go. AMD, Intel and Nvidia would be more than happy to provide driver support in such a scenario.
Additionally, Apple has been seeing some pretty serious declines in it's stock and revenue as of late. I would find it very interesting indeed if they started allowing PC Manufacturers to install stripped-down versions of OSX on their PC's.
If either of the two above scenario's occurred, Microsoft would be looking at realigning itself to handle such a fight because once those technologies are accepted and open standards become adopted, it's very easy for them to get squeezed out of the market by open standards like Novell did. That can happen faster than they can react to it. If you include Rapid Development Platform Virtual machines in the mix, things get incredibly interesting all of a sudden.
This line especially nails it - people run an OS for an application of a group of applications.
This is something like the 6th attempt at a tablet system for MS (I've got a recent WinCE tablet right here which is insanely slow given the hardware) and they not only don't have much of an ecosystem of touch apps but with their ARM version they are ditching the established range of apps. Less apps than an iPad, twice as expensive - lame.
i have no point to use that fancy new technology forced by ms , and the product looks disgusting to me , gonna eat away precious cpu to turn it into a cheaper mac ,
if i want a mac ill buy a mac .
Ubuntu will take off now.
Good leadership speaks for itself, good leaders don't need defending. Bad leadership on the other hand, blames others.
He did this with the failure of online business, he loaded all the failure onto the ad division, then took a big writedown on that division, and blamed Gates for that quarters loss.
Now we're blaming engineers for making bad management choices?
Oh and I see how you point the finger at Sinofsky, but ultimately he had to do *something*, and reconcile Windows Office division with touch. You can say he's done badly, but with the inertia in Microsoft he was always going to deliver a dog, Office division is not capable or willing to deliver a touch product, Management won't let Microsoft use a touch office from someone else. The idea that low level employees drag the business forward only happens when CEOs fail to, Ballmer is clearly a failure here.
So Sinofsky delivers a botch, they'll fix some of the interface issues, and it will still be a botch. Because the real problem is internal politics and an incompetent leader.
Oh and yes Microsoft's prices are up AGAIN , congratulations, he can raise prices. Well done, on the price rising talents, yeh, superiour price incremental skills.
What I think both gnome-shell and the metro interface attempt to do is put the task you're involved in at the center of the experience.
But their attempts aren't successful in a lot of cases because a task may use more than one application, and keeping both applications visible provides context to the user. One example is reading a web page and taking notes. This task uses two applications: a web browser and a text editor. Another example is web development: a text editor in one or more window to edit HTML markup, style, script, or a PHP program, and a web browser in another window to view the output. The task involves refreshing the page, inspecting the output, and tweaking the code to make the output more closely resemble the expected output. This task likewise uses more than one application.
with few context switches to switch context. win8 breaks this bigtime.
A couple months and that passes as good??? Oh wait, I think that might be sarcasm but I'm not really sure...
Actually, I work on my server during the day and often have multiple windows open (I run a dual screen set up). During my down time, I do a lot of music recording and have a full home studio set up. If you start looking at the "Metro" screen as a fancy start menu, it really is just a decorative upgrade. Not anything to freak out about.
It's simple really. Consumers are moving towards tablet like devices. .
This is repeated so often that some people might even think it's true. The truth is that everybody who want's a PC already has one. I don't need a new PC every 2 years, and neither do most people, but I sure need a PC. I didn't have a tablet, so I bought one. I have bought more tablets in the past 5 years than I have PCs, but if I had to give one up it would be the tablet.
Nothing about the PC is advancing very fast, so the only time you really need to replace your PC is when some critical component breaks. I used to be a serial upgrader, replacing a couple major components a year and doing a complete gutting (motherboard, processor etc.) every 2 years or so. My current PC has been running with the same core components for about 5 years, with no major upgrade other than a SSD (which was pretty nice). It was once "high end" and plays year-old games (discounted on Steam) just fine if I don't max out all settings.
