Microsoft is not composed of morons, their engineering is world-class, and they're not out to ruin their business or their product line. And the problem isn't Windows 8.
I'm guessing:
The Windows 8 Desktop side will be top-notch, comforting, and work as before and as expected.
The Windows 8 Metro side will be top-notch, internally-coherent, well-received, and offer a reduced complexity set for novice users and those seeking clarity and easier consumption.
The core OS will be top-notch, work on a grand range of hardware, and work as before and as expected.
It's not the problem with any of these pieces, it's how they're put together.
The first hour of Windows 8 is maddening, regardless of your technical skill level, comfort with Windows idioms, or level of resistance to change.
Two thirds of system configuration has been gutted and stranded in Metro mode. Login (if set up) is baffling and new. The computer violently flips between Metro and Desktop for reasons you're never quite sure of. It's constantly trying to drag you to this new place with completely different rules, appearance, and behavior. UI is hidden and transient.
There's no guide. You're just dumped there, and all efforts to work your computer like you did before are stymied. Yes, eventually YOU figure it out, but someone who's spent 20 years baking in the same ultra-reduced set of magic rituals to get the e-mail out is going to feel stupid. And they're not going to blame themselves - the era when you had no choice but to blame yourself is long over.
The Microsoft TABLET will be fine. The Microsoft SERVER will be fine. The Microsoft POWER USER base will be fine. The Microsoft GAMER population will be fine. The Microsoft DEVELOPERS will be fine.
It's the people who are only on the platform by virtue of "that's where facebook and my email is" who are going to run away screaming "Vista 2". That's the chip they're gambling with here, and I think they're going to lose it.
This is the most accurate comment on Windows8 that I've seen so far.
I'm a developer so I had no problem playing around with Windows8 DevPreview and ConsumerPreview.
However, if you gave Windows8 to someone who doesn't even know how to navigate the filesystem properly, they will just get mad. Unfortunately this happens to be, by far, Windows' largest market.
I'm a developer so I had no problem playing around with Windows8 DevPreview and ConsumerPreview.
I'm a developer and I absolutely had a problem with it. The question I ask of changed software is whether it makes my life easier or if it makes my life harder. Windows 8 makes my life harder to force a tablet paradigm on the desktop, hoping to leveraging a desktop monopoly into taking on Apple. From no perspective does it improve my experience on the desktop.
It is actually the first time I've seriously considered moving my primary development desktop to Ubuntu or OSX.
One advantage for Microsoft is that the Linux desktop environments currently also mess around with their UIs. Maybe in the long run it may turn out well but currently Gnome Shell and Unity make life hard for people who just want to use Facebook.
How does Unity make your life hard? I'm on osx myself but I love the unity interface and everyone that I've seen using it seems to easily find their way.
Change in general is bad for non-power users short term. Especially now that the interfaces grew less similar to the old windows paradigm it will get harder to steal the theoretical people escaping the Metro UI.
I have personally not formed any opinion if Unity and Gnome Shell are good or not. I have used them too little to say, I primarily use XFCE myself which was very easy to get started with.
> Gnome Shell and Unity make life hard for people who just want to use Facebook
How? I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop for my wife and she finds it as easy as ever to do email and Facebook because essentially the only app she ever runs is Chrome and it's locked in the Launcher. She doesn't even know that Unity exists so it's certainly not making life hard for her.
Isn't this the perfect use case for Windows 8, though? Your wife would have no trouble finding the Internet Explorer (or even Chrome) tile prominently featured on the Metro UI launch screen.
I love Unity. I love that you can start things by typing just a little of what you are looking for.
My normal environment is OS X, and I've grown used to using Spotlight to start apps. Cmd-Space + a few keystrokes, hit Enter. The only time I use the Dock is to resurrect the occasional hidden window. I'm too lazy to bother configuring the Dock. Start menus, even gorgeous ones like the OS X Dock, are so 1999.
Similarly, when I browse the web, I rely on keystroke completion and search, not on bookmarks. I'm too lazy to maintain my bookmarks
> I love that you can start things by typing just a little of what you are looking for.
That is great when you know what you are looking for... but when the image editor is called GIMP, or KRITA, the audio player is called rythmbox, the video player is called VLC, then you need to know those names in order to find what you are looking for.
IIRC common users went to Windows running from having to remember MSDOS commands.
I don't have that problem. I just type the word "music" and I get all the players. Typing "video" will also get me my video players.
I find this to be a nice feature. I am a developer but don't have the time to tinker with every little on my desktop. For me, and with the newest version of unity, it works well enough to let me get on with my work.
So 70%-80% (taking a guess) of their user base will not like the new Windows or want to bother with learning it. That doesn't sound like great news for Microsoft.
I don't think the best way to deal with disruptions is to force most of your current customers into the new paradigm. You need to convince them, one at a time, that they should use the new one. It should all be organic. Instead what Microsoft is doing feels a lot like Google+, where Google just tries to force a social network on everyone. Facebook and Twitter grew organically, not by getting AOL or whoever, to force them on their existing database of users.
Microsoft tries their best to force Metro on you in Windows 8, because that's the most convenient strategy for them, not the user.
