[CoffeeFiend]

Tripredacus, on 16 May 2012 - 08:21 AM, said:

That has been done before, but before it was free.

It's hilarious. They're pushing a worthless update, and you have to pay for it too. I'd much sooner pay $15+ to get rid of it!

Fredledingue, on 17 May 2012 - 03:58 PM, said:

Looking at the comment on Sinofsky's blog, the verdict is unanimous: Metro will is a disaster.

And I can tell you for sure that they do censor some of the comments, even if you're not using vulgar language or anything special. I've had very mild comments that just never got posted, as many others have. Either ways, they don't care at all if we all complain or that customers don't want any of it. Metro will be forced down your throat if you have to use Win8.

Fredledingue, on 17 May 2012 - 03:58 PM, said:

With all these negative feedbacks, they would be crazy to go ahead with that. They would face total incomprehension.

Yet they will still go ahead with it. It'll make Vista seem like a monumental success.

belgianguy, on 17 May 2012 - 04:31 PM, said:

Windows 8 will "disappoint": Analysts cut price targets on HP, Dell

The RC isn't out yet and everyone already knows it's going to fail hard. Ain't that saying something?

belgianguy, on 17 May 2012 - 04:31 PM, said:

Windows Phone ranks below Bada in worldwide sales

Yep. MS couldn't sell mobile devices even if they came with a free gold ingot. They've failed hard with WinMo devices, they've failed hard with the Zune and the Kin, they're failing hard with Phones, and they're going to fail with tablets next (turning their flagship product into something no one wants to buy in the process)

belgianguy, on 17 May 2012 - 04:31 PM, said:

that kind of news is to be expected for WP7

Seeing how well Windows Mobile phones sold before WP7 phones (they've been trying for a decade), it was very much expected that they would't sell either.

[JorgeA]

Tripredacus, on 15 May 2012 - 07:24 AM, said:

Yeah, they already inflate their numbers by counting VLK and OEM sales into their retail figures. Now since they are marketing Windows 8 RT and Windows Phone 8 as "Windows 8" they can just toss those numbers in there too!

Tripredacus,

Incredible but true...

That's one rationale for making all your devices run on the same interface -- it makes the sales totals look bigger.

--JorgeA

This post has been edited by JorgeA: 17 May 2012 - 11:55 PM

[JorgeA]

Fredledingue, on 15 May 2012 - 01:32 PM, said:

When the first Unofficial Service Pack for w8 Developer Preview?

LOL

Fredledingue, on 15 May 2012 - 01:32 PM, said:

MS has decided to turn computers into interractive TV.
They signed at the same time the dead of the PC and the the birth of the shopping & entertainement console.
(Note the "cart" tile on the Metro)

And also the uniformisation of the interfaces. Wether you turn on a TV, a computer or a hand-held device you get the same screen with the same moronic suggestions about last products, fashion, new hits, weather and celebs.

I'm positive that even single moms with kids will hate it.
MS is very deeply underestimating the seriouseness of the regualar home users about their computer.
Just listen to non-geek/tech-ignorant poeple around you complaining about things, not so ignorant and not so non-geek.

+1 on that! IMX most folks who buy a computer treat it pretty seriously. It's not a tablet or a phone: they've got one of those, too, and THAT's the one that gets treated like a platform for trivial stuff.
Each kind of device has its own reasons for existing, but the geniuses at MS seem to be blind to that.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

UltimateSilence, on 15 May 2012 - 05:58 PM, said:

People who purchase a new Windows 7 PC between June 2012 and January 2013 will be eligible for a discounted upgrade (15$) to Windows 8 Professional, according to this ComputerWorld article.

(Sounds like someone is worried?)

UltimateSilence,

Hmm... This may sound shocking, given everything that I've been saying all along, but this time-limited offer of an inexpensive upgrade to Win8 may actually get me to purchase one single license.

A couple of factors are at play here. Let's assume that the upgrade to Pro brings me one of the necessary steps closer to getting Windows Media Center on Win8. And let's assume that WMC for Windows 8 will have the same lifecycle as Windows 8. And finally, let's assume that the EPG (electronic program guide) isn't going to be provided forever, but rather only during the officially supported lifecycle of the product.

If all three of these hold true, then it might make sense for me to buy one license so that I can extend the supported life of my DVR PC by three years. That PC lives in WMC anyway, so exposure to Metro silliness will stay at a minimum.

Again, this is assuming that, as now a separate add-on, Media Center doesn't end up with its own (truncated) lifespan.