The PC market is mature, it isn't dying at home or at work.
first of all i'm not a so called coward...you would not call me that if you were in my face little man of no guts..i'v been on pc's long before you had a dad..sit tight and learn..fool..i dont walk around looking like a nut case with a phone stuck in my ear all day and i dont vote for fools that think thay can fix everything..any way what a wast of time for windows 8 and the money spent on it i'l stick to windows 7 thankyou and by the way qbasic abasic and windows 3.1 i still have and 3 types of dos..geezzz get a life kid play baseball or run after girls or something get a dam life will ya :(
I'd say any task in which you traditionally would have overlapping windows rather than side-by-side windows would be a case where switching between full screen views wouldn't be so bad. The utility of the overlapping windows is to give you an easy way to remember what else you were doing and how to get back to it
In an overlapping mode, the user can always see at least a sliver of the other window, which prevents doorway amnesia by giving the user's subconscious mind a continuous cue that the thing in the other window still exists. Preventing something from ever being completely out of sight prevents it from being out of mind. It also gives a drag and drop target when moving or copying an object from one window to another, which is faster than long-pressing an object (where a short press is bound to Open), tapping Share, and selecting the correct application from a long list.
getting to your "last" task is especially fast w/ touch on Windows 8
Which sucks for devices without a touch screen. It also sucks for laptop and desktop computers with a touch screen because of the gorilla arm issue.
Finally, I'd add that on most laptops, side-by-side screens aren't really that great: a typical laptop at 1280 or 1360 pixels wide doesn't really allow two standard webpages or word documents to be displayed next to each other
How would these 720p-class displays (1280x720 WXGA and 1280x1024 SXGA) not admit two Word documents? Word existed in the 640x480 era, and at a nominal 96 dpi, 640 pixels cover 6.67 inches (169 mm), or the width of a US letter or A4 sized page minus standard 1" or 25 mm margins. Heck, back in the day, an XGA+ (1152x870) display was considered two-page.
I know some people and their parents who really think that latest 2k+ computer with latest MS software is mandatory. Then they basically just use MS Office with it.
I see that MS Office is the biggest selling point here. Microsoft should really enforce its use and try to bad the same functionality from other software.
(And don't tell me there are alternatives such as Libre Office as there really is not: it doesn't support pptx, for example).
Yeah, manufacture what the seller needs, not what the buyer needs. That's a good strategy.
I worked for the Woolworths retail chain in the UK for a while. They had the most peculiar strategy. Usually you let people come to your store and and stock your stores with those products your consumers want to buy. Woolworths HQ pushed products to the stores and told them to sell them.
No wonder they went bust.
I must say, I only had the shortest time to play with Windows 8 in a shop, but from that 2 minutes, I couldn't make head nor tails from it. No idea how it worked an even less idea how I could get back to the initial screen it was showing.
Just sayin'
I solved this problem easily... switched to Linux Mint and now run Windows in VM's...
If I need a metro app it will just get its own VM and can then be resized appropriately and reside on one of the six screens on my desk and lab bench. :-)
I do still have a few standalone Windows systems. But they are all just lab bench test systems. Use until they croak from driver testing and then re-image.
I have built these wonderful 100000W home stereo amps, and it's only the architects' fault that they don't sell, if they only built bigger homes with only one power outlet that can actually power them, they'd sell like hotcakes!
Hey, MS, guess what? Computer manufacturers build what sells, and touch-centric desktops don't.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The vendors should go w/ PC-BSD, which is the only BSD that has been made specifically for desktops/laptops and not for servers (for servers, the full FBSD is recommended). Neither NetBSD nor OpenBSD have desktop editions of their OS, and under FBSD, there was once another OS called DesktopBSD, but that is pretty much an abandoned project. So if the OEMs decided to go w/ BSD, they could standardize on this one.
Also, in the event that drivers don't exist for one or the other, once they get written, they won't get broken in subsequent versions of the OS. Unlike in Linux based OSs. This since the BSDL has nothing against binary blobs, or whatever it takes to have them working.
How would these 720p-class displays (1280x720 WXGA and 1280x1024 SXGA) not admit two Word documents? Word existed in the 640x480 era, and at a nominal 96 dpi, 640 pixels cover 6.67 inches (169 mm), or the width of a US letter or A4 sized page minus standard 1" or 25 mm margins. Heck, back in the day, an XGA+ (1152x870) display was considered two-page.
You forget that applications have changed. Have you actually tried looking at two word documents side by side on a 1280 screen? It's the same with the web -- back when smaller displays were common, pages were designed for smaller pages, but as displays have grown, so has the standard width of a page, which then interferes with the ability of the larger displays to accommodate two pages side-by-side.
