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Microsoft's "New Coke" Moment?
theodp writes "Remember New Coke? Twenty-eight years ago, Coca-Cola replaced the secret formula of its flagship brand, only to announce the return of the "classic" formula just 79 days later. Had it launched in 2013, Coke's Jay Moye suspects a social media backlash would have prompted it to reverse itself even sooner. In a timely follow-up, ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols points out that Microsoft is facing its own New Coke moment with Windows 8. 'Does Ballmer have the guts to admit he made a mistake and give users what they clearly want?' Vaughan-Nichols asks. 'While it's too late for Windows 8, Blue might give us back our Start button and an Aero-like interface. We don't know.'"
More like Old Joke. (This has happened before, you know.)
Seems like Microsoft already had their 'New Coke' moment with Vista.
Two failures in three OS launches is going to be a lot more difficult for the shareholders to get over.
Remember Microsoft Bob?
Apparently, neither did anyone at Microsoft.
Rarely ever will a CEO admit a mistake. It's the user's fault for not loving it.
I'll debate that while New Coke didn't work out, the aftermath resulted in Coke classic dominating the cola wars with a solid lead for decades now.
If it wasn't for new Coke, Pepsi would have overtaken Coke in the mid 80's and never looked back.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
...when you put sh** in the new recipe.
Windows 8 doesn't suck because of the lack of a start button.
It doesn't suck because of a lack of an Aero like interface
The Metro interface doesn't suck
Windows 8 sucks because it flips between the classic and the metro interface seemingly at random. Yes, we computer folks know that it depends on whether the program has been written as a metro program or a classic one, but from the start screen there is no way to tell what interface you'll end up in when you click on a program. And I'm pretty sure that consistency is one of the central tenets of good UI design.
Here's your cheque.
I switched to OSX about a year ago, and while it has its shiny moments, it also has lots of blunders and I wouldn't really say that it's a better desktop than Windows 7. Besides, calling "standard desktop OS" something that has ~10% market share is ... funny.
To say this is a "New Coke" moment is to fail to identify Microsoft's slow but irreversible decline. It's just another punctuation on the way down.
The problem with the "LOW MARKET SHARE!!1!!" comments is that you're talking about a company having a 10% of a market worth billions of dollars. I will take 10% of a billion dollars any day of the week.
Apple *is* getting converts in key sectors and if Microsoft continues to blunder and do whatever the fuck they want they will get more. Microsoft won't go anywhere - there are too many Microsoft zombies in upper management - but to roll out the "low market share" argument is absurd here when Apple has more cash on hand than the federal government.
The whole point of the Metro interface is to be inconsistent with the old UI.
How else can you charge developers for writing an application they could have just as easily have written using the old interface for free?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
What these critics all miss is that Microsoft is now betting on the tablet market, and doesn't give a damn what its PC users think.
I loved the flavor of new Coke. The Edsel was an innovative automobile. I still have Vista installed on my PC. I plan to upgrade to the Windows 8 experience. I am insane.
I'm not giving MS any more of my hard earned cash until I see Clippy up there helpfully interfering with my mouse clicks.
Depends on what the companies who pay a lot of money for licensing are saying. MS dont give a real shit about the consumer but the Enterprise - who by far are the ones MS depends on - are saying no, they dont want W8 or Metro.
Ya think MS are going to stand there and stick to their guns when Enterprise says fuck it and refuses to upgrade?
This really riles me that people are rejecting Windows 8 because it does not have a fucking 'Start' button. Just the mindless stupidity of it just boggles the mind. Windows 8 is fast, lean and very impressive OS. It continues the great work done on Windows 7 and really builds on that foundation. How fucking stupid are these people that they don't understand the Metro start screen is just a full screen modern version of the start button. Fucking Lowest Common Denominator morons dragging the rest of us down with them.
They don't need to backtrack very much. Add a button during initial user setup that lets you enable boot to desktop if you want it. When that's on, boot to desktop and show a start button. At a bare minimum that button could just bring up the Metro Start Screen, which as long as it had a clear way to close it (like an X at the top right when on a PC) would mollify a lot of the complaining.
Bringing back the full start menu would solve more of it, but I'm not convinced that's entirely necessary. In my experience most users actually start programs by clicking icons on the desktop and don't use the start menu much at all anyway. What they really need is just a more familiar way to do what they need to do.
For the more serious people that really want a full start menu back, there's stuff like Start8.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Apple *is* getting converts in key sectors
No its not...and it won't Apple will never be a serious contender for the Desktop, it simply costs too much. Sales dropped 22% last quarter...and shrunk a more manageable 2% this, but any pretence of world domination, or mass exodus to Apple simply aren't happening.
The reality is Apple could buy Dell (about 22 times), or they could License their OS, but if anything they have got used to relying on Microsoft being so awful..they get to roll around on wads of cash...and even though the salesman is dead, Cooky seems indent on second guessing what a dead man will do.
I love the idea of Apple going for Microsofts throat, but they Love the incredibly profitable Duopoly. It looks like companies are putting bets on Android...and Linux is sneaking market share.
OS X may be "much better than both Windows and Linux desktops" but it will never be the "standard desktop OS". Apple's business model presents itself as the premium option, not the standard one, and Apple would just as soon see OS X die in favor of iOS.
A desktop line consisting of gimmicky miniature, an all-in-one, and and overpriced, functionally obsolete deskside doesn't make for standard even if it makes for the standard for you.
Win ME did it backwards compared to the other ones. ME was based on the 95/98 line and was a crapflop following a successful product and was the end of the line (after ME, MS ditched it's separate "consumer OS" and just made variations of the business line (NT) for consumers).
Classic Shell is the way to go with Win8 by the way. Works like a... *not*charm. I am never in Metro besides a brief instant on startup. And all the edge mouse gestures are gone! I now prefer Win8 to Win7. Thank gawd for whoever is writing Classic Shell. MS should pay them.
The change to New Coke and then back to Classic Coke happened because Coke wanted to change their formula but knew that consumers would notice a taste difference. They needed to create a time barrier that would allow people to forget what Classic Coke tasted like so it was in their interest, in the long term, to release an inferior product knowing people wouldn't like it and "force them" to change back to the Classic formula which, actually, had changed to a cheaper ingredients list. It was one of the smartest executions of a formula change ever yet people constantly view it as a marketing blunder.
I'm a full time Linux user and admittedly a basher of windows, but I am generally quite impressed with windows 8. The tiled environment, though different, is something I could get used to. The problem is they've missed the point of it; when you still have to go to a traditional desktop to do pretty much anything, why bother?
You can't be serious. Windows 8 makes it damn near impossible to run a multi-windowed environment - which is what the OS was named for. It is pretty clear that Microsoft panicked with the tablet boom and forced a tablet onto a desktop. Yes, tablets are probably going to be used for a single app at a time, but I still need a desktop that let's me access multiple windows at once since I normally run about 13 applications at once.
Windows 8 sucks at every single level. Even the Metro interface, while the design is interesting and unique, ultimately isn't all that use friendly. Very few applications have actually done something useful with live tiles, and the whole pastel colour thing goes to hell when other apps choose to make multi colour logos instead of the style Microsoft uses. Install a few apps and the whole metro screen looks dreadful and unwieldy and unusable. It's like Android widgets, clever idea but I haven't seen anything beyond weather widgets that you would really want on your home screen. And it's now so quick and simple to get to much used apps or Google Now, and sharing is so easy in Android, widgets seem pretty superfluous except as shortcuts to apps.
That is on top of the other issues. The one reason I haven't switched to Macs until now is that the easy familiarity and efficiency with using Windows will take some time to learn on a Mac. Windows 8 kills that argument, a few minutes with it and I realize if I am learning something new I might as well move to Mac. And maybe if Windows 8 followed Vista we would be more open to it. The problem is Windows 7 is so amazingly good at staying out of the way and letting you get things done, it makes Win 8 even more jarring.
Windows 8 is also being pushed out on the same cheap laptops with low res screens and awful touchpads, where a gesture based interface is no fun to use. I got one for my mother, and I regret not just getting a chromebook. As soon as Google get proper offline editing of MSOffice files, chrome will become a better option for so many people.
They are actually only charging developers for being on the Windows store. There's a metro version of Chrome for instance. You can actually flip-flop back and forth between the two interfaces depending on what you are doing. Which can be kind of nice. It's kind of interesting that it took tablets for us to realize that full screen, and I mean every pixel, not full screen, minus task bar, minus title bar, minus menu bar, minus a tool bar can actually be quite nice to use in many situations.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I've been in the business since DOS4 and Windows 3.0 were the currently shipping versions. Windows 8 is the only version I have seen where people around you will spontaneously chime in and tell you how much they hate it. Even WinME wasn't like that.
I hope not. I hope they stick to their guns. Look, I am not the biggest MS fan, but Windows 8 is probably the most innovative and certainly the boldest thing MS has done in years. Maybe, ever.
the start button is an afterthought, it was something to get rid of how we used Windows 3.11 (which was permanantly opened folders). It was neat, it worked, but that is the past. The part people don't seem to grasp is that window with all those boxy icons IS the start menu. it is just visulazed now.
they will cave, because that is what MS does, but they shouldn't. Windows 8 is fantatic, and MS should grab their users and drag them out of 1995.
Have you tried using w8/2012 over a low bandwidth link? The suckiness is terrible to behold. Visual prettiness may belong on a tablet where big icons are needed to accommodate big fat sausage fingers, but how useful is a touch screen going to be on a server where you need to create a new account or something useful?
The way I get around w8/2012 is much like w7 - hit the windows key and start typing what I want. w8 is _so_ much slower to give me the answer so i'm less productive.
The problem with the "LOW MARKET SHARE!!1!!" comments is that you're talking about a company having a 10% of a market worth billions of dollars. I will take 10% of a billion dollars any day of the week.
Yes, but saying they'll be the new standard makes no sense, Apple yields the low end and mainstream market early and often. Seen any budget iPhones? iPads? Macs? Budget Apple anything? It doesn't matter how many blunders Microsoft makes as long as Apple doesn't want to enter those market segments and do it better. They don't want to start a race to the bottom against Windows any more than against Android, and no we won't all be buying $1000 computers, $500 phones and $500 tablets any time soon.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If you're doing stuff that upsets customers, you need to change your business model to sell ($) to customers what it is they really want.
Microsoft should switch to annual subscription fees for Windows, and keep patching and supporting Windows versions indefinitely.
It's time to retire the 1980 business model of software. Viruses didn't exist in 1980.
Ask any computer professional or any focus group of moderately intelligent users and you'll get the same thing. Bring back the start menu, leave the new features that are actually beneficial, dump UEFI, and ditch Tile Land. That's it. After that, it's all set to go. I'd even concede the BIOS-embedded license key because I'm sick of other repair shops than mine playing games with Windows 7 licenses to save money. 1 license = 1 motherboard and enforce that for everyone and I can accept that.
I switched to OSX about a year ago, and while it has its shiny moments, it also has lots of blunders and I wouldn't really say that it's a better desktop than Windows 7. Besides, calling "standard desktop OS" something that has ~10% market share is ... funny.
I don't think he meant it like that, i.e. in terms of market share. You are too stuck in the MS fanboy idea of Windows, Excel, Word etc. and their market share making them 'Industry Standards'. He probably meant more like that OS X is becoming more of a benchmark/reference point to measure your own Desktop OSes usability against than Windows is, i.e. that people are more likely to steal ideas from OS X than Windows 8. Of course you may disagree on whether OS X is the best UI ever made. Having used both I'd say it's better than Windows if only because OS X has a lower UI friction factor, although Windows 7 made major strides in that department so it's less of a factor than it was in the time of XP and Vista. I don't think anybody will be using Windows 8 as a usability reference UI any time soon. If OS X was discontinued tomorrow my next choice would probably be Gnome 3, bugs and all rather than either Windows 7 or 8.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Yep, nothing says "innovation" like confusing the hell out of your users and removing the ability to have multiple programs on screen at once.
Because nobody who uses Windows multitasks, right?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
And if you think they will, look at when Microsoft originally wanted to EOL WinXP, and when they actually did.
Worse, do you think Dell, HP et al will sit still and just twiddle their thumbs when companies don't buy new PCs because they can't get them with anything but Win8?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Vista did suck when it came out for quite a lot of people, but the core problem wasn't Vista. The problem was that the driver model changed and there was a lot of immature drivers out there. But for your average home user, all they understand is that the computer has Vista and isn't working as well as their older XP one did.
Windows 7 didn't share that problem because by time it came out the drivers had matured.
Windows 8's problem is that it's two UIs that don't play nice together in the same place, and people who know how to use Windows 7 (or XP) don't want to learn the new one and figure out when they're going to switch back and forth. It's a blunder on Microsoft's part that the two don't play together more nicely.
That, and what moron thought moving the "shut down" button into such an obscure location was a good idea? Yes, people do in fact turn PCs off fairly regularly.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Apple has more cash on hand than the federal government.
That is a fairly low bar, I have more cash on hand than the federal government as I don't run a deficit.
Time to offend someone
I think Microsoft is like a WW II giant warship. Helpless against modern warfare still takes hours or days to sink. In the meanwhile it is still a sitting duck firing big rounds against anything that moves.
Please die and don't make more damage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_battleship_Yamato
Windows 8 is not "New Coke." For this to work out as well, M$ would have to have a Pepsi-like product. On the desktop, that doesn't exist. New Coke was an attempt to re-make a flagship brand. To appeal to changing American tastes for a sweeter product. Windows 8 isn't that product. Consumers weren't clamoring for a touch screen desktop. They accepted touch on tablets and smartphones because it works on handheld devices. It doesn't work well on desktops. Look at the Windows 8 commercials. You don't see office work. You don't see email or composition. You see touch applications, and that's the point. When you buy a laptop, you expect a keyboard. You expect to type. When you buy a tablet, you expect to touch.
For this to work, Microsoft has to have a Domino's moment. Admit you were wrong, then come out with a truly well designed and well made product. I'm not seeing this happen with Blue. I hear about Blue on sites like this. I don't see M$'s corporate face on Blue. Blue feels like a politician's half-hearted admission of guilt.
I predict the business world will continue to adopt Windows 7 and skip Windows 8. If these same IT shops adopt Office 365, Windows may fall off the desktop. A web-based office automation product doesn't need expensive desktop licenses. That change could make "the year of the RHEL desktop" happen.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
OS X may be "much better than both Windows and Linux desktops".
What is better for you, maybe is not better for me. Don't shove it on everyone else.