>> Microsoft tries their best to force Metro on you in Windows 8, because that's the most convenient strategy for them, not the user
Not sure why you say that. Wouldn't it be better if the same metro UI that I see on my tablet is also on my phone and my xbox thus making it more predictable how I use them?
Wouldn't me as a developer be happier that the app I write can run on both the phone and a laptop with minor or no modifications?
What if I as a customer doesn't have to pay twice for that app?
What if by combining platforms, improvements are delivered faster and are more consistent? Would I as a user be happier with it?
Microsoft is not composed of morons, their engineering is world-class, and they're not out to ruin their business or their product line.
Microsoft miserably failed with a very second rate mobile operating system for over a decade. Their browser has been an also ran to a couple of small-teamed competitors. Their core operating system, despite being the linchpin of their business, has seen endless grand ambitions abandoned because of a gross inability to execute (do people forget how dramatic of a change Vista was supposed to be? They tossed all of that and re-branched XP, releasing essentially minor GUI changes to bring in the payday for another half decade).
Any argument that argues the technical ability of Microsoft starts on a flawed foundation. I have a lot of respect for certain parts of that company, but they have had some enormous failures, both from a vision and technical perspective. There is nothing that demonstrates that Windows 8 is the pinnacle of engineering.
EDIT: One of the most foreboding elements of Windows 8 is that an improved copy dialog gets play in ever commentary about the operating system. Seriously, just think about that for a while. Otherwise it's a thin veneer of a shell, inconsistent with the overwhelming majority of the operating system, that makes it a stellar operating system?
Yeah but look at Windows Phone, Xbox, and Zune. I think they're very capable of evolving and innovating when their product has competition. Balmer and his management style still needs to go but the main reason they didn't innovate with Windows is because they had no reason to.
They didn't change Windows because there was no serious competitor to it and they were in a position of "there's no reason to change we're not losing sales". Now that there's competition they're in a position of "If we don't change we will lose sales" which is a huge motivation.
Just look at their Xbox brand which they grew so well they surpassed Sony's PS3. Having competition has motivated Microsoft to innovate incredibly well. No one can deny that the Xbox brand, especially Xbox live, is a huge success in both sales and in innovation. Just look at how much they've changed the Xbox 360 alone. From the dashboard, the the UI, the target demographic, the addition of the Kinect controller, gamer tags, avatars, and the look and style of the console itself. Xbox live did so well it forced Sony & now Nintendo to finally innovate their own online services.
Same with the Zune. It was a commercial failure because they launched at a time when stand alone mp3 players where on their way out and smart phones were in. But everyone I know who had a Zune loved it. When it started it wasn't anything worth mentioning but MS evolved it into an elegant, sleek, beautifully creative device and (its few) users loved and praised it.
So Microsoft is definitely starting to change and evolve. They're surrounded by competition and have no choice but to get the creativity flowing AND shipping.
When it comes to mobile and browser, Microsoft probably did not prioritize properly and I think they acknowledged it too. Using that as an argument to question their technical ability is not right. IE10 can take any browser head on and so can the new mobile OS.
The problem is that other browsers keep defining what a browser should be, and then Microsoft has to play catch-up. Same with Windows Phone and Windows 8: other people defined what a mobile OS should do, and now MS is trying to catch up.
When you're not defining the market, you're an also-ran. Microsoft in the last 10 years failed abysmally at defining new markets, which is what they had done with Win95/Win2000 first and then Office and VisualStudio and IE5 later (yes, IE5 was commercially fantastic -- there's a reason all those shitty "web-apps" from 2001 were not written for Netscape or Mozilla).
In this sense, Windows 8 is more of the same: other people pointed the way, and MS is now scrambling to imitate them as best as they can. Not a recipe for success, if you ask me.
I thoroughly agree with this. If they know what they have to replicate, they can do it in style. I can't find three significant points of conceptual difference between Windows 8 Metro and iOS....
available mouse pointer.......... ummm..... more colors?
Meanwhile: mandatory revokable code signing. no side-loading. centralized apps. restrictive filesystem. fullscreen by default. centralized homepage. everything-is-an-app. sliding pane navigation. implied scrollbars. ARM SOC hardware. on and on and on and on, it's a direct clone of what's working in the marketplace.
Having played with the Release Preview I have to say that while Metro is very cool, the bipolar experience of constantly switching between Metro and legacy (?) is very not cool. I'm not sure if there was a better way to solve the problem or not (obviously Microsoft prioritizes backwards-compatibility), but right now it kills the experience for me.
If Metro apps take off we'll likely see the need to switch to legacy mode dwindle over time, but with so many of our common day-to-day apps living in legacy mode at launch I'm afraid Metro will just fade away in most users minds ala the OSX Dashboard...
Having been using win8 for around a year now (MS employee), I really haven't noticed it getting in the way. I rarely find myself using a mix of both - either I'm in metro mode or I'm in a desktop mode. If I'm on a desktop, the keyboard shortcuts (win + type anything has gotten a lot better since windows 7) work wonders. They've made a lot of speed improvements that have been really nice. If I'm in metro mode (which admittedly I rarely am, it's just not that useful right now on a desktop), I tend to stay within that modality. I think that right now Microsoft is preparing for future hardware with this release. On traditional desktops, this doesn't make sense. But on things like the new surface I can actually see it working well.