IANA CTO but assuming MS ran the usual user labs prior to release of Win8, there must have been a lot of business user representatives present who said "we are not going to do company-wide retraining and company-wide rollout of touch screens, we must have the traditional desktop environment".
Yes I realise the two are not mutually exclusive.
I can't believe they were all bewitched by the shiny shiny and I can't comprehend how MS thought it was OK to dismiss these opinions.
"Now let's bury him and his post, so it never sees the light of day again." - by Areyoukiddingme (1289470) on Sunday January 27, @11:20PM (#427125
To +2 Insightful (my posts' rating) from a default AC rating of 0?
* I'll take it... & you FAIL!
(Especially considering you literally have a 'brand-new' 7-digit account no doubt created for trolling, & quite recently I'd wager...)
Besides - I said it nearly 5 YEARS ago, "get rid of Steve Ballmer @ MS":
GET RID OF S. BALLMER @ MS:2008 -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=543962&cid=23310698
Just judging by the current results & lack of CLEAR vision? I still stand by it & I was correct... no arguing with a prediction that was spot-on correct years later!
The guy has NO business-forecasting sense!
E.G.-> I would've seen this coming a MILE off!
I.E.-> Especially since bad economic times mean NO ECONOMY! Folks don't spend on mere 'wants' then... they save/hoard cash for hard times, & only spend on NEEDS!
In "hard times", Folks will take what they have, especially if its fast & works well already (via FAST current CPU's & Windows 7 for example) & work with that, saving monies for NEEDS rather than mere WANTS!
Especially that, rather than use some hacked together smartphone interface (shoved down their throats!)
Mr. Ballmer apparently doesn't know his own clientele either, & a cardinal rule of business?
YOU CAN'T SELL PEOPLE WHAT THEY DO NOT WANT, much less NEED!
To get people to buy in down economic times/depressions/recessions, generally, you've GOT to "put your best foot forward" & apparently? Mr. Ballmer doesn't even KNOW what that is, or means, for Microsoft & Windows.
What a shame.
APK
P.S.=> Thanks to whoever uprated me thus - I only told it how it is, and I am certain of it (I don't *like* seeing it either since I am a Windows fan, but there it is - I was just being straightforward & honest).
Man - this debacle brings another prediction that many others reflected on this page: This will be the end of Mr. Ballmer as CEO!
Yes folks - It doesn't take a brain to realize that stockholders won't put up with it, though he'll fight to the end, with any means necessary (honest or dishonest, even *trying* to "pass the blame" onto others, his own allies in business no less, alienating them even more - "good job" (not), they'll make him burn for it now)...
... apk
I refer to it as the "Tiled UI".
Stupid flounders!
well, modern architechture is now what, 60-70 years old?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
http://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qptimeframe=W
Win8 has more market share then Linux at this point.
You can point finger wherever you want, but if your product failed to sell it's still 100% your fault. (this may no apply to smaller businesses, indie devs, etc, but heck, it's MS we're talking about).
GNOME3 and Win8... the two themes Slashdotters hold most dear to heart.
none
I think it is obvious why PC makers do not make more touch screens.
I have been re-watching "Enterprise" on Netflix lately and I was suprised to see that apparently by the time we have warp engines we still haven't figured out wide spread touch screen use. Rather they use little buttons on the side of the monitor. It is clear that PC makers are fans of Star Trek, or afraid of some temporal paradox, and do not want to introduce touch screens before their proper time. Though apparently no one thought to tell they makers of handheld devices like phones, as apparently my Galaxy S 3 is looking distinctly more advanced than anything those poor saps on Enterprise has available to them. I can only come to the conclusion that it is because they need special radiation hardining for the rigors of space or something.
In summery: T'Pol is still awfully hot.
as displays have grown, so has the standard width of a page
By "page" do you mean a Word document or an HTML document? I'll answer both. The size of letter size paper (US letter or A4) hasn't grown; therefore, the area between margins in a Word document hasn't grown. And the first quartile size of displays for viewing web pages has actually been shrinking. Though the median size for desktop and laptop displays has crept up to the 1280-1360 pixel width of a 720p-class landscape display, tablets with 10", 7", or even 4" portrait displays have become popular, forcing web designers to adopt "responsive" practices to ensure that the design remains usable at any window width. So if you put two 640x768 browsers side-by-side on a responsive site, the style sheet's media query sees the 640-pixel width and gives you the view for a 7" tablet. And besides, 1080p monitors have become common, and those are almost twice the width of the old standby 1024x768 for which web pages used to be (and many still are) designed.