Windows 8 made to many changes to fast without the support of legacy add-ons. Forgoing my own feeling about the Windows 8 interface and window management, not including a start button or a way to add the start button back and not allowing a user to boot to the desktop were both huge mistakes.
You can try to change the way things are done but at least provide a way back to the old methods, at least for the first release of a new system, then you can go ahead and start removing features slowly. It's like getting into a cold pool, you slide in gently to make sure you don't get a shock, this is what Microsoft should of done, not a running cannon ball and later have to suck the water back out.
"I am altering the OS, pray I don't alter it any further."
— Darth Ballmer.
Quote: "Windows 8 sucks because it flips between the classic and the metro interface seemingly at random"
Exactly. Metro on a phone is not bad at all. I KNOW I don't know, so I'm OK with exploring the interface. But Win 8 gives me a lot of "WTF - when did $X go?" Is it in the metro interface, or in a new location in Control Panel, or was it dropped, or...."
Place nail here >+
At least Intel spends about 25% of its revenue on R&D. That kind of justifies the 70% margins. Actually, Intel shows 58% gross margins in Q2 2012, but that is still really high. http://www.intc.com/financials.cfm
Keeping a steady or very slowly growing small chunk of a billion dollar market is far better than trying to race your way to the top, burning out and becoming nothing. The problem is that's what the stock markets want so they can get their billions and then move onto the next company to ruin. Luckily Apple has stayed realistic about their mac marketshare.
It's even worse than those points. Back to a basic level, nothing is labeled. It's just symbols until you mouse over them and even then, some things are perpetually blank. Then you can't even tell what's clickable and right clickable at all. That's beyond bad UI design.
Every single level? That's a bit over the top. I hit Windows-D to see the standard desktop and suddenly things are more familiar. When I want to launch something that I don't have a link for already on the traditional desktop, I hit windows and start to type the name of the program. It quickly finds it, I hit Enter and it launches. Maybe I'm more keyboard-centric than the average user, but I've found Win8 to be non-issue. If users are simply shown how to get away from the metro interface, it's really not so different.
If you have web software that requires IE on Windows to work, the problem is on your end.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The problem is the trend of being cool because you can complain has left . Can't find the start button? Yes it's damn annoying I agree, but New Coke sucked all around. Windows 8 isn't all about a single button. A keyboard you aren't used to will ruin your life much more miserably, but do you call Dell and tell them the computer should go in the garbage? It's time people got used to this mess. Yes as a hardcore 24 hours a day user it is definitely a mess and why we can't get to the shutdown or log off screen with a click is frustrating. You are not going to sell businesses on this model the way it is right now. But it is not going to make anyone go out and change their life. Let the insane and moaners do whatever makes them feel better. I will donate a leper to your cause.
You don't seem to get it. Microsoft is a business that is attempting to sell a rather expensive (~$100 and up) product to consumers. If you want to sell your product, you have to listen to what your customers want. You can't just brush off their complaints by saying that they will eventually get used to it. Well, you can, but you'll lose a ton of business that way, and shareholders will start to get unhappy.
It may be an exaggeration to say that "the customer is always right" – sometimes individual customers really are unreasonable – but if thousands of customers are telling you the same thing, then you should damn well listen.
My laptop started chugging on Windows 7. I noticed a performance increase on my netbook when I previously tested Windows 8, so I thought I would give it another try,
I have to admit, it works wonderfully. The system definitely performs better and the interface on Windows 8 is nice.
Here comes the obvious: Metro is pretty shit.
The full screen apps are useless and the main interface has no appeal. You know what my biggest problem is? The thing that bothers me the most? When I search for a program, there is no default "Show All". First it only shows programs installed, and then "Settings". Often I'm using it to find windows components like Device Manager, and it requires additional mouse clicks and movements to get there. Likewise on a tablet, it would require more touches. It's the simplest, most obvious thing, and if they overlook little things like this I don't have much hope for the rest of Metro.
The OS itself it pretty nice though.
Also, they seem to have the "good 10%". The part of the computer market that actually doesn't mind spending a little extra money to get a well built product. They are making lots of money in profits. They have ignored the $300 laptop market for a reason. There is very little profit to be made in that sector. Their cheapest laptop is around $1000 for the Mac Book Air. Saying that 10% market share is doing badly while still making tons of profits is just stupid.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
And if you think they will, look at when Microsoft originally wanted to EOL WinXP, and when they actually did.
Hell, I'm not convinced that MS is even going to EoL XP on the scheduled date in 2014. There are still a lot of big companies (and not a few governments!) stuck on XP, and I think many of them are asking MS how big a dump truck of money they have to drive up to their door to get the expiration date pushed back indefinitely.
I would disagree with the comparison to New Coke. Drinkers of New Coke plain just didn't like it and there was nothing Coke could do to fix the product itself, so they had to revert to a different formula.
Windows 8 is more like the recent J.C. Penney disaster. Microsoft brought out this new version of what they think an operating system should be like, and ignored what their customers were telling them. Windows 8 can be fixed, Microsoft just needs to be willing to listen to their customers. They can start by making Metro an optional GUI overlay that can be enabled by the user - and not the default GUI. They can make Aero an optional GUI theme that can be enabled. Of course no one will get fired at Microsoft over this debacle like the JCP CEO did (except Steven who tried to stop the Windows roll-out). Microsoft should roll out a service pack for Windows 8 that takes care of these issues.
The only sad thing about your comment is Apple could reinvigorate the Desktop market...
That's right. Tim promised us we would get new MacPros this year. He promised us!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Metro would be ok as a concept at least if it was a Windows component you could choose to install.
Look at Windows Media Centre for example - outside of a media PC there will be many Vista and 7 owners who never use it, and aren't affected by it even being installed. There are others, such as myself, who use WMC daily in the lounge, on a PC that is sat inside a AV cabinet operated by a remote control.
This is critical to understanding why Metro is such a failure. People with desktop computers will likely be sitting some distance from their monitor, and it would be uncomfortable in most cases for them to operate its touchscreen when it sits vertical on the desk. Notwithstanding that usability issue I would assume that it is still the case today that the vast majority of Vista/7 users do not have touchscreens, and in my experience Metro is pretty underwhelming without one. The use of a touchscreen is antithetical to using a desktop computer for the most part, yet MS seemed to think that the transition would be fluid and that the marketplace was just crying out for someone to fill this void.
This would all be just a misstep if it were possible to get to the main Windows desktop and stay there and retain all of the functionality you had in Windows 7 (Start button, etc). Instead Metro apps and utilities drop you to the old desktop seemingly on a whim and without warning, which is quite jarring, and you can't even really choose to stay there if you wanted to with ease (at least not without third party utilities to help you recreate the old UX). It is quite a shock to drop from Metro to the old desktop, the UX is completely different - which is fine for a seasoned user but is it really the experience MS wanted people to have?
That W8 drops you to desktop with a totally different UI smacks of MS really not having a clear direction or dedication to Metro, which is something you can't really say of Apple for example. Apple are notorious for having a walled garden approach to their software, and the OSX UX is very much "they'll take what we give them", but Apples customer base is used to that UX, they are familiar with it, and it is not change for changes sake.
Metro would've imo made a great Windows component in the same vein as Windows Media Centre - something you can choose to install or even boot to IF you want to, as it is it's an affront.
I don't care for Windows 8 as much as the next guy, but they're not going to reverse field; Microsoft is all in on this.
I'm sure if you had asked Coke executives in May-June 1985, all of them would have said they were "all in" on New Coke. People generally don't attain high-level executive positions by being indecisive or publicly showing doubt. But when customers don't want to buy the product you're selling now, and they want to buy the product you used to sell but don't any more, then it doesn't take a marketing genius to figure out what you should do. And if you don't make that decision on your own, then eventually someone higher up will do it for you. If not the leader of the Windows team, then Ballmer. If not Ballmer, then the Board of Directors. And if not the Board, then ultimately Wall Street.
"better than both Windows and Linux desktops"
Hey - that sounds like something good. But, please, tell us: better than WHICH Linux desktops, precisely? And, tell us what metrics you are using to measure these desktops.
I'll be fair here - I've never owned an OS X computer. I don't have the background to make real comparisons.
I've run every version of Windows from Windows version 1. Every one of them. Some were pretty cool for their time. Two have positively sucked. Windows 8 is shaping up to be even suckier than those first two suckers. Win2k and XP were pretty solid operating systems, though they've aged and aren't much to brag about today. Win7 is pretty solid.
Linux? I do a lot of distro hopping. Some are great, some are less great. Ubuntu's Unity is kinda sucky - but hey, that is only one of a multitude of distributions. Depending on what I need a machine to do - there is a Linux distro pretty much tailored to that need.
So, please, tell us what metrics you used to determine that OS X is better than anything that might compete against it. Is it the price? Is it the pretty? The reliability? Uptime? Support? Market share?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
They are also alienating their core high margin markets eg Music and Media have been worried for a long time now that Apple will throw them under the bus in the pursuit of the lower margin consumer market.
Still doesn't make OS X the standard. And Microsoft is in the enterprise not because of "Windows Zombies" but because they offer the enterprise tools. OS X server is a joke, especially since the further dumbing down in 10.8.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
If Apple had allowed PC manufacturers to ship OS X at Windows 8 launch, then it could be very well standard desktop OS by now. But Apple chose not to 1-up Microsoft in order to avoid diluting their brand, so OS X remains confined to the high-price niche.
They've been down the grey box path before, and there's a reason they don't do it. The whole reason that 10 years ago Apple had a reputation for reliability and Windows had a reputation for being crashtastic was that Apple had control of the hardware environment and didn't have to worry about relying on 3rd parties to develop drivers.
Windows 7 is better than XP was, to say nothing of the whole 9X line, but Apple is still better in that respect. If they allow 3rd party vendors into the ecosystem again, then they lose control over the hardware.
Considering the "I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this" patent wars Apple has instigated in the smart phone and tablet markets, I wouldn't exactly say they gave them away.
Windows 8 is probably the most innovative and certainly the boldest thing MS has done in years. Maybe, ever.
You don't get it. Windows users don't want bold change. We want things to keep working the way they have been working, just with additional polishing, bug fixing, and little features here and there. The existing Windows configuration is a standard workflow, and when you mess with that, you're killing productivity.
what the hell takes 5X more clicks? you put the things you use on the start screen, and it's always 2 clicks no matter what you need, and it's big enough to put everything normal users need on there. And on the desktop you can still pin your most used applications on the taskbar and open them in a single click, so unless you used to be able to open 5 applications in a single click, and now no longer can, i wonder where the hell your 5X number comes from -_-.
And yes, with everything that is new there will be people complaining and getting lost. Doesn't mean it is worse, it just means it's a change, any change will trigger that...
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. I'm head IT manager so let's use my company as an example. I checked when our bosses wanted to get a mac for media editing (which is comical by itself). It works with exactly zero of our software suites. ZERO. No CRM, no office, no database apps, nothing. In fact, Firefox and Safari don't work with our ASP software either. Macs are toys for clueless rich people and have no place whatsoever in a professional environment. Forget compatibility, just go with cost. It's an idiotic choice.
lol.
"Doesn't work in my environment" != "in any professional environment."
This is /. - your "head IT manager" credentials are just a drop in the bucket here. As another "head IT manager," I support an increasing number of Macs and iPads alongside a long standing Windows setup, in a diverse company that covers several industries. Beyond the initial learning curve, I'm finding the Macs are a lot easier to support and maintain. And, in 2013, compatibility is becoming increasingly less of an issue as so many business apps are moving to the browser.
What's an idiotic choice for your narrow section of the world doesn't make it an idiotic choice for everyone. And so long as Apple keeps with their separate plan for what is a desktop OS and what is a mobile OS, I think they'll be on track to displace a number of traditional workplace PCs. Meanwhile, Microsoft's garbled inconsistent half hybrid will becoming increasingly insignificant.
yeah sorry, but if you think apple is the one being cited by gartner and being used in enterprise exclusively in some fantasy situation, you're fairly mistaken.
it's pretty much android/apple/windows/solaris/unix, which is pretty much the same as it's been............ever.
don't expect that to change, probably ever.
nah, rather annoyed at the stupidity. i'm not saying windows is holy and allmighty. i'm just annoyed at all the stupid comments and FUD i read about it. how the new start menu would be unusable etc... i installed it wondering what i would encounter, and it was strange at first (and had my doubts), but i got used to it (and googled how to configure it i must admit :p ), and don't really notice it anymore. It works well, and i got all the programs i often start in there, and i like using my win 8 pc as just a desktop pc with it.
Same shit with vista, the eternal complaining, while i had then bought a new, decent pc, installed vista on it. And just noticed a stable, fast pc that worked (with only being pissed off at philips for not releasing a 64 bit driver for my webcam -_-. got me a uvc webcam now so whatever changes in drivers, it can't fuck up my working hardware anymore :p).
every windows has it's issues, some are bigger, some are minor, but i don't get where this eternal complaining keeps coming from. even more since it's so obvious many of the complainers haven't even used it, and are just echoing some rants they heard (and preferably exaggerating it while they're at it -_- ).
Just try it (and i mean really try it, not install it while you've already decided that you hate it), and if you really don't like it, at least give some good reasons, everytime i read complaining it's either
"omg, something changed, hate hate hate"
or
"omg i heard there are no more windows and i need windows and they can't remove multitasking, if it can't multitask how could it possibly be used for desktop pc's" (as if the start screen is the only screen in windows 8....)....
I like how the biggest problem people have with Windows is its Start button. The security holes, viruses, instability - all okay, don't worry about it. It's like sitting on the deck of a sinking ship and talking about the paint job that's desperately needed. Who. Cares.
OSX can't take over as long as Apple insists that it only be installed on their hardware. Businesses don't want to be locked into one particular hardware vendor. And while Apple's premium laptops are competitive in terms of price and performance (the 15" rMBP is probably the best on the market), they have basically nothing in the under-$1000 segment. And their desktop offerings are laughably outdated and overpriced junk.
It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to shut down my computer in Window 8. Windows 7, you press the windows button and there's a shut down option.
Let's just put a happy little 8 here and this Start Menu can be "our little secret"
for me the start screen is just a fullscreen start menu with some fancy features.
and if you use it as such, there really is no issue. you're still most of the time on your familiar desktop, and if you need a program, you click on the lower left corner, click the icon (as you used to), and the program you chose starts on the desktop.
i don't see what the fuss is about, and how this is complicated? and organising this new screen maybe takes a few minutes of experimenting how you can group items and put them where you want them. But that's about it...
i'd love to see some actual good examples of the issues people encounter. It's always these vague reasons that don't really seem to make sense... (or often just ranting without being bother by actual knowledge or having used it...)
