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.

Comments

Gee, so only a year of screaming

[msobkow]

So it only took about a year of screaming from the users and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and brought back the MENU instead of that god damned useless start screen. Who knows -- by 9.x maybe it'll even be as usable as 7 again.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[rikkards]

It's because they can't use their usual solution which is "you need to upgrade to the next version"

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[MightyMartian]

A year? People have been telling Microsoft Metro was a catastrophe since they released the public betas.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Mashiki]

What's funny is that if you slapped in your favorite UI replacement, then Win8 became even better than 7. Faster, more stable, and if you're a gamer gave even better performance. Remove that, and it was a huge pain in the ass, so in your post I can't quite figure out the "by 9.x it'll be as useable as 7 again..." there's paid options such as Start8, not paid options such as Classicshell. And really, if you couldn't be bothered to replace the awful UI for something else, that's your own problem.

I will say there are still bugs in it. I just ran across probably the most rare of them regarding SSD's yesterday. Where an open handle which isn't properly closed on shutdown, on a SSD volume can lock a SSD, in turn causing the volume to become corrupt. Needless to say, not impressed by that one.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[TheGratefulNet]

OT: I finally found your moped jesus:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

now that that mystery is solved, all the rest look comparatively simple.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it took long enough for a new CEO to come in.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[MBC1977]

Useless to who? There is this thing called "adapt and overcome" that works wonders. Or to put it another way, just because you (and some others) don't like it does not make it useless. I use it interchangeably with the Windows desktop and my output of work has not changed, thanks.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[mwvdlee]

"Product X is great, you just have to replace it's main features with additional products Y and Z".

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[ackthpt]

It's because they can't use their usual solution which is "you need to upgrade to the next version"

The next version is a trap!

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

New CEO, and already actual tangible changes. I'd hate to judge early but I'm pretty sure Satya is the right guy.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[ShakaUVM]

>So it only took about a year of screaming from the users and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and brought back the MENU instead of that god damned useless start screen.

It came out in October 2012, but people have been screaming about it since the pre-release in 2011.

So about the same amount of time it took Blizzard to fix the clusterfuck called Diablo 3, and with the same amounts of fucks given by the general population.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Jane Q. Public]

"A year? People have been telling Microsoft Metro was a catastrophe since they released the public betas."

Even so, they've taken this dubious fall-back position: "Okay, we admit that it sucks and that nobody likes it, so we're going back to the old way. But we're going to keep pushing the obviously failed 'new' way at you anyway."

Because... ??? Honestly, the only reason that comes to mind is that they are incapable of admitting that the whole thing was just plain a bad idea.

But wait! I guess it did accomplish something. It got others in the industry to also adopt eye-burning flat toolbars and icons, containing little pictograms that the brain associates with nothing in particular.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[MightyMartian]

The problem for enterprise environments is that these add-ins are likely not going to be manageable via AD and GPOs, and at least where I am, that makes adoption an iffy process. Much better to have this basic GUI functionality built into the operating system itself.

If the next version of Windows is close enough to Windows 7 for our staff to be comfortable, then we'll lift our organization-wide ban on Windows 8/8.1 workstations. For the moment, however, we continue to purchases Windows 7 Professional workstations and notebooks, and, amusingly enough, our suppliers basically say "And you will be wanting that with Windows 7, right?" They know that Windows 8 has been a bomb in the enterprise market.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[redmid17]

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.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[lgw]

I'm sure Windows 9.5 will be revolutionary, unlike anything we've seen before, and Windows 9.8 will continue to improve on it.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is actually really damn competent at making windows run well. Even since 7 they've made a whole lot of under the hood improvements. Kernel, memory management, better support for modern hardware. SSD optimizations. Graphics system improvements.

It's like Vista. Vista introduced a massive amount of improvements particularly when it came to enterprise management.. But they fucked up hard on on the end use experience. Badly tuned. Ran like shit compared to XP. They fixed it up and released 7. (It really does run like shit. Install fully patched 7 and Vista on the same hardware and you'll be shocked with how much better 7 is)

With 8, for whatever fucking braindead reason, they pushed the Metro UI. Again it's being rejected because they've ignored the end-user experience. 8 runs well but it sucks on the desktop.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Who knows -- by 9.x maybe it'll even be as usable as 7 again.