Yeah, the latest version of "Windows" should have been renamed to "Window". You can still Alt-Tab through your stuff, but it's a lot clunkier than clicking on part of a visible window, or the taskbar. Heck, I can't even easily see what time it is on Metro.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
All they have to do now is release their installer so that it can be installed on ANY hardware, the public has had about enough of Microsoft.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
If all you make is garbage don't be surprised if no one wants to buy it. This goes for both Dell/HP/etc and MS. Between them, I almost think they are trying to put themselves out of business.
First MS, if >50% of you users hate your product, maybe you should consider listening to them.
Second, Dell/HP/Intel/etc, yah apple makes cool hardware and gets a nice markup for it. Don't expect to make the same old garbage, in a thin case and get the same markup. Its not just the apple experience, its also the display. If you want me to spend >$1000 on a laptop it had better come with a display better than the one I can get on a nexus 10. I also expect to be able to upgrade the RAM,hard drive and battery two years down the road. Oh, and I want a proper keyboard too, none of this chiclet crap.
What I don't understand is how these manufactures can each offer two dozen different models, and they are basically all the same with slight changes in processor or screen size. Sure none of you manufacture anything anymore, but the least you can do is try to differentiate your products on something other than price.
Otherwise, i'm just going to get a "cheap" tablet with a decent screen, a BT keyboard, and use a remote desktop app. Or I'm going to stick to my 6 Y/O lenovo with a 15" screen that is better than any current dell/HP laptop.
IMHO: the win8 has suffered the same thing (in a diferent scale) that happen to gnome3. They made a Os (if this can be called so) for Apps (not aplications) and media Consumption not development, not creation thus sterile. You have to push menu after menu afeter menu to find another menu that says you what the machines is thinking you want to do, not that you want to do (I remeber in win95 and gnome 2.x you went after a right click et voila) I really think its a backdrop instead of add more hardware power and better software, you get the apus and apps for doing nothing!!! the only diference, if you want, is that gnome 3 its a graphic environment and win8 is... win8. =p
It's amazing how many people haven't figured out how to use that Windows button on the keyboard.
Now it's really time to switch from Windows if you're a home user or one of the unlucky Surface (crap) tablet users.
Let's see - force a change to something that doesn't work, that won't sell, and that most users are tired of having to upgrade every other year
because YOU (M$) got caught being 10 years behind the 8 ball.
Search GOOGLE for millions of articles stating Dell, HP, Lenovi, Acer, Sony, Toshiba, ASUS, Samsung (and the list goes on)
felt like their hands were forced by M$ to change what they sold to consumers. Now, after the chance to sell their wares, M$ has failed to deliver W8 on it's new (OEM) vendors, and the blame is on who?
Moving to Apple and OSX and never will run another Win box again....
and move that tech into the business environment pushing out Win as well.
Adios M$ - it was not nice knowing you
The Problem with the Edsel, was the name. Poor marketing surveys... everyone will buy a car named the Comet, or Meteor, or Mustang, but nobody will buy a car named Edsel. Kind of like when Chevy realized that the reason they couldn't sell Nova's in Mexico or South America was because No-va means No Go in Spanish. The Mercury was always the mid-priced quality car in Ford's garage. The Mercury was dropped from production a few years ago because the U.S. is losing it's upper middle class. Ford makes Lincoln's for the rich, and the Ford Focus for the lower middle class. When you're on the bread line, you'll remember that there was a time when you saw the Red Flags, and didn't do anything about it. mensunion org
The fact that all the feedback they received during development pointed to the OS being a steaming pile of donkey doo doesn't mean a thing apparently. "Let's just dress up this donkey doo and tell people it's great! It'll work. They do the same thing with music all the time! Get some crappy band who plays crappy to mediocre music, dress 'em up, make a couple good music videos, pay for some good radio play, and promote them on iTunes/Rhapsody/etc, and people will think they're great! We'll sell more than enough to make up for the money doled out to promote them!" "Wait... what? It didn't work? What the F***?!?!?"