I have also used products at the companies I've worked for that 1) worked well for me and that 2) nobody else can figure out. Eating your own dog food is a good first start, but never believe it is sufficient to really understand how users will use a product.
I've had to configure my helper applications to avoid getting thrown into Metro from Desktop by accident; e.g., setting my PNG viewer to Chrome instead of picture viewer. I haven't found much to in Metro yet beyond browsing my applications, but I think the whole concept is very cool. Even on my Samsung tablet I find myself in desktop all the time...b/c OneNote is just that good.
I've been using Windows 8 has my main development machine since the start of April (developing Metro style apps). I also found the jump between Metro and Desktop initially jarring but I've gotten used to it now and it feels less unnatural.
Given that I'm spending 80% of my time in Visual Studio I definitely spend more time in the Desktop than Metro (on the tablet it's pretty much the opposite), if you're living in Desktop and not launching any Metro apps than you can almost view the Start Screen as a launcher / dashboard. Tapping the windows key to quickly see alerts, tiles and notifications and then typing to find the app you want to launch.
I think Metro can succeed on the desktop but it'll certainly need the appropriate sort of apps to do so and building apps that work well as both a full screen mouse / keyboard app as well as a tablet app is going to be a real challenge.
I agree, and I think the hype for the metro interface creates a false expectation that the whole windows 8 experience is going to be new. I was disappointed using it the first time how similar it was to windows 7. Looking at Metro, you can imagine how far they could have gone, but that really would have meant betting the company on it.
Bleah. Here's a thought: "Newer" and "innovative" do not necessarily equal "better." As far as I'm concerned, the Ribbon UI sucks big hairy ones, and is just one more reason to run screaming away from Windows 8.
Then again, since Windows 8 isn't F/OSS, I have exactly zero interest in running it to begin with, so MS aren't losing a customer here.
FOSS is fundamentally about freedom--the freedom to control the software you use.
Even if LinkedIn or Twitter were open source, I would still not be able to control them--I don't have a spare server lying around and I certainly don't have a way to get everybody else on my own system! So if I took LinkedIn's source and improved it, it would be useless: I would first have to get a server to run it and then I would have to get everybody I know to switch to it. This means that, even if LinkedIn was open source, I would still have to use their implementation on their servers; it would not have much of a practical effect.
Put another way, Reddit and HN are open source. But this does not mean I can meaningfully modify or control the code; this control is naturally left to the people with the servers. There is very little practical difference for me as a user between an open source Reddit and a closed source Reddit.
Now, this is not to say that web apps should not be open sourced--quite the contrary! Open sourcing is great for reasons besides freedom: you contribute to the common good, give more people insight into the development process and help other people with similar projects. But it is less critical than having open source programs that run on my own computer.
For one, I don't view services like Quora as being in the same class as "software I run on my own machine" in the first place. It's a subtle distinction, granted. But I've just never viewed those services that way.
Secondly, because there aren't adequate F/OSS replacements available. I can use Fedora Linux with KDE and get an experience that's better than Windows. I don't know of a Quora like service that makes their code available, that gives a better experience than Quora. That said, if such a thing were available, I would prefer it.
I don't see it as a subtle distinction. Simple using shouldn't grant rights. If I touch an ATM, or if I borrow someone's computer there's no reason I should be able to demand the source.
Free Software is about user rights. If you are fine with having your rights restricted by the software provider, then this kind of freedom is not for you.
But I like my own freedoms and I'll avoid buying software that prevents me from exercising them.
Well, yeah -- the people who are going to object most strenuously to a huge UI change are those who are invested in the current interface, and are going to have to waste a lot of time relearning things the 'new way.'
But they also tend to be the people most invested in the software itself, so if you're a company that sells software you should probably torment them at your peril. Drive them away without successfully luring any new users, and you may not end up with very many at the end of the transaction.
Innovative really should equal better. Put another way, if it isn't better, I don't see how it can be called innovative.
The caveat, of course, is that, just because something is better for most people doesn't mean it will be better for all. And, of course, there is a large group of people who just refuse to accept change.
(I've used the Office ribbon exactly once and couldn't figure out what I needed to do. I don't consider myself well versed enough to say whether it is innovative or not.)
I don't understand the fuss, it is minimized by default and works well on a touch screen by showing a lot of common commands. It's like people love to hate it or something, especially ones that don't even use Windows daily.
Can't comment on the tablet experience - maybe it works.
But Office on the PC wasn't made for a tablet - they intended the ribbon to be used by PC users, and it's terrible. Removing the menus eliminates discover-ability. The common case now when using a recent ribbon-enabled Office application, for me at least, is vaguely recalling a function that I used in a previous version and then hunting around for 2 or 3 minutes through the UI and not finding it. Without doing google searches, I'd never be able to find these features. And each of these feature-hunts adds up to a lot of wasted time.
You have to be kidding me. Discoverability is lower in a system which uses logically arranged tools, with larger buttons for more frequently used options than in a system which, perplexingly, hides everything behind nonlabeled buttons, in menus and sub-menus and ridiculous dialog boxes?