There is NO other reason, though, for me to consider buying a computer with Windows 8, let alone installing that OS on any of my existing computers. I'd rather go without new Windows updates starting in 2017 (Vista) or 2020 (Windows 7). With any luck, by then Microsoft will have been chastened and brought back the possibility of leading a Metro-free life in the Windows ambit.

--JorgeA

[bphlpt]

You do realize that you have to "purchase a new Windows 7 PC between June 2012 and January 2013" in order to "be eligible for a discounted upgrade (15$) to Windows 8 Professional", right? So that upgrade license is going to cost you a whole lot more than 15$.

Cheers and Regards

This post has been edited by bphlpt: 18 May 2012 - 01:17 AM

[xpclient]

I used to be one of the biggest fans of the Microsoft era when they knew what they were doing and had a clear vision. Everything they did was magic in the 90s. Today, I am a critic. It's over. Vista started it and Metro will end it. Microsoft is dead. They still make a profit, but their own foolish dumb products are killing them. It's a company filled with dumb people. Their dumbness knows no bounds. Vista/Windows 7 had some brilliant innovations though to make up for the less than ideal UX.

Windows 8 is beyond just upsetting. It's not just that it's crap (which, make no mistake, it is), it's that it shakes my previously solid faith in Microsoft to its core. It's the same company which created a product such as Windows XP. Windows 7 can't match up to XP at usability, it's just Vista polished and re-marketed for dumbed down experience but looks gorgeous and the improvements under the hood are superb. But I look at Windows 8 and I see a product made by dumb people. That's too harsh. But certainly not the Microsoft of the 90s. It's just another big company that makes crap without even knowing what it's doing. You can argue that Microsoft of the 90s made well-designed but buggy software but that was more an issue of development talent. Bill Gates knew what he wanted, he just didn't always have the people under him to execute. Now, they don't even have that. They are lost and clueless, without any idea of user interface design, user experience, usability. It's depressing.

I think of Ballmer as this:

This post has been edited by xpclient: 19 May 2012 - 08:10 AM

[Tripredacus]

Now that is just scary!

[JorgeA]

bphlpt, on 18 May 2012 - 01:16 AM, said:

You do realize that you have to "purchase a new Windows 7 PC between June 2012 and January 2013" in order to "be eligible for a discounted upgrade (15$) to Windows 8 Professional", right? So that upgrade license is going to cost you a whole lot more than 15$.

Yes, I do realize that.

I'm sort of in the market for a current PC anyway. Relative to waiting till (for example) 2014 when the discount no longer applied and I would have to pay full freight for Windows 8 Professional, then this could turn out to be a money-saver.

Again, this is assuming that the price of Win8 Pro would ultimately be higher than the price of Win7+Win8Pro downgrade. We'd also have to verify that the new PC would, as different hardware, still be able to play the shows that we already have recorded.

On the other hand, it does give me pause to know that I'd be contributing to improving the sales figures for Windows 8. So it's a close call.

--JorgeA

This post has been edited by JorgeA: 18 May 2012 - 03:10 PM

[G8YMW]

Perhaps this thread should be called "Deeper Depressions"
I can see my wife and I giving Win8 the same treatment Vista got off us!

[JorgeA]

G8YMW, on 18 May 2012 - 03:19 PM, said:

Perhaps this thread should be called "Deeper Depressions"

LOL, very apt! The thread has evolved from a "user's viewpoint review" to a general discussion of Windows 8, but that's OK.

To quote CoffeeFiend, things only get worse with Windows 8: Microsoft is doubling down on Metrofying the Desktop. Design elements that I thought were merely signs of how unpolished the beta version was (such as the squared-off corners of windows) turn out to be deliberate decisions. So "it's not a flaw, it's a feature!"

Quote

We applied the principles of “clean and crisp” when updating window and taskbar chrome. Gone are the glass and reflections. We squared off the edges of windows and the taskbar. We removed all the glows and gradients found on buttons within the chrome. We made the appearance of windows crisper by removing unnecessary shadows and transparency. The default window chrome is white, creating an airy and premium look...

To complete the story, we updated the appearance of most common controls, such as buttons, check boxes, sliders, and the Ribbon. We squared off the rounded edges, cleaned away gradients, and flattened the control backgrounds to align with our chrome changes. We also tweaked the colors to make them feel more modern and neutral.

What the MS employee describes as "clean and crisp" is what all along I've thought of as, "flat and plain." Interesting that they should have chosen a screenshot from Windows 1, because that's what Windows 8 is looking more and more like. Hardly a "premium" or "modern" look -- I get the sense that they want Win8 to be able to run on an 80386...

