[CoffeeFiend]

Yet another nice article.

99% of what I see on any website about Win8 is very much negative, and this article is no different (it has many similar links in it too).

Also, all of the popular articles on pcword's Windows 8 section are overwhelmingly negative about Win8 too, and so are the comments. Even toms' hardware are publishing similar articles now. Even the comments on anantech's few articles are quite negative. I don't recall Vista being received so badly so soon.

I think it's obvious that it's going to be such a catastrophic failure (you think Vista had bad press?) And unless there are MAJOR changes until it's released which is extremely unlikely I definitely won't be running it, neither will we upgrade at work. Totally out of the question. Win8 has already failed and is history as far as I'm concerned (along with Bob, WinME and others). I've already moved on to waiting for Win9 which MS truly can't afford to screw up so badly.

[tomasz86]

Still Windows 8 powered tablets look very promising

This post has been edited by tomasz86: 16 March 2012 - 10:38 PM

[CoffeeFiend]

tomasz86, on 16 March 2012 - 10:36 PM, said:

Still Windows 8 powered tablets look very promising

Losing to the older iPad pretty badly IMO (not only in what was shown but overall too). Then again, most Windows tablets will probably have far lesser screens than the iPad 3 (3MP IPS LCD!), far less apps, battery life that's no better, yet without beating the iPad on the price point. But hey, at least it runs your good old x86 apps, Flash and ActiveX-based websites, right? Oh wait... I don't even see what it has to offer over Android even. I mean WOA is so unlike Windows that it's practically pointless.

Then again, being far too late to the market, it seems like people don't want of a Windows tablet anymore, that they're priced to fail anyway and so on. Analysts like IDC already predict Win8 being a failure.

[tomasz86]

I guess it depends on your needs. iOS is such a closed system that you can't even customise anything without hacking/jailbreaking it, you can't synchronise your files effectively using anything other than iTunes, etc. I'd never use such a device myself. Windows 8 looks like open source compared to it

[CoffeeFiend]

tomasz86, on 17 March 2012 - 12:05 AM, said:

iOS is such a closed system that you can't even customise anything without hacking/jailbreaking it

WOA is hardly better. They can remotely wipe apps from your computer (that you already paid for) and all. And you can't install another OS on it ("secure" bootloaders, yay!) You can't sideload apps, it works only through the app store (which have to be pre-approved just like Apple does). It's as locked down as it comes. If you want full control (like side loading) then you will need to root it too.

But if that's your thing then Android seems like a vastly superior option still (it *is* open source, heavily customizable and thinkerer-friendly). I'd sooner buy an Android device than a WOA device for sure, but Apple has what seems like a really slick product to most people.

[tomasz86]

CoffeeFiend, on 17 March 2012 - 12:21 AM, said:

But if that's your thing then Android seems like a vastly superior option still (it *is* open source).

I've been using an Android tablet myself (Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9') and I like it although it's still far from perfect. Especially the UI is very slow and the available apps are also not ideal, especially the office related ones. And I need to learn Linux first in order to be able to go deeper into it.

By the way, Android 3.x (Honeycomb) is not open source

[CoffeeFiend]

tomasz86, on 17 March 2012 - 12:37 AM, said:

the available apps are also not ideal

There's a whole lot more of them than for Windows though and it just might stay that way: there's TONS of Java developers around (that's what most universities teach), and Android is a nice system -- whereas Win8 will most likely flop anyway, will not have nice inexpensive devices, and almost nobody develops using WinRT or XAML in the first place. That's one of the reasons I'd buy an iPad first: tons of highly polished apps, cheap, for pretty much everything (Personally, I won't be editing documents by typing on a LCD screen). The other being that they have better hardware overall than pretty much everybody else's and I don't expect Win8 tablets changing that either. There are going to be lots with poor screens, short battery lifes, slow CPUs, overheating, shoddily built, feature light versions for sure, while struggling to compete with Android and iOS devices at the same price point still. And those that people are getting excited about seem very much unlike a tablet I'd want to use e.g. the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga with its super high TDP Intel i7 draining your battery and producing massive amounts of heat, which has double the thickless, double the weight, and has half the screen resolution of the iPad 3 while also showing all fingerprints... and its 1000$ price point. Oh and the iPad 3 also has 2 cameras, does 1080p video capture, has image stabilisation + autofocus + face recognition, etc.

tomasz86, on 17 March 2012 - 12:37 AM, said:

By the way, Android 3.x (Honeycomb) is not open source

That's untrue. The source is available online at AOSP. Just follow the directions.

[JorgeA]

CoffeeFiend, on 16 March 2012 - 09:03 PM, said:

99% of what I see on any website about Win8 is very much negative, and this article is no different (it has many similar links in it too).

