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Windows 8.1 May Restore Boot-To-Desktop, Start Button
New submitter geekoid writes "According to media reports about leaked Windows 8.1 code, the next incarnation of Microsoft's flagship operating system will have an option to boot directly to the desktop. People have discovered 'references to a "CanSuppressStartScreen" option in early builds of the Windows 8.1 registry.' There is also speculation that Microsoft will be re-implementing the Start button, though the claims come from nebulous 'sources,' rather than the leaked code. In light of recent reporting about the general distaste and design flaws of Windows 8's user interface, will Microsoft's updates be dynamic enough to stop the current Windows exodus?"
Suggestion to MS: just put the Windows 7 UI back on. Oh, and while you're at it, tweak Office to honor the UI theme instead of implementing it's own.
From an enterprise viewpoint this looks very different. Right now I am in the middle of our Windows XP to Windows 7 migration. We skipped Vista entirely - when users asked for it, we told them "we don't have the time".
Same thing all over again. It's great that your aunt has a new smartphone that does everything, and she thinks that's the wave of the future. But I have legacy code, ODBC connections, custom written drivers, and automated patching to worry about. Not to even mention bare metal imaging, inventory agents, or the thousands of lines of old batch files that glue things together. About 90% of the enterprise IT guys have told Microsoft "we'll wait for the next bus". What they're doing right now is putting together the next bus. I'm certainly in no hurry, it will be 2014 before we even think of how we're going to implement Win8.
I can cruise on Win7 until 2017. Microsoft is still getting our software assurance money if we upgrade or stay with WinXP. No one's in any hurry right now.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
Microsoft cannot stop the exodus. And it is only going to speed up once smart phone docking stations become ubiquitous.
My smart phone has almost as much horsepower as my PC.
Unless your PC is extremely crappy, then it really doesn't.
There's no reason in the world why I should not be able to hook up my IBM Model M, a mouse, and a couple of large monitors to it for the purposes of media creation. Once this happens commonly, it's all over for Microsoft.
Sure. I bet you'll have no problem pumping out enough pixels for a 7680x1600 display (or even 2560x1600, with a single monitor) to play games on or create and render video content on. Why, I bet that's just around the corner.
Of course, then what desktops can do by that point will be far greater than they are now and the standard will have shifted.
Your $200 pocket phone can do a lot of things that it couldn't do a decade ago, but it will always trail behind what is possible with more dedicated hardware and is a very long time off from being able to do everything you need to a satisfactory degree such that you don't need any other form of computing. It can't even compete with a standalone digital camera, yet (unless your needs are very minimal -- just for snapping pictures of your drunk idiot friends at a frat party or something).
That said, I have no doubt that Microsoft would be willing to just dump the whole market and dedicate themselves to mobile, because -- by sheer numbers -- that's going to end up more profitable the same way it's more profitable to make a mediocre show that ten million people watch than an award-winning highly revered show that only four million people watch.
Oh yeah search is a GREAT way to find that program I use every six months that lets me put some of my pictures together to create a collage for those posters I make twice a year. I think it was called "Blue Pixie". /s
Except that it was called "Green Pyxel" and started with an executable named "grnpxlUI.exe".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The problem is that Microsoft didn't bet their company on their attempts to force a paradigm shift in how people interact with and use Windows. They bet the entire desktop computer industry along with them. By way of point on how bad things are Windows Vista wasn't released at Christmas like Windows 8 was and Windows Vista saw much higher deployment rates (not sales rates) than Windows 8 has for the same months after release. The net result was an almost epic level collapse of the industry that followed with a record drop in PC sales, however all of the offered excuses fall flat when you look at them with a touch of logic:
The economy. It's actually better now than it has been for the last several years and unemployment has been starting to decrease.
Tablets. Tablets started becoming popular a few years ago, the slump in PC sales is directly timed with the release of Windows 8.
People already having a computer. Since the Mhz wars petered out a several years back speed has had a little to do with new computer sales. Again, nothing new here.
Smart Phones. Smart Phones started taking off en mass about 3-4 years ago and there is nothing particularly expansive related to the last 6 months there.
The bottom line is that Microsoft started causing severe economic damage to the PC industry with their attempt to force a UI change on the market. If they hurt the industry enough, the industry while feel compelled to look for alternatives to Microsoft to distribute their products. Microsoft knows that this can and has happened with smart phones and tablets and industry simply couldn't take any more pain without risk of simply no longer being dependent on Microsoft.
The secondary reason is that the enterprise market has made adamantly clear that they absolutely will not deploy Windows 8 until the start button and boot to desktop interface issues are resolved. Microsoft saw enterprises stick it to them with XP for a decade and realizes that enterprise is not about to put up with another Vista experience. Microsoft has to make these changes, or they risk losing their distribution chain to their competition.
I agree - and really their greatest folly with Windows 8 adoption was with trying to create a single UI for all platforms. That just doesn't make sense from a user standpoint at all. Phones are going to have different UI needs than tablets. Tablets are going to have different UI needs than PCs. Each specific family of hardware needs a UI created for use on that particular hardware type, due to each hardware type having it's own nuances in user input. I don't know why their designers thought otherwise.
