Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions

[MagicAndre1981]

I wonder how they fabricated their numbers to backup that statement.

The consumer preview is almost 2 months old, yet its market share of desktop OS'es is 0.11% according to hitslink.com (or 0.08% according to w3counter)

The first Win7 beta was released in early January 2009. 2 months later (March 2009) its market share was more than double at 0.26%

yeah, pure PR lies as usual.

[JorgeA]

Win8 is making everything useful about Windows "legacy", only to force an ill-suited touchscreen interface on mouse/keyboard users which is a gigantic setback in usability and which will just confuse everybody. It'll take some time for most users to adjust to this tacky interface and its gaudy icons, gestures, hot corners and screen edges (removing buttons), hidden elements (less visual cues), reduced discoverability, scrolling up/down with the mouse that actually scrolls sideways, everything running maximized (and with no chrome), multitasking being very much neutered, the disjointed combo of metro and desktop environments, etc. Also, customizability has been thrown out of the window, they're forcing MS cloud services on users, ARM devices throw 20 years of backwards compatibility out the window (and they also introduce locked bootloaders), the app store that can remotely deactivate apps you paid for, the existing Metro apps are of incredibly bad quality and are very much feature-light (most are also useless without an internet connection), etc. At best it just gets in your way, it's an obstacle to getting work done and it slows you down.

CoffeeFiend,

That's the best summary of the situation that I've seen anywhere.

This Metro nonsense is starting to spread like a disease. A couple of nights ago I visited winunleaked.tk to see what they've come up with lately. Instead of reaching the blog directly, now they first put up a Metro-looking "Start" screen where you click on the part of the website that you want to go to. Of course, before this it used to be that you could reach the blog page directly and then click on the forum link if you wanted to visit that part of the site. Bottom line: it's more steps if you want to read the blog, and no fewer steps if you want to enter the forum. Not only does it look like Win8, it works just like Win8, too!

--JorgeA

Edited April 22, 2012 by JorgeA

[CoffeeFiend]

yeah, pure PR lies as usual.

Of course. Next they will be saying "It's the best selling OS ever!", based on sales of most PCs which come with that OS as the only option (totally disregarding those who will upgrade it to Win7 later or those who make use of their "downgrade" rights at purchase time), bulk purchases of licenses by big chains still unsold and sitting on shelves of their stores, not accounting for the increase of desktops/laptops sold in that time frame, comparing sales over periods of different lengths, etc. That will be another useless fabricated statistic, just like they did with Vista. They're so predictable with their lies and half-truths. They might as well have written this book.

Now, if you can show me that more PCs were actually sold with Win8 and isn't getting upgraded to Win7 shortly after, than there were PCs sold with Win7, while accounting for market growth and such factors then sure, that will actually mean something. Of course MS won't give us something like that as it would look really bad for them. Of course they'd never admit that it's not selling well. Fortunately for us, the online market share statistics mostly reflect real world usage of various OS'es (what's currently used -- not what it shipped with, or licenses old that aren't installed on a PC or whatever) and we do have access to that. Then again, MS is already lying about this which is pretty funny. The other metric we won't see is what percentage of the population actually likes it, but anyone who's been in any Win8-related article/blog post/forum thread or such can very quickly see that this number is very low comparatively.

That's the best summary of the situation that I've seen anywhere.

Thank you

Meanwhile, everyone's making fun of their new "Windows RT" name and they already see it failing in the enterprise (duh!)

[jaclaz]

BEFORE that:

They've reinvented the wheel by making it square.

Back to the origins...

Something you, like the vast majority of people, might be unaware of, is that the original design for the wheel was a square.

after a very unfortunate attempt to reduce the number of bumps by using a triangle as shape....

...it was later re-invented as an octagon, with the new approach of reducing the magnitude of bumps....

....then the latter idea evolved into a dodecagon....

...and only relatively recently it was fully developed as a circle ...

Why, in my day, all we had was...:

http://reboot.pro/1908/

and we LIKED it!

It's far, FAR worse than WinME.

Me wasn't actually that bad, it was a bettered Windows 98, only worse. (BTW not as bad as Vista - a bettered XP, only MUCH worse )

jaclaz

[CoffeeFiend]

BEFORE that:

I never played that version. But it seems very much like Radio Shack's Pocket Repeat from the 80's:

BTW not as bad as Vista - a bettered XP, only MUCH worse

While Vista was pretty heavy, and good quality drivers were late, at least it offered a good amount of worthwhile stuff. Like better security, start menu search, sleep that finally "just works", etc. I mean, that wasn't so bad comparatively speaking.

Win7 vs Win8 fares much, much worse. Win8 is very much lacking in terms of new features (only a couple minor "okay" new things, and zero must-haves) while doing away with large parts of what made it a good OS (like a sane user interface, for starters). It's about as bad as moving from XP down to Win 3.1.