No compatibility with your vendor locked in software maybe, but that's not the case for everyone. When evaluating software my business uses, not being stuck in a vendor locked in solution is a very high priority and I wouldn't want it any other way.
exactly, and those Windows users who do want change - have already changed to iOS or Android. They don't want Windows again, not if it doesn't do what it used to do.
It is a personal opinion, and that's always subjective.
The fact that the whole user experience is messed up is objective. I expected to hate Win 8 because it was different and I was ready for that. I didn't expect to hate it because of a bunch of stuff that MS should know better than to screw up!
That is the most praise you will typically hear about windows 8: you can basically ignore all their new features. Which, in some ways is analagous to gnome3 to a certain extent - at least for me, and only then when I ignore the modernist take on Alt-Tab.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
I've both used windows vista & windows 8 a lot, and both are very decent versions of windows. Vista was very stable & fast for the time i used it (a few years), and now i've got windows 8, and i like the look, and it's extremely fast :). The new start menu is a bit of getting used to, and there are some improvements possible, but it's a very decent first attempt, and i'd rather have them improve that, than keep that old start menu alive forever because people are so afraid of change -_-.
And seriously, all the stupid things you read about it on slashdot are just ridiculous. it's not because we now got a tablet friendly start menu that allows some basic applications in it, that the entire desktop and every single other feature of windows suddenly disappeared, there still is a desktop, windows, multitasking, ... just some fancier start menu that's strange at the start, but works pretty well. and when my family sees me using it, they seem fairly positive, the change to the new system is only a week of getting used to it.
For all the intelligence that people always say is here, why do you all have to act like conservative bigots when it's about windows?? both vista & 8 are decent windowses, and all the fuss about them is just plain ridiculous -_-.
Its Slashdot. Just as Fox will hype the "Obama is going to take your guns" stories because it keeps their target demographic coming back for more, Slashdot will run "OMG, everyone hates _____ from Microsoft" stories, too.
There's occasionally good stuff posted on here, so its best to just ignore the stories targeted at feeding the base.
This industry can turn on you in an instant (Well a decade-long instant, you really have to not be paying attention.) Look at Sun, no one ever thought anything would take them down. A decade before Sun went under, I attended a Linux con in Denver and had some SGI rep try to convince me that his company was crapping daisies and unicorns. I asked him point blank why I should buy a storage solution from him when I knew for a fact that IBM would be here two decades from now. He then tried to blow some marking smoke up my ass, but their company sank shortly thereafter. I started seeing the same writing on the wall for Sun later on, and they were gone a couple years later. I really feel like these guys believed their marketing and thought nothing could take them down. Well these days Microsoft's competitors are VERY quick on their feet and can take over emerging markets before Microsoft's lumbering behemoth even realizes there's something to take over. So they're coming in against already-established and VERY popular players. So unless Microsoft loses the complacency and learns how to compete in this new era, the gutted remains of their company will join Sun and all the others in the "Also-Ran" bin of history. This is not an anti-Microsoft rant. This is a warning.
My guess is the future will be pretty robust competition between an Android-based Google OS and OSX. Though I'm still not sure about Apple without Steve Jobs' vision to keep them rolling. Plus, once they exhaust the world's supply of brushed aluminum, things will get difficult for them, too.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Deficit refers to cash flow and not cash on hand. It's entirely possible to have cash on hand and still run a deficit. What you're thinking of is debt, not deficit, but even then it's still possible to both be in debt and have cash on hand.
It's kind of interesting that it took tablets for us to realize that full screen, and I mean every pixel, not full screen, minus task bar, minus title bar, minus menu bar, minus a tool bar can actually be quite nice to use in many situations.
I agree with your point, but I don't think you're taking it to its logical conclusion yet.
I suspect what really didn't work about "traditional" WIMP systems is having arbitrarily stacking/overlapping windows. Partially obscured background windows are often useless for both reading and interaction, so most of the time they are merely noise. All the window dressing that comes with arbitrarily movable/resizeable windows then amplifies that noise. The end result is a lot of clutter with little if any practical value.
Tablets have given up on all of that clutter, and shown that you can still work just fine with a cleaner visual style and a UI that makes switching contexts to another task easy but comprehensive.
However, tablets are mostly aimed at doing one thing at once. The screen typically isn't big enough to show lots of things at the same time, and on a touch screen the only interactions you've got available are tied directly to what you can show. Neither of those limitations necessarily applies to a desktop or laptop system where Windows would traditionally be running, where it is often both possible and useful to have many things on-screen at once.
So we evolved concepts like window tiling utilities to organise the main screen area where applications live, and we also see smaller areas reserved for helpful things like the task bar and notifications in Windows 7. Having that instant access is useful enough to justify borrowing a bit of screen real estate when you've got a large screen and have many things happening at once. On tablets, it's the opposite argument, because that screen space is more precious and there's less advantage to having the shortcuts and notifications there all the time.
Where Microsoft seem to be going wrong at the moment is in trying to produce one UI that fits both situations, which seems like one of those games you can't possibly win.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I checked when our bosses wanted to get a mac for media editing (which is comical by itself).
Media editing is actually one of the areas where Macs excel. There is a wide variety of software available, and they have been favored by creative professionals for quite some time.
It works with exactly zero of our software suites. ZERO. No CRM, no office, no database apps, nothing. In fact, Firefox and Safari don't work with our ASP software either.
Firefox and Safari for OSX are standard web browsers. If they don't work with your "ASP software" then that means the software is crap (probably designed to be IE-specific) and needs to be fixed. It's not a problem with the OS or the browsers. Why a media editing system would need CRM or database apps isn't clear to me, but you certainly can get MS Office for OSX if you need it.
http://www.classicshell.net/ I recommend this to everyone who's complained to me about Metro. For a bonus it customizes the Start Menu and Explorer. No Windows 8 isn't bad, just the forced mobile GUI was a bad choice. You lost the mobile war M$. Foisting your mobile GUI on desktop users isn't going to increase the love.
FTFY.
You are too stuck in the MS fanboy idea of Windows, Excel, Word etc. and their market share making them 'Industry Standards'.
I run into this problem frequently. Windows is a zombie where I work because no one knows that there are alternatives. There is no official policy, yet the whole place has turned into a Microsoft shop for no reason. Apple seems completely uninterested in competing in the business world and so it goes, Microsoft claiming huge "market share" simply because it is familiar and fairly well supported/integrated at many places of employment. I chose to use OS X and Linux at work because I do a lot of work with command-line tools and Mac-only vector drawing programs. (And let's face it, farting around on Slashdot.)
What kills me is that, when I refuse to use our stupid Oracle calendar system because the native OS X client is several years out of date and buggy, and syncing it with my phone is harder than a shuttle launch, the zombies all chant "switch to a PC." (Where PC means our in-house Windows XP installation.) Their argument isn't that it is better, but that it has "more market share for a reason" and that it is "the industry standard" and "why do you have to be different anyway?" Arrrrgh.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
I agree. You are in desktop *mode* and move the mouse to the side of the screen and some Metro thing slides in.
Maybe you wanted it but probably you were just trying to get to the side of the image you are photoshopping (or whatever).
It doesn't respect the modes - that is the problem.
I've both used windows vista & windows 8 a lot, and both are very decent versions of windows. Vista was very stable & fast for the time i used it (a few years), and now i've got windows 8, and i like the look, and it's extremely fast :). The new start menu is a bit of getting used to, and there are some improvements possible, but it's a very decent first attempt, and i'd rather have them improve that, than keep that old start menu alive forever because people are so afraid of change -_-.
And seriously, all the stupid things you read about it on slashdot are just ridiculous. it's not because we now got a tablet friendly start menu that allows some basic applications in it, that the entire desktop and every single other feature of windows suddenly disappeared, there still is a desktop, windows, multitasking, ... just some fancier start menu that's strange at the start, but works pretty well. and when my family sees me using it, they seem fairly positive, the change to the new system is only a week of getting used to it.
For all the intelligence that people always say is here, why do you all have to act like conservative bigots when it's about windows?? both vista & 8 are decent windowses, and all the fuss about them is just plain ridiculous -_-.
Its Slashdot. Just as Fox will hype the "Obama is going to take your guns" stories because it keeps their target demographic coming back for more, Slashdot will run "OMG, everyone hates _____ from Microsoft" stories, too.
There's occasionally good stuff posted on here, so its best to just ignore the stories targeted at feeding the base.
It's just that somewhere i got this tiny bit of hope that on a place like this were we're slightly more intelligent than the average fox viewer that people would behave a tiny bit smarter, but... you're probably right >_...
I would love to see the financial logic (assuming there is any) behind this. They might be basically going from Henry Ford's: "If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse". This might mean that they have looked at the future of windows with a Start button and realized that it has no future. Many companies in the past stuck with "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and ended up in the rubbish heap of companies while some upstart came along with a new way of doing things and ate their lunch.
So if I had to guess the MS plan it is that they see the mobile type platform as becoming dominant. They probably see people showing up at work and becoming frustrated with their work machines not being more like their mobile platforms. To see this point of view dig out your favorite iOS or Android product and envision your anger if the next version comes out with a start button style UI. Most people would scream "What is this? Hello 1998 is calling and wants its UI back!"
I am not saying that the new Windows 8 interface is some work of genius but I suspect that it is the result of a company that knows that it has to do something to stay relevant.
If I did have some suggestions for MS marketing it would have been to do two things. Assume that all mobile initiatives are loss leaders. Win hearts and minds is the primary goal. So I would have put out 3 versions of the new mobile platform at zero cost. One designed for the crappiest phones possible. Basically step in front of Android for people testing the smart phone waters. A second version aimed at people who are going to have a phone as their primary interface to the world; so basically aimed at large screen fairly good phones and people who usually consume but once in a while might need to do some work so a docking station option. And a third optional interface that could be turned on in Windows 7 (I never would have put out an 8). This way once you are familiar and love your mobile interface you could go to work / school / staples and make the computer just like your phone.
So the goal is to not win Windows 7 people over to your mobile platform but to win mobile people and then keep them in your ecosystem.
Where I don't think MS gets it is that the days of the Windows Tax are dwindling. It seems that they put out overpriced phones that were loaded down with the windows tax. Then they took their desktops where they already charge their tax and managed to get people who used to be happy to pay rethinking their relationship with MS.
The other 2 central principles of Discoverability and Visibility, Metro fails at both of these as well. I accidentally opened a PDF in metro and after 5 minutes had to google how to close the app.
Agreed with your modal window focus, but I hate Windows version of 'open new app, focus goes back to old app' method too.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. I'm head IT manager so let's use my company as an example. I checked when our bosses wanted to get a mac for media editing (which is comical by itself). It works with exactly zero of our software suites. ZERO. No CRM, no office, no database apps, nothing. In fact, Firefox and Safari don't work with our ASP software either. Macs are toys for clueless rich people and have no place whatsoever in a professional environment. Forget compatibility, just go with cost. It's an idiotic choice.
Dude, you need to calm down. Every single one of your complaints is about cross platform issues If you designed your infrastructure with only Windows in mind and didn't factor in portability needs you have only yourself to blame. You might as well be complaining that pickup trucks are crappy pieces of equipment because they have zero parts commonality with your companies bulldozers.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Apple has more cash on hand than the federal government.
That is a fairly low bar, I have more cash on hand than the federal government as I don't run a deficit.
No... In reality you don't have more cash than the government, because you are the government. People forget that anything that is done by the government is done in their names, whether they like it or not. So that deficit... yeah, it's your deficit too... Maybe if more people understood this we would have better government.
It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to shut down my computer in Window 8. Windows 7, you press the windows button and there's a shut down option.
And, as I've posted previously, there's a good chance you didn't really shut down the computer - instead you just logged out and hibernated. (Which is what "shutdown" does now.)
Actually shutting down the computer all the way involves a hidden setting somewhere in the power options - you have to "change what the power buttons do" and then uncheck "fast startup." Only then will shutting down the computer allow you to do a clean boot at a later point in time.
As an additional exercise, figure out how to log out. Remember how it always used to be an option in the shutdown menu? It's not any more.
The answer: turns out your account name on the start screen can be clicked on. I never noticed it was even there until it was pointed out to me, because my use of the Windows 8 start menu was almost exclusively "press start key, type search terms" - which makes the username vanish.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
If you want to sell your product, you have to listen to what your customers want. You can't just brush off their complaints by saying that they will eventually get used to it.
Of course you can, particularly if you're right. Most people are naturally resistant to change, even if in the long run it is change for the better. Experienced business management teams know this, as surely as politicians do. They still promote ideas that their research tells them are better than what was there before or necessary to cope with where the world is heading, and they accept that in the short term they will take flak for it, and they hope to survive market forces/elections for long enough that their newer idea starts to pay off.
Obviously there is a risk involved in that strategy if you're not in a secure position to start with. That's why these big tech companies love their war chests. And obviously sometimes people do push things that aren't really better at all. They made the wrong call, and in the long run the hostility is still there and their strategy doesn't pay off.
But I think the important question here isn't whether Microsoft should be listening to their customers more, it's whether they're right about the change. The immediate, knee-jerk feedback from customers may or may not be a reliable indicator of that.
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. -- Henry Ford
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
If Steve Jobs was the CEO of Microsoft....
...except (salesman) Steve Jobs logic turned Apple into to become an electronics company (dropping the computers from its name in the process). Microsoft is already doing that...store *check* locked down OS *check* surface mobiles and computers *check* electronics interface *check*
The problem is they should have done the opposite of Steve...and focused on creating a great product we would love, license the OS for nothing, remove restrictions from the hardware....Like Android.
Microsoft is a business that is attempting to sell a rather expensive (~$100 and up) product to consumers.
Oh, you mean it's not freeware?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Usually, this is the result of people with no IT knowledge making IT purchasing decisions.
Non-Technical C-Level Exec: "Hey, this CRM software is really flashy and cool! Some guys came in and demo'd it for us last week. We loved it. We're going to buy it and put the whole company on it."
IT Manager: "But it only works on IE 7..."
Exec: "Aye-aye-aye-what now? Stop talking gibberish, just get started installing it."
Check out my world simulator thingy.
It's just that somewhere i got this tiny bit of hope that on a place like this were we're slightly more intelligent than the average fox viewer that people would behave a tiny bit smarter, but... you're probably right >_...
