Slashdot Mirror
Windows Phone Free-Fall May Force Microsoft To Push Harder On Windows 10 (pcworld.com)
tripleevenfall quotes a report from PCWorld: Microsoft sold a minuscule 2.3 million Lumia phones last quarter, down from 8.6 million a year ago. Phone revenue declines will only "steepen" during the current quarter, chief financial officer Amy Hood warned during a conference call. That's dragged down Microsoft's results as a company, too. As the company's mobile device strategy continues to disintegrate, Microsoft may feel compelled to push harder on Windows 10 adoption and paid services to prove it can survive without a viable smartphone. CEO Satya Nadella's strategy is simple enough: grow Microsoft's revenues by convincing customers to adopt its paid subscription services.
"Their file explorer GUI is absolutely incredible, for instance."
You're taking the piss right?
The file explorer is as simple and bare-bones as it can get, and yet it still has massive problems. These may not affect all users, but the forums are "full enough" to justify a fix.
File explorer refresh bug.
File explorer "finding items" bug.
File explorer slow to create or delete a folder.
These are really basic operations. The most frustrating is the refresh bug, and second to this is the slow response to move or delete a folder: it should be instant to write the inode and tell the filesystem that the folder is in a new location.
On top of these major issues, here is a list of features that would be really nice in a file explorer, and while we may disagree, I don't think these are power-user items:
1) Allow a copy/move operation to be paused.
2) Allow a move operation to be undone with visual feedback (hitting CTRL+Z will undo a move, but it's a silent operation)
3) Stack concurrent move/copy operations based on disk IO: in other words, if I am already moving data from a USB drive and then start a second operation, queue it rather than start it immediately.
4) When a copy/move operation encounters an error DO NOT FAIL SILENTLY. Anyone who has left a large network transfer to finish, and returned to no dialog and assumed that it finished, when really it failed and only some of the data was moved/copied, knows the pain of which I speak.
5) When making a selection, show some useful information about the selection, such as how many items are selected and how large the selection is. This used to be shown in the status strip in XP, but was removed in Vista/Win7.
6) Any kind of tool for mass manipulation of names.
OK, fine, some of these are better in Win 10 than they ever were before, but I think my point stands, the Windows File Explorer is just the simplest bare-bones GUI for manipulating files. And even then, it's not as bug free as one would expect. My understanding is that they fucked it in Vista with a new asynchronous model, which probably made heaps of sense from a code structure point of view, and probably improved network browsing no end...yet they fucked it, as per the infamous "refresh bug" linked to above.