Chinese here, would love to share some observations:
1) It's likely that the ban on Windows 8 has nothing to do with "power-saving". To me power-saving is just a buzzword in the title of the notice.
2) This notice is concerned with a specific round of bid. So it's not an administrative order, but rather a requirement list for the bidders. If I understand correctly this only applies to computers to be purchased during the bid. I'm not sure about how large the scale of the bid is, though; it may affect 1% of the government computer installations, or 99%. Either is possible without further information.
3) This notice doesn't say anything about Windows 7. What this means that bidders are allowed to provide computers pre-installed with Windows 7 and IMO this is pretty likely. Yes there are conspiracy advocates who would rather stick with Windows XP (I have never been able to understand their reasoning...), but I believe the computer vendors are more sensible. After all it's they who have to provide customer service.
4) This notice is also only concerned with the pre-installed OS. It's totally possible that the government officials may replace the OS with anything they like (which are, unfortunately, most likely pirate copies). I don't know about the central government, but it's common practice in local governments. The central government has very weak executive power when it comes to such detailed things. (Why bother enforcing such regulations after all?)
Then it follows that there must be US government procurement documents that ban Windows 8 on government computers, as it would be part of the spec. Perhaps someone should tell Reuters, they might have forgot in all the excitement.
That's not how things work. US procurement is not going to leave the OS choice up to a third party so they may require win 7 but there not going to ban win 8. If for no other reason that offline computers are 'secure' enough for testing and the government has a
lot of proprietary apps.
I suspect that whether a given government software spec includes blacklists, whitelists or a combination of both depends largely on who wrote it. Unless someone can show me that exclusive whitelisting is enforced US policy, I would think there will often be documents detailing which versions of software are not to be used on a given contract, as well as which ones are.
I'm sure that windows 8 is deployed in a more than a few places. But for instance, the department of Ag _just_ upgraded to windows 7 from XP (squeaking by the end-of-life deadline).
The 'worst' part is that Windows 8 is actually fine, except for the extremely superficial differences. Given the many options for reverting Windows 8 to essentially a faster Windows 7 but with a new UI, Microsoft has really shot itself in the foot.
If MS provided a group policy toggle to essentially say 'force Windows Classic mode', enterprises would have a lot less reluctance (beyond the normal reluctance that IT has to anything new, which is to get the enterprise's infrastructure into a state of balance and then not touch it for ten years).
Only if you think basic UI functionality and a few decades of muscle memory x a few tens of millions of people is "superficial", that is.
It doesn't matter how awesome the changes under the hood are if it's painful to use. And I'd argue that the unwarranted attempt to shoehorn a (mediocre by itself) touch UI into a desktop, poorly, ranks as "painful", never mind the knock-on effects with certain configurations (laptop touchpads interpreting normal mouse movement as swipe gestures for example).
I actually prefer the 8 UI to 7's. You click the start menu, and your intention is clearly to interact only with the menu, so why not make it take up the whole screen? The application icons on the bottom are also much more space efficient.
I think a majority of the complaints come from "this is different!" not "this is worse!".
No, the intention is to quickly start something without distracting from the main screen. There is no sane reason to go fullscreen here, if i have Writer open and want to start a calculator or MSN or whatever other app.
I needed a few trials until i found where to shut down that stupid OS (and eventually installed the classic menu).
Interestingly i have a touchscreen laptop but on my main OS (Linux) i went the complete opposite direction lately, with a much more keyboard-driven setup, no fancy animations.
Basically a distraction-free work machine, and not the colorful, animation-loaded distraction "beast" Windows has become.
I think the function of the windows key, where a menu pops up in the right and you can type out the application name, is what you want for that purpose. Ubuntu does the same thing. I'm pretty keyboard-centric myself, and this works really well for me. The fullscreen start menu is nice when you forget the exact name of the application, IMO.
And Ubuntu has similarly turned into an example of what not to do. This fad of cramming a touch UI down the throat of mouse users and acting like it's all perfectly natural is obscene.
I'm talking specifically about a feature that enables fast keyboard access to applications. I don't see how that has anything to do with mouse or touch UI.
Ubuntu's UI has its own issues, but that's not the point.
Ah, I wasn't on my windows computer when I checked it. I guess the standard windows key does go to fullscreen. The fast, small one is Win+S. It would be nice to be able to switch them.
They are superficial in "it will cust just a few hours of development time to fix". But certainly aren't superficial in "the user experience does not suffer because of them".
There were a lot of reasons the old start menu was removed. I listed some technical reasons why "just leave it in as an option" isn't as easy as it sounds.
It is not a straw man to say that investing in one area means you have to sacrifice in others. This is what we call software development.
Features are not added in service packs, and I don't even think service packs exist anymore (service packs are just collections of security and reliability updates, created and packaged together by a special "sustained engineering" team, not the product team).
The product team is building a new start menu option for a future version of Windows. It's a significant undertaking, not something they're throwing together willy nilly. They don't have a time machine, so they can't go back to 2012 and ship it then.
Still, given that the missing start menu is most folks' #1 complaint about Windows 8, wouldn't you have to say that (at least in hindsight) it was a mistake to leave it out? Yes, software engineering is always about compromises, but isn't it also about making the right compromises?
It's a straw man to suggest that putting in the effort to update a fancy menu would have had so much impact that the product would have been ruined. But I think I misread your clause about 'disjointed' at first.
The GP has actually grabbed some of my sentiment. I doubt that it's just an outright expression of the frustration over Windows 8 from the government people as customers and doesn't have much conspiracy behind it, which the tone of Reuters seems to imply.
1) It's likely that the ban on Windows 8 has nothing to do with "power-saving". To me power-saving is just a buzzword in the title of the notice.
2) This notice is concerned with a specific round of bid. So it's not an administrative order, but rather a requirement list for the bidders. If I understand correctly this only applies to computers to be purchased during the bid. I'm not sure about how large the scale of the bid is, though; it may affect 1% of the government computer installations, or 99%. Either is possible without further information.
3) This notice doesn't say anything about Windows 7. What this means that bidders are allowed to provide computers pre-installed with Windows 7 and IMO this is pretty likely. Yes there are conspiracy advocates who would rather stick with Windows XP (I have never been able to understand their reasoning...), but I believe the computer vendors are more sensible. After all it's they who have to provide customer service.
4) This notice is also only concerned with the pre-installed OS. It's totally possible that the government officials may replace the OS with anything they like (which are, unfortunately, most likely pirate copies). I don't know about the central government, but it's common practice in local governments. The central government has very weak executive power when it comes to such detailed things. (Why bother enforcing such regulations after all?)