This is horrible news. It just might save Windows.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[GrumblyStuff]

Why is this a thing that always has to be explained? It's not just the start screen, it's the pervasive touchscreen controls that do not fit the desktop PC ergonomics. It looks great for a smartphone or tablet but PC? No and their attempts to make some of those controls work with the mouse (ie, charms) is a perpetual annoyance.

Now as for the start screen itself, the act of taking over the whole screen is, at least to me, akin to the Doorway Effect. I don't want a wall of icons; I want text labels in (a few at most) columns ordered alphabetically. You know, like most of my files (sometimes by file type, sometimes by last modified).

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[CronoCloud]

Totally unusable for many people without third-party extensions, yet those same people keep telling everybody how great it is.

once had a little discussion with some Gnome 3 advocates including Rahul Sundaram, either here or on the Fedora Forums about Gnome 3. They'd say install this or that add-on to restore the functionality that was in Gnome2. I said there was a reason that the CDE/Win9x+/XFCE/Gnome2 interface was fairly standard, it's not perfect but it just works to get stuff done and to quit copying mobile interfaces for desktop use.

Then ol Rahul said Gnome 3 wasn't inspired by tablet/mobile interfaces.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[NeverVotedBush]

"Here's a hint as to how important the UI is to an OS, you can freely replace them with no real affect on the overall system barring resources used by the UI."

Without the UI, an OS is just a command line interface which is itself a UI, albeit not a very useful one for a lot of people.

I just recently broke down and installed 8.1 since some software I was needing to run simply would not run under Linux. While some things really run fast and well under 8.1, it is the most obnoxious interface I have ever used. Things that used to be two clicks or even one in XP and still are in Linux now take 8-10 clicks in and out of Metro to do the same thing. It's terrible.

I can navigate around it, but 8.1 gets in the way of everything most people would try to do on a desktop. My desktop doesn't have a touch screen, doesn't need giant fonts, doesn't need all the garish stupid tiles that are just a waste of space and really only a distraction.

Linux is so much better it isn't even funny - Gnome and KDE. Metro is for brain dead point and grunt types who need their chins wiped whenever they smell food.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Prien715]

by 9.x maybe it'll even be as usable as 7 again

Are you kidding? Windows 9X introduced the start menu! Don't you remember The Rolling Stones promo commercial (Start me up)?

I'm more worried about what comes after 9X (probably Me, you know, to compete with all the iProducts).

[Yes I realized there was a dot between 9 and X. Which I took to be the Perl concatenation operator.]

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Hadlock]

It's the WS2012 R2 kernel wrapped with desktop widgets. I'll let you google from there, but the improvements are vast. If you know what you're doing you can hack in WS2012 R2 functionality like file deduplication and NIC teaming in to your 8.1 desktop.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Your.Master]

Without the UI, an OS is just a command line interface which is itself a UI, albeit not a very useful one for a lot of people.

And without input drivers, an OS is just a machine that plays back prerecorded video.

The question isn't "is the UI important". It is, and Microsoft fucked up, and are finally getting around to fixing it. The question is, is the UI the main feature of the OS?

It is not, generally. It is, however, the most immediately obvious feature.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Opportunist]

Looking back, you can actually see a timeline of their PR bullshit.

1. "Here, the new Metro! It's shiny and cool, and you'll be so much more productive!"
2. "The new Metro is great! Really, it is! If for some odd reason you don't instantly fall in love with it, it only means that you haven't tried it!"
3. "Metro is good! And the only people who don't like it yet are those that didn't give it a chance and try it for a while."
4. "Metro is really useful, trust us! You just need to give it a try and use it for a while and get used to it. Honestly, once you're used to it you'll wonder how you could live without it."
5. "Ok, for the time being you can switch back to old style, but you'll see that you'll do it less and less frequently and you'll eventually embrace Metro, most applications will only be useful in Metro anyway!"
6. "Well, it seems that at least for now we have to allow using "old style" for more apps, because there are still those luddites that can't accept change. But you WILL find Metro useful at some point in the future, maybe the time isn't right yet!"
7. "Ok, ok... the world is not ready yet for Metro it seems."

Still waiting for the "Ok, ok... we admit, we tried to fix something that wasn't broken and realized that looking for a problem with a solution nobody wants is the wrong way 'round."

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[RabidReindeer]

With 8, for whatever fucking braindead reason, they pushed the Metro UI. Again it's being rejected because they've ignored the end-user experience. 8 runs well but it sucks on the desktop.

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.