Windows 8 is a fast operating system that can interface any of the important software programs even ones that are ten years old: Photoshop CS, Word 2009, Adobe Premiere, Powerpoint, Cubase.... etc. What are you using a computer for? Text messaging friends? I recently bought a Toshiba Ultrabook i5, 14 inch screen, for $550, that I'm very happy with. Using my Motorola Android M as a hotspot... I can flip the laptop open and be on the net in about 15 seconds... the boot time is lighting fast from a sleep mode. I click the desktop view and surf the net with the same desktop screen, icons, and toolbars as Vista or Win 7... the only thing that didn't work for me was Mail. I have two accounts (both POP3) and the Mail app could only send from one and download from the other. So, I had to install Mozilla Thunderbird for my mail... so what. It's Win8... 64 bit, and every software program that I installed looked online for the updated drivers and they work flawlessly. Why would I want a Touchscreen, or a Cloud, anyway?
And this is exactly why the "revised" Start Menu that started in Vista and continued through Windows 7 was so hated. People just want a very small, simple menu of all their apps that stays out of the way of other windows to launch programs For some reason Microsoft thought people wanted it bigger and bigger. Maybe it's because the execs at Microsoft are getting older, and they can't see as well so they force the OS to change for them. I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 9 had no interface at all. They will remove the monitor entirely and it will just talk to you because all the execs will be 90 years old and blind.
Internet Explorer (IE) peaked at about 88% market share briefly in mid-2003, and has dropped steadily ever since. Now IE has about 14.7% market share, below Chrome at 46.9% and Firefox at 31.1%.
Between December 2008 and January 2009 Firefox has had more market share than IE. Chrome passed Firefox in market share between Feb and Mar, 2012.
IE has been in 3rd place ever since early 2011, when Firefox AND Chrome had more market share than IE.
I've been using Firefox and Chrome so long that I have to hesitate and think and deliberate when helping fix a friend's computer with nothing but MS software on it.
I have sent a lot of hate and accusations Microsoft's way over the last decade or more. They have done many things to poison the ecosystem of computing and bleed dry every dollar they can, perfecting the art of squeezing blood from a stone.
one thing I have never accused them of is behaving stupidly. Everything I've ever seen them do or say (tho I admit I don't follow that closely) has been a carefully crafted move by professional business and marketing professionals to manipulate the market and change technology to suit their purposes. Examples coming to mind are HTML and ODF implementations.
So when I look at this article I don't think "oh they're being childish and blaming others for their problems or attempting to sway public opinion of their product. I am far more wary of some plot to ensure compliance with an agenda to implement UEFE or destroy OpenGL or make Linux faulter or something else everyone on slashdot cannot even imagine.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
This Microsoft discussion has come home to roost. Manufacturers use the EOQ logic to determine production runs and inventory. And customers know that they can get more than adequate W7 or Linux boxes for less than the cost of a W8 UEFI system.
Since MS W8 sales are so slow, MS is going to learn to leave more frugally. They will watch the bonuses and salary increases dry up and restructuring occur.
Sadly, some very good developers are going to be on the market.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
The dysfunctional software company that makes most of it's business by being a de-facto standard goes to tell the hardware company fighting in the trenches against Apple and Google that they didn't spend enough money.
So very classy...
Windows hasn't been any good for real work since XP PRO, which I still use in addition to my Linux boxen.
Vista blew chunks.
Windows 7 showed signs of recovery, but still wasn't as good as XP PRO.
Windows 8--I suppose it's FINE for tablets and pads, but is of very little use for a real computer.
Next box I get, I'm just going to immediately void the warranty and stick Fedora or Debian on it and get some real work done.
Maybe they should release Micosoft 8s. It works for apple... people line up for miles for that consumer shit.
All you people sound just like the luddites who trashed on Windows 95 because they were scared of the new UI.
MS has been planning Surface Pro for years... probably longer than they planned Surface RT... to say they're launching Pro out of spite, now, is just troll bait.
Further... I've got Windows 8, sans touch, sans modification, running on several machines, including my mom's and my kids'...