A misplaced hope, unfortunately. It was fine ten years ago. The failure of VA Linux/SourceForge/Whatever-name-they-had-on-a-given-day started a downward trend that culminated in the transition to Dice. I suspect the only intelligent discussion left on here is largely because of the force of some number of readers who keep coming back out of ten or fifteen years of habit, and have the same visceral reaction I've got in most stories. (I actually suspect my reading of Slashdot will end or mostly end with the passing of Google Reader...)
Actually it sucks, because Metro generally sucks if you have to use it with a mouse. It might be fine for a touch based interface though.
Anyone that has studied marketing at all would know that New Coke was a way to replace sugar with corn syrup in Coke and not have a back lash. Introducing New Coke for a few weeks forced customers to beg for old Coke back. When Coke Classic was brought to market, no one complained about Corn Syrup because it was so close in task to the original. Comparing Coke's brilliant idea to trick people into accepting change to Microsoft's blunder makes no sense!
It took me 30 seconds to realize I couldn't find the Off option, then another 30 seconds to google the solution.
I thought the slow adoption of Windows 7 was one of the motives for Windows 8. The other motive for Windows 8 was univification with mobile platforms, rplacing Windows CE. Poor Windows 7 sales was the reason the long time Windows manager was retired.
like win9x && win2k
maybe microsoft should cope gnome-2 or gnome-3 or kde-3 s
at least i knew where everything was and i was not searching all over menus and the control panel and rightclicking all over everything trying to find where they hid some feature i liked to change
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
>> it's really not so different.
Yep. if you use only the keyboard.
Few people use only the keyboard.
For all others it's unusable.
aaaaaaa
Shit, that sounds almost as bad as gmail.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
How many people click the button to allow MS to collect usage data? Thats where they must be getting the data. Ive never allowed MS to collect my usage data so they miss the fact i use my start button numerous times a day.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Apple better USE that money to DO something game changing
I think they should take over Nintendo. Since the launch of the Wii U. It just seems such a interesting match.
But the reality is they should do the boring things, like compete on price, have a product range..things every other company has to do in a maturing market.
That's like saying you 'own' your tricycle so you're better at moving stuff than the guy who has a loan on his big rig...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
New Coke was not a blunder. The fact is that Coca-Cola wanted to replace the sugar cane on the recipe with high fructose corn syrup. It's not only cheaper but generates more need to keep drinking (eating) whatever has it. The taste is close enough, but you couldn't switch it overnight without people noticing. Thus, the launched New Coke to have a few months between batches, so people wouldn't notice ti taste difference. After all, they wanted the Old Coke to taste the same old.
It worked quite well, btw.
Win8 might have been quite the same strategy, but the question would be what's the Microsoft high fructose corn syrup? I don't think they are that clever.
As the technology has matured, the inevitble is coming to pass, the laptop/desktop market is coming to a plateau. The tablet and phone markets will (or already have by some accounts) hit the same point. Some even say that the 'tablet' market other than iPad *started* in that fashion. Apple probably has the most durable strategy, inspiring their customer base to consider their devices a fashion statement as well as a tool (same way some auto makers can extract more volume and margin out of select models versus others)
While there of course are examples of people who use Tablets to displace their usage of computers, by far the vast majority have both depending on circumstance. Maybe they bother to bring their laptop out to lunch or the couch less, but at work and at home they are still pounding on a traditional PC system at least once a day.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Honestly, I can't believe how obsessed people are over it! Why do I want to scroll through a whole list of options rather than just select an icon (Win 3.1 and iris 4D style) or type the name of the application (linux style)?
Even the Metro interface, while the design is interesting and unique, ultimately isn't all that use friendly.
I agree. I wanted to like it. I think it looks cool. It suffers from a huge problem, in my opinion, in that so many of the UI elements are hidden.
What I mean is, there are simply too many things that only show up when you hover the mouse cursor in a particular place, or when you right-click on a particular item. Worse: the "hidden" things that appear when you hover or right-click aren't entirely consistent, so if you're in a new application, you don't really know what you're going to get when you right-click. That's pretty bone-headed.
The worst part, in my opinion, is the hovering, though. It necessarily slows you down. Every time you have to hover, it adds at least a few fractions of a second to wait for it to appear, and then to visually confirm that the correct thing appeared. Then, once the hover menu appears, you have to visually seek out the control you were looking for, and move the cursor there. If you don't time things well and you miss your target, the hover menu disappears (or doesn't show up properly in the first place) and you have to start over.
All in all, it's a awful design that a good UI designer should have been able to dismiss at the design stage. It never should have made it into a shipping product.
As always, failure flows from the top, starting with Ballmer, with help from those immediately below him.
As long as Microsoft's internal fights keep shifting strategies, as long as they keep firing competent programmers who didn't happen to get management's notice that year. As long as they continue with the 90's teen nerd arrogance that seems to say, "I know better than you," they will fail, and fail, and fail again.
They need to dump most upper management, change evaluation procedures to eliminate the constant paranoia, and start acting like mature adults creating and selling the products people *want* instead of solving problems that nobody has (e.g. Metro, WPF, etc.) with pointless cutting edge whiz bang.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I think with Windows 8 Microsoft felt the need to be innovative and groundbreaking and so introduced Metro to work as a common bridge between the emerging Tablet market and the existing Desktop/Laptop market.
Had this been an optional interface I think the reaction would have been far more favourable. Had people not been forced to use Metro on the desktop, but instead allowed it as an optional "new" interface, people's reactions might have thought it cool and overtime more and more people might have adopted it favourably. But forcing it on everyone upfront was a huge mistake and it will ensure that desktop users will never like "metro".
Its going to be hard for Microsoft to recover from this, but they should make it optional sooner rather than later, at least turn it off by default on non-touch products because the new Metro overlay was simply not designed efficiently for use with a mouse.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Like the default PDF reader, which literally has me growling at my computer every time I open a PDF with it?
You cant, when noone is using your stupid, empty app store.
It is the standard desktop with a majority of users that reside and work exclusively at Starbucks locations.
If your order includes both "Non-Fat" and "Soy" there is a 93% chance you are using OSX.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
but New Coke sucked all around
According to wikipedia, New Coke was actually considered the superior taste by every blind taste-test that Coke did.
The truth of the matter is, beneath the surface, Windows 8 is a respectable improvement on Windows 7. Even as an outspoken hater of Windows 8, I have to admit this after having run both OS's side by side on a number of machines.
Windows 8 has a lot of optimization in it, so it performs better than 7 - especially on older/marginal hardware. (I suspect the effort was made in this area because Microsoft was concerned that Win 8 adoption would suffer if people decided their older machines weren't going to handle the upgrade very well.)
For example, I have an old Dell Latitude D420 here... one of the early attempts at an "Ultrabook". It only has 2GB of RAM in it, and its hard drive is a SLOW drive of the same type Apple used in the iPod Classics. It was designed for Windows XP. Interestingly, it runs Windows 8 pretty well. The slow hard drive means you have to wait a little while for it to do the initial boot -- especially if you just performed some Windows updates and it's grinding through the final stage of those during the subsequent boot. But other than that, you almost wouldn't realize you're not using it on a much newer, more capable machine.
The *real* reason most of us (myself included) can't stand using 8 is the Metro UI they insisted on bolting onto the front of it. Everyone I talk to who tries to defend Win 8 talks of the ways to patch it to boot to the Windows 7 style desktop and/or put back a START button. I'd say that's generally not a bad work-around, except the reorganization of configuration settings on the sliding side menus is really annoying too. I don't see how any of that improves the user experience. It only forces people to re-learn how to get to all the functions they've had years to get used to.
So all MS needs to do here, if they can admit they screwed up, is to back out all the Metro stuff. If they simply gave users the OPTION to run an update that allowed a "Windows 7 style" configuration for 8, or the new style -- that would be ideal, IMO. I'm sure some people do like the tiled interface and Metro apps, and there's no reason to throw out all of that code completely. Just let each user decide which way they prefer to set it up.
Yeah, 10% or the OS market is a lot of money but that's not the argument here, is it?
If 10% of all cars were convertibles, they wouldn't be considered "the standard", no matter how cool they are. If 10% of all voters were Libertarian, it wouldn't be considered the "standard" or "dominant" political party, even if they have principles and their opponent (clearly, over tens of thousands of instances) have shown they don't. And if 10% of computer users are knee-jerk Apple fanbois, that doesn't make those products the "standard" either.
Sorry, we're going to have to be able to hate Micro$oft while admitting that all Apple really does is provide an example that capitalism, in ubergeldlust mode, can wear may (ugly) masks.
"To be fair, I was left completely unsupervised." ~Anon
I'm pretty keyboard centric, however I don't have a Windows key :)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
OS X is an awful desktop.
Yes. Just like democracy is an awful form of government. Unfortunately still better than all the others that have been tried.
IT makes the suggestions. The bosses make the final decisions. I know damn well what one I wanted but they went with the cheaper one. You obviously don't work in a corporate IT department.
And while testing you guarantee it works with Firefox versions 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35... how?
How many desktops in Redmond squeal "Windows 8" when they boot up? Not counting the demo units in the lobby or the one in the lab. How many actual employees are using it day-to-day.
agree with everything except: " Apple has more cash on hand than the federal government."
The federal government has Helicopter Ben. Not even Jobs had that power.
Oooh, so scared. You obviously don't work in a corporate IT environment because you're talking out your ass. The cheapest barely working software suite is what the bosses approve regardless of my suggestion. We (before I worked here) bought one CRM and the company behind it got bought out 2 years later so all support is gone. It technically doesn't work with IE10 or any modern versions of Firefox. That's what happens in the real world in real IT departments.
You can go work in pretend land where there's infinite money, you make all the decisions yourself, and you can swap out the main software yearly.
I don't see how that's much different from what I said. IT may not even have room to make "suggestions" at all, and just gets stuck doing whatever upper management says they will do.
Even when you do make suggestions, as you pointed out, management makes the final decision, so you aren't likely to get what you wanted.
I have seen both happen. Rarely have I seen IT actually get their way in terms of what software to purchase, at least if anyone outside IT will ever have to use it.
But no, I do not work in an IT department (thankfully.)
Check out my world simulator thingy.
I spent plenty of years in corporate IT, sorry. Interoperability was always a big thing - even bigger now with smart phones and tablets and all kinds of other ways to get at apps and data.
You remind me of a guy at a local company I used to do work with here. He ran the company on an AS/400 and couldn't understand why people weren't happy getting their reports as TIFFs. I was able to get his data out of the AS/400 and into an actual database that folks could connect to using odbc from their desktops, allowing them to not only run the same reports themselves but also pull the data into Excel and manipulate it further.
It doesn't take infinite money - hell, the server I set up to run it was pulled from the trash bin (literally) and reconfigured with FreeBSD in about an hour. It went down one time in 3 years when someone tripped over the power cord in the server room.
I know how to run IT, and I also know how to explain patiently to "upper management" why it might make sense to spend an extra $10 now for longer term benefits. These are skills you should learn.
Do you have ESP?
I'd very much like to see what would happen to Microsoft Research in case the mother base plummets. There is some incredibly good stuff in there, of which Kinnect is the most viable of their short term projects - but they have equally good things going on for mid and long term. I wonder where all that IP would go if/when the ship sinks.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Yeeeeah, here's how the SDLC really works. You submit 3 CRM suites so your bosses in a presentation. You heavily favor the best one with the best reputation, widest support, and overall least pain in the ass to the IT department long term. Then your bosses pick the cheaper one anyway and quit and make it someone else's problem. Then I got hired on to replace him (yes, this is a real story, lol). Now the company behind the CRM got bought out, we never renewed our support contract anyway, and we haven't updated it in 3 years because they just want us to buy the new post-merger hybrid version that fully supports all browsers for approx 75% the cost of the initial suite.
I proposed we switch to a legendary CRM that also has a point of sale interface, stable database underpinnings, great support, great price, and getting a contract for updates and support. They bosses declined it. Now all the users and the IT dept is pretty pissed that the old CRM can't talk to our new Exchange 2010 server that we just got about 5 years later that we should have (due to budget reasons and bosses).
This is how IT reality actually is so put down your college textbook and welcome to how the IT world really works. I just got done with a contracted project at a call center that just migrated off of pentium 3 desktops with 2GB of PC133 and they chose Dell laptops that had a RMA rate of 1/5th of them in the first week. So this isn't even as bad as it gets. Also, their head IT manager just quit so now it's 1 IT to 500 employees instead of 2:500.
The same thing happened with HP/UX 9. HP tried all sorts of things, including free consulting to get customers to upgrade to 10.x, but the don't-fix-what-isn't-broken crowd kept driving their dump trucks to Cupertino. They finally ended it by pointing out that there was no way to make it Y2K compliant without breaking backwards binary compatibility.
tuppe nails it:
Having a strategy...that failed to stop *sales* of a larger range; better value; standards following; more open; platform. There are strategies against that, but they decided to swim in money instead.
Yep.. I've always visualized Apple management storing their profits in cash in huge grain silos and "diving into it, swimming in it, and throwing it up and letting it hit me on the head" Scrooge McDuck style. aww yeh.
"To be fair, I was left completely unsupervised." ~Anon
... Maybe if more people understood this we would have better government.
The people that run the government understands this and don't care.
Be seeing you...
Had a Mac. Detested it. The prob with windows is that it's getting more and more mac like every day. MS seems to be looking at mac sales and thinking that's the way to go. Not realizing that Jobs is dead. He was the driving for and marketing genius behind mac. Look at them now. While still a powerhouse they're beginning to stumble without Jobs.
If they do put the start button back I have to wonder what will be there. Just shut down / restart? Not what people are really missing. If they don't put all the features that were in the start button... well, they don't have a clue as to how bad that screw up was.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
In the case of web apps, I'd start by asking the vendor what their commitment to using open standards is and what browsers they officially test with and support. A good answer to that question would be that they are committed to using open standards and they support the most widely used browsers. Any answer other than that should set alarm bells ringing.
You can and should do your own testing on top of that. You can even stick to IE if you don't like version numbers incrementing every other week, but the important thing (to me) is not to get locked in to the point you can't jump ship to something else later down the line.
Adobe Premiere CS6 for OSX gets GPU acceleration via OpenCL. And in any case, this isn't really the deal-breaker you seem to think it is. In most cases, staff time is still more valuable than computer time. You'll be hurting productivity if you force staff off of a platform they are familiar with and onto one they aren't, even if it does mean some effects render faster.
"Apple would just as soon see OS X die in favor of iOS", and your basis for claiming this is what, exactly?
So what you're saying is that it's Apple's fault your company sucks?