We currently don't have a whole lot of really new hardware features that desperately need a new OS to use. So the alternative is to change the UI, even if it means that people will complain about it. And hope that eventually, they stop complaining.

Unfortunately, the current trend in desktop UI design seems to be to make desktops be like tablets, whether it makes sense or not, and to remove popular features because it's prettier without them.

Windows isn't the only OS out there that's gone this route recently. But since Windows doesn't do plug-replaceable desktops, and since they charge money for this gobbler, they're getting even more heat that other systems have.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[budgenator]

you've got low standards.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[budgenator]

In windows the UI is pretty tightly integrated with the kernel so yeah it's a main feature; in Linux the UI is interchangeable. I've gotten used to the UI better after getting an android phone, amazing what you can get used to; but why do they keep screwing with the control panel?

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Somebody Is Using My]

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.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Grishnakh]

Maybe, maybe not. Even if Apple took over 90% of the market, at least we'd never have to be subject to the Win32 API any more. And given the free and open availability of Linux and the *BSDs, any new "devils" would probably simply build on those, just as Apple did, rather than inventing a whole new monstrosity.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[exomondo]

Because... ??? Honestly, the only reason that comes to mind is that they are incapable of admitting that the whole thing was just plain a bad idea.

Well the traditional Windows 7 UI is a royal pain in the ass to use on touchscreen devices so you need an interface more tailored to touchscreens which the modern UI is good at. Their only issue was making it the default on desktops.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[shutdown -p now]

The whole thing was not a bad idea for tablets. And having tablet-centric touch UI side by side with desktop UI makes sense for all those convertibles.

The problem was that Metro was shoved onto desktop/mouse users. Now that it's being fixed, this makes sense. What makes even more sense is Metro apps being able to run in regular floating, resizable windows - this means that you can write an app with a single codebase that runs on any Windows device in any form factor, including ARM varieties and phones (and yes, it is possible to dynamically adapt UI to the platform). Which means that people will now actually write those apps, because they will have the entire market of existing Windows desktop users to target.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[shutdown -p now]

Why do you believe that MS under Satya will retain the lock-in? One very noticeable thing that came up shortly after he came to the helm was a renewed talk about F/OSS, both using it and shipping it. Heck, I didn't think I'd ever live to see the time when a Microsoft lawyer would use the words "copyleft" and "cool" next to each other in a single sentence, and yet it happened a week ago.

Things change.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[shutdown -p now]

Satya is the right guy. He's an engineer, not a salesman. He knows how things actually work, and not just inside the little (in modern realities) Microsoft bubble.

(case in point: he knows what node.js is - not as a buzzword, but the actual tech details)

There's one more thing. Not many people seem to have been paying attention to what other changes there have been under Satya, but one noticeable change is the skyrocketing rise of Scott Guthrie. Why this matters? Well, Scott is the guy who, for the last 7 years or so, has been heavily pushing for F/OSS inside Microsoft. In particular, open sourcing ASP.NET MVC was his testbed project, and all the other .NET bits that went F/OSS after that were also under his guidance. Oh, and jQuery.

And now this guy is being rapidly promoted - first stepping in to take Satya's place as the latter goes CEO, then becoming an executive VP of Cloud+Enterprise. Now this is the division that's basically responsible for the entire MS server-side stack - SQL, Exchange, Azure etc - but also all the developer tools. I'll let you draw the conclusions from that.

Oh, and one other telling thing was the recent renaming of Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure, with the justification of "we do more than just Windows there, and don't want Linux users to feel unwelcome". This sort of casual dismissal of the Windows brand was unthinkable mere months ago.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Blaskowicz]

Search doesn't even make sense if you don't know what's installed on the computer or don't remember every detail of what you have installed or not installed, or removed. Using the menu is also the default thing on major linux desktop environments : gnome 2, mate, xfce, lxde, even mere window managers like Openbox have a menu.

Maybe search is more useful on a laptop where the built-in pointing device is inferior to a mouse. As a desktop user on a desktop PC I find it more of a hassle, it slows the PC down a bit too. If I know the program's name I can use an auto-completing runbox anyway, from either alt-f2 or a shortcut on a panel.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[gonz]

> So it only took about a year of screaming from the users
> and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and
> brought back the MENU instead of that god damned
> useless start screen.