Thankfully Win7 is a fantastic OS and it'll remain viable for a number of years. Hopefully Win9 won't be such a disaster, otherwise we'll all move to something else like OS X and virtualize what we can't just replace or port. I'm certain it'll boost Apple's sales regardless.

[Octopuss]

At least WinME didn't force a stupid UI meant for an entirely different kind of device on you (it looked and worked very much like Win98 and Win95). Nor did it try to force dinky phone-like "apps" on us to replace traditional software.

Win8 is making everything useful about Windows "legacy", only to force an ill-suited touchscreen interface on mouse/keyboard users which is a gigantic setback in usability and which will just confuse everybody. It'll take some time for most users to adjust to this tacky interface and its gaudy icons, gestures, hot corners and screen edges (removing buttons), hidden elements (less visual cues), reduced discoverability, scrolling up/down with the mouse that actually scrolls sideways, everything running maximized (and with no chrome), the desktop being just another application, multitasking being very much neutered, the disjointed combo of metro and desktop environments, etc. Also, customizability has been thrown out of the window, they're forcing MS cloud services on users, ARM devices throw 20 years of backwards compatibility out the window (and they also introduce locked bootloaders), the app store that can remotely deactivate apps you paid for, the existing Metro apps are of incredibly bad quality and are very much feature-light (most are also useless without an internet connection), etc. At best it just gets in your way, it's an obstacle to getting work done and it slows you down.

They've reinvented the wheel by making it square. It creates countless major problems rather than solving any, just so they have a laughable chance at selling a few mediocre tablets (I'm sure it'll sell as good as the Zune or Windows Phone). But hey, explorer now has a ribbon, and task manager has heat maps!

TL;DR: It's far, FAR worse than WinME.

Good, I will spend money on buying WinRAR and donating to Imgburn and similar free USEFUL programs instead.

[JorgeA]

Apropos of some of the images we've been seeing in this thread, check this out.

--JorgeA

[jaclaz]

Apropos of some of the images we've been seeing in this thread, check this out.

The world is so nice because everyone can have his/her opinions , OT , but not much , and JFYI:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/winlockpro/

I realized that people were getting boored of the normal user interface that Windows 7 has provided us since it's release, hence created a new interface with tons of special features to protect your privacy,data and to make your user experience better.

WinLock Pro was inspired by Windows 8. After the release of the Developers preview, I was immediately drawn towards its simplicity and beauty. The new and improved metro interface to all the minor changes caught my attention. Something that really won me over was the excellent Lock Screen and logon interface that Windows 8 provided the home user, a simple and easy way to access your PC at any time without any trouble. I was browsing online one day and realized that there were a countless number of blogs and forums dedicated towards this topic. And I immediately thought of bringing this experience all the way to Windows 7,Vista and XP.

jaclaz

[tomasz86]

Exactly. There's a handful of people obsessing over how fast it boots when I reboot like once a month. That might save me all of 2 minutes per year! Or indeed, how it would run better on a ten year old computer which I'd never want to use for anything in the first place. As if those are main concerns, especially when Win7 already works great on 5+ year old hardware.

A lot of the talking points from MS on Win8 are about increased boot time. Tossing around figures and times that remind me of my old Win95 PC as far as boot time. I think I only know one person that shuts down their computer at night. Most people just leave them on since the old days of memory corrupting and PC getting slow are things of the past OS like Win95 or 98.

Actually I'd like to disagree with this point. It may not be important on a desktop where you indeed can have it turned on all the time but it's very important on laptops and other mobile devices which you sometimes need to turn on and just use instantly instead of waiting those several seconds. Of course this shouldn't be the main feature of Win8 but still I personally wouldn't neglect the benefits of it.

[MagicAndre1981]

@jaclaz

everyone has a different taste. I personally hate the metro look. The colors are ugly and the first thing which I disable is the ugly lock screen. This is annoying for me on the desktop

[JorgeA]

I just came across a review of the Metro interface. The article was interesting, but the real stars on the page are the commenters:

how many ppl have touchscreens at home anyway? i don't know a single person who has one at home OR work. I went to a great site i buy pc parts from all the time, guess what? they don't have a single touchscreen for sale. And heres the real thing, I have 2 24" screens an arms length away from me. even if i had a touchscreen, do they really think i want to spend all day with my arm stretched out infront of me? heck no. I DON't want to use a touchscreen. I want my lazy arm on my desk, with the mouse so sensitive that I barely have to move 2 inches to move the pointer across 2 desktops. windows 8 is trying to turn my killer machine into a mobile phone. this sucks! get the cell outta my pc!!!!!