Anyway, don't think you're safe just because your IT department uses Windows. You'll run into trouble when someone in the executive suites wants to do business on his iPhone or iPad. "Our system doesn't support it" is generally not an acceptable answer in these cases. Maybe you should start looking for a job with an organization that doesn't have its head firmly lodged up its ass?
No the latest versions of OS X are having the same problems that Windows 8 is having. Trying to put more tablet like interface into a desktop OS.
I actually like Windows 8. However the problem that most PC/Laptop manufactures are going into dying mode, and not really trying to innovate that much. We get a few light weight convertible tablets, but still there is a slew of standard Laptops and PC without touch screens, and they are not doing much to try to make new systems standard with them.
Shortly after windows came out, Most PC's were getting a mouse standards, pre-windows days the mouse was a toy. However during this time desktop technology was new and fresh and was happy to add new stuff to make their new version of the hardware that much cooler. Today PC's are not changing that much, and they are making the multi-touch stuff optional, just so they can appeal to the standard Slashdotter who just can't handle change.
Without Multi-touch windows 8 is a step back. With multi-touch windows 8 is two steps forward. I don't see this a new coke moment. It is just that there we are in a transition period and we don't know quite where it is going to go.
Microsoft biggest mistake is the same thing they do every time, is a complete failure in compatibility across platforms. The Windows 8 pro and RT should run the same software, even if it means it runs slower. They dropped the ball again on having platform compatibility. That is their biggest mistake.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The 'government' doesn't spend down its reserves to make up a deficit. It would affect American companies' ability to trade and would possibly hurt the dollar.
OP is not at all wrong, and it's bullish of you to suggest that a business should simply change its entire operating strategy to account for the limitations of the install base of the operating system. I worked as a CTO for a niche retail business (wine) which had certain custom measures to track in order to maintain basic levels of inventory management (e.g. multiple vintages and sizes use the same SKU). The stores had already deployed Macs for their POS due to the business decisions of my predecessor. I spent months trying to find a POS system that could handle anything beyond the "my first retail system" level. I found three retail POS systems at all. One of them we were already using -- and it didn't work, one of them was similarly barebones and locked down all of the database material so I couldn't export to something like Quickbooks, and then there's Lightspeed, which is big, costly, and spends more time and energy on advertising "It Works on Mac!" than it does providing any utilitarian function whatsoever. I gave up and installed Windows 7 on the systems through BootCamp, opening up at least 30 wine-retail specific POS systems for my pleasure.
Nearly all cross-platform software suites don't talk to one another. Quickbooks won't talk between Mac and PC. More specialized office applications and database applications won't talk to one another. There might be a FEW that will provide interoperability, though it's often buggy beyond belief, and most don't provide critical features necessary to certain businesses. Try and find an actually usable service-based POS (QSRs and restaurants). There are none. I'm sure that's because the Mac hardware is not touchscreen, which makes the OSX unusable to an entire industry.
If the general topic is about replacing your fleet of bulldozers with pickup trucks, parts commonality between the trucks and bulldozers is a pretty important metric.
Reminds me of all the self righteous blog posts by industry insiders about how average person just don't understand the elegance, and the future direction of the GUI.
The said the vocal outspoken are just loud cry babies that don't know anything, don't contribute, and just waste everyone's times.
As if removing the start button and window themes and ridding the world of "archaic" features like a program list and mouse will enlighten the common man to GUI nirvana.
Yeah, didn't happen did it.
This is exactly where the MS strategy (if this was really a strategy) broke down. A PC is not a tablet and a tablet is not a PC; unless all you do on a PC is browse the Internet, Facebook and the occasional short email, you should use a tablet (just not that Surface POS). People who perform real work on a computer need a desktop/laptop and use it very differently than they do a tablet. A touch screen is not much use on a PC. For power users who want to work efficiently it taking your hands off the keyboard and mouse just slows you down. It also diminishes one of Windows less appreciated advantages over Macintoshs - a two button mouse and the ability to right click on any UI widget and bring up its extended properties.
Win8/Metro/Surface/Window Phone - are not going to get Microsoft into the tablet market, that ship has sailed. However these horrible products could easily cause them to lose the desktop/laptop market (which has better margins anyways). The tablet market is still not settled, but it's down to Apple and Google. Personally, I prefer Android tablets - I have both an iPad2 and a Samsung Galaxy Tab and I find the Android far more useful for business purposes. The lack of a user accessible file system, the inflexibility in how you organize the UI and Apple's pissing match with Google that cause them to delete applications when you upgrade the iOS makes the iPad frustrating to use for business purposes - but that's a different topic.
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
I see Windows PC's in so many workplaces, offices, doctor's offices, etc. Most (not all) have upgraded from XP to Windows 7. These are offices where often multiple programs run at once, where productivity is king. I cannot envision Windows 8 working at all well in an office environment. Maybe, if the clerk has one application ONLY that they run, but a lot of office workers are actually pretty good power users of Windows. All this goes out the window (so to speak) with Windows 8. I have helped many new users with Windows 8, and it has been uniformly bad. I myself had a windows 8 computer for ONE DAY, and went all over the place to find a Windows 7 machine (wonderful HP Envy :)), display model, but I didn't care. I now enjoy productivity, the enjoyable Aero interface (which is actually beautiful compared to the blocky 90's looking Win 8), and easy navigation of multiple windows. With a 3 year warranty with my new Windows 7 laptop, I am set until at least Blue. Then I will decide if it is finally time to jump ship. The next move is yours, Microsoft. I will be watching.
The reaction to Vista was supposed to be Microsoft's New Coke moment, which is why many desktop users are unnerved by Windows 8 and its management.
Or here's a car analogy: Windows 8 is to Microsoft what Chris Bangle did to the 2001 BMW 7-series. I don't remember BMW apologizing for that f-up either.
Well, unlimited in theory, but in practice it is "only" limited to the EXPECTED future taxable income. Expected: They can spend money today and create an IOU and the expectation is that (hopefully because of good government investments, e.g. in key infrastructure instead of wars, which are just spending with no real ROI) the people will have more income in the future, which the government then can tax to pay back the IOU.
Anyway, even while some IOUs are being paid, you DON'T WANT the government to pay off all debts - your money IS the debt! Please read up on what modern money actually IS. A simple google search will suffice to give you enough to read for a few months. Anyone repeating this stup|d stuff about the government debt needs to get an education. What that debt DOES do - in the long run - is a redistribution of wealth, of course - from tax payers to those holding government debt.
I don't think that OSX will ever be the standard for desktops.. I use Windows, Mac and Linux on the desktop... OSX can be a bit frustrating at times, the latest most of the bunch, and if the next release is any more nanny state, I'll probably put linux on my MBP. The dock is a decent enough interface for common apps, but the Win7 task bar does most of that being able to dock certain apps... I remember liking the OS/2 PM dock back in the day, and even ran PM for windows 3.x... The unified menu is nice in theory, and it is nice having most common settings between apps in the same place, with multiple monitors it gets a bit cumbersome to have to move the mouse to an entirely different screen to access the menu for my browser (usually edit on the left/main screen, and view on the right).
Win7 is hands down my favorite desktop UI to date, it has its' own flaws though. OSX tends to have very consistent interfaces between apps, MS can't even get a consistent UI between it's own apps in the same release year, let alone 3rd party apps that do even worse implementations of whatever the MS trend of the day is. I find Linux apps to be even more schizophrenic than those on windows. IMNSHO The Gimp has the single worst UI I've ever tried to get comfortable with, and every year and a half a new initiative is started that fragments users even more.
I like OSX for it's unix underpinnings and very consistent UI between even 3rd party apps, but it's far from the best imho. Now get off my lawn.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
The problem with the "LOW MARKET SHARE!!1!!" comments is that you're talking about a company having a 10% of a market worth billions of dollars. I will take 10% of a billion dollars any day of the week.
but to roll out the "low market share" argument is absurd here when Apple has more cash on hand than the federal government.
As a consumer buying computer equipment, why on earth would you care how much money Apple has? Once you're past the low-bar threshold of "this company isn't going out of business and has enough cash to do R&D", how do their cash reserves really affect your experience in any tangible way?
I like OS X and have used it for years, but I've never experienced any personal benefit from Apple's pile of cash. It simply doesn't matter, and I've never read any convincing argument that it does. Got one for me?
Dangerous, sexy, turing complete: Femme Bots
or your could use the firefox Enterprise Support Release (ESR) that is supported for a year.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
I know how to run IT
when someone tripped over the power cord in the server room.
Those two statements are mutually exclusive. You don't know shit.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So, is there a new site we can go to that isn't ruined by this? XD
Windows ME, Windows Vista, Windows 8.
Folk-wisdom is that these were all mistakes - because they were awful, and we ask ourselves "why would you sell this P.O.C"?
But I don't think people really stop to think about that. Yes - the Coca Cola company reversed course after less than 3 months, but not because of popular backlash, because of the bottom line.
And yet - here we are on Microsoft's 3rd "New Coke".
Not least because, while PC sales may be dry at the moment, MS has a cornered market there that ensures they're going to make most of cost back simply on people buying PCs, and even if those people don't actually use Windows 8, that doesn't hurt Microsoft; infact, if some portion of them go out and buy a replacement, older, MS operating system, that's still good on the bottom line.
If Microsoft have decided not to release Windows 8 and continued development to the next version, there would be this big gap on their books and the actual development cost of Windows 9 would appear much greater.
My take is that it's not a mistake, it was a calculated gamble to manipulate the books.
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
That would only be because these Music and Media people are idiots that listen to analysts that are either predicting or demanding that Apple immediately stop what they are doing and switch over to the same business model that all the other tech companies are using.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
No. The problem with the low market share myth is that it mistakenly categorizes Apple as a software company in competition with Microsoft. Apple is a hardware company that happens to make an OS for their hardware that blows the doors off any garbage M$ could ever create.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Apple doesn't support CUDA (well, CUDA doesn't support Apple, lol)
No it supports GCD and OpenCL. OpenCL alone is a superior alternative to CUDA, couple that with GCD and OpenCL managing it all and it blows CUDA in the ground since your code can run on any number of processors and processor types (cpu/gpu/apu, the list goes on).
Its supported both of those far longer than I've owned multi-core machines, so perhaps its you that needs a time machine rescue.
I don't know a single video or audio production company around here that uses Macs anymore.
So you just don't know any then?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
That is beyond a shadow of a doubt one of the biggest problems your company has right now.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
No the latest versions of OS X are having the same problems that Windows 8 is having. Trying to put more tablet like interface into a desktop OS.
Seriously? This tired bullshit again?
The 'iOS' look in OS X ... is an application .... that isn't the default ... Other than that, there is nothing about them that 'looks' the same, though they do share a lot of the same core technologies and ideals.
Claiming OSX looks or acts like iOS just makes it clear you don't know what you're talking about and are just parroting what you heard some other zealot you aspire to be like saying.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Yes, it does, and the new launcher also sucks. An Aero-like interface is optional, but now that computers are finaly fit for it and can actualy save power using it, MS is discontinuing it...
(Here comes a very nice thank-you, MS, for suffering all the adoption problems at the conversion from CPU bounded GUIs to GPU bounded ones. The free software could ride on that to create great environments... I just don't understand why you don't want any of the fruits of that prior suffering.)
Rethinking email
Actually, Apple has very high market share with iOS. It is cannibalizing their own macintosh lines. It is possible for OSX to vanish. Windows won't because the enthusiast and gaming PC markets (themselves at least as big as the OSX market) will continue to use it - the OS is just a part to them - and those markets are still growing.
Mac sales are going down too, just so you know. It seems the general population is moving towards Android and iOS, with the majority of people using their smartphones for all their computing needs.
It also diminishes one of Windows less appreciated advantages over Macintoshs - a two button mouse and the ability to right click on any UI widget and bring up its extended properties.
Um, what? Macs have been using two buttons for at least since they starting using USB. As for properties, I'm pretty sure you can right-click and get them. Personally I use Apple-I which has been used to get properties since the classic Mac. Just like Apple-O is to open. Apple-W is to close.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Been using Windows since 3.1, and never needed to look up how to turn the computer off. Just never thought it was something you would need to Google, I thought I was missing something blindingly obvious.
Windows 7 Start Menu shows a list of recent applications with little sub menus listing all the files I opened with that program. Brilliant and simple. Also it's dead simple to navigate with a keyboard. Don't know how I can do the same on the stupid Metro desktop.
I read this somewhere else too, but it's false. Shutdown really does shutdown your PC. The proof? You need to manually enable a setting in power options to actually show Hibernate in the menu.
Google it.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
You know its bad when they consider references to BSOD better than their current OS offering.
Every single level? That's a bit over the top. I hit Windows-D to see the standard desktop and suddenly things are more familiar. When I want to launch something that I don't have a link for already on the traditional desktop, I hit windows and start to type the name of the program. It quickly finds it, I hit Enter and it launches. Maybe I'm more keyboard-centric than the average user, but I've found Win8 to be non-issue. If users are simply shown how to get away from the metro interface, it's really not so different.
Yeah...especially if you install Classic Shell*, so you don't have to ever deal with the 'Start Page' at all.
After getting my new laptop, I played around for a couple of hours, honestly trying to give the Windows 8 interface a fair shake. Sheer frustration drove me to find something that would stop Windows 8 from dicking me around, found and installed Classic Shell, and voila! Suddenly Windows 8 is useful, sleek (well, mostly) and intuitive again (as long as you don't want to work with any sort of system settings, that is...). No more jarring, uselessly-full-page-how-the-f$&k-do-I-get-rid-of-this-crap-again-aaagh! accidental mouse clicks, no more need to memorize a ridiculously long list of incredibly non-intuitive keyboard shortcuts just to be able to navigate in the basic interface, I know at a glance what applications are open or minimized and can close them easily, I have (mostly) full control over my screens real estate again, etc.
I don't think that Windows 8 performs better than Windows 7 for the most part, but it's at least comparable (and bearable) with that little bit of outside help. No way would I ever buy a standalone copy of Windows 8 in its current condition, though; it's simply not ready for production yet. If this laptop starts getting goofy, I'll throw Windows 7 on it instead of even trying to piss around restoring 8...
*That's right, forgot to donate to the project! Now where'd I put my PayPal login again? Ahh...there we go. More than worth it!
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Because one of the defining characteristics of Apple since 1997 has been its willingness to kill successful revenue-generating products now in order to secure strategic advantage with something better tomorrow. Every tech company in the world would have sold its soul to have a product as amazing as iPod, and Apple effectively killed it when iPod was selling more than ever before and making more money than ever before. The thing is, what Apple replaced it with was iPhone.