No, what it took was a new CEO. Don't flatter yourself. What you have observed is merely the surface of a significant shift that is happening. The fact that these effects are already visible in the first 6 months is pretty telling.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Opportunist]

Then do what other companies did: Make one UI for lap/desktops, and one for touch tools. Why the heck did MS, the company that gave us ... how many? 20? ... different versions of a single OS earlier, think that it's a spiffy idea to give us a "one size fits all" version?

That reminds me of an old German proverb "Zu wenig und zu viel ist aller Narren Ziel" (too much and too little is the goal of every fool).

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Spacelord]

A touch screen on a PC or laptop is a solution looking for a problem. It makes sense on mobile devices, because you don't have the luxury of decent input devices there, but a mouse and keyboard will always be superior if you have them available.

April Fools was yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft listens to end users?!

Re:April Fools was yesterday

[gewalker]

I thought it more laughable the parent suggested that MS listened to slashdotters

Desperation?

[ilsaloving]

Wow, this just smacks of all kinds of desperation. It's amazing how badly Microsoft fails when they're not allowed to stack the deck in their favour.

Although I'm curious about Cortana. If they make her/him/it sound like GladOS, I would have to seriously reconsider my position. :3

Digital Assistant software

[slapout]

"Microsoft also finally unveiled Cortana, their digital assistant software that's similar to Siri."

As opposed to Clippy, their digital assistant software that's similar to Jar Jar Binks.

Re:Digital Assistant software

[gewalker]

Actually, this is the one thing I actually care about. A little competition in the digital assistant marketplace can only be a good this. The number of deep pockets able to compete here must be pretty limited, and the state of the art can definitely use some improvement. Matters not if MS version is better or not as long as it is decent it will be some additional competition.

What about 2012R2???

[fullmetal55]

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!

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

You silly rabbit. Servers run linux.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[MightyMartian]

We're running one DC and our Exchange server on Server 2012, and I haven't had any problems with the AD and Exchange management tools yet. Maybe there are some features that are unsupported, by the big ones I use; DNS, DHCP, AD Computers and Users, GP Management, Event Viewer and Exchange console seem to work alright.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[mjwx]

We're running one DC and our Exchange server on Server 2012, and I haven't had any problems with the AD and Exchange management tools yet. Maybe there are some features that are unsupported, by the big ones I use; DNS, DHCP, AD Computers and Users, GP Management, Event Viewer and Exchange console seem to work alright.

No, we're serious. No problems whatsoever.

Sysadmins always talk to their guns when they clean them. Nothing unusual there.

Re:"Free" Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously why would you use something as bloated as Windows

Because we know that the current iteration of Android is svelte, lean and mean...

Finally!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I've heard people saying that Linux is something that nobody wants even for free. It's nice to see that Linux has finally caught up with Windows! Or the other way around. Whatever.

Dockability

[tepples]

Seriously why would you use something as bloated as Windows for a mobile or embedded device?

So that the device can do double duty. It can act as a tablet by itself, or it can be docked to an external keyboard and monitor and act as a basic desktop computer. At least this is what Canonical promised for "Ubuntu for Android".

Re:"Free" Windows

[dougmc]

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.

Cortana

[SpaceManFlip]

Cortana was Master Chief's AI companion (the big space marine carrier's AI computer) in the original Halo game. I still hate that Microsoft bought Bungie, and now they're going to milk the shit out of that IP by naming the rip-off of Siri Cortana. I grew up playing the Marathon series on Mac, and when I first played Halo I saw that all the same stuff was there, just fleshed out into awesome 3D so I was like "yay Bungie" and then Microshit shit all over Halo 2 with their Vista "DirectX 10 required" lies etc. Halo 2 worked well on XP with the Vista checks removed. /ramble

So what about server 2012 first release?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about all us fools who installed server 2012, and can't upgrade to 2012 R2 without paying another 1400 bucks? Are we going to get screwed without even a start button for the next 5 years that we run these servers?

Re:So what about server 2012 first release?

[Pentium100]

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.

Re:So what about server 2012 first release?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a totally separate OS, look it up. If you purchased software assurance for a hefty fee, you can upgrade for free. You will have to totally reinstall windows though. For those of us who buy OEM for small business customers, they would have to buy a whole new copy of 2012R2. OK, so maybe it's more like "only" $800 since I think you can still use your 2012 client access licenses. Factor in 3 or 4 hours of labor to complete the upgrade, and well, you get the idea.

It's definitely not anything like the 8.0 to 8.1 upgrade, if that's what you're thinking.