CoffeeFiend,

Very interesting set of articles, thanks very much. Especially good was the batch of writeups from Info/Computerworld that I got deeper and deeper into as I clicked on successive links from one article to another.

A commenter to the Tom's Hardware piece offered some incisive observations. Writing about Windows 8 and Metro, "Marcus52" (he's on page 3 of the comments) said the following:

Quote

1) It decided my other computer on my home network was a "media device" and started turning it on via remote desktop without my say so, or knowledge that it could even do that! That's a SEROUS, BAD thing in my book, nothing says BIG BROTHER more than my devices being turned on without my permission!

2) I clicked an email link in Firefox in my Yahoo email account to send someone an email, and it opened up my Hotmail account and tried to make me use that for my Yahoo business! I NEVER connected the Yahoo account to anything on my computer, only the Hotmail account. BAD, Microsoft, BAD!

3) In Vista and Win 7 (and every version of Windows before), there are settings reached via "Advanced appearance settings" (Personalization>Window Color>Advanced appearance settings. . .). This appears to be gone entirely from Win 8. I want MORE from an updated OS, not less!

...

4) Things opened up by Metro cover the entire screen, and there's nothing you can do about it. My small screen on my second computer is 21" and on this computer it's 27", I don't need 27" of screen for anything except games! I feel like I'm getting slammed in the face with a giant window, most of which has nothing on it.

5) Metro decides how to put apps in columns, you don't. You can move them around, but you can't change the column structure. You can't put apps in some parts of a group without other columns being filled first. The solid background color is about as well done as a solid color background can be, but you are out of luck if you want anything different. Hate the app colors? Tough.

There are good things about Win 8, like the way storage is being handled. Very nice. I'm still leaning towards Win 8 over Win 7 when I upgrade my Vista machine, but really, there shouldn't be any question, Win 8 should be a no-brainer choice between it and a previous version of Windows.

Curiously, the "fixingwindows8.com" website that the Tom's Hardware article refers to, seems to have disappared off the face of the Earth. I wonder if MS lawyers leaned on the guy to shut it down, on the pretext of unauthorized use of the Windows 8 trademark.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

tomasz86, on 16 March 2012 - 10:36 PM, said:

Still Windows 8 powered tablets look very promising

tomasz86,

Very good comparison!

My only experience with a tablet is for a few minutes at a friend's house, so I can't offer a well considered opinion on what it's like to use them, but based on that video the iPad looks so much sleeker and polished. What's with these huge, blocky, single-color tiles in Metro? Based on looks, if I were in the market for a tablet, there's no way I'd pick a Metro device.

--JorgeA

This post has been edited by JorgeA: 17 March 2012 - 10:41 AM

[JorgeA]

Funny and revealing video in the Tom's Hardware article CoffeeFiend linked. It should go out to everyone considering Windows 8.

Not that I want to help Microsoft succeed with this Metro monstrosity, but there is a simple fix for this problem where users can't figure out how to get things done in Win8. The default Windows 98 bootup process includes a "Welcome to Windows 98" that offers to take you on a tour of the OS and how it works. A sensible and useful feature. It would be so simple (and it's certainly desperately necessary) to do something like that for Windows 8, but I guess that the novelty-crazed developers at Microsoft are way too cool to find good ideas in the past.

--JorgeA

This post has been edited by JorgeA: 17 March 2012 - 10:44 AM

[vinifera]

ironic thing that article that links site as its source "fixingwindows8.com" is gone

maybe MS didn't like the naked truth

[CoffeeFiend]

JorgeA, on 17 March 2012 - 10:44 AM, said:

Funny and revealing video in the Tom's Hardware article CoffeeFiend linked. It should go out to everyone considering Windows 8.

There's also a video of the same old man using OS X for the first time. As you probably already guessed he has far less problems getting adapted, despite having perhaps 20 years of experience with Windows and never having used a Mac. Most likely a video featuring Linux (with GNOME 2 or KDE) would beat Windows hands down as well.

JorgeA, on 17 March 2012 - 10:44 AM, said:

a tour of the OS and how it works. A sensible and useful feature

That would help figuring out how it works. But it still wouldn't make it work in a sane manner.

The only thing they have to do to turn this disaster into a success is to make Metro optional (for tablets), but that won't happen.

I mean, they've essentially taken the touch screen interface from 2 failed products that weren't selling (Windows Phone and the Zune) and they're now forcing that onto all users on their desktops and laptops. Yeah, like that'll fly.

Nice links you found BTW.

[JorgeA]

The "Fixing Windows 8" blog still seems to be down. Or at least, I can't get to it from my computer.

Here's the best I could come up with -- the Google cache -- but the only graphical element I get is the YouTube video.

Any word on the grapevine as to what happened to that website?

Maybe I'll try the internet Archive.