For the complete opposite, see "Microsoft"
STFU! already about windows 8 failing for being to complicated or schizophrenic. Same shit was said about 95, xp, 7, etc... I got used to the menu and it does not take more than 4 seconds to click on the windows key and find your app or application icon quickly. Like i mentioned before in other posts it took me 8 minutes to install windows 8 from a usb on my phenom x6 machine and about 40 minutes for installing the vendor proprietary drivers, than applications and apps, and finally windows updates. With windows 7 everything took me nearly 3 hours. If you want the old menu style for crying out loud go and get classical shell which is free and it has the old 95, xp, and 7 menu's to choose from.
Sorry, but they are huge in the enterprise. That's not the result of their OS monopoly, that's what caused their OS monopoly.
Home users are jumping ship from the open computing paradigm anyway. It's too much power in their hands that they can't manage. Users want the walled garden.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I use Windows 8 every day, and spend the large majority of that time on the *desktop.* Sure PC sales are flagging, and MS has to be more present in the tablet area. But the number are... anyone. Huge. They better get WITH IT! Because we Linux nerds know marketing, sales and what the people really want sooooo well. Also, when we all get into an echo chamber, the sound gets really loud! That means what we're all saying must be true! By Shona Ghosh Posted on 2 May 2013 at 11:18 Read more: Microsoft sold as many Windows tablets as all its partners combined | News | PC Pro http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/381583/microsoft-sold-as-many-windows-tablets-as-all-its-partners-combined#ixzz2SXEDxYcE http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/381583/microsoft-sold-as-many-windows-tablets-as-all-its-partners-combined "Including sales from Acer, Asus and other manufacturers, total Windows tablet sales came to 1.8 million, meaning Microsoft sold as many tablets as all of its partners combined." All you have to do is get off your asses and do the smallest amount of research to see that your positions of alarm for MS are debatable at best. I love when nerds get their panties in a bunch about an operating system that has already blown all Linux distributions into the weeds. Windows 8 is great. I think the Start Button replacement start screens are much better than searching through lists (click click click click click click). When people get used it, they'll start complaining about something else. Meanwhile, whatever PCs and Tablets with Windows and Windows RT will keep selling, way, way more than all desktop users using Linux. We should make a yearly "Microsoft is Going to Die Because _________," event where Slashdotters can carry signs that say, "The End of the World is Coming!"
This conversation is a lot of grumpy old men complaining about things changing too much.
I hated Win 8 until I saw one of my friend's kids using it on a tablet. If you haven't seen a "touch native" use it yet, track one down. This kid was great, he was doing things with shocking efficiency. His dad was telling me he wouldn't use the (substantially more powerful) desktop anymore because "it's too slow".
We are not the market segment Win 8 was built for, and we're not going to drive the market maybe ever again. This is the kind of thing we're going to need to get used to. It was only a matter of time before technology changed so substantially that even technophiles got future shock.
In the end, it doesn't matter that Win 8 is a market failure. Our first computers were DOS or Windows 3 boxes. Our kid's first computers are cell phones and tablets. They're going to want an operating system similar to the one they grew up using the most.
You setup a server in such a way that someone could trip over the power cord, and we're supposed to take your IT background serious? Really? For your sake, I hope there is much more to the story, because that's some seriously bad stuff.
You talk about interoperability as an important thing...sure, it's important on some levels. Having said that, it's hard to convince the stakeholders that they can't get the product they want because our homogenized MS environment supports it fine, but we're concerned that we wont be able to run it if we potentially decided to switch to Linux in an undetermined amount of time. I'm sure that would go over REAL well. Obviously you're correct about smartphones and tablets being game changers. The difference between the mobile revolution and the Linux/Apple revolution is....wait for it....the mobile revolution actually happened. I don't care how much you like Linux or Apple, their market share in the enterprise is miniscule.
Now, if I was developing a public facing website, I'd make damn sure that it supported every browser and device that I reasonably could.
Because nobody who uses Windows multitasks, right?
Not anymore, with 8. :(
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
CUDA is available for all of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Wish I could still mod this as troll...
No, it doesn't. Hibernate doesn't log you out, it keeps all your programs running and does what you expect it to do.
The new "fast boot" system Windows 8 uses makes it so that "shutdown" will log you out (like you'd expect) and then, rather than completely shutdown, essentially hibernates at the log in screen.
The idea is that it will be faster to load from hibernation than it would be to do a full cold boot. I'm pretty sure that this isn't true, especially as RAM sizes in modern PCs increase. I'd have to time it to be sure, but I'm fairly sure my Windows 8 PC boots faster with the "fast boot" option off than it does with it on.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
That's a punishment?
Nope. It's hidden in a small tile, which means it's been deprecated.
And on some flavours it is not even available (Win RT, Windows Phone).
Cook: We're a hardware company.
Dunkirk: But you could be software company and clean MS's clock.
Cook: Could someone please remove this Dunkirk fellow from my office?
...and right now that hardware is selling badly as natural market forces come into work, one of its options would be to sell music; books; applications and take a cut of the profits. the PC market is 1.2Billion computers.
Right now what saved Microsoft last earning was it had managed to Diversify enough, so its Windows sales drop did not hurt it short term. Google famous for selling advertising space is suddenly collecting more and more of its Revenue elsewhere (even without Motorola).
Currently Apple is simply the iPhone company...and because of that it looks incredibly weak
LOL. I was an "outside consultant" - I would have never set it up like that. The reason it was like that was that they moved the server at one point and didn't want to power cycle it. But it was outside my control.
Do you have ESP?
You setup a server in such a way that someone could trip over the power cord, and we're supposed to take your IT background serious? Really? For your sake, I hope there is much more to the story, because that's some seriously bad stuff.
I did the software setup as an outside consultant. Someone else placed the server in its room. I would have never done that.
And, if you think that's bad - I had another client one time that had their Sun e450 plugged in to the same power strip as their laptop. They nearly lost their web site when they accidentally pulled the plug on the 450 instead of the laptop one Friday evening. Oh, and no backups.
I do what I can...
Do you have ESP?
Car analogy:
BMW has a 1.8% share of the US auto market (source). BMW reported their second highest Q1 results ever last week.
Clearly, a low marketshare doesn't dictate if a company is successful or not.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Businesses don't want to be locked into one particular hardware vendor.
My Fortune-20 company buying 100% of it's laptops and desktops exclusively from Lenovo disagrees with you.
Why? Less model diversity = less configurations to support for drivers, firmware, imaging, etc. Business wants the least amount of configurations possible, because supporting all that shit for the life of the machine costs way more money than the initial hardware purchase does.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Or you can just press alt-f4 while on the desktop, just like you could with windows 7.
Everyone knows pepsi is better than coke. Linux is better than windows. Android is better than iOS.
I do work in a corporate IT environment. A God damn big one, at that.
We support Windows 7, and Mac OS X 10.8. And you know how we get around something not working on Mac OS X, that absolutely must be run on a Mac? With a concept called virtualization, from a little company called Citrix. And Citrix Receiver is definitely not being used by anyone in the Fortune 100. No, wait... practically all of them are, including the company I work at.
Macs have their place in prepress production and video edit - my company does it's own advertising layout for newspaper advertisements in over 35 of the top 100 MSAs in the US internally. Using Mac. In a completely managed environment. And our team can do it cheaper and better internally than we could by outsourcing it; proven year after year by comparing internal costs to the sales pitches from other agencies.
Oh, we also have our own television studio for producing internal associate communications and training videos. Using Mac. And we also do that cheaper than we could by outsourcing it.
Do we throw Macs everywhere, into every job role? Absolutely not - that's what low cost Windows PCs and laptops (and, by the way, Linux thin clients, which we have over 30,000 of, spread across 2500 sites) are for. Does Mac make sense for certain workflows? It sure as hell does, which is why Apple still sells them by the truckload.
Pull your head out of your ass.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
You talk about interoperability as an important thing...sure, it's important on some levels. Having said that, it's hard to convince the stakeholders that they can't get the product they want because our homogenized MS environment supports it fine, but we're concerned that we wont be able to run it if we potentially decided to switch to Linux in an undetermined amount of time. I'm sure that would go over REAL well. Obviously you're correct about smartphones and tablets being game changers. The difference between the mobile revolution and the Linux/Apple revolution is....wait for it....the mobile revolution actually happened. I don't care how much you like Linux or Apple, their market share in the enterprise is miniscule.
Let me explain this from another standpoint. Having a web site that works with whatever browser doesn't mean that I'm anxiously waiting for Linux or Apple to take over the world. I don't believe Linux is going to take over the enterprise desktop any time soon if at all, anyway.
But I don't know what's coming down the pike in IT. Just 7 years ago I don't think anybody but Steve Jobs would have truly known how much folks would be hitting web sites from phones and tablets now. Even Windows has had dramatic changes from version to version.
We're in a position now where almost everybody who still uses IE6 does so because they have some shitty software at their company that requires it. Think about that. "Interoperability" doesn't just mean "Mac, Linux, Windows, whatever". It also means "Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, etc.". This is key: even if you're just going to stick with Microsoft interoperability is just as important. People stuck on IE6 now are using a browser that isn't even safe to use on the internet and doesn't work well with modern sites, anyway.
I've also found that folks who write code that works just about anywhere also tend to write code that also works "later".
So, yeah, this stuff is important. I have to think about it a lot in my business, and I help others think about it, too.
Do you have ESP?
CUDA for Mac: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads
You are an idiot, and should stop posting.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
1) Lose your phone, you've lost your data to someone else
2) If it's in the cloud, any police agency can walk in with a warrant.
3) If it's in the cloud, access can be socially engineered by the bad guys, and your data wiped. See http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/08/07/0250248/how-apple-and-amazon-security-flaws-led-to-mat-honans-identity-theft
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
They are also alienating their core high margin markets eg Music and Media have been worried for a long time now that Apple will throw them under the bus in the pursuit of the lower margin consumer market.
Even these guys are getting somewhat skittish. The Mac Pro hasn't had a decent hardware upgrade in some time; PCs 1/3 the cost are outspeccing it now. Firewire still has a respectable niche in video and audio production, yet these all require Thunderbolt adapters now. Final Cut Pro X got the nickname "iMovie Pro" because, in a colossal oversight, it opened iMovie project files but *not* FCP projects (though admittedly they fixed this in a service pack).
Now Apple will continue to have a respectable share in this market if for no other reason that people simply don't take you as a "real" musician if you run Ableton or Protools or After Effects on a PC, despite all of these applications (and countless more) being cross platform. Depending on how Apple proceeds with OSX, this could go either way...unless production tasks become the domain of the iPad and the Lightning Hard Disk.
Hell, I'm not convinced that MS is even going to EoL XP on the scheduled date in 2014. There are still a lot of big companies (and not a few governments!) stuck on XP, and I think many of them are asking MS how big a dump truck of money they have to drive up to their door to get the expiration date pushed back indefinitely.
Thing is, Microsoft has released patches for end-of-lifed software before... But the catch is that they charge through the nose for each such update.
For example, a number of years ago the daylight savings dates changed which caused some fun side-effects in Outlook (calendar times are based on server, offset for DST. Due to the changed DST dates, calendar appointments could be off by an hour all of a sudden). The DST fix for Exchange 2003, 2007 etc. were free. The fix for Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000 was created as well, but MS charged $4,000 for it.
Just because they may fix problems for people with deep pockets, doesn't mean they'll have any intention of making them freely available to everyone.
As someone said earlier, if Henry Ford had asked, the people would have said they want a faster horse.
Win8 is a faster horse than Win7. I see engineering occurring, not creativity.
I've found in my IT work that it's often more important to look at how fast a software company provides updates to their software. For instance, if we're looking at software and they don't support the newest version of IE, I'm going to scrutinize them much more than if they don't support Chrome. If they support the newest version, I'd ask questions and do research to see how fast they were to support it. While internally, I like to give people the freedom to use whichever browser they want, it's not my job to make sure that every browser works with every web app we have. I need to make sure that the browser(s) we officially install and support are compatible. If using an app means that I can't use a secure web browser, I'm going to be pissed.
You mention examples of going from XP to Vista to Windows 7. Yes, it's important to pick software that can handle the migrations well. However, it's impossible to know what's coming down the pipe from too far away. For example, I consider the biggest migration in Windows to be the shift from 32bit to 64bit. It's a change that most people don't pay much attention to. It's done more for compatibility issues than XP to 7 ever caused us. I've had to deal with everything from software that is fully 64bit compatible, but some idiot designed the install shield setup to require 32bit on the OS before it installs. My company also used an ancient 16bit DOS app for their imaging system. Sure, it's easy to laugh at that and tell them to wake up and get something new, but when you're talking about millions of dollars of time, software, and legacy documents, it's a big deal to change it. When the software was purchased 15 years ago, it was cutting edge. They vendor had kept it running fine even with Windows 7 32bit. It just couldn't run in a 64bit world.
The point of this is, hindsight is 20/20. You can try to pick the right vendors, and vet your major purchases as much as you want. The problem is that seeing beyond a few years is very difficult for anyone to do. If you or anyone you know can spot technology trends beyond a few years out, please let me know. God knows that my stock picking could use all the help it can get.
The Entire point of Win8 was to try to leverage their massive desktop monopoly into saving their dismal mobile offerings.
The idea being that people got used to Win8 on their desktop PC, and when it's time to buy a phone or tablet people would pick the windows version because they would already be familiar with it. Metro had to be front and center and pretty much 'unavoidable' in order to push that agenda.
In addition to that, as an added bonus it would enable them to follow Apple's lead and position their own appstore with a 30% kick-back because 'of course' all app developers would want to be able to tap into the nifty new launch screen.
What Microsoft always seems to forget is that outside of the MS board room, Microsoft ISN'T cool or desirable. Never have been, never will be. Microsoft is the 'boring-but-it-does-everything-i-need' option, leveraging 30 years of legacy software support. By throwing that out the window and forcing such a radical change, they are alienating their entire customer base. A PC with dual 24" monitors is NOT the same as a 4" mobile device, and you absolutely can't treat them the same way.
I've ran into three different people last few month that started ranting to me about how they just bought a new PC but returned it to the store because they absolutely despised the operating system. People didn't like Vista either, but I don't know anyone who returned their computer over it.
just imagine the execs eyeing getting thirty percent from every CS installation.
This is likely why Adobe went this route - they can sell users a service that has feet in all ecosystems, even walled gardens.
By not charging for the software, but the service, Adobe neatly sidesteps the 30% problem. They can also now play in the OSX fenced (gatekeeper is default on) and iOS walled gardens now too.