Re:So what about server 2012 first release?

[JustNiz]

>> Are we going to get screwed without even a start button for the next 5 years that we run these servers?

Nope. Just install Linux on them. Have whatever desktop you want, or none at all.
What are you thinking running Windows as a server in the first place?

Re:"Free" Windows

[squiggleslash]

Seriously why would you use something as bloated as Windows for a mobile or embedded device?

Because desktop operating systems aren't much bigger than they were 10 years ago, yet modern mobile devices are pretty much as powerful as a large proportion of PCs were five years ago. The major issue with running Windows 7 on the Atom-based notebooks I've seen was screensize, not speed.

Yes, Apple and Google have both released mobile operating systems with substantially different userlands to their desktop cousins, but in Google's case that appears to be because of a different, non-Unix, vision they have for mobile devices, and Apple, of course, was stuck originally with a very poorly powered phone that was, in some ways, the Mac 128k to their desktop's Lisa. Both systems were developed when phones were considerably underpowered compared to how they are today. It's not clear to be that Apple or Google would have followed the path they took if they were to design a phone operating system today.

Die, die, die, flat UI elements

[QuasiEvil]

Now, could they get rid of the flat, huge, ugly UI elements (window borders, buttons, etc.) and go back to the reasonable look of Vista or 7? Sheesh, honestly the hideous ugliness of it was the most irritating thing about 8 for me, as the tile interface and start menu problems could be fixed with a few add-ons.

Re:"Free" Windows

[CastrTroy]

Same thing goes on my Surface2. The Windows 8 interface really shines on a touch screen device. It's also worth pointing out that you don't need as many apps on Surface as you would on an iPad, because it has a lot of functionality built in. Getting videos to play off my shared folder on the main PC was a piece of cake with Surface. With iPad, it was a royal pain, and it still doesn't work well with certain videos.

If you could get a 9 inch tablet for that ran full windows, you could have a very portable computer that you could just plug into full size monitor, keyboard and mouse, and use it as a full desktop. You wouldn't need any cloud services like drop box because you could literally bring your whole desktop computer with you wherever you go. This is the main point of the Surface Pro that most people seem to forget. You have this ultraportable machine about the same size as an ipad, but that you can hook up standard peripherals to and make it work as a full fledged desktop. The Surface Pro is a little outside most people's budgets, but the ASUS Transformer Book T100 is a little cheaper, and can still run most desktop apps.

They're doing it wrong

[laffer1]

This should have been part of 8.1 from the beginning. I just got used to the start screen and now it's going back?

This should be 8.2 or 9.0 instead of a patch against 8.1.

You have been asleep for a 10 years

[tuppe666]

I've heard people saying that Linux is something that nobody wants even for free. It's nice to see that Linux has finally caught up with Windows! Or the other way around. Whatever.

I don't think you really understand the irony...Microsoft *partners* are prepared to *pay* Microsoft to run Linux instead of windows.

“It’s not like Android’s free,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive. “You do have to license patents.”

FYI Apple is doing quite nicely too

Re:Big deal.

[yakovlev]

It's interesting,because my opinion on those two is the exact opposite.

I couldn't care less about boot to desktop. That's a single button click when I boot the machine.

However, I use the start menu quite often. It provides a hierarchically sorted list of every program I have installed on the system. I use that about once a week to once a month. It also provides a list of my most recently used programs. I could move those to the taskbar (and sometimes do) but sometimes these change and I don't want them semi-permanently taking up space on the taskbar.

There are three things that are really bad about windows 8. I've ordered them from worst to least bad.

1.) The charms bar is torture on a desktop. You have to go to the top right of the screen, then go halfway down the screen in a narrow strip to actually click on something. If your mouse moves outside that narrow strip for even a moment, the charms bar disappears and you have to do it again. "Thank you, sir, may I have another?"

2.) The start menu was removed, because it is rarely used. This was just not thinking. The start menu has become big and clunky... that's also become it's purpose. We have new and better methods to access frequently used programs, but the start menu continues to be useful for those infrequently used programs. A hierarchical list is certainly better than displaying them all in a flat grid of live tiles.

3.) Metro programs can't run in a window. This makes them inconvenient for multitasking, which is common for desktop users but not for tablet users.

IoT

[sexconker]

Stop trying to make the "internet of things" happen.
Fuck your shitty marketing terms. Fuck them from "1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes" to "* as a Service" to "Cloud" to "Business Solutions" to "Internet of Things" to the next shitty fucking thing you come up with and decide to market, require job applicants to have experience with, etc.