The ribbon is a massive, massive step up in usability, the difference is you already knew how to get to features in the old version, so there was a learning curve. Show two people who are brand new to office Office XP vs Office 2010, and I an completely certain that they'll have an easier time with 2010 (especially Excel, the usability difference there is incredible).
Discoverability is lower in a system which uses logically arranged tools, with larger buttons for more frequently used options than in a system which, perplexingly, hides everything behind nonlabeled buttons, in menus and sub-menus and ridiculous dialog boxes?
If you're trying to do anything other than the obvious stuff, then yes. I struggle to find anything in Office w/ Ribbon, whereas I could almost always find what I was looking for in a few seconds worth of menu hunting before. Personally, I find discoverability to be absolute shyte with the Ribbon interface.
That's EXACTLY the problem right there. You know what's probably the single best feature on OSX that nobody else has? The spotlight help menu. You never ever have to hunt for a command on your own again - and it even shows you where it is and what hotkey it uses for the next time you need it. It's both letting users discover and empowers them to use a product to its full potential at some point.
This is one of the most thoroughly researched and tested facets of Office. I assure you that you're wrong on the discoverability of Office features for the average user: it went up by leaps and bounds with the ribbon, and in fact the entire ribbon was designed to address the fact that the most common feature requests for Office were for things that already existed.
Maybe the ribbon helps new Office users with discoverability, but for a power user like me, it gets in the way and slows me down. For instance, in order to change the font size of highlighted text in Word, I have to keep coming back to the Home tab, even if most of my current work involves a different tab (such as Page Layout or Review). Another way of viewing this is that the Ribbon forces me to work within and switch between certain modes (Insert, Page Layout, a general mode corresponding to the functions on the Home tab, etc.). These modes don't match my own working modes very well. With a toolbar/menu combination, I wasn't forced into these modes as much. Common processes, the ones currently placed in the Home tab, were always right there on the toolbar, and I didn't need to switch back and forth to use them.
In Word 2010 at least, a simple right-click on highlighted text brings up something like a mini Home tab. You can change the font, size, color, alignment and everything.
OK, to be fair, I've never used the ribbon on a touch based device... just Office on a conventional PC with mouse/keyboard. But that was enough to turn me off on the "ribbon" and nothing I've seen or heard to date has given me sufficient reason to revisit my dislike for it.
But, I only use Windows at my dayjob where I have no choice, and I try to spend as little time as possible paying attention to the fact that it's Windows (hello, Cygwin). I'm probably not exactly the target market for MS on this to begin with. ;-)
As far as I'm concerned, the Ribbon UI sucks big hairy ones
I am not adverse to change, and had a very open mind about the ribbon in office, but it still hinders me far more than it ever helped. From observations of others there are perilously few who actually appreciate that interface tactic.
> In the post PC era, Microsoft is betting the company on Windows 8, desperately trying to serve two masters with one operating system.
They could be onto something here, but it will only pan out if Microsoft can execute it properly.
Instead of thinking of it as "serving two masters," think of it as treating all HID paradigms as first class. You have one device that can hold all of your data and can adapt to either a tablet or a workstation input mode.
Basically, it's the OQO with an iPad form factor.
This could be just as "Post PC" as anything else claiming the moniker. Instead of all computing being embodied in a PC, the PC/workstation just becomes one of many input form factors. Whether or not this will fly will depend on how well Microsoft and partners can achieve the same sort of vertical integration that Apple has. (It will also depend on how well Google can develop the same and how well Apple can maintain theirs.)
If you'd like to hear Tim Cook's take on what Apple think, see his interview from D10, where he talks specifically about this, and why Apple thinks keeping iOS and OS X separate makes more sense than combining them.
TLDR: A legacy OS (OS X) has to much "Old stuff" that would hold back an iOS device (iPad) because it would be too clunky.
There is no reason they could not have a single kernel and system api with a different version of explorer and windowing manager for the tablet and PC versions. They could have easily have blended their entire stack into one OS with different skins over the top, but they are just trying to cram them into one mess.
> But I have to say, this choice seems, at least so far, to be a bit saner approach than the super hard totally incompatible iOS/OSX divide in Apple land.
I just changed it back in the Preferences. I tried to get used to it but somehow while it makes total sense on-glass it seems absolutely backwards on a touch pad. Maybe just too much muscle memory.
The thing with Windows 8 is that the only devices it seems to make sense on are the Surface laptop things.
The question remains as to whether OEMs will start to make similar devices and try and compete with Microsoft (who will have an inherent advantage).
For the corporate desktop , there is still probably a lot of mileage left in Windows 7.
I agree to a point. Windows 8 works without touch, but it doesn't have the same wow factor. With that said, I cannot imagine buying a new device without touch.
I can't imagine getting real work done on a touch device. Touch device implies it's screen is small enough to hold in one hand. In other words, the screen is too small to spread a few browser windows on. Touch implies discouraging the use of a mouse. Fingers are fuzzy and annoying for precise selection, and onscreen keyboards suck. By the time you've gotten an external keyboard and mouse to work around this, you no longer have a touch device.