Apple tried to prevent this with their draconian pricing/link policy a few years back, and lost, but this seems the end result - if Microsoft's Win8 marketplace was successfully entrenched, Adobe's profit would suffer greatly with a healthy 30% cut being taken out. That MS has yet to succeed gives Adobe time, but I'm betting Adobe doesn't want to be caught off guard when Win9/8blue/etc has a successful uptake of the MS app store concept.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
It appears that you don't actually do anything significant with your laptop. That's what the OP was commenting on. His experience is consistent with my own except I have used low profile PCs rather than laptops.
Macs are less thrilling once you want to put them under load.
That so called "quality" is just superficial fluff for hipsters.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Wow.
Anybody who knows business knows that they're not all alike and what works well for one can be a huge mistake for another. Things change. Tying yourself to one vendor might appear to make things easier now but will likely cost you at some point.
A few years ago, we had some folks in our IT department fuming that we weren't willing to use IE specific features to deal with certain challenges. Guess what? Several months later Apple came out with the iPad and we were able to deploy them to our field staff for use with a particular web application shortly following the iPad's release. Moving from laptops to iPads was a huge win for us. It was the right device at the time. But we didn't lock ourselves into Mobile Safari either. Now needs and the tablet market have changed. It looks like an Android device will best give us what we need for the next couple of years. Again, with little effort, we can make the switch.
The fact that some company larger than most countries buys it's stuff from one vendor doesn't mean that it will do the same tomorrow. The fact that alternative vendors exist can be used to strike better bargains even if there is little prospect for them to actually switch.
+...as far as that "less diversity" nonsense of yours goes. There's probably no less diversity available in the products available from Lenovo than any other PC vendor.
It's Lenovo, not Apple.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For being the new "standard," it's kind of funny that I never happen to come across it. I don't think "standard" means what you think it means.
I am reminded of what happened with digg. Nice free website and news site, like slashdot. They monkeyed with their interface and alienated a core group of supporters.
The very next day, usage on digg dropped and increased on reddit.
If UI changes can drive people away from a free service, what happens to people making decisions about expensive purchases?
Microsoft was not built on brand loyalty. It was built on vendor lock-in. It simply must take into account how the user community views its products because it can't count on people stick out of loyalty. I have to use it for my job. I don't have to use it in my personal life.
> He probably meant more like that OS X is becoming more of a benchmark/reference point to measure your own Desktop OSes usability against than Windows is
This is what happens when you have fanboys that just fell off the turnip truck.
If anything, the gap is getting smaller rather than larger. There was a time when Apple produced a much more robust and interesting product (than Microsoft). As they have morphed into just another PC vendor, that has dissipated considerably. The attempt by some to confuse MacOS with Unix hasn't really helped this much.
One is supposed to be based on VMS and the other is supposed to be based on BSD but the weak point of either is the proprietary user land bits bolted on the very top.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
They even sell specialty "supercomputer" boxes running Linux stuffed with high end GPUs running CUDA.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually, replacing Aero is a good thing. A nice flat interface like Windows 8 (once you shrink the godawful border widths) is better I think. Aero was too distracting. I like OSX look even better and it's even more minimal.
Windows 8 isn't even consistent with itself. Even on Windows 8 RT (the tablet-only dumbed-down version) you still have to pop to the "desktop" to do some basic operations.
One thing I don't understand is why Windows 8 shipped with such horrible default metro apps. Maybe I'm just not a big enough social-media/smart-phone/cloud fan, but these are all stupid and broken, and everything I've seen in the app store is a stupid idea too. I mean who thinks they need a completely separate app for "Sports" that is full screen and difficult to use compared to just using a shortcut to pops you to your favorite sports pages in a browser? I mean the web version of Bing is better than the Bing app, how sad is that?
Macs are easy to learn. I use on in my present job despite not using once since the "classic". If you know unix then you already know the command line. If you know how to click on icons then you'll do ok.
I like the android widgets. Time/calendar in one spot with some icons below it for example. Widgets work best if they're half the screen or less so you can see what you want and interact with it from the screen without having to open the app first. Ie a short list of your messages, your upcoming calendar events, etc.
Then you will HATE windows 8. In Windows 7 the windows key is optional. In Windows 8 you really need it due to the lack of start menu and a dysfunctional start screen.
And you can't just start typing "show me all the applications and documentation I have on my computer" and get the equivalent of clicking the start menu button.
And really, New Coke was not that bad. It failed because it was different. If people had wanted something that sort of resembled Pepsi, they would have bought Pepsi. If you've got a style that people like then you shouldn't mess with it while retaining the original name. Or at least make minor incremental improvements ("Classic" Coke tastes much different than it did 50 years go for example, even discounting things like corn syrup vs sugar).
The big problem was that Coke rammed it down people's throats and took away the old version completely. Had New Coke been rolled out alongside Classic Coke, Classic Coke TODAY would be a niche item available in 12oz 6-packs, maybe 2-liter bottles at liquor stores and large grocery stores, and if you could buy it at a gas station or convenience store at all, it would be as individual cans or retro-looking bottles in the original cane sugar formula at double the price of regular Coke.
By abolishing Classic Coke overnight and turning it into American holy water that people guarded with their lives, Coke managed to shoot themselves in the foot. As others have said, if Microsoft made Metro an optional part of Win8, and made it a free voluntary download for Win7, some people might have actually liked it. Instead, they've gotten people to hate Windows 8, and induced hatred of their phones and tablets, too. At this point, Metro has become so tainted & toxic, Microsoft is going to end up having to reinvent their phone and tablet UI from scratch yet again just to de-stigmatize it and undo the damage done by desktop Metro.
Start by realizing that the problem with soda isnt kind of sugar, its that each coke has 1/10th of a pound of "sugars".
(checks label of Coke Zero)
Are aspartame and acesulfame potassium any better?
Because I want this thread to be even longer than it already is.
The idea is that it will be faster to load from hibernation than it would be to do a full cold boot. I'm pretty sure that this isn't true, especially as RAM sizes in modern PCs increase. I'd have to time it to be sure, but I'm fairly sure my Windows 8 PC boots faster with the "fast boot" option off than it does with it on.
I've actually got Windows 8 installed at home, so maybe I'll give it a try and see. I'll report in tonight.
However, I'm not particularly skeptical, at least not for the reason you describe. First, it doesn't have to load the entirety of RAM. Second, Windows's resume-from-hibernate has always been quite fast IMO. I've compared a few configurations across both Windows 7 and Linux, and to go from a computer which is actually physically off to being on and usable, Windows resuming from hibernate was the fastest by a significant margin. I'm not totally sure that my tests were appropriate to draw a conclusion about fast boot on or off*, but they are at least cause for hope.
(* My tests would have measured the span from turning on the computer until I could get to some fixed web page in a browser. It's quite possible that the hibernated version already had the browser open.)
sorry, couldn't resist.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
That is the most praise you will typically hear about windows 8: you can basically ignore all their new features.
Yeah, that's about it for me. (I've got it on my home desktop.) I find a lot of the hooplah about metro to be overblown, and in some sense I almost don't even notice it virtually all the time. (In Windows 7 when I wanted to start a program, I pressed Win, typed what I wanted, hit enter. In Windows 8, I press Win, type what I want, hit enter. In Windows 7, I used alt-tab to switch windows. In Windows 8, I use alt-tab to switch windows. (Alt-tab works reasonably naturally even with metro programs in my experience.)) The biggest problems for me have been relatively minor annoyances as opposed to some showstopper or something that required a lot of adjustment. But at the same time... I don't really see anything compelling in the upgrade, at least for desktop use. (I did it because I needed to do a new Windows installation anyway (dead HDD) and decided to try it out.)
It's useless!!!! If they bring back the Start button that will the very first thing I disable. If they don't let me disable it I will get (or write) an app that hides it. I can't stand the Start button and anyone who insists they need it has probably never actually used Windows 8.
If I have a keyboard, I want a shortcut that allows me to write the command I want to start.
Once you use the shortcut, a list of completions of the command that you are typing should appear. The problem with the Windows 8 Start screen is that a full-screen list of completions completely obscures what you're working on. This change in visual context leads to a memory loss analogous to doorway amnesia, as another Slashdot user pointed out.
You mean Windows 8 using metro/modern UI makes it nearly impossible. But it's trivial on the windows 8 desktop.
kubuntu, you don't know what you're missing.... It notifies you there are patches, you click, and go on about your work, no reboots needed.
Hah, yeah right.
I run Ubuntu, and while I haven't done a formal study (it'd go on over too long a timespan), my informal impression is that I get a reboot-required update from Ubuntu with a similar frequency as I do on Windows.
(Actually, my subjective impression is that it's more frequent on Ubuntu than on Windows, but I think that this may be a false impression due to a measurement and psychological bias having to do with how frequently I think about updates with both.)
because with the Linux box, I hit the poser switch, pour a cup of coffee, and it's running just like it had never been shut off, all apps and docs that were open reopened and no password needed; it enters teh password itself
Huh, interestingly my Windows box does that too; I just have to click on "hibernate" instead of "shut down" when I turn it off. (You may counter that your Linux box is doing a clean boot, in which case I'm very skeptical that it would restore the amount of state which I would want.)
(Well, at least it used to. Then my video card died and I got an Radeon, and now it bluescreens on boot maybe 40% of the time. I don't know for sure because I changed multiple variables at once, but I'm guessing that's AMD's fault instead of MS's.)
As for the start menu, how many clicks does it take in Windows 7 to open the control panel?
In Windows XP, it was Win+R c o n t r o l Enter.
Windows 7 also used less memory than Vista by many accounts, plus it toned down the constantly in-your-face UAC.
Buy more monitors. Maybe you can get a 6-pack.
For this to work out as well, M$ would have to have a Pepsi-like product. On the desktop, that doesn't exist.
Might Launchpad (formerly At Ease) on Mac OS X or Unity on Ubuntu be Windows 8's Pepsi?
how many of the posters here have actually tried Windows 8 on a laptop or desktop? Yes, I think most of us can agree that the 'Metro' interface sucks on anything but a tablet or phone. All that aside, you're one click from the old familiar desktop. Just click on the Desktop tile and you're good to go. So I really think this stuff about the tiles is a bit of a red herring. You don't have to work with them. In fact, I downloaded a free tool that completely bypasses the tiles and goes right to the desktop. Puts back the Start button too. It starts up and shuts down faster than Windows 7. It has better memory management than Windows 7. They finally got UAC right. In short, Windows 8 is better than Windows 7 in many ways. It's light years ahead of XP and Vista.
What this all illustrates, for me, is that MS is possibly the worst marketing company on the face of the earth. You watch the commercials and all you see are fancy colored snap-in keyboards and people dancing around in an office. Why not just show you how the thing works? How about illustrating some of the new tile based features, for those that want them, but also showing that you can still use your computer in much the same way you have in the past? Is this the same crew that pushed out those disastrous Seinfeld ads? I swear, these clowns couldn't sell life jackets on the Titanic.
err no this is the Apple column in sound on sound the recording industry bible saying this sound on sound is where they have people who started out working with George martin on Sgt Pepper featured let a lone the CF that was final cut.
> 'Does Ballmer have the guts to admit he made a mistake and give users what they clearly want?'
It's not guts, it's arrogance, I think, that's keeping him from doing the right thing.
Reminds me of my last flight on TWA, shortly before they went out of business. We had had a horrible flight on the first leg, the movie stopped five minutes before the end, the release button jammed on the intercom so we got to hear galley noises for much of the trip, the plane was ice cold but the woman next to me was yelled at when she asked for a blanket, two flights were combined making it way overcrowded, people were bumped after their luggage was loaded, and on the second leg, the plane went back to the terminal after three attempts to get the engines up to takeoff speed, and we were told to deplane and wait for another plane. I was one of many people trying to get transferred to "anything but TWA" once we deplaned, and after establishing that TWA declined to transfer the ticket, was told by the TWA ticket agent through gritted teeth "you. will. enjoy. that. flight. ... SIR!" With the last word said sarcastically.
I vowed never to fly with them again, which turned out to be an easy vow, as they closed up shop shortly thereafter.
So is Balmer to say to us "You. Will. Enjoy. This. Version. ....... SIR." -- through gritted teeth? (Or would he say "punk"?)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
In 2004-2005 iPod was Apple's flagship piece of consumer electronics. It was making shitloads of cash, was transforming multiple industries, and was THE portable music player.
At just about any other company in the world the VP of the iPod division would have considered this internally-rumored iPhone thing a threat, and he would have used his clout as the guy in charge of The Company's Most Important Thing to have the project aborted, and everyone would have supported him because no company in its right mind develops future products that by necessity must destroy the company's present flagship products. You BURY those things. Something something Kodak, something something Microsoft, etc.
True an bigger ipad that could run abltron live would be a real plus for live users
Partially obscured background windows are often useless for both reading and interaction, so most of the time they are merely noise.
An obscured window provides a visual reminder that the document represented by the obscured window still exists, which adds context to the user's mental model of a task that involves both the frontmost window and the obscured window.
However, tablets are mostly aimed at doing one thing at once. The screen typically isn't big enough to show lots of things at the same time
Even a 7" tablet like my Nexus 7 is bigger than two phone screens. Why can't I run two phone-sized applications side-by-side? It's because the major phone operating systems' APIs were originally designed to allow applications to assume that the screen size will never change after the application is installed.
Neither of those limitations necessarily applies to a desktop or laptop system where Windows would traditionally be running
That'd be fine, except manufacturers discontinued 10" laptops in 2012 because tablets have a higher profit margin.
Honestly, never mind OS X Server. OS X doesn't cut it in the Enterprise desktop space either because it's an absolute pain to manage them at any kind of scale, or with anywhere near the level of granularity of Windows. Windows just outright wins for that case.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Microsoft is a business that is attempting to sell a rather expensive (~$100 and up) product to consumers.
What makes you think that? I was under the impression that Microsoft sold most copies of Windows to PC manufacturers.
Oh, I agree with you there. But Microsoft, IMO, lacked in the creativity department for a LONG time. I don't really look for a Microsoft solution if I'm expecting a creative, new way of accomplishing tasks. I consider MS stuff more of "staple items". About as exciting to use as a loaf of bread or carton of eggs is to buy at the store -- but just as popular and practical.
The problem they've had with products like Windows ME and Vista is an inability to deliver even on THAT. To keep with the loaf of bread analogy, it's like they discontinued their line of bread and replaced it with "New, improved!" versions which no longer came pre-sliced, had a bag that wouldn't re-seal properly, and some of the bread was stale as soon as the buyer got it home.