If you can't describe a service or product with concrete terminology then you're selling a bag of marketing fluff and I will not be giving you money for it. Until you can actually tell me what you're selling and why it's useful please SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Re:Too little too late....

[Missing.Matter]

2) Allow users to load different "skins" like you can on Linux or Android. Metro interface for tablets/phones, Win 7 for desktops. Don't like the one you have? Restart, choose new skin, done. 3) Open source the GUI and allow others to create their own GUI's and sell them in the MS App store. Or give them away. Whatever..just give people choices.

These last two have been possible since at least Windows XP. Windows allows you to replace the shell with whatever you want. This is the whole idea behind Classic Shell: http://classicshell.net/

Re:This still creates a coverage gap for a lot of

[JDG1980]

This still creates a coverage gap for XP users. If 8.1 had a sane UI today, I'd go XP-to-8.1. It's just an announcement though. With XP support going tits up in just a few days, there's no way to fill the gap without doing something transitional that you might want to throw away in a few months.

Just upgrade to Windows 7. It's a proven solution and it has extended support (security patches) up until mid-2020.

Windows 9 looks like it's going to fix the worst suckage of Win8, but I don't see it as being a "must-have" any time soon.

Bad Management

[enter to exit]

Metro should show some intelligence in how it open apps.

Ideally, if the user opens a metro app from the Desktop, it should be windowed. If it's opened from the Metro Screen it should be full screen.

Metro is a fine interface for touch devices. It looks good and works well. However it fails miserably when you're trying to use it in conjunction with the desktop. MS should go whole hog and create a Metro only tablet.

A lot of the blame for Win8 can be shouldered on Steven Sinofsky, who by all accounts thought himself as a cross between Steve Jobs and Napoleon. He was given free reign over Win8 due to his perceived success with MS Office (and the ribbon interface).

If you follow the MS news, you'll find constant suggestions that he treated the windows division as his fiefdom (and windows phone as a competitor, refusing even the most basic coordination) and that not only did he refuse to include a start menu in Win8 as a transitional step (up to that point, MS has usually offered a way to go back to the old behavior for at least one windows version) he intentionally introduced architectural changes to make it harder for MS to implement one in the future. You'll notice he was fired shortly after without much remorse by anyone.

Little by little

[Dega704]

Unfortunately, it looks like they crammed the start menu full of those blasted tiles instead of the useful things users will be expecting. I have used this interface on Windows 8 and Server 2012 and I have tried to give it a chance, I really have; but at the end of the day it is just a nuisance that squirrels away the things I need to get to into the most awkward places. Hopefully by Windows 9 they will finally stop forcing fisher price tablet bullcrap on desktop users altogether. I would be happy if they just got rid of that worthless "charms bar".

Re:Big deal.

[cbhacking]

1) What do you *need* "charms" for on the desktop? You are, I presume, using desktop apps (which don't interact with the Charms bar at all). For things like Settings - even the "Metro" Settings, if for some reason you want those - you can reach them using Start (more on that in a sec). Oh, and FYI, Win+C will display the Charms bar without any stupid mouse shenanigans. I believe you can turn off the hot corner entirely, if you want to.

2) Wrong, the Start menu was removed because they wanted to present the Live Tiles interface and the menu didn't have enough room for that (interesting that Win8 update 2 or Win9 or whatever they end up calling it will have a Windows Phone-like width of tiles as an option on an actual menu...). As for "better methods" that would primarily be Start search, which is much faster than using the mouse. It also generally works a lot *better* with rarely-used programs (or settings, or files, or direct links to settings pages you didn't even know were possible to link directly to...) than hierarchical menus do. Start search has been built into Windows since Vista (2006). They fucked it up a bit in Win8 (still worked for programs, but extra keypresses were needed for files or settings) but fixed it in Win8.1.

3) Assuming you use "Metro" programs at all (eww...) then yes, this is a problem (and is being fixed in an upcoming version). If you're like me, and prefer to just use Win8 as a more efficient Win7 with better multi-monitor support and the ability to run Hyper-V, this isn't really a problem. Aside from games (which I'd want to have running full-screen anyhow), the Win8 apps are worthless on a desktop.

Win8 is deeply weird

[MyNicknameSucks]

Background from a UI designer at MS: http://www.reddit.com/r/micros...