Windows predates Linux. The actual 'theft' would be from Xerox PARC, Apple and others who predate Windows.
But the ideas aren't stolen. They were freely available for everyone to use because they were developed before we reached the level of intellectual property idiocy that allows rounded corners and other moronically simple design elements to be patented and copyrighted.
No the real problem is that there isn't a real problem. Yes, 8 was another Vista/Me experience but writers and commentators keep tying this back to the "global PC market collapse" which may or may not be due to Windows 8 as the story guys. The subby wasn't much better with his "exodus" comment, the simple fact is Windows 8 isn't bad by any means from a UI stand point if, ya know, you actually use it. It's start up time and performance on computers is at least on par with 7 and to me feels a little more spry. The real issue is that PC hardware has been good enough for years, my 07/08 Dell laptop died a couple weeks ago, and surprise surpise I'm on an 07 Vaio to tide me over until I purchase and guess what? It works for everything but games and Adobe Lightroom (which is still 'passable'). Keeping that in mind this 'collapse' may very well be happening as far as new PC sales go, but it has no merit when it comes to PC usage. Show me a person that has truly gone mobile and left the PC behind and I'll show you someone desperate for clicks. No all that is happening is that people are buying other devices while their PC keeps on plugging along year after year and the sheer amount of hyperbole and linkbaiting surrounding this issue is absolutely ridiculous.
I think Ballmer and MS knows that different hardware require different UI. I think MS wanted to foist their tablet/smartphone UI on desktop users to get them used to it so if/when they bought a tablet/smartphone they were already family with Metro. Basically they couldn't compete on the merits of the UI alone so they had to leverage their monopoly.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Why do some fools think nested folders were a bad thing?
Some of the retarded lengths companies went to were bad, but nested folders, on the whole, are a VERY good thing. They allow me to organize everything into categories based on what I might want to do. I don't want to see every installed program thrown at me as soon as I open the start screen, and before you start telling me I can organize them the same way on the start screen: Yes, yes I can. Just in a less convenient, less efficient and tile-filled manner.
They're on the right track, but their implementation is still too blurry. Right at the first boot (or during the installation) of Windows 8 the question should be asked before the user can do anything else: "Do you want to use this as a desktop or as a tablet?"
Choose "Desktop" and you are presented with the same familiar UI you would expect in Windows, and no full-screen Metro. If you want to use the built-in Metro apps, launch them from the Start menu they just appear in their own self-contained, manageable windows.
Choose "Tablet" and it'll default to its current behavior, with the full-screen touch-friendly interface and Desktop mode accessible as its own tile.
Stick an option in the control panel where people can change this setting if needed later on down the road. One OS to develop, both usage cases covered.
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Dear Microsoft,
I fully understand the reason for switching to the full-screen Start screen. You want a cut of the app revenue like Apple gets, and that only makes sense. I would even be happy with Win8.1 if you could just boot to the desktop and not have the Start button back (but I would REALLY like it back as a bonus...) Here's one thing I can't live with that needs to change:
Put Aero Glass back into the OS as a selectable theme, or even Aero without the glass.
I'm our company's desktop systems architect, and I'm still on Windows 7 for all my personal machines. The main reason is the flat, ugly, hard-to-navigate 2D user interface on the desktop. I really want the client-side improvements Windows has made, I want Client Hyper-V so I don't have to shell out for VMWare Workstation. I definitely want Windows to Go. But I can't use the new flat user interface. Office 2013, Visual Studio and Server Manager are acres and acres of monochrome text and icons with very little to guide your eyes around the screen. I know a lot of people complained about Aero wasting processor cycles, but even the non-transparent version had buttons, text and icons that were colorful, stood out on the screen so you knew where they were instinctively, etc.
I guess I should have left the Customer Experience Improvement Program opt-in checkbox checked all these years...but I can't be the only one who feels this way. So if you want me to upgrade, I need the following:
- Aero Glass available as a theme - you can even leave the 2D screen as the default.
- Start button as a bonus -- If I don't get that I'll be OK, but I'd be happy if I did.
If I upgrade, there's a very good chance 6000+ PCs will upgrade too.
Sincerely, Me
Except it did not work,it actually backfired and many warned them it would.
Windows 8 on phones and tablets is actually pretty good, but the negativity/bad press generated by windows 8 on the pc has spilled over and affected peoples view of the phones and tablets.
If they had not forced metro on the pc and left it optional, not only would windows 8 pc sales have done a lot better, but also probably the phone and tablet sales would have been better as well.
You can give +1's to AC's. The purpose of modpoints is to promote constructive posts, not to reward registered users.
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For starters, nested folders are gone. In All Apps, shortcuts are grouped based on a single folder, and everything is in one view.
That everything in one view aspect is not an advancement, but a step backwards.
The stupid Company Name > Program Name > Program hierarchy is gone.
If you don't want nested folders, then don't use them.
But why take the ability to use them from people who want to use them?