--JorgeA

[bphlpt]

Another possibility for their reasoning could be that since they are trying to unify the user's experience on ALL Windows platforms, from desktops, to laptops, to tablets, to phones, to get a unified look they have to go with the lowest common denominator of processing power, storage space, and display capability including resolution, reaction time, and size. Not that it seems very smart to me to shackle a multi-core, multi-processor, multi-display, multi-GB of RAM, multi-TB of storage, multi-GPU desktop with the same restrictions as a smartphone, no matter how powerful they are getting to be, but apparently they have their own misguided reasons.

Everything in the quote you provided seems to be marketing mumbo-jumbo that tries to disguise that from the gullible public and convince them that "it's not a flaw, it's a feature!", as you so rightly pointed out.

Cheers and Regards

This post has been edited by bphlpt: 18 May 2012 - 07:33 PM

[CoffeeFiend]

JorgeA, on 18 May 2012 - 06:53 PM, said:

things only get worse with Windows 8: Microsoft is doubling down on Metrofying the Desktop. Design elements that I thought were merely signs of how unpolished the beta version was (such as the squared-off corners of windows) turn out to be deliberate decisions. So "it's not a flaw, it's a feature!"

The latest entry on Win8's blog (where your neowin link got its info from) goes very much in that direction as well.

Some of it is blatant market speak ("Grace and power: Windows 8 apps"? More like "Lame, crippled and teh suck: Windows 8 apps"), and some points expose the main problems with Win8 i.e. pretending your PC is a gigantic smartphone that has no touch instead of a fantastic and powerful general purpose computer (e.g. "Make your PC work like a device, not a computer" i.e. a dumbed down consumer device, or "Creating an environment exclusively or primarily suited for touch input" when our PCs don't have it)

JorgeA, on 18 May 2012 - 06:53 PM, said:

What the MS employee describes as "clean and crisp" is what all along I've thought of as, "flat and plain."

Exactly what I was thinking seeing their latest screenshot:

So darn bland, boring, boxy and ugly. Just imagine those ugly fat mouse cursors on top of that too Almost as much eye candy as Windows 3.1 (but now with Metro too)!

Seemingly they're making the desktop (the only useful part of Windows) as awful as possible in order to force people to use Metro.

Meanwhile, MS keeps suing competitors instead of making a product people want to buy, by banning the import of competing devices due to a trivial patent. Yep, forget about making users want to buy your stuff because it's great -- just sue the competition into oblivion, then everyone will be stuck with your garbage that currently no one wants of.

And Forbes has has a great article. It starts with:

Quote

Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today.

Well worth the read. I agree with all of it. They need to fire Ballmer NOW.

[MagicAndre1981]

CoffeeFiend, on 18 May 2012 - 08:10 PM, said:

Exactly what I was thinking seeing their latest screenshot:

So darn bland, boring, boxy and ugly. Just imagine those ugly fat mouse cursors on top of that too Almost as much eye candy as Windows 3.1 (but now with Metro too)!

yeah, if I still was in doubt if I ever consider using Windows 8, now it is clear. I won't touch Windows 8. Aero Glass was the most beautiful thing in Windows and now it is gone and ruins UX so dramatically

CoffeeFiend, on 18 May 2012 - 08:10 PM, said:

Seemingly they're making the desktop (the only useful part of Windows) as awful as possible in order to force people to use Metro.

I now think the same. Make it is ugly as possible to force users no longer go to the desktop

CoffeeFiend, on 18 May 2012 - 08:10 PM, said:

And Forbes has has a great article. It starts with:

Quote

Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today.

Well worth the read. I agree with all of it. They need to fire Ballmer NOW.

he should also take Sinofsky, Harrions, Green and the ugly Designers with him.

[CoffeeFiend]

Another great article by Paul Thurrott: Windows 8 Release Preview: RIP, Aero (2003-2012):

Quote

It’s about the Windows team abandoning the very market that drove Windows’s success for over 25 years in order to chase a coming and potentially illusory market for tablet devices

Quote

I’m starting to see more clearly what’s happening here and starting to accept that Windows is growing into something that isn’t so much for me anymore as it is for some mythical tablet user base that may or may not appear in the future

Quote

Windows 8 isn’t even Windows anymore. It’s a tablet OS that’s been grafted onto Windows like a monstrous Frankenstein experiment

I think this says it all really. Basically the same thing I've been saying here... They're killing everything that made Windows useful and forcing a dumbed-down smartphone UI on PCs where it makes no sense at all, just so they can sell tablets, while disregarding that they've always failed hard at selling such devices.