My mom being the least technically savvy of the bunch hardly has technical questions with it. When she does, they're stuff she'd run into with any OS, and I'm sure the answers are easier than they were with Windows 7 and/or any flavor of Linux.
I'll admit, my grade-school level kids are more technically savvy than their average peers... but how bright do you think you need to be?
It couldn't possibly be because technically it's not "Windows". It should have been named Microsoft "Apps" or "Tiles". I actually like Microsoft and wish they would get it together. This is much worse than the Vista debacle. The pile that is windows 8 just plain stinks.
In an overlapping mode, the user can always see at least a sliver of the other window, which prevents doorway amnesia by giving the user's subconscious mind a continuous cue that the thing in the other window still exists. Preventing something from ever being completely out of sight prevents it from being out of mind.
Ironically, this has actually been the staple of Metro UI design since its appearance in WP7 - it's precisely why it provides that "cut off" of more data at the far right side of the screen - to indicate to the user that there's stuff to the right that he can swipe in to see.
Which sucks for devices without a touch screen.
For any device with a keyboard, touch screen or no, the fastest way to switch to the previous app that you've used is Alt+Tab (it works for Store apps, too).
Curiously, this key combination also works on Win8 on-screen touch keyboard (if you enable its "full PC" variant that includes Alt and Tab).
gosgog: Good ,although I long since left MSN, most of the little kids around here are always pointing at screens & we don't need their dirty finger prints on either monitors or the big TV screen.
The system is identical to Windows 7 only the boring "Start Menu" has been replaced by the "Start Screen" with "Live tiles". It's turned one of the drab features into something cool.
People trying to do real work don't need "cool".
They need fast, functional, and familiar.
I agree. During my down moments when I'm not trying to be productive, I might be happy to run an application that behaved like "live tiles" so I can set up news feeds and comics and silly little videos. It should be a fairly trivial app for Microsoft to write. When I'm trying to work, live tiles needs to just go away because I need to get things done and they certainly just get in the way.
At best, live tiles is an alternative to icons and menus. Something to be used as as supplement, not a replacement.
Do you like to people watch? If so, drop down to a local best buy and enjoy a laugh or two near some win8 pc's on display. Just take up residence, sit for a minute and watch as people walk up to a win 8 screen and swipe around expecting it to do something. Last week, i saw a crowd around one pc, a woman was arguing with her husband "why would we buy it, it's already broken?".... he was trying to explain that you can use a mouse but, with all the people around them yammering on how win 8 is another off version flop, he got no-where. Personally, I just sat back and enjoyed a decent laugh.
In all seriousness however, the release of windows 8 may have to be histories worst product launch. I mean, honestly, selling win 8 pc's without a touchscreen is akin to selling a car without a steering wheel. At first mention of a desktop with a tablet input device as a near "must have", i found the idea absurd. Expecting whoever knows how many pc manufacturers to have "ready at launch" a new, highly complicated (when compared to a mouse), high cost input device is out and away one of the worst ideas ever for product roll-out. Then when you think about Microsoft's 3 remaining markets (technically savvy computer users, computer users who cant "leave" the platform for software support reasons & business) it becomes even more absurd. Technically savvy users are likely very comfortable with their current input device and appreciate the comfortable feel of home on a windows PC. So, starting with the login screen, they are getting a major blowout... swipe to begin... no no, use your mouse... Of course over time, software for win8 will become more available, but for now, I personally would be very fearful of switching because a lot of my legacy & high end software may not work... i'm betting i'm not at all alone. As for business, our it guy summed it up pretty well... "yea, like i need that headache."
Even if touchscreens were cheap, easily and readily available and all that. who in gods name would want one as their primary input device? Smudged, oily fingerprints all over the screen, reaching forward out of my chair and over my keyboard to "swipe", and figuring out how I am going to swipe a 42" (swipe enabled) tv display on the other side of my living room (never mind affording it), hardly seems desirable. In my opinion, MS should have simply added the functionality of touch screen to windows 7 and called it a day. Innovative, nope... but better to release an OS people will actually consider than one they automatically reject.