Metro was designed for, paraphrasing pwnies, your mom so she could watch her favourite cat videos without getting bogged down in the OS. So ... it's really good at single- and double-tasking, less good if you juggle multiple windows, and kinda' confusing if you run a mix of Metro and standard desktop apps. Metro's downright nasty to use with a mouse, but works great with touch (at least once you grok that swiping from the edges makes stuff happen) and keyboard shortcuts (type to search is nice).

But what kills me is how hard it is to just use one UI or the other, even after significant tweaking. Win8, as far as I can tell, always defaults to Metro apps, even if launched from the desktop and there's an equivalent (or more powerful) desktop app available. Many settings are only found in Metro. File associations, even for file types that casual users are unlikely to use, like .CR2 (a RAW image type) are associated with Metro apps. And the default programs app doesn't even list all of the file types that the desktop pic viewer can handle; you have to set image types like .CR2 through Explorer. Seriously? Weird choice, that.

The flip side, of course, is that if you want to do something other than media consumption you get bumped into the desktop. Somehow, I think it's telling that Office 365 is not a suite of applications for Metro. And that most of the apps in the store seem more ... well ... tablet- and phone-oriented than desktop-oriented. MS doesn't want people to work in Metro, but never really had the stones to say it bluntly.

For my part, I got so pissed off at Metro on my desktop PC that I installed Start8 and another app that opens Metro apps in a desktop window so that, if Windows decides once again that a 22", full screen, four function calculator is really what I need when I'm trying to double-check some math for an email ... I won't have to deal with Metro.

And, hell, if I want to kick back and surf or play a stupid game, I'm going to grab a tablet or smart phone ... not use my PC.

And ... you know what? I set up a new PC for my mom a few months ago. I didn't want to deal with tech support for Metro on her PC (no touch screen, and didn't want to bother with teaching her keyboard shortcuts or deal with her chucking her mouse through her monitor when she can't find the hot spot to switch apps). But ... she's like ... the target audience for Metro. There is a giant bullseye on her head. She is the casual PC user defined and distilled down to its most basic. And I couldn't face down the prospect of explaining charms to turn off her PC (or how to open the charms bar). Or how to switch apps with a mouse.

On the other hand, I do like the idea of MS finally adding some new functionality to the desktop. Even if I'm unlikely to give 2 shits about live tiles in the start menu (seriously, given how much MS knows about me from 20+ years' worth of product registrations, configurations, IP addresses, and that MSDN sub a few years ago, you'd figure they could get at least the country right for the default locations for the weather, sports and news apps -- I deleted them because I couldn't be bothered to configure them).

And yet ... Win8 is fast. Stable. Runs on the same hardware Vista did.

It's kinda' weird, ya' know?

Re:"Free" Windows

[exomondo]

"Windows on a phone works pretty well"

Windows on a phone is crap - did you ever try the Compaq iPaq?

You do realize you are comparing completely different operating systems with different core and UI and completely different hardware with over a decade between them and different input mechanisms don't you? I don't see how you expect to draw any meaningful conclusion comparing a 14 year old iPaq to a 1 year old Nokia 520 when they have virtually nothing in common apart from the word "Windows" being part of the title of their operating system.

Re:maybe trolling

[Anonymous Coward]

There will be stipulations in those deals that they create desktops/laptops with Windows only. Whether those companies will get to create "Linux" only machines is something I am curious to see.

This isn't the 90s anymore, the biggest Windows licensees already create Linux laptops, desktops and smartphones in the form of ChromeOS, Android and (a lot less commonly) Ubuntu. Though many have tried desktop Linux distributions they have been given a massive "Do Not Want" by consumers but on the other hand they do want Android which is why they produce a lot of Android devices. If Microsoft had the power you fantasize about them having then Android tablets and ChromeOS laptops would not come from any of the big players.

If the Linux community can get it sh** together and stop the inner fighting they have an opportunity to finally take hold, and take off, it seems anytime they have that chance they sabotage it, killing any progress.

That won't happen, what DE should they use? What audio system? What compositor? etc. Even though it is easy to circumvent the issues that create all the criticism for Windows 8 we have seen consumers (and the geeks on this site) demonstrate that they dont want to have to customize anything and that is why linux wont take hold in a desktop capacity but why it has succeeded on smartphones.

Re:I will still use Linux, like I have for years.

[jones_supa]

Desktop Linux never exploits those opportunities properly.