It sounds like a great plan: destroy what's your only trick (desktop software) to sell devices which aren't going to sell. How could that possibly go wrong? As the Forbes article said:

Quote

Mr. Ballmer should not be allowed to take such incredible risks with investor money and employee jobs. Best he be retired to enjoy his fortune rather than deprive investors and employees of building theirs

[tomasz86]

MagicAndre1981, on 19 May 2012 - 06:00 AM, said:

Aero Glass was the most beautiful thing in Windows and now it is gone and ruins UX so dramatically

De gustibus non est disputandum

I personally find the whole Aero ugly and that's only distracting attention (I especially hate the whole transparency concept). I'm not saying that I like Metro though.

This post has been edited by tomasz86: 19 May 2012 - 09:58 AM

[JorgeA]

CoffeeFiend, on 19 May 2012 - 09:30 AM, said:

Another great article by Paul Thurrott: Windows 8 Release Preview: RIP, Aero (2003-2012)

CoffeeFiend,

Wow, Paul Thurrott has completed his turnaround on Windows 8. Thanks for the link.

I'd seen that screenshot of the new Windows Explorer, but it didn't hit me what MS was doing with it till Thurrott's discussion of Aero. I'd already noticed the squared-off corners and wondered why people were saying these things were getting changed/removed for the Release Preview, but now I understand. It's worse than even I had thought.

Was going to say that we truly are back at Windows 3.1 in terms of the look, but even 3.1 had some convex buttons.

I don't have a d*mn battery in my computer -- I don't need to "save" on battery power. Let me have the esthetic elements that make using a PC more pleasant, and let those who want to squeeze an extra hour out of their battery charges turn those features off. But don't turn them off for everyone! What ever happened to the concept of customization??

I've heard the rationalizations and the explanations for the strategy, but I still don't understand why MS wants people to use a golf-cart engine even if we have a Honda Accord of a PC (let alone a Lexus, or a Ferrari).

--JorgeA

[MagicAndre1981]

tomasz86, on 19 May 2012 - 09:58 AM, said:

De gustibus non est disputandum

I know. Ask 10 people what they like and you'll get 10 different answers. I absolutely don't like the MetroUI and but others may like it. But the difference is that if you don't like Aero, you can DISABLE it and you're happy. Metro can't be disabled. I'm force to use this ugly crap. And this is the problem. MS tried to force the user to like what a small amount users in Redmond like. And this i wrong.

@JorgeA

Zorin6 (RC) and Linux Mint 13 (RC) are out. Test if you like one of them. Both are based on Ubuntu 12.04 and get security updates for 5 years.

[tomasz86]

MagicAndre1981, on 20 May 2012 - 05:02 AM, said:

the difference is that if you don't like Aero, you can DISABLE it and you're happy.

Not in Windows 8 I don't mean the (removed) Aero Glass but the whole skinning thing.

This post has been edited by tomasz86: 20 May 2012 - 05:55 AM

[CoffeeFiend]

Another nice article on zdnet: Windows 8: Does Metro actually work? It's on Mary-Jo Foley's page but it's written by Matthew Baxter-Reynolds, a developer/consultant who's writing a book (published by O'Reilly) called Programming Metro-styled apps with C# (not just a random hater, the guy has some insight)

What he has to say very much reflects the opinion of every developer (and basically everybody) I know:

Quote

What no one’s asking, though, is this: “does Metro actually work?”

In my opinion: No.

I find Metro baffling.

He also writes articles for The Guardian (a British national newspaper), like That Windows 8 experience? Confusing. Confusing as hell.

Oh, and do you like a PC free from crap? MS says it's a $99 upgrade.

Edit: I'd like to quote Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple:

Quote

Anything can be forced to merge. But the problem is that the products are about tradeoffs. And you begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn’t please anyone. And you can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.

That is exactly what happened with Win8. They tried to make a desktop OS and a tablet OS into a single OS that sucks for everybody, particularly desktop users which happen to be their only market right now. Way to shoot yourself in the foot.

[Fredledingue]

The management is going to terminate Microsoft Corporation as a going concern.
Everything they do with Windows 8 goes to that direction.

Next step will be removing True Color support, only 16 colors.

Quote

Yet they will still go ahead with it. It'll make Vista seem like a monumental success.

LOL