I can't imagine buying a touch device for work. I wouldn't object to getting one to watch movies or read books on.
I guess this is why hybrid devices like surface exist.
The question is whether the future is to have a single "do everything" device like a Surface laptop or several discreet pieces of hardware for different jobs.
People with high disposable incomes don't seem to have any problem owning a PC/Mac desktop , a laptop , a tablet , a smartphone as well as several games consoles and other gadgets. Assuming you already have an iPad I don't see any huge benefit to having a Windows 8 laptop over a Windows 7 one.
I know people who bought touchscreen monitors to run Windows 7, in combination to keyboard and mice. They found these a novelty for the first few days but they never really use the touch functionality.
Anything that size will give me arm fatigue using the touch in any meaningful way. For occasional interaction, it's fine, but standing in front of it all day, the touch will mostly get ignored.
After wrangling with some HP TouchSmarts, I agree. The hitboxes suck, the on-screen keyboard is fatiguing after a few sentences, and playing a game with touch only sounds like work.
Eventually you forget that your PC has a touchscreen. Even when you do remember that you can just jab something with your finger, your internal context-switching brain-lobe-thing tells you to not bother because the next few micro-tasks will involve the keyboard and mouse anyway.
I completely agree. But, I also think it is just as odd to have to choose your device based on what you want to do with it. To me, this is why the Surface is so cool. Attach the keyboard, you have a work device. Detach it, you have a consumption device.
To be fair, the iPad (and Android tablets) with a keyboard provides similar flexibility, but I think the desktop paradigm is what is missing.
I came here looking for this comment. I have an iPad3 with a Zagg keyboard and I freaking love it. Imagine the same level of flexibility with access to legacy Excel/Word/IE apps when you need it, but also access to newer more friendly replacements as time allows!
My wife needs a new laptop, but only because she requires access to these legacy apps. Going into "legacy" mode for this, but providing the mobile consumption experience and productivity of a convienent keyboard is a killer combo.
I'm actually fairly impressed with the promise of the Surface. I might go as far to say this will be what people will be carrying in 5 years or less.
I can understand you may not like typing on a touch screen, but it's pretty clear that for a fairly large portion of the market (70%? 80%?), typing on a glass screen is fairly acceptable. Otherwise you wouldn't see such dominance of keyboardless phones over those with hardware keyboards.
I carried a blackberry for 5 years (and sent dozens of emails a day from it) but I've never particularly found that switching to a glass screen on iPhone and now on Android impacts my ability to compose messages. Most of the folks I hear complaining about screen keyboards are still using hardware keyboards and haven't used both methods for any extended period of time.
Software keyboards double the effective screen size. They may be inferior in every other respect, but when your screen is about 4 inches diagonally, it doesn't matter. You're willing to trade a whole lot to be able to see more.
I start to see two camps on Windows8. Some who love the surface usage idea, tech people who can easily adapt and the other camp having a real challenge with the new UI. The majority of users are the second part and I think it will be a long hard battle for MS to convince that group. At least they tried something new.
As long as I can pull up a command prompt I realy don't care as it's the easiest way to move all files starting in "A" and ending in "Z" (move A*Z ./wibble/wap/woo/.). Show me a GUI that does it easier and then we can talk about progress.
GUI's can't, and that's why so many tech companies are trying to develop intelligent voice controls. Saying, "Hey move all of the files starting with A and ending with Z" is easier to remember than command line syntax. Don't try and make a GUI do something it's not designed to do, you'll end up with a bad GUI, not progress.
You forgot my camp: Persons so abused by Microsoft over the years that I'm fresh out of goodwill.
Metro looks bitchin. I can't wait for others to copy it.
But I can't imagine Microsoft sustaining their commitment. Nor can I imagine them not trashing whatever investment I've made in their platform(s), either as a user or as a dev.
Windows 95 was the last time I can recall a major rev of Windows lived up to its pre-release hype. This Windows 8 hype reminds me of the salivating over Longhorn which turned out as Windows Vista, again.
Well... The difference between what has been show of Windows 8 and the preview versions you can download and run are small when compared to the Longhorn PDC'03 video and what was actually delivered as Vista.
In fact, the PDC'03 Longhorn is still light-years ahead of Windows 8.
"I'd argue that the last truly revolutionary version of Windows was Windows 95. In the subsequent 17 years, we've seen a stream of mostly minor and often inconsequential design changes in Windows"
I know Jeff is looking at this more on the design side than the technical, but I'd argue that Windows XP was a much bigger deal than Windows 95, being the first consumer release based on the NT kernel and thus the first "home" version of Windows with reasonable memory protection between processes. How quickly we forget how terrible Windows was in the bad old days of daily BSODs.
Agreed. All the tech popularizers and business people focus on the non-exclusive license for DOS they gave IBM as the smartest decision Bill Gates ever made, and I guess it was, but for my money a very close second was hiring Dave Cutler and his people from DEC to build a real OS kernel. Without the NT kernel to fall back on, Windows would have collapsed under its own weight long ago.