All I'm saying is, I think Windows 7 was honestly a good, solid OS. Sure, some people dislike it and that's fine... There are other options out there for them. But by and large, it did what it was supposed to do and didn't crash much. Windows 8 would be a worthy successor if it did nothing more than improved on performance and resource usage while adding support for some newer technologies. It was the MS attempt at "getting creative" which ruined it, a la Metro UI.
If they had refined it and geared Metro towards being a Kinect compatible interface, instead of touch, and made it optional I think they would have had a hit. Or at least a not-a-turd!
I'd have to time it to be sure, but I'm fairly sure my Windows 8 PC boots faster with the "fast boot" option off than it does with it on.
So my timings follow. I have Windows installed to an SSD, and this is running on a Core 2 Q6600.
I started the timer when I pressed the power button, let it boot, logged in and went to desktop as quickly as I could, started Chrome (via a taskbar pin), and went to slashdot.org. The first time I did it I used the settings I just have on naturally (with "fast startup"), then I turned off fast startup, shut down the computer, and measured the next boot. I was a bad experimentalist and only tried each one once.
The time with fast startup on was about 48 seconds, and the time with fast startup off was about 56 seconds. Subjectively I think I may have taken a couple seconds longer the first time, so fast startup seems to give me a 15-20% improvement in that measurement (probably closer to the low end).
That's not the whole story though. My computer POSTs fairly slowly; it was between 21 and 23 seconds from power button until Windows got to even start. If I further estimate that it took 5 seconds to log in and stuff (subjectively, neither configuration seemed to take longer at this step; that 5 seconds is a it low) and I subtract 27 seconds off of those times, then fast startup improved the Windows boot time from 29 seconds to 21 seconds -- that's a drop of almost 1/3. On an EFI system, you would see more absolute benefit as the POST time would be lower.
Of course, YMMV. In particular, I'm not sure how I would expect the time to differ on an HDD.
how they are supposed to know? i'd suggest by watching the fullscreen demo of it when you start windows 8 for the first time, that carefully shows you where they are?
I think the main reason why Apple is not interested in competing in the business world is that the business world buyers are not those that actually use the device. Apple's strength has been its focus on the people actually using their devices, and they stumble hardest with things that need to be device-independent, such as with iCloud.
This is what drove Apple's success with the iPod, then the iPhone and the iPad: instead of chasing feature lists, they concentrated on how the device would actually be used. This is especially true of the iPhone, as Apple was selling them to the customers, whereas Nokia, Motorola and the established manufacturers were still selling to the telecoms.
I do see a lot more Macs and Mac OS X in the office, but that is because developers have been able to choose their own devices recently. Those that stick to non-Apple hardware prefer Ubuntu as their desktop OS, but I must add as a caveat that I work in web development, where Posix compatibility is important for backend development, and the Mac has multiple ways to run Windows with VM's and through Boot Camp.
The fact that government "debt" isn't the same as personal debt is one of the most crucial things that people need to be aware of, especially when it comes to voting -- yet precious few Slashdotters have a damned clue about it. It's pretty messed up given how many people here claim we should restrict the right to vote to "knowledgeable" citizens in order to ensure good results...
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Mac mini. iPad mini. They also have a business reselling and manufacturing their old devices such as the iPhone 4S.
We don't buy everything Lenovo makes. We certify 4 laptop models and 2 desktop models, all models from their business lines (includes out-of-band management hardware) which makes support and maintenance of the God awful Windows driver model even possible on a large scale. We get a contract from Lenovo that says the exact same model will continue to be available until the next major product refresh comes along, so we don't get surprised by a switched out NIC or some other pain in the ass. We then match up the equipment to the user's job.
Sure, we can (and have done in the past) the same thing with Dell or HP, but when we last did our service auction, Lenovo came in with the best price / performance scores in our analysis. However, because we lock in with a contract that also includes favorable pricing, that means we absolutely will not be changing up tomorrow.
Try again.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
OpenCL has the same performance as CUDA. This has been shown in benchmarks done by the HPC folks time and again. If the application itself has poorer performance it just means it was poorly developed or optimized to run on the platform.
MS Just hit the 100Mileon licences sold on Windows 8 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/07/us-microsoft-windows8-sales-idUSBRE94603220130507 so TFA is just more MS bashing bigoted FUD
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
We create software icons and always need to follow the latest trends in UI design. When it became clear that Windows 8 would have the tiles UI we decided this was a mistake and came up with an idea to at least make the transition to the new UI more comfortable for Windows users.
What we did was to take the old Vista/Windows 7 icons and create a monochrome version of each icon. With some Javascript this could have been used for a very cool transition between the old Vista/Windows 7 desktop and the new Windows 8 style.
Unfortunately this idea never really took off (we never saw anybody use this), but used correctly it could actually come in really handy for Microsoft in handling this difficult situation.
If you are interested here is our technical page demonstrating how the transition works (some animated samples, lots of technical details):
http://www.iconexperience.com/technical/
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
I hear about the better Usability all the time, but every time I try and use OSX I get totally lost. It certainly isn't comfortable or particularly usable to me.
I posit that while there is "bad" usability, there isn't an ideal of generic usability. And there isn't an example of generic great usability in computing OSs. There are a lot of good UIs, but I'd argue they're good only within the niche they represent. And everyone has some usability blunders.
On OSX, I can't get my head around the drag to trash to unmount a filesystem - not that finding the little icon next to the clock in Windows is better, or the Linux umount, just that OSX isn't really more intuitive or usable here.
The one menu at the top of the main screen also seems strange to me. It's farther away from the window I may be working with than in Windows or Linux, so I have to move the mouse farther - also it changes depending on focus so I have to change focus before I can click on a menu option for a window. It's not a huge deal, but it certainly isn't better for someone who's not already used to it. And even when you are used to the platform's method, I can't say that one is objectively better than the other. It all seems to break down to which paradigm you are used to.
Which is why Windows 8 frankly surprises me even more. When you totally break the operating paradigm your users have, and potentially break application compatibility (like with RT and the confusion that has sown) - you force users out of the rut of doing what they've always done, simply because Microsoft is NOT LETTING them keep coasting with Windows 8. So now customers stay with Windows 7. Smart customers will evaluate Mac now as they're shown they need to re-think computing entirely according to Microsoft anyway.
Best yet, this is an unforced error. Microsoft did this of their own design. No one has been asking for a tablet experience on their desktop. Apple research bore this out with the continuing iOS vs OSX - Microsoft HAD to know this.
Getting back from my tangent, I think usability is going to end up being subjective.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
If we have $1000 to spend and that buys a crappy mac or an ungodly fast Windows PC, then no, it's not the software's fault that $1000 bought better performance on a Windows PC. It's Apple's ridiculous pricing that caused it.
Almost zero macs ship out with Nvidia cards and CUDA runs unstable and inconsistent on Macs. You are an idiot and should stop posting.
IE10 and Chrome 26 are both faster than the last Firefox ESR so then why use Firefox?
Multitouch on a small screen you carry around seems great. I don't see users interested in replacing their monitors if they're still working. Many people I know decouple monitor replacement from desktops or laptops (of course the built in laptop monitor isn't, I mean external monitors people plug in for more screen space).
So even if all monitors for sale went touchscreen tomorrow, it would take a noticeable transition period. And that's exacerbated by any price premium for multitouch monitors.
Mice were an addition to a computer setup, monitors are already there and integral. Remember, USB mice didn't replace PS2 mice in any sort of short time period. Even laser mice didn't replace ball mice. I'm sure if you could add a ~$50 thing to an existing monitor to give multitouch, it might catch on quicker if it was an obvious improvement to the computer.
Even with the hardware in place, it's not clear to me I want to try and do multi-touch with my arms extended in front of me to a monitor that (at least many cheap current LCDs) is kind of floppy so I'm worried about pushing it over... Remember, most are not designed with the idea they need to stand up to people pushing at them regularly.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
adblock noscript,https everywhere...
Firefox just has a abundance of add ons that improve the experience, while from what i have seen with chrome most of the adddons seem to be more the webapp variety. i am not that experienced with ie 10 as i haven touched ie since switching to linux
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
You said that Apple doesn't support CUDA, which is technically right, as if you called Apple about CUDA problems, they'd tell you to talk to Nvidia.
You then said that CUDA doesn't support Apple (whatever that means, since CUDA is a product, and not a support entity), which is wholly incorrect as there is a supported installation for it in my link.
Now you say nebulous subjective things like "runs unstable and inconsistent" which means absolutely nothing. Also, "almost zero macs ship with Nvidia cards" is a blatant lie, as the MacBookPro9,1 and MacBookPro10,1 (current 15" models, non-retina and retina display, Apple's top selling Mac products) both ship with Nvidia GeForce 650M. If we're talking about Mac Pro desktops, you go buy any GeForce 670 or 680 and plug it in, and it works without one single byte of software being installed to the OS that isn't already there. If Quadro is more your speed, Nvidia publishes drivers for Mac OS on their web site.
Just because you aren't able to make it work, doesn't mean it doesn't work at all. It could be that you are incompetent.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
dont worry, apple will have their day too.
Bitch you KNOW the side.. WORLD MAFUCKIN WIDE..
The problem with Fast Startup is that you never re-run startup steps so you don't clear out some potential cruft, and never re-apply startup GPOs for the enterprise users. In Windows XP and Windows 7, you can hibernate and resume many times, but eventually you have to do a full reboot. I expect this will happen with Windows 8 as well...
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Why does it seem like I'm in the majority here on Windows 8? I understand most power users hate Windows 8 - but now that the average person in my classes this semester have gotten used to Metro, they actually really like it. I think one of the biggest issues with Metro is it's use on non-touch enabled laptops and desktops. The key to Metro is touch - without it, you need something different. As far as Office goes, I have noticed I am a lot faster now using the ribbon interface than I was with the file menus.
...you can hibernate and resume many times, but eventually you have to do a full reboot. I expect this will happen with Windows 8 as well...
You "have to" do a restart once a month for patch Tuesday anyway; I didn't have any problems with Win7 hibernating and resuming every couple of days for a length of time around that long. (My AMD video driver crashes or fails to resume frequently on Win8 so I can't say the same thing there.)
Another site said that choosing a "restart" instead of just shut down discards the fast startup hiberfile (I didn't verify this, but it certainly sounds like the thing to do), so I'd expect that restarts following an update would do the same thing. (They'd pretty much have to...)
Obviously that doesn't help with your group policies, and at the same time you could get around them simply by leaving your computer on anyway.
You forget how those 2003 menus would randomly hide whatever features you want unless you hover your mouse over the menu bar for an annoying number of seconds. I still run across machines with that feature and it's amazing how long interface rage can simmer.
Back in those days, network adapters were an add on accessory. I'm not sure that having to enable TCP/IP on a machine with no network hardware is such a bad idea.
I'm anything /but/ an Apple fanboy. They've made a lot of missteps, and their software always takes a our-way-or-the-highway sort of approach (one menu bar for all apps, when I can have 9 screens? Seriously? I think it's time for mister UI to grow up. And what's this with a closed imac? What do you mean no user-upgradable memory? The old G4 iMac i had could be upgraded. I wish I hadn't bought it sight-unseen across the 'net.)
That said, as a developer, I *love* the unix-based command line. Unix tools, a command line whose width can be adjusted, a kick-ass development environment (Xcode), able to run X windows apps with a download, silky-smooth multi-screen handling, printing-appropriate fonts, the near-silence of the iMac, and the beauty of it's 21.5" screen (wish I could have afforded the 27")).
Recently, my PC died from static electricity. On a cold winter's day my jumper touched the case. Shorted the PC right out.
That was 3 weeks ago. I haven't needed to sort out the windows PC since. I got Steam on my Mac, and so I can even game on it. The hard drive I found a IDE/SATA to USB cable, and so I got all my old data and moved it across.
I don't even have the slightest urge to /pirate/ Windows 8.
The *only* thing I miss is Elder Scrolls: Dragonrim.
Microsoft has a tough row to hoe here. They're trying to ape Apple's store, trying to secure the OS, trying to be all-things-to-all-people with Surface/Metro, and failing miserably. Corporates generally speaking aren't interested in upgrading. Now even enthusiasts are migrating. I thought they had a chance with Surface/RT, but then ruined it by making sure it's completely locked and screw anyone who wants to run something else on it.
If OSX didn't do unix better than Linux, it might just be the year of Linux...but I actually want to spend time getting things done, not recompiling my kernel again and again.
At this point, not even a Start button reversal and a hand-written apology letter from Balmer would bring me back to windows, methinks.
His company sounds perfectly normal, it's "slashmydots" that sounds like an incompetent moron
I've been to a number of them myself, and I've yet to see one where the relationship between executive and IT is as disfunctional as he describes!
Why do Americans keep putting "an" instead of "a"? Idiots.
That's not supposed to be standard in America, I can tell you that. Americans who think it is fell asleep during English class.
Metro, Much like Unity, fails on the desktop for one, blindingly simple reason..
I bought a desktop pc. I did not buy a tablet. I expect to be able to use my desktop pc like a desktop pc. If I had wanted a f**king tablet, I'd have bought one.
End of story.
I am using it for nearly 7 years now.
I have yet to find a decent way to use the portage system, something that works flawlessly on Windows with Cygwin.
I have no equivalent to any of Linux packaging and developement tools nor do I have any of the GUI based options I am used to in Windows like SQL Managment Studio or Visual Studio.
Regarding everyday stuff I don't have the ease of windows and the pletora of freeware for this OS not do I have the freedom of Linux.
Why dio I have macs at home (note the plural)? Because when I bought my iMac a PC was not an option for size (small apartment) and my wife got used to it so that she got herself a powerbook.
I do my SQL stuff on a Windows 7 laptop and my code on my faithful Debian Acer notebook. And the iMac for internet.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Products are just the chuff. The real relationship is the company's PR/marketing and the customer. Any company is a viable entity not based on whether or not it makes a good product, or even a product at all...it's how well their PR department can convince the consumers that they need to send money to this company. Nike used to make good shoes. Now they fall apart, but we still pay for the brand, and not the product. We pay to feel good about the swoosh and the "Just Do It."
Products are just the placeholder for the initial buy-in. After that it's a combination of guilt, resistance to change, "brand loyalty," and the unwillingness to admit you may have made a bad purchase (which rises exponentially to the amount of money you spend.
No, it's just terrible. Better to have no computer at all than deal with the bullshit involved with a Mac desktop.