--JorgeA

[MagicAndre1981]

Looks like MS (Sinofsky, Ballmer) can't accept that nobody wants their Metro-crap:

[cyberpyr8]

I have been running Windows 8 from the Developers Preview until now with the Consumer Preview and it has not gotten any better for me. I do see where on a touch based tablet it will work much better than on a traditional desktop or laptop. But if you are running a Windows 7 PC now I don't see a compelling reason to upgrade. On my laptop the constant switching and need for keyboard commands get annoying. It wouldn't take much to fix it, but I know that MS is not going to change it much between now and the final release. I could see this being a bigger disaster than Vista from a PR standpoint. I was on a MS customer case study team for Windows 7 and Office 2010 () & (http://www.microsoft...stem/4000008296). I can tell you that before they were released it was obvious that they were good products. But in testing Windows 8 I don't see it working well for most desktop and laptop users.

If they would make the charms menu easier to get to with a mouse and allow you to stay on the desktop it could be better. I hate that I keep getting thrown back and forth from the metro desktop to the traditional one. The charms menu is fine but I always find myself on the left side of the screen when I need it. I hate that the shutdown is 3 clicks or more. I do shutdown my laptop and I want to be able to close it out quickly. In the dev preview I thought it was easier to search for apps than it is now too because there was a start button. I am a MS fan but this is hard to like. Maybe on a touchscreen I will see how it all makes sense but right now it really doesn't.

[Tripredacus]

My co-worker is trying Windows 8 for the first time. All I keep hearing is:

"WTF?"
"Where is the Desktop?"
"WTF?"
"Where is the Start Menu?"
"WTF"
"Where is the Control Panel?"
"WTF"

Doesn't look too good.

[vinifera]

I'd be confused too

simple logic

I turn on PC, I get greeted by this screen of squares (tiles)
I click on one of them
it either drops me into another confusing flat area or desktop without any icons and menus
so while I try to find minimize or X button or start menu or ANYTHING
I also stumble upon various sidebars popping out when i come with mouse in certain screen edges
and those bars provide some more confusing "functionality"

screw that

[JorgeA]

MagicAndre1981, on 19 March 2012 - 09:21 AM, said:

Looks like MS (Sinofsky, Ballmer) can't accept that nobody wants their Metro-crap:

LOL and

Pretty funny how they edited that clip, and with the music added.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

cyberpyr8, on 19 March 2012 - 02:03 PM, said:

I have been running Windows 8 from the Developers Preview until now with the Consumer Preview and it has not gotten any better for me.

cyberpyr8,

My displeasure with Windows 8 has eased a little bit since the Consumer Preview came out, as they made some of the functions and utilities easier to get to. But by and large it's still harder to get things done in Win8 than in Win7, and I still have to look at that fugly Metro start screen every so often. Every time I saw XP's default "Luna" theme I expected the Teletubbies to come hopping over the crest, but the Metro screen makes me think I'm stuck in a kindergarten. I wouldn't want that on a phone or a tablet, let alone a 23" monitor. The iPads and Android screens I've seen out there look so much sleeker.

That was an excellent promo for Office, BTW -- glad you posted it. If I didn't have Office already, it would make me go out and buy it, no joke. I'll even start poking into OneNote, a program I've never ever opened.

--JorgeA

[belgianguy]

JorgeA, on 20 March 2012 - 10:10 AM, said:

cyberpyr8, on 19 March 2012 - 02:03 PM, said:

I have been running Windows 8 from the Developers Preview until now with the Consumer Preview and it has not gotten any better for me.

cyberpyr8,

My displeasure with Windows 8 has eased a little bit since the Consumer Preview came out, as they made some of the functions and utilities easier to get to. But by and large it's still harder to get things done in Win8 than in Win7, and I still have to look at that fugly Metro start screen every so often. Every time I saw XP's default "Luna" theme I expected the Teletubbies to come hopping over the crest, but the Metro screen makes me think I'm stuck in a kindergarten. I wouldn't want that on a phone or a tablet, let alone a 23" monitor. The iPads and Android screens I've seen out there look so much sleeker.

That was an excellent promo for Office, BTW -- glad you posted it. If I didn't have Office already, it would make me go out and buy it, no joke. I'll even start poking into OneNote, a program I've never ever opened.

--JorgeA

OneNote's quite a nice tool, especially for scatterbrains like me. I can categorize my notes (and add contextual arrows and other signs between them) so I can streamline my thoughts as if I were doodling on paper.
I even have one tab solely dedicated to a shopping list, and some small financial tidbits (who owns me what, and what I still need to settle). And when I stop doing work and go down a rabbit hole of interest, I can often pin some useful links in OneNote to get back to.

I'd never thought of opening it if someone didn't tell me to try it, and I've been using it quite a lot since. So yeah, you should try it.