On the other hand, one of the worse ones was the fiasco involving OS/2 2.0, which was much closer to NT than Win9x was and for example could have been used to legally attack DR-DOS. Why did it take 10 years after Intel released the 80386 before 32-bit programming became popular? I have a thread about it here:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=516&cpage=1#comment-3413
> Windows XP was a much bigger deal than Windows 95, being the first consumer release based on the NT kernel
I hung on to 98 until 2001 for gaming, but at that point most stuff worked perfectly on 2k. While it wasn't intended for "home" users, 2k was the preferred OS among my group of friends until XPsp2 or so.
I really don't get why the NT kernel wasn't introduced to the "home" market until XP.
NT5/Windows 2000 was delayed by a couple years (supposedly due to the corporate networking stuff). The hardware was certainly ready for it by about 1998.
There was also a companion "Windows 2000 Home" edition announced, however it was rolled into XP while Windows ME was released as largely unwanted stopgap.
I was a big proponent of Windows 2000 as well. Though not marketed/positioned as such, it was really the start of the merging of the consumer and corporate OSes... based on NT kernel, but had support for DirectX and other APIs Microsoft never bothered to support in older NT releases.
How terrible third-party Windows applications were. Writing cooperative multitasking applications is hard and much blame was assigned to Windows when it should be on applications.
Windows 95 could preemptively multitask 32-bit code. But its core was 16-bit, and there were many legacy 16-bit apps, all of which were cooperatively multitasked.
I agree with you up to a point but given the hardware of the time, it was certainly possible to make the OS more robust than it was prior to the switch to NT everywhere, and to Microsoft's credit they did make the correct decision.
Now, despite the lingering snarkiness from the *nix-hipsters, Windows is incredibly robust... even more so today since in Vista and on even the graphics driver can crash without an OS restart in most cases.
True. The BSOD bloggers love to write about, for instance, was mainly caused by faulty hardware or defective third-party drivers. The OS, conservatively, entered panic mode to prevent damage to data. Somehow it seems acceptable for a Unix kernel to panic on such conditions but when it happens to a machine running Windows, that must be because Micro$oft programmers are so stoopid...
Whenever anyone lists the new copy dialog as one of the top features of Windows 8, it really makes Windows 8 sound bad.
I mean, seriously? The copy dialog? The thing whose job it is to say "OK, you've got plenty of time, go take a shower" and "OK, we're almost there!"
I'm sorry, this is not a key piece of infrastructure. If that's one of the most exciting things you can point to on Windows 8, that says to me there's not much exciting to point to.
Come on, nobody is suggesting the copy dialog is the pinnacle of Windows 8, but it's important because it solves a very common and very visible frustration with previous versions of Windows.
Users regularly express frustration with the inaccurate way Windows calculates time estimates on file transfers and the fact that you can't add or remove files in the queue without using a third party application like Teracopy.
I would imagine I'm about as much of a "power user" as anyone else on here and I couldn't care less about either of the things you just mentioned. Making a big deal out of the file copy dialog on a new OS does seem a bit over the top.
It's amazing how fast things change these days. Good 7" tablets for $200-$250 really undermine the whole Windows 8 strategy. Carrying around a laptop and a cheap 7" tablet that is actually light enough to hold for long periods of time is going to be a better choice for most people than the 2 pound Surface Pro which may very well end up costing more than two separate devices.
The trend of 'surface won't suffice! I need a workstation to get real work done!' reminds me of 'a UI won't suffice! I need a command line to get real work done!'.
And, for the people making that claim, this is still true. I certainly wouldn't be nearly as productive if I only had my GUI tools and could not use Bash, after all!
I don't understand why people assume that just because CLIs are older and less popular they are also necessarily worse: they really aren't.
If the stylus is good enough I can see people who use Photoshop or AutoCAD replacing their laptop/desktop with a tablet. I just don't see how a tablet would be an improvement for working with something like a spreadsheet.
You say that like it's not true. I've never met a decent developer who runs windows, and the obvious explanation is that its command line is still hopelessly inadequate.
I just don't really get why they can't do what Apple does. There are two metaphors here, one for fingers, one for keyboard and mouse. For systems with a keyboard and mouse, use the metaphor that suits them better. Seems simple.
Apple's approach requires you to have multiple devices to get both the tablet and full-on-workstation experience. I don't want multiple devices. I want a single device that can adapt to different uses—the Surface tablet looks just about perfect as a starter laptop replacement to me. I'm hoping it'll do to my MacBook Pro what the MacBook Pro did to my desktop PC: relegate it to infrequent use for a few specialty cases that need a bigger screen or the full laptop form factor or something.
Do you want a 2 pound tablet though? That's the big problem with the Surface Pro. The original iPad at 1.5 pounds was generally considered to be too heavy by a lot of people. I can't imagine adding an additional half pound to it and being able to actually use it as a tablet anymore.
OK, that's great, but why does what you want have to affect my experience on the desktop? You want a touch UI that also gives full desktop functionality. Presumably they can deliver that to you via the Surface UI. Why can't they have a Surface UI and a Windows UI?
That's a good question, and mirrors my own frustration with post-10.6 Mac OS X trends... I guess since I basically never use the Start menu, I just haven't gotten the impression that it will particularly change my desktop Windows interface.
