Slashdot Mirror
Windows 9 Already? Apparently, Yes.
Nerval's Lobster writes "A little over a year after Microsoft released Windows 8, and a mere three months after it pushed out a major update with Windows 8.1, rumors abound that Windows 9 is already on its way. According to Paul Thurrott's Supersite for Windows, Microsoft will begin discussing the next version of Windows (codenamed 'Threshold,' at least for the moment) at April's BUILD conference. 'Threshold is more important than any specific updates, he wrote. 'Windows 8 is tanking harder than Microsoft is comfortable discussing in public, and the latest release, Windows 8.1, which is a substantial and free upgrade with major improvements over the original release, is in use on less than 25 million PCs at the moment.' Microsoft intends Threshold to clean up at least a portion of Windows 8's mess. Development on the latest operating system will supposedly begin in late April, which means developers who attend BUILD won't have access to an early alpha release—in fact, it could be quite some time before Microsoft locks down any new features, although it might double down on Windows 8's controversial 'Modern' (previously known as 'Metro') design interface. Yet if Thurrott's reporting proves correct, Microsoft isn't abandoning the new Windows interface that earned such a lackluster response—it's betting that the format, once tweaked, will somehow revive the operating system's fortunes. With Ballmer leaving the company and a major reorganization underway, it'll be the next Microsoft CEO's task to make sure that Windows 9 is a hit; in fact, considering that rumored 2015 release date, shepherding the OS could become that executive's first major test."
I'm waiting for 9.1. Don't want to be first in the pool.
The H/W support and other features of Windows 8 were completely overshadowed by the interface. Fix the interface and maybe MS gets a third chance.
Windows 20 is planned for next fall.
Write a good clean seperation for the launcher and let app developers go to town, like they do on Android. Let the best one win, and incorperate its fearues as the offical one.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Knowing Microsoft, this is what they're going to do:
- Remove Right-Click capability
- Remove all menu bars and hotkeys
- Require SuperAdmin privileges for everything from resizing a window to shutting down the computer
- Make MSOffice 100% touch-screen compatible, removing all mouse compatibility
- Make ribbons 60% bigger
- Remove ability to save over existing files
MS shouldn't create any new versions of Windows O/S. It should take Windows 7 and make it a subscription-based product. Pay $50/year and MS will maintain it in its current form forever. It has everything that it needs to have - all it needs is ongoing support for bug/security fixes. No more churn on hardware. No more churn on software. Just make Windows 7 the new standard so that any investment into hardware/software for Windows 7 is never thrown out and make Windows 7 rock solid. I would happily pay $50/year to have the O/S locked down and put into maintenance mode in perpetuity.
As long as Windows 9 has metro is won't a hit. Microsoft doesn't seem willing to change any major issues people have with 8/8.1, Windows 9 will probably turn out to be is a bunch of little fixs, basically 8.2, but with a huge price tag.
Proper high-DPI support would be quite important.
Drop the Metro/Modern interface, and focus on the desktop for business use - that is where Microsoft has always had it's strongest showing. If they don't, and insist that it's all touch, all Metro, all the time, they have just ceeded the business desktop to the Linux variants such as Mint and Ubuntu.
Metro on servers is a big turn off but MS will be slow to accept that server admins have different GUI needs. Sure core is catching on some but the GUI users will stick around until forced to use powershell.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Windows failed to learn a lot of the lessons that iOS and Android could have taught it. It failed to learn the lessons it should have from GNOME 3. It failed to bring the Internet to the desktop in a way which hadn't been tried in Windows since Windows 98.
Windows 8 finally brought us a managed application repository with automatic updates, monetization features, etc but only for modern UI. The Desktop apps were still their own special snowflakes stuck in "Don't accidentally a toolbar" install and update hell.
Windows 8 has tight integration with cloud services, but those are limited to only services and features hand picked by Microsoft and (last I checked) has no openness for third parties to integrate in the same way. GNOME 3 on the other hand, has lots of integration with various social and cloud services. Sign into Google for instance and your Google Docs are available in your Docs folder, your contacts show up in your Contacts app, your Google handouts get routed therough Empathy etc. Windows 8 does this for Facebook and Sky Drive but, again, only in the Modern UI.
Windows 8 Modern apps are firewalled from Windows 8 Desktop apps. Do you have Skype? You have two Skype apps. Do you have a chat client? You have two apps again. The same app on Android can run on everything from a wrist watch to a Television supporting tons of different input paradigms ALMOST natively (the developer has to do some basic UI legwork of course).
As a consequence of the previous point, lots of services (push notifications, application lifecycle management, etc) are available ONLY in Modern and not on the Desktop. Desktop apps still need to manage their own networking state and messaging. Many of the native applications were rebuilt as Modern full screen apps and their desktop equavalents were removed. The most galling is the Photo Viewer. If you open a picture in Explorer in the Desktop, all your windows go away and the image takes up the full screen.
In conclusion, Windows 8 problems don't stop at the Start Screen and framing the Start Screen as the biggest and only problem fundamentally misses what Microsoft did very, very wrong. Microsoft did not TRY to bring modern cloud technologies to the desktop. They ported their tablet OS to the desktop and stopped there.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Unfortunately, the disaster that is Windows 8 can in no way compare to Vista. Vista's shortcomings primarily came from a sloppy implementation of user-land, a bloated and sluggish system, and poor driver support. The UI was a fine improvement over XP, and most of the issues Vista had were fixed with updates over time.
With Windows 8, the desktop environment has fundamentally been changed. They created an OS designed around tablets, and then shipped it to desktops and laptops. They're betting the farm that if they introduce their tablet OS on the desktop, people will--in the long run--go with Windows tablets and Windows phones because it's what they'd be used to from their desktop/laptop. In short, MS has been convinced that their salvation lies in leveraging their desktop monopoly to make their tablets/phones more popular.
Of course, the underestimated how shitty and terrible trying to use a touch interface is an a desktop environment. The end result is that anyone with a clue is avoiding Windows 8 like the plague. They need to go back to classic Windows (Here's a suggestion, name Windows 9 "Windows XP 2" since everyone liked XP), and just acknowledge that the desktop environment will never go away, but it will also not be as ubiquitous as it once was.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
They should call it the "this is it" version. Make a grand video of the rehearse of its pre-release beta version. Hire a tech doctor to put it to sleep with anethesia. Have a great big media trial and debate. Then admit it's dead.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Microsoft stated with Windows 8 that they'd be moving to a far faster release cadence. What's with the surprise? The version number change... or? The title says it all - Windows 8 was released a year ago, windows 8.1 3 months ago. If they're going to get Windows 9 out the door anytime soon to follow the faster release cadence they'd HAVE to be working on it already. They probably started the second that Windows 8 shipped. Since everyone here appears to have a ridiculously short memory, let me remind you what was stated at Build 2013:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57591154-75/microsoft-moves-from-short-twitch-to-rapid-release-at-build-2013/
Oh joy a new set of incompatibilities and endless upgrades and updates await. Windows 8 broke a lot of desktop apps and 8.1 did the same, especially in the AV camp. Let's hope 9 at least maintains backward compatibility for app users otherwise it's more pain than it'll be worth.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Most people use Windows for one of those two things: gaming or business.
Make the following:
- Windows 2015: Gaming Edition, optimized for games, no useless services running in the background, only the bare utilities to help setup/add hardware easily.
- Windows 2015: Business Edition, optimized for business applications with strong support for emails, calendars, networking, etc.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Take away all hardware purchased/built prior to 2011. The longevity of hardware purchases is the real culprit. People no longer feel compelled to upgrade their hardware every three years (give or take). Outside of the gaming community and niche video/photo workers, what does the average person do on their pc that one from 2007 can't handle?
That happens to be Microsoft's biggest problem.
They had a really hard time convincing people that they needed more than XP, and they finally got it right with 7, when a decade did make XP clunky for modern hardware.
Barring some industry revolution, convincing people that 7 is outdated is going to be near impossible, for at least another 5 years.
It works, and has all the features that any non-geek needs.
...since Microsoft want's a new "APPS" business model and consumers like me just want a fast, reliable operating system. These two don't get along very well (IMHO).
+ 10% more pink on everything. Can't go wrong with pink.
The point of a new Windows version is to generate revenue for Microsoft. Hope this helps.
With Windows 8, the desktop environment has fundamentally been changed.
Basically they created a start screen instead of start menu.
Oh ya, the start screen can also run these other apps which you don't have to use.
They should rename it Window 9, and drop the 's'. No more multiple windows. This is the design choice Microsoft has made. They've dropped the feature that made people want to use Windows and force a single Window format on users. They've dropped their namesake feature. It's ridiculous.
So why is everyone acting so surprised when they keep following this trend?
Vista's problems, by and large, were under the hood. It was still the old Windows 95 desktop paradigm with some new bells and whistles. The suckage came from poor driver support and suboptimal systems having "Windows Vista Ready" stickers be stuck on them. We have a bunch of Windows Vista SP2 workstations in our organization, and they work perfectly fine.
In fact, by and large the suckage of Windows versions has been under the hood. Windows 95 was slaughtered by stability issues, as was ME. The suckage in Windows 8 is of a different variety. For the first time since Windows 95 they've made major alterations to the GUI. Heck, let's be blunt, Metro is an entirely different GUI based on a pretty different paradigm, and switching between the "classic" desktop, which has been with us since Windows 95 and the Metro UI is jarring and incoherent. Worse, once you're in Metro, it's just a gawdawful UI that makes one pine for the days of Windows 3.1. Even if you look to the transition between 3.1 and 95, by and large the Windows 95 GUI is an extrapolation and enlargement of the older Windows 3.1/Presentation Manager model that had been around since OS/2. Metro is just plain alien.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Just calling the new release "Windows 9" isn't going to do the trick. They need to listen to what customers, especially power users and enterprise administrators, are saying. Grandma has already moved on to an iPad and she doesn't spend much money anyway; she's a lost cause. Forget about pandering to the lowest common denominator. Stop trying to beat Android and iOS at their own game. Emphasize that Windows is a tool while Android/iOS is a toy. Windows is what people use to get work done. That means a renewed focus on the desktop. Because, let's face it, if you're willing to ditch the desktop and legacy compatibility, you might as well ditch MS altogether.
Specifically, Microsoft needs to make it possible for desktop users to never see, or interact with, Metro. Yes, I know they want us all with touch screens and buying apps from their app store, but it isn't going to happen. All they are doing is alienating their most important customers. Bring back the real Start Menu so that people who have been using Windows for 10-20 years aren't confused and baffled by the new interface. (Remember that many people who use Windows at work are not technically oriented. Re-training costs money, and IT departments often don't have it to spend.)
Also fix the little things. These are important. An example: After using Windows since 1995, my eyes are used to seeing the title on the top left side of the window frame. Win8 centers it, for no good reason other than some designer's dubious sense of aesthetics. That completely breaks my eye-tracking and costs a second or two every time I have to look at the title. It doesn't sound like much, but little things add up, and minor issues of fit and finish are often the difference between a successful product and an unsuccessful one.
Its amazing how nobody at Microsoft seemed to realize that if they forced Metro on people and people didn't like it, that would harm their phone/tablet sales rather than help them.
If I hate it on my desktop PC (where it sucks), why would I want it on a tablet?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Good name. An even better name: Tipping point.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What I see that makes Windows 8.1 [1] an upgrade isn't the UI changes. There are some nice under the hood features. The annoying wait for chkdsk to finish is gone, because it can be run while a volume is online to find broken index nodes. BitLocker can be used without a TPM to ask for a password, similar to how TrueCrypt functions on boot. It is easier to blank out a PC completely if handing it to someone else ("reset" option, choose to blank the drives, let it erase and reinstall,) Windows Store apps function in their own jailed space, which helps security, and so on. None of these features are really what a lot of users care about, but with a third party program like Classic Shell, W8 or W8.1 can be made decently usable.
So, all things being equal, and if Classic Shell does make up for the new UI quirks, moving to W8.1 is a good thing to do just due to the fact that it is coded for more recent threats. This isn't as bad as the XP days where an OS made in 2001 is trying to handle threats in 2014, but using an OS with security designed for more recent threats as opposed to having it strapped on can be the difference between reading about the latest version of Cryptolocker going around versus having to pay the Cryptolocker guys several BitCoins.
[1]: Well, in my case, Windows Server 2012 R2, just because the server version of wbadmin is one of the best and simple backup utilities out there, and server editions install as little of possible by default, so it tends to have less useless cruft than a client.
Clippy will be reborn!
Someone you trust is one of us.
Making their desktop/laptop users hate Metro is not advancing their phone/tablet cause. It's the opposite. Nobody who has a bad experience with Metro on their PC is going to go looking for it in another environment.
They needed to make using Metro painless on PC for that strategy to work, and they failed in spectacular fashion. It's time to give PC users what they want and make Metro a secondary thing in that environment, because it simply works badly on PC and forcing it hurts their other product lines.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Why is this a surprise? Company releases current version, starts to work on the next version. Heck, in many cases work on the next version starts even before the current version is released.
Make a desktop interface which is optimized for the desktop and is substantially better than anything that exists now. Look at all the academic research, and take years to adopt and polish it. Demand excellence internally and never believe your own BS.
Heck, even NextSTEP from 1990 is a better zeroth-order start.
In a nutshell: work on something truly great for your customers. Not for your delusional marketing requirements or internal power point power plays, e.g. "mobile and tablets are the future, and so we need to privilege their interface everywhere because we want Windows Everywhere."
Steve Jobs wasn't stupid enough to put a little microscopic Mac on the iPhone. The previous horrifying Windows Mobile 5 made that mistake, a miniature XP with a stylus on the phone. Microsoft still didn't learn!
One simple check box could have saved the computer industry including Microsoft hundred of millions in lost sales. - Windows 8- boot options: [ ] Metro OR [X] Desktop - Click OK to restart with the new settings
We are using windows 7 at work, also macosx and linux, but the windows machines are running windows 7, almost no windows 8 almost no windows XP.
And now Windows 9 is showing... tell me why should I upgrade my windows 7 machines ? The faster they release the less I want to upgrade. I prefer to wait until the dust settles. Even the users can understand this. Windows 7 have become a comfort zone.
That's very true. I'm mildly interested because this will tell us what direction Microsoft is going and whether they learned anything from the mistakes on Windows 8. If 9 is still 8 with some minor improvements, this reinforces my deathgrip on Win7, and what I recommend to users. But if 9 has what purports to be the performance improvements of 8 (which I never got to test, as before I had figured out how to make it work, I realized I didn't care anymore and went back to 7) and a reasonable KVM-centric GUI paradigm, then not only does it become a candidate to upgrade Win7 boxes, but it becomes a panic upgrade for Win8 boxes.
There needs to be conventional analogs (read: actual menus) to those funny bars that are swiped in from the sides, because you do not swipe with a mouse. Conveyance needs to be improved -- it should be obvious what is clickable and what isn't. And -- feel free to scatter admin tools throughout the touch menu system; I don't care. But every single thing I need to do to a machine had better be in control panel. The machine should detect the absence of touch hardware on boot and automatically boot into desktop -- a real desktop, with a real menu system, not that retro-DOS "just type the command".
If these things happen, I mean, *really* happen, not just a "start" button that takes you back into touch-only mode, then sure, I'd consider Windows 9.
Parenthetically, someone I know that actually likes Windows 8 (there are a few) said that she puts up with the confusion because on her laptop, she can see those big squares in Metro mode, whereas she couldn't really tell the icons on her desktop apart in Vista without her reading glasses.
This got me thinking... does Metro look like that because.... Gates and Ballmer have gotten... OLD? Because big splotches of color are easier for old tired eyes to see? Are they flat because elderly eyes can't distinguish shading? Is Win8... the GERIATRIC OS?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Like netflix chaning their nice listing format to movie art. It takes me so much longer to find the movie I want by looking at box art rather than scanning title names.
My wife's grandmother was having computer trouble so I agreed to look over her PC. Unfortunately, it was running Windows 8 in Metro mode. Though I pride myself on my knowledge of computers, I couldn't figure out how to locate anything. It seemed like every step of the way, the computer was actively preventing me from finding tools that would have diagnosed the problem. It was like the OS was designed to be "so easy grandma can use it" to the point that they didn't even think that someone knowledgeable in computers would need to use it. Finally, I managed to escape from Metro-ville and fixed her problems. It turned a five minute job into about a two hour job, though.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
There was Windows "Millennium Edition" and there was also Windows 2000 -- Now, before you say that Win2K wasn't a "consumer" OS, it essentially was because a lot of people Upgraded to 2K not from NT but from Win98. And XP was the first merge of the 2k and "consumer" windows codebases, which is how we wound up with XP Pro, (there was never a Win98 Pro, for example)...
Anyhow, my point is; you make it seem as if this is all cut and dry, like MS is following a master plan, but the history of Windows releases is a little more complex and convoluted.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
This. Even if Win8 comes with the funky UI, I'm still mostly happy with the quality of software Microsoft puts out these days. In the past their stuff was unstable, bloated, and had major security problems. These serious problems have now been fixed for the most part.
Yeah except the start screen, although taking the whole screen, contains less options than the start menu. I understand for tablets, big fingers, small screen but not for a desktop. I don't use it anyway I just use search to find the program.
I think people at MS realized this. I think management doesn't care. They are going to force the Metro UI on customers whether they like it or not as this is the only way they can think of catching up to Android and iOS.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Metro isn't a bad UI in itself. The problem is how it is currently implemented on the desktop.
First, of all the default Metro apps, not a single one matches the functionality of their desktop equivalents. That alone is enough to sink it, especially when it took me less than an hour after first installing W8 to find something that I needed the old application for (the Music app lacked workgroup support, and I wanted to play some music stored on my laptop). If your default Metro apps are less functional in a concrete and quantifiable way than the old Desktop apps, then Metro apps in general get a reputation as being underfunctional and dumbed down. It doesn't matter that your Music app works just as well, even better, than the Android music app or the iOS version of iTunes - on the desktop, it's fighting WMP and all the third-party apps like VLC and whatnot.
Second, you shouldn't have two different means of interaction. We knew this even back in the CLI->GUI transition - DOS prompts, and later the "command prompt", were encapsulated in windows because everything was being done through windows.
There's two ways this could be done. The simplest, and perhaps the most popular, would be to simply let Metro apps run in a window (or something interacted with like windows). Yes, Metro apps look different than Desktop apps, but who really gives a shit? Counting the windows I have open right now, at least four have their own distinct UI paradigm (Thunderbird, GTalk, Steam and PuTTY), plus several that differ from Windows norms in subtler ways (including Microsoft's own Media Player).
Or you could double down on Metro's tiling, and make Desktop apps run in Metro tiles instead of in the traditional windows. If you designed it right for the desktop, this could be perfectly fine, maybe even better than the desktop. But you'd have to design it for power users to be able to use, because the casual computer users are slowly switching to tablets or laptops. Don't run things fullscreen unless it's a small enough screen - let us configure layouts we want on each monitor, switching them as needed, and just "drop" apps into the spaces. Add virtual desktop support, so I can emulate having six or twelve or thirty monitors instead of three, and I'd basically have my current work setup, with slightly more space (lack of window borders+UI) and without having to manually set up these layouts.
In short, having *two* UIs makes users choose between the two to find one they prefer, using the other only if forced to. On the tablet, they went for Metro because it was more tablet-oriented and the only Desktop app of note was Office. On the desktop, we went for the classic UI because its programs worked better and because most of us have enough display real estate that using fullscreen apps for almost anything is wasteful. Instead, go full-on with Metro, but give us variants (I'd go with Phone, Tablet, Laptop and Workstation, each slightly tailored for that device class) so that our *experience* fits what we're using.
That's really the short version of it - they decided to bundle API, UI and UX, and they failed because those things don't actually have to be bound together.
The windows 8 kernel is great! ... yeah yeah we all hate Metro.
But I run it on a Windows Phone. The kernel on the Windows phone is identical to Server 2012 and the Xboxone. It is quicker than my older Android one, lite, responsive, and has low cpu utiliazation. MS really did cut out many millions of lines of code with Windows 7 from the XP days to make the kernel as small and modular as possible. It is not a micro kernel in any sense of the means but its latency, size, and other issues with responsiveness and power usage right now have Linux beat.
Linux is really complicated with calls all over the place.
http://saveie6.com/
Early adopter here -- it came pre-installed on a notebook.
What I eventually realized is that MS is now supporting 3 separate UIs, all with quirks, and all with separate design philosophies.
The classic, window-based UI has been evolving over 15 years; it's straight-foraward, if cluttered. Start button; apps binned to the task bar; random crap on desktop; text-based menu bars; high contrast, colourful design elements.
Ribbons in Office. Similar to windows, but it replaced the menu bars with ribbons. More customizable than the menu bars, but my old eyes find the muted colours, grays on white, and small icons troublesome, especially in Outlook. Runs exclusively in classic UI.
Metro -- which actually comes in two flavours, touch and keyboard / mouse. The touch interface isn't bad, although I personally find it a pain to sort through open apps. But ... I find it hard to stay in Metro. Open up the calculator app, and you end up with a full screen calculator that looks STUPID on an 18" monitor (similar calculator on a 4" smartphone looks great, mind you). Open up Outlook? Back into classic. Further, the apps themselves feature scrolling vertically and horizontally which is ... disconcerting. If there's a pattern as to the reasoning behind H v. V scrolling, I don't get it. While the tiles themselves are colourful (a reference to the classic UI?), the apps are back to scroll bars that are grey on white (Office?). And the Music app is mostly black / grey / white. Weird choice, that, since it removes a design element that can highlight useful information. And, having a whole bunch of live tiles scrolling information on an 18" monitor is distracting, not illuminating.
But Metro with a keyboard and mouse? I know it can work ... but "put mouse in corner and pray" seems like a poor design choice. Further, I'm unaware of any helpful hints within the OS itself about how to use keyboard shortcuts. Seriously, MS made one of the most counter-intuitive UIs I've ever used with a keyboard and mouse, but did an outlandishly poor job of introducing it. First impressions last -- and if the first impression was "rage", good luck to you.
And, finally, my grousing aside, but if MS had released Win 8 with useful, clever, and outlandishly cool apps, we might not really be having this conversation. Instead, MS has my geographical location (Toronto, ON), but the installed apps gave me news, sports and weather for NYC (seriously, they got the country wrong?). Again, it's small -- but it would've been a nice touch if the apps tried to have a local flare because, frankly, I don't care about NYC. At all. The other apps? Music is interesting, especially since it includes free streaming (something of a big deal in Canada), but the interface blends local libraries with cloud streaming not-quite-seamlessly. The other apps, like mail and calendar, suck.
Win 8 is a deeply weird beast. It's fast. It's stable. And I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, especially if you're wedded to Office. The weird blending of multiple UIs is, plain and simple, goofy.
Looking back at my comments. What I think I would like is a small, tablet-sized second monitor for running Metro, connected to my desktop. I'd have whatever I'm doing on the classic desktop open, but could easily glance over and see Twitter updates, incoming e-mails -- a lot of things I use my iPhone for. Weird thing, that.
The only advantage I can think of for Modern UI/Windows Runtime in Windows 8 is that it lets you buy an app once and run it on both your Windows RT tablet and your desktop PC.
Hallo,
A comment from someone who just was learning about computers then, so take this with some salt...
One basic problem about Windows Me is that its timing was wrong. We all heard about the crash happenings of Win 95. Win 98 was a decent effort at least to tidy all that up. Not perfect, but you could see that someone tried. My first comp I learned on was Win 98.
The problem was, behind the scenes someone started a "skunkworks" second dev track based on the Win NT line that was at that time much more stable. Then they managed to get hold of the legendary Dave Cutler who poured himself into it all, and basically stamped the Win 2000, which when tweaked, became the Win XP that we all argue about today.
Win Me was a last left over holdover from the Win 98 codebase without all that extra hardening in, so it ran up against too many things that had been solved on the other dev track from Win 2000 / Win XP.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Microsoft themselves stated that they're corporate goal is to migrate away from the software business to become a device and service company. This plan means pushing people to the tablet as the delivery mechanism and the proverbial "cloud" as the platform. Microsoft sees the desktop PC as a dead-end and wants to be the one that drives a stake through it's heart - the future is software as a service and thin (razor) clients.
In that light, the dichotomous UIs of Metro and the Windows desktop make sense in an agenda where they want to slowly deprecate the desktop entirely. Once Office is migrated from the Windows platform to the Microsoft cloud platform, the desktop version of Office will also be deprecated. Users may not want the Microsoft, but, heck, if they do it sufficiently gradually enough, users will acclimate to the new world order.
I think this is one of the sources of friction between Microsoft and OEMs like HP. The manufacturers business models aren't aligned with Microsoft's objectives. I suppose the reason that a number of those vendors showed Android - Windows hybrid devices at CES wasn't because the vendors though anyone would be particularly interested or that it was a good idea, it was more to demonstrate that computer manufacturers would be just as happy (if not more happy) to jump in with the Android or ChromeOS camp unless Microsoft starts making certain concessions to them.
I see it going one of two ways: Microsoft succeeds and the Windows PC becomes history and long-time Windows users find themselves software subscribers with dedicated mobile consumption devices, or Microsoft shoots itself in the foot and stumbles about while the rest of the world grabs the Android / ChromeOS ball and runs with it. At this point, I think it's increasingly Google's game to lose rather than Microsoft's game to win.
I had the consumer preview version a few yrs back. After not being able to escape from metro for entirely too long, I uninstalled the OS and sold my MSFT stock.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
The problem with Windows 8 is not entirely the UI. It's "apps". Microsoft has a vision of "apps", which they've outlined to developers. "Apps" don't cost much, don't do much, and Microsoft gets a cut of the revenue. "Apps" are usually written in Javascript/HTML/CSS. All core functionality is provided by Microsoft. It worked for Apple on the iPhone, after all.
"Apps" which have Big Data do the big data in the "cloud", preferably on Microsoft servers. This has gone further with businesses than one might expect. Many cash registers are now "cloud-based". This is the future if vendors have their way.
All your base are belong to us.
I've always^H^H^H^H^H^H often been told to ignore people that talk in absolutes. I have quite a few problems with Windows 7. Most of them are fixable, but it's a pain in the ass. Also, someone at MS keeps resetting my registry settings that turn off libraries because they feel like forcing it down my throat on OS Updates for some reason.
Fixed that for you. -- Now people can pay attention to your post.
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
No, you have to be at least 13 to register an account.
"Good things don't end with eum, they end with mania or teria." - H. Simpson
Honestly, I think this argument can be put to rest. The sales figures do not lie.
While It's nice for you that you are happy with Metro, the interface is not moving computers off the shelves. There are a lot of people who will risk staying with XP, and the security risks that go along with it, rather than switching to Metro.
Windows fan boy or not, there is no arguing that MS has built a flop. Time to move on. The train has left the station.
Apple carved out a new frontier in the small touch screen market with the iOS interface. Then Android came along and also did well in the small touch screen interface market. However, both of these OS's left their desktop version (OS/X and Linux whatever) behind. Different modes of interfacing with hardware drove different interfaces.
People were happy using a traditional desktop on the desktop (Windows was the clear #1 here), and a new interface on their small touch screens. Could you find a few odball users? Sure. For the most part, however, people seem to have no problem using more than one interface. Each interface suited to its environment.
The idea that everyone wants one interface is a problem that does not exist, and is not looking for a solution.
Compared to Windows development, Linux is like going on vacation, Windows is like standing in a crowded airport for hours with no direction, help or reason.
Will they bring back the start button.
They spent ~20 years training a generation of business computer users that the lower left corner is where to go for the menu.
Their UI was so ubiquitous that they got a key added to almost every keyboard manufactured.
And then for no apparent reason they decided to change it. /governments/ large offices
UI design shininess should really take a backseat to legacy.
When will microsoft realize their real customers are businesses
They aren't going to get the new OEM computer market that they have had in the past because people aren't buying new computers.
They need to adapt to the changing market and their attempt to remake themselves as a integrated tablet environment has failed spectacularly.
Continuing a 3 year release cycle with drastic changes each time requiring huge amounts of emplyee training and modification of legacy apllications is going to kill the business market too.
Sometimes I feel a little sad watching the Redmond death spiral and waiting for the year of the linux desktop.
A complete redesign from the ground up. I'm talking about making it look more like Linux, but with Windows' support (i.e. everything "just work" 90% of the time). Why is C:\ still the local disk that houses the OS, for example? If they just keep building on top of the same system and adding on to it, eventually Linux will leave them in the dust (specifically when it becomes much more user friendly). Seriously. Just redesign the whole thing to make more sense from a management and browsing perspective (among many other things). Off-topic: Can someone explain to me how to make line-breaks on /.? Shift+Enter and Enter do not do it.
Welcome to the year like 3000 BC. What the hell? Give the customer what they want and they'll buy it. I think the Greeks knew that. Hell, let's back it up because I bet Sumerian shop owners knew that. Get rid of that awful interface and release Windows 7 with some fancy new modern features that work. Stop mentioning "Xbox" on corporate desktops, get rid of the mobile-y app store garbage, and give people a normal computer that works like a computer.