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A Serious Proposal To Fix Windows 8

GMGruman writes "Windows 8 is simply not selling, and everyone but Microsoft knows it's a mess of an OS. And the Windows 8.1 'Blue' that Microsoft revealed some details of late last week doesn't address the fundamental flaws. So a team at InfoWorld worked up a serious proposal to rework Windows 8 for both PCs and tablets that fixes those flaws and lets Microsoft's true innovations break free of today's Windows 8, complete with mockups of the proposed Windows 'Red.'"

9 of 578 comments (clear)

  1. if it doesn't include pushing more to metro by gl4ss · · Score: 5, Interesting

    then microsoft isn't interested.
    the whole point is to get people to use metro apps. to pay for metro apps. to get a cut of metro apps sales.
    thus the push towards the metro ecosystem. supposedly it would also fix problems with some malware and so forth, but the real dollar bills would be from getting a cut from everything that is run on the pc. that is a huge pie. unsurprisingly traditional sw makers are asking why the fuck should they bow to that and are moving to subscription models partially as a backup against ms possibly being so stubborn as to force sw to be downloaded from their market sometime in the next 5 years or so.

    they could easily do that if metro apps would have started to gain a lot of traction, too bad people don't like metro enough.

    the simple fix would be to ship it with possibility to multitask metro apps and to run them in windows as default features, but then people might start asking why bother with metro apps at all. it's not like it's impossible to make touch friendly apps - with esentially the same api's - that aren't constrained to running inside metro vm.

    (written on a windows 8, it's so nice that it comes with a pdf reader. too bad you can only run the piece of shit fullscreen and view just one pdf at time! and the fuck does some fucking single player games need my windows account and facebook for? ??).

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    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    1. Re:if it doesn't include pushing more to metro by RogueyWon · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The shift to a Metro UI was one of the big late-cycle mistakes that MS made with the Xbox 360 as well. The second-generation 360 UI which they used through the middle years of the cycle was about as good as anybody's managed on a console. For the final few months of its life, it actually worked really well with Kinnect's voice and gesture commands (which, sadly, couldn't be said for any games).

      By contrast, the third generation Metro UI was ugly, hard to browse with a controller and almost unusable with voice/gesture controls. It seemed to have been designed with just two purposes; maximising the percentage of the screen given over to adverts and serving as an early push for the whole "Metro" concept.

      Metro's ok for a tablet. Not great, but I've seen worse. For anything else - desktop, notebook or games console - it's dreadful.

      The whole thing has the stink of the kind of dumb idea that investor relations departments think up as something that can be pushed at less-than-intelligent shareholders. "Look, we may have missed the whole smartphones and tablets thing, but we've got a really great unified UI concept now that will let us take over the world! Honest!."

      It would only take a couple of those big institutional shareholders to get a clue and start asking a few pointed questions about the consumer-focussed parts of Microsoft to make life very, very uncomfortable for the company's management.

      But I can see no signs that's about to happen.

  2. Re:Nice objective summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Nice sarcasm. :)

    Windows 8.0 is fine, and so is 8.1. Its about time the massmedia/blogsphere found a new fly paper.

  3. Re:sales figures? by Joce640k · · Score: 3, Interesting

    According to this article they have sold 100 million copies so far: http://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/windows-8-sells-100-million-230105134.html

    Not at all bad, if you ask me.

    How many of those licenses had the disk reformatted and a pirate copy of Windows 7 installed?

    Vista had downgrade rights to XP and a lot of people used them but it still counted as a Vista sale in Microsoft's accounts. If Windows 8 had downgrade rights to Windows 7 then I bet a *lot more* people would use it than they did with Vista.

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    No sig today...
  4. Re:Works for tablets by Rob+the+Bold · · Score: 4, Interesting

    but it works realy well for tablets and touch-enabled devices.

    How nice for you. But some of us need a desktop to actually get some work done. And there, it sucks.

    I don't think it was the GP's decision for MS to (unwisely) try to unify desktop and touchscreen interfaces into one OS. He just pointed out that it worked well for him on a tablet. (And that he didn't like it on a desktop.) Why put the hate on him? You got the wrong guy. He didn't ruin your desktop.

    BTW: Hey, Ubuntu team? You seem to be going in the same direction of merging tablet and desktop interfaces . . . I hope you're studying this debacle and learning from it.

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    I am not a crackpot.
  5. Re:My solution for fixing Windows 8 by StoneyMahoney · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I bet nobody thought they'd see the day when an OS comparison favoured Vista!

  6. Re:No, it's not. by AliasMarlowe · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Lots of people, obviously. Probably millions.

    Lots of us don't care at all at home - nothing but Linux boxes: laptops, desktops and servers (2 in each category).
    However, at work it's all Windows 7[*], and probably will be for some time. Not Windows 8; we don't have any (outside the odd test machine), and likely will continue that way. In fact, Windows 8 had already out a while when I recently got a new laptop with Windows 7 Enterprise on it.

    [*] More than 10^5 laptops & desktops. Some of the "desktops" run Windows Server 2008. Our real servers run a variety of things, but more run Windows in some form or other than Linux or Oracle's bastardized shitpile.

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    Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
  7. Re:Nice objective summary by Grishnakh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well of course he has lieutenants, but they don't call the shots on major decisions, they can only advise him. Windows 8 is not something his lieutenants can just build and put out in the market without the CEO's say-so; it's such a huge thing to the company as a whole it had to have his approval. Plus, part of the impetus for Win8's Metro interface is this crazy idea of having a single UI across all devices, and that's something that spans company divisions, and again, would require CEO approval. Ballmer certainly isn't involved in every little detail of everything MS does, but for the really giant decisions like this, it's unfathomable to think he didn't at least take a look at it and sign off on it. And if you buy into hairyfeet's theories, Win8 is probably largely a product of Ballmer's insistence of trying to one-up Apple, because he's pissed that they got so popular with phones and tablets when MS's efforts in those spaces (which predated Apple's by many, many years) were all so lame and unsuccessful.

  8. Re:Windows 8 IS a success!!! by 0123456 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I believe you'll find OEMs are buying Windows 8 licenses and 'downgrading' their machines to Windows 7 instead. Everyone I know who's bought a PC in the last few months has bought one with Windows 7 because Windows 8 is an utter disaster.