What most people are not grasping is the division between Win32 and WinRT. If Microsoft has its way and Win32 is abandoned and everybody is programming for WinRT, we should all forget about windows in Windows. WinRT is a full-screen environment which also manages applications without user input. If this change takes hold, you should forget desktop computing for ever. Rich applications with rich output and capable interfaces using the desktop in an intelligent manner would be history for good. Is this what you want?? Is this what anybody wants?

On that page, the comment that appears just below this last comment sounds like an even more serious indictment of Metro, but I'm not a developer so I lack the expertise to assess it. I'll be thankful to any who do know what he's talking about and who will flesh out some of what he says in the first two paragraphs.

--JorgeA

[CoffeeFiend]

The article was interesting

...and is often spot-on:

my personal view is that desktop applications need to be rewritten or modified for the touch environment

That. Non-touch apps don't work right for touch input. And touch apps suck with mouse/keyboard interfaces. And in lots of cases, very large parts of the code would have to be replaced (as much as 90%). This is why Metro doesn't make any sense, except on tablets. But again, it's not like we're given the choice of having the right kind of UI, everything is now a smartphone according to MS.

What Windows 8 needs is to go back to its roots and to become Windows again.

This. We'll wait it out for a while, but if Windows doesn't become Windows again then it just becomes a useless and irrelevant OS that I won't use on any device.

As for the comments:

windows 8 is trying to turn my killer machine into a mobile phone. this sucks! get the cell outta my pc!!!!!

+1 to that.

If this change takes hold, you should forget desktop computing for ever. Rich applications with rich output and capable interfaces using the desktop in an intelligent manner would be history for good.

Exactly. Almost all the software that makes using Windows worth it just doesn't and can't work with the Metro UI. It's just not suited to desktop computing. If MS pushes that aside then they greatly reduce the usefulness and relevance of Windows i.e. they're killing it.

On that page, the comment that appears just below this last comment sounds like an even more serious indictment of Metro, but I'm not a developer so I lack the expertise to assess it.

That's the same kind of stuff I've been saying all along, just with specific points and examples. It's far too limited, the apps are sandboxed (your access to anything is very limited), and yes, it's not exactly a mature development platform and things like the controls suck (and of course, everything is maximized now). That's why we don't plan on porting any of our software to Metro. Having to rewrite *huge* amounts of code at great expense, especially when most people believe Metro will be a complete flop, and that MS lately is quicker at killing or replacing their new developer tools? MFC (tech from 1992) still works today. But Winforms? Well, that's been replaced by WPF. Oh, wait, that's being replaced by WinRT. Silverlight? Forget that too, it's HTML5 now, and maybe WinRT. "Classic" ASP was replaced by ASP.NET, and that's being replaced by ASP.NET MVC. They seem to do this for all their recent stuff. They push hard for something then they just kill it off, and you end up having to re-learn how it works and by the time you're there they replace it again. So eventually you stop caring about the flavor-of-the-week stuff.

So yeah. Why incur the expense of porting existing Win32 apps that work great and already costed quite a lot to develop, having to re-think how every part of interface should work using touch, re-training all programmers for WinRT, writing all the new code (maintaining 2 separate code bases) and doing a lot of restructuring work so you can reuse parts of the old code. That's assuming that what you need to do can even be done in that sandboxed environment (in our case it can't be for most of our apps). Just so we can have a smartphone-like app which will only run on ~1% of our users' computers (those with Win8), only to see them use it with their mouse anyway? Most likely they'd hate it and just run the good old version on the desktop instead. It's just *so* not happening. You can imagine that lots of other companies, if not nearly all of them (except those who make smartphone apps), will do the same.

[JorgeA]

CoffeeFiend,

Thank you very much for the explanation. Putting that commentary together with what you've been saying, it's starting to make sense to me now.

The May issue of PCWorld came in the mail yesterday, with Windows 8 as the cover feature. Editor Steve Fox likes the new look and the fact that MS has made a bold play for the growing tablet market. However, he's dubious about Win8's viability on desktop machines:

But it runs the risk of confusing, or even angering, mouse and keyboard users, who may find themselves staring at a screen offering few navigational cues, not even the familiar Start button.

After discussing "a potential user revolt," the lead editorial concludes:

I'm predicting a major hit this time as well. In 2015. With Windows 9.

--JorgeA

[Tripredacus]

At least that Metro app has an off switch!

Anyways, just read a huge in depth article on Windows 8 at Ars Technica. You can see there are MANY improvements that are great for us techies, but it also points out the problems of course. I see that one is that the multi-monitor taskbar is configurable, which I hadn't seen in my tests. I made a complaint about it somewhere in this thread.

[jaclaz]

Speaking of games, I just coded a new one , inspired by MS OS releases .

(See attached Excel worksheet)

jaclaz

MS-Chess.zip