I believe both companies see increased convergence for 90% of use cases down the line, and Microsoft's just making a more dramatic transition. I can see the argument that it's premature to make the big jump at this point, before there's a Metro app ecosystem or anything (and I'd be very antagonistic towards any dramatic changes to the non-Metro interface, since for the things I use my PC for, I don't want Metro), but I can also see an argument that it's better to make the painful transition early.
And I'm gradually just resigning myself to the fact that the things I want a computer for aren't the same as most people's... so whoever provides the least-painful way to still get power-user stuff done in a "Post PC" world will get my money. I'm very intrigued about running Lightroom on a Surface Pro and tossing it in my bag with my camera...
Where Microsoft is going makes much more sense to me (I actually think Apple may be headed that direction too as each release of the desktop OS seems to add more and more iOS features).
It seems like Microsofts end game is that you will have one device and the interface for interacting with that device will depend on where you are. If docked at home with external monitor, keyboard, and mouse you get more of the desktop feel. Unplug the device and take it with you and you have more of the touch based interface.
So are you saying Microsoft should force people to use either touch or mouse on a device, but not both? What if your device supports both touch and mouse, for example a notebook with a touch screen? Windows 8 will have to approach that head-on if they are going to have tablets that simultaneously support touch, mouse, tablet, or even Kinect-like gestures via the camera.
My preferred solution at the moment is that they do what they are doing for Windows 8's surface UI for both touch and hybrid devices, but also continue with the strain of Windows that is targeted to mouse-and-keyboard.
Because they didn't do this with the customer in mind. They did it for themselves. The main is because they are very "weak" on the ARM architecture, so they need to somehow tout the ability that you can also run legacy apps, even though that's always been possible on Windows tablets, and people never cared, because they were still unoptimized for touch, just like the one that exist now will be.
And second, probably because they didn't want to be the ones that actually push the knife deep into their decades long partner, Intel, and they wanted to drag them along in the "post-PC" era.
Or, maybe, because they thought having a single device rather than two was an advantage? I would certainly rather have a single tablet that could also act like a laptop as opposed to both a tablet and a laptop.
There are too many hardware constraints. Current ARM chips have less than 1/10 the memory bandwidth of current Intel notebook CPUs and in real-world benchmarks are MUCH slower. Ditto tablet vs notebook GPUs. At best, Microsoft is making a tablet with a keyboard, not a notebook/tablet hybrid.
I love my iPad. But Surface isn't going to save me from buying a laptop. There are lots of things that I've found that I just couldn't move over to my iPad, and none of those are going to move over to a Surface either.
So at the very, very most, Surface saves you from buying one of these:
But they do still have a desktop, which is a bit of a head-scratcher. Why not go all-metro for WinRT? Will anyone write any non-metro Windows software for ARM, apart from Microsoft's own Office?
From what I remember of the demo, the desktop is for the Intel version only and the arm version is 100% metro. Just google'd this though and couldn't find anything confirming either way.
If this is confusing people on HN, think what it will be like for consumers since the two devices look very similar. Imagine trying to explain to someone that their laptop can't run software X that someone else's otherwise identical (or near enough) laptop can because "it has an ARM chip not an intel one".
Instead of saying " Supports Windows 8 " , non metro software will now have to say " Supports Windows8* "
I wonder how many developers will bother with metro since we already have a bewilderingly huge choices of platforms to support with our software, including "Just give up and do a web app".
Reminds me of when Microsoft's marketing-based product management crazily shoehorned the ".Net" moniker onto everything that the company sold whether it made sense or not. Now the actual .Net technology was pretty nice when everything settled down - but I don't understand now that Microsoft finally managed to make decent virtual machine technology foundation, why they're pushing forward with a path with Windows 8 (ARM) incompatible with Win 8 (x08) why not something a bit closer to run everywhere on a VM?
I'm assuming you can do that and MS will encourage people to write code for .Net rather than C++. You would probably need to add some thing for metro but I'm guessing MS will try and make it as painless as they can.
My guess is that they decided to ship an incomplete Windows RT rather than wait until they could do the obvious thing (provide a complete metro). It's a question of practicality winning over perfection. Think of this as MS Tablet 1.0. It's not perfect, but Windows 9 will be better, and so on.
Will anyone develop software? I'm sure they will for one definite reason - hope. Lots of folks in the ecosystem with skills in ms tool chain etc. who will prospectively develop stuff. But key developers will only ship stuff if the platform is successful.
Windows 8 is certainly a sign that MS is steering in the right direction. Its income base isn't disappearing immediately, so it may have the time to do its usual thing of getting it good enough in version 3. Windows 8 seems close enough that MS might even have it right by version 2.
Here is where I think Microsoft may have screwed the pooch:
* Orphaning WP7.
* Possibly orphaning/pissing off its third party partners. (When will they give up their abusive relationship?)
I for one am glad that someone is taking on the space between the Macbook Air and iPad so that I don't need to spend on and lug around two devices.
If you want an iOS clone, there's always Android. Why should Windows too play a me-too copycat and reduce choice to the user? What benefit is there to that?