One last thought I had was touchscreen quality... especially in the beginning, expecting swipe enabled displays to be as smooth, and effort free as an iPhone seems unlikely and very costly. Anyone who purchases a bare bottom touch screens will likely curse win8 for it's lack of response (we all know how smoothly apples displays work and will use that as the measure of fluidity). Ideas of picking up a pc for a good price
Anyhow, between lack of preparation, a plethora of bad ideas, and an overzealous "we need to be creative" though process, MS blew it. Don't blame the pc people, win 8 is a bad idea paired with poor execution.
MS has learned much from Obama. When you make a mistake, blame others.
Methinks Microsoft is blowing up because it is huge, gigantic Microsoft and the guy running it has let that size and power go to his head to the extent that he thinks he not only can but is driving the consumer. I see that attitude in Windows 8, I see it in Office 2013 where people are actually describing Microsoft's attempt to change Office into a fee-based subscription service as "conditioning" the end-user..."conditioning", as if either the consumer were somebody's pet rat or Microsoft were a cult!!!
Somebody forgot to tell Ballmer that putting on the CEO suit of Microsoft is not equivalent to assuming godhead...
(Although come to think of it, that assumption of godhead has become quite common among American CEOs...)
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Microsoft has only themselves to blame.
I've set up and used Windows 8 - and I hate it.
It's not that the formerly-known-as-metro UI is bad, it's that it is misplaced on the desktop/laptop/notebook, regardless of the presence or not of a touch screen. It would be nice if it were an option the user can choose to enable or disable. If it were optional, and the Aero interface were retained (looking back, network performance and UAC glitches aside, Vista really wasn't all that bad and Windows 7 perfected it!), and if you could overlap Windows (which was the huge selling point of Windows 2.0 ;)) regardless of application architecture, it would have carried on Windows 7's success. Also, Windows 8 is downright corporate-hostile with its foolish UI.
Instead, Microsoft is forcing the touch interface and workflow-hostile maximized-only UI design on all devices in effort to gain inroads into the tablet and phone market. Why? Why? Because Apple and Google' partners are succeeding in those markets? Please.
Microsoft essentially OWNED the smartphone market with the PocketPC-based phones for a brief while, before other smartphones really existed (even before the crackberry). Granted, the market was a niche but it was there and WinCE, for all its faults (and leading to the obvious joke of calling it "wince") but it was a very corporate-friendly platform allowing for integration with Exchange. They even got smart and required vendors to make their devices flash-upgradable. Unfortunately, they let the platform languish, did not follow through on the promise of continued upgrades and did not push the issue with device vendors. Microsoft was clearly not interested in maintaining that business, and never really got serious about integrating the PDA and phone aspects of their platform.so others..
RIM, then later Google and Apple filled in the gaps. Crackberry had some initial success, along with "feature phones" that could run java apps (and in many cases even be sideloaded just like the PocketPC-based phones) but app availability was extremely limited and corporate features were exorbitantly expensive. The real phone revolution was spawned by Apple with iOS, and Google with Android. Ironically, it appears that Apple really didn't know what they had on their hands prior to the first jailbreak (which allowed installation of third-party native apps - prior to that Apple was insistent on keeping the iPhone an iPod phone that could run some web apps), which is what really be credited with the smartphone revolution.
Both iPhone and Android offer push notifications, push email, tight integration with Exchange, gmail, and other services right out of the box. iPhone works really well, is reliable, and user friendly. It's not as corporate friendly due to the nonexistent-to-limited sideloading and deployment capabilities. Android is a lot more friendly in that area, but it is somewhat fragmented, with no assurance of whether or not any given app will run on a given device. Both are very upgradable though, and the iPhone in particular enjoys great support and remarkable "future-proofing" via OS upgrades.
Microsoft, having lost their edge with their software platform being costly and resource-intensive compared to Linux (and not scaling well on big iron on the other extreme), are grasping at straws to stay on top. They see Apple and Google succeeding in areas where they have failed repeatedly (media, tablets, smartphones) so it seems like Windows 8 is a hare-brained scheme to market their me-too smartphone and tablet apps. The problem is, both iOS and Android devices enjoy such an entrenched userbase that the idea of forcing the Microsoft Surface UI on everyone, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Plus, Apple is seen as the premium/prestige product, and Microsoft is trying to penetrate the market with an inferior product with vastly fewer available apps at a much higher price point? Really? Way to go, Microsoft.
Microsoft, I have a better idea: shit-can the formerly-kno
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50