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Microsoft: Start Menu Returns, Windows Free For Small Device OEMs, Cortana Beta
At Microsoft's BUILD conference today, the company announced that the Start Menu will officially be returning to Windows 8.1. It will combine the Windows 7 Start Menu with a handful of Metro-style tiles. They're also making it so Windows 8 apps can run in windows using the normal desktop environment. In addition to the desktop announcements, Microsoft also talked about big changes for Windows on mobile devices and Internet-of-Things devices. The company will be giving Windows away for free to OEMs making phones and tablets (9" screens and smaller), and for IoT devices that can run it. Microsoft also finally unveiled Cortana, their digital assistant software that's similar to Siri.
PLEASE PLEASE TAKE THE DAMN TILE INTERFACE AWAY FROM YOUR SERVER OS!!!!
It's useless! it's painful! I curse myself whenever I hit the start button!
Windows on a phone works pretty well -- I picked up a Nokia 520 because it was $40 and why not, and it's actually quite decent.
The tiles based interface works quite well for a small device like that. I certainly don't like it on a PC with a big screen (or two), but for a little screen it works quite well.
In fact, the only real problem I had with the OS is that there aren't many apps available compared to iOS and Android.
What about Terminal Services? It may be a server, but it may be used by lots of regular users like a mainframe was used in the past instead of running IIS, Exchange or something like that.
I'm assuming you're too lazy to google
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...
http://usabilitygeek.com/windo...
http://www.techspot.com/review...
http://www.zdnet.com/windows-8...
If you're lazy, you can just read the conclusions. It's not necessarily enough to make me upgrade to 8 (already have 8 on one laptop and 7 on some other devices), but it measurably better in a few areas.
I think the braindead reason is simply that when you're selling an OS version, it has to offer something different than the version that it's supposed to replace. Otherwise people won't see the point in throwing away their old computers just to get something even more bloated than the OS they have now.
Except people do not buy new computers for the OS; the operating system is just something that comes with the computer. People would still be buying new computers at more or less the same rate if they came with Windows XP.
Yes, new operating systems need to be updated so they can take advantage of hardware improvements (SSD drives, USB3, etc), and to fix known security issues. They should also feature improvements and extra features to put the OS more in line with how people actually use their computes (for instance, adding cloud storage or better syncing with mobile devices). But it has been repeatedly shown - with Metro, Unity, Vista and probably a dozen other examples - that changing the interface solely to market your product is going to backfire big-time unless there are some very obvious advantages (MacOS versus DOS, for instance). And Metro lacked those advantages.
Worse, Microsoft was repeatedly warned of this mistake and chose to ignore it. It focused on form over function and barring an excellent marketing team - which Microsoft has never had - it was inevitable that they would fail in their transition.