I don't want an iOS clone. I want desktop Windows to continue to exist. As it is, I will be forced to use a touch UI on my desktop, which is less than optimal for keyboard-and-mouse.
Why not the Transformer tablets? I'm planning on doing a lot of oss development for it when I get one of the infinities - I figure someone will be putting out a good vim port among other things, designed for either attached or bluetooth keyboards.
I still think it's a bet... OSX isn't integrated with iOS in the same fashion of Metro/Desktop in Win8 and Android has not a real desktop version to make a comparison here. Microsoft is trying to bring the touch experience to desktops with a keyboard and a mouse and that's very risky.
Microsoft abused me for years. They had a monopoly, I had to use Windows and Office ( I still do at work for many things).
Now , thank god almighty, I have choices. They will have to do a lot better than Windows 8 to rope me back into the corral.
Metro and Windows 8 might be good enough if introduced by any other company. Microsoft is not any other company.
I am not a ludite nor a nutjob. I have real work to do and am forced to use Microsoft products. But I will roast in hell before I give them any benefit of the doubt. Ever.
I'm amazed that Windows is sold and tied to one user interface!
Why they don't afford the user choice like Linux I don't know.
Forcing users to make a limited choice of one is going to upset many, change can be bad as well as good.
Come SP1/2 of windows8 they will offer alternative user interfaces - can smell the outcome in the air. Failing that they will have a active market in alternatives that will become more mainstream aware than the alternatives currently.
If you sit down at a friend's Windows box, with two buttons, you can use it, again with no problems. But just try making sense of a friend's X terminal: three buttons, each one programmed a different way to perform a different function on each different day of the week -- and that's before you consider combinations like control-left-button, shift-right-button, control-shift-meta-middle-button, and so on.
There is also a very active windows theme customization community who use tools like windows blinds to tweak the current windows theme into something you probably wouldn't recognize.
What i mean is you get the windows GUI and are not afforded any alternatives like you are browsers, there are alternatives out there but they are not for the faint hearted and that in itself is the issue. Tech's like us have no issue with them but for joe public then they only see what they are given and when they are not offered an option then they see no choice.
So anytime someone is excited about a product and says "I love it; you should try it!" they're a shill? If your customers used your product and told others to do the same, would you have the same opinion?
I can certainly see how this is like Daring Fireball: he does neglect to talk about any downsides. But I can't imagine how this is worse, except that it's about Windows rather than OS X.
Personally, I find Daring Fireball significantly more smug and annoying--unlike this post, Daring Fireball also likes to constantly rag on Android and implicitly assumes almost everything Apple does is perfect.
Oh look, they've updated the copy dialog again. Tell you what: maybe just make it as fast as it can possibly be, and I'll promise not to ask how long it's taking.
We seem to be heading towards a point where booting Windows is going to take longer than copying a single file.
Making every copy operation excruciating just to support the few cases where you might actually benefit from the fullscreen 3D copy visualisation with Dolby Surround Sound isn't a design tradeoff with which I've been particularly satisfied. It'd be fine if you could hold down Shift or something to say "please don't muck about". It's even worse when it's putting stuff in the Recycle Bin, at which point you really, _really_ don't care.
Your mileage is entirely welcome to vary, and perhaps the performance of this new dialog is such that I won't notice it as much as its Vista and Windows 7 counterparts. To be honest I couldn't work out the Windows 8 preview to the point where I could even find a file, let alone copy it somewhere.
I'm not clear what your complaint actually is. Are you upset because the dialog exists at all? Would you rather that you get no convenient way to know when the copy is complete? Or are you annoyed by the extra visualizations and such? It seems like you could simply not expand the additional info.
As for the recycle dialog, I'm pretty sure that's gone in Windows 8.
I'm guessing:
The Windows 8 Desktop side will be top-notch, comforting, and work as before and as expected.
The Windows 8 Metro side will be top-notch, internally-coherent, well-received, and offer a reduced complexity set for novice users and those seeking clarity and easier consumption.
The core OS will be top-notch, work on a grand range of hardware, and work as before and as expected.
It's not the problem with any of these pieces, it's how they're put together.
The first hour of Windows 8 is maddening, regardless of your technical skill level, comfort with Windows idioms, or level of resistance to change.
Two thirds of system configuration has been gutted and stranded in Metro mode. Login (if set up) is baffling and new. The computer violently flips between Metro and Desktop for reasons you're never quite sure of. It's constantly trying to drag you to this new place with completely different rules, appearance, and behavior. UI is hidden and transient.
There's no guide. You're just dumped there, and all efforts to work your computer like you did before are stymied. Yes, eventually YOU figure it out, but someone who's spent 20 years baking in the same ultra-reduced set of magic rituals to get the e-mail out is going to feel stupid. And they're not going to blame themselves - the era when you had no choice but to blame yourself is long over.
The Microsoft TABLET will be fine. The Microsoft SERVER will be fine. The Microsoft POWER USER base will be fine. The Microsoft GAMER population will be fine. The Microsoft DEVELOPERS will be fine.
It's the people who are only on the platform by virtue of "that's where facebook and my email is" who are going to run away screaming "Vista 2". That's the chip they're gambling with here, and I think they're going to lose it.