JasonGW, on 09 August 2012 - 02:12 PM, said:
Nobody would say that Vista was the second coming of anything but catastrophe for Microsoft. It was a bloated pig of an OS, cobbled hastily together after multiple stops and starts with failed technologies, and released to a world whose hardware was barely adequate to run the OS even at the higher end of the spectrum. Vista was TERRIBLE. But for as awful as it was, Vista actually was a positive thing to happen to Microsoft. Why? Because its failure and unilateral panning made them wake up and realize that the path of bloating up each iteration of the OS is a catastrophic mistake that can't be sustained, and it forced them to change directions. The other major catastrophe that benefited Microsoft was the emergence of iPhone and Android as the new "super" phones. They showed a new path forward, one which ultimately pointed Microsoft themselves in a new direction where they have, in many ways, outperformed their competitors in developing new and innovative ideas in the time since.
The first product to show their new direction was, of course, Windows 7, which corrected virtually everything wrong with Vista--except for the Apple-esque tendency toward glossy UI elements. It was smaller, faster and much less bloated than Vista, and has generally made both home and business users very happy.
...
The "strategy" with Windows 8's graphic design is actually really simple: flat colors without garish visual effects like glass and chrome, or the hideous skeumorphism of Apple products, use fewer system resources and make for a lighter, faster OS that's more able to "get out of the way" and let you focus on the applications you use. That's the mark of solid design, and I think it'll be a smashing success
...
Vista is hideously ugly, with excessive and garish visual gloss that does nothing but eat memory, processor and GPU time. Those UI's--those stale, boring, archaic UI's--are wasteful, ugly and pointless.
Couldn't possibly disagree with you more. Not about whether Aero glass is beautiful since that is subjective (and I'd give it a 7 out of 10 in Win7 with some room for improvement, but a 1 out of 10 in Win8 for absolute fuglyness) so you can think what you want, it's your
choice (but of course there was nothing stopping you from customizing or disabling Aero all along, correct? Your
choice was always available. That is the point.) My problem is with the cheerleaders rooting for Microsoft to screw up my computer as well as their own. But I digress.
These quoted comments simply express the excuses from Sinosfky and his team of Windows destroyers. Yes, we read it at their blog, Microsoft's
Metro team is all about saving us from the hideous gloss of the GUI. We were too distracted and not getting our work done. I suppose we should be thanking them? This is one of many ways Microsoft demonstrates their deafness by failing to realize that what really irks people is being insulted, treated like little children, and especially lied to. This nonsense about Aero is but their latest rationale for eliminating choice - just like
Apple has long been known for!. For most of the past few decades Microsoft had a well deserved reputation for user customization and Apple for iron-fisted uniformity. Oh the irony that now we have the Vista visual
appearance being thrown under the bus and called
Apple-esque, (as if that is what anyone was actually complaining about in Vista) while the Microsoft company itself is racing ahead to become Apple.
Microