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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.
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
Proper high-DPI support would be quite important.
I've always said that the purposed of Windows 8 was not the interface, it was the introduction of their 'App Store'. They want the same think Apple has with iOS (and to a lesser degree, OSX); they want a cut of all sales and the ability to dictate what can be installed. It will be interesting to see if either the interface or the app store goes away ... I'm betting the interface will go before the app store does. I'd say I hope I'm wrong, but I don't. The more they lock users and development shops out, the more will join Valve on Linux.
In the mean time, Stardock's ModernMix does exactly that (run metro apps in a regular window). Combine that with their Start8 app and Windows 8 is a perfectly comfortable experience for a Windows 7 user.
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/
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.
- Windows 2015: Gaming Edition: Get a SteamBox! ;-)
- Windows 2015: Business Edition: Get Windows 7
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.
The problem isn't GUI users, its the fact Powershell is complete shite.
All this time I cant get a basic instruction on how Powershell works without getting a 500 page book. Learning Linux and AIX wasn't this hard (granted the Linux training covered a lot of the AIX ground).
Also you have to deal with different versions of Powershell, I once spent an entire day constructing a Powershell script for Exchange 2007 only to find out it required Powershell v3 and only v2 was installed on 2008 by default. It was easier to get management to give up on the idea then go through change control to get Powershell updated.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
Clippy will be reborn!
Someone you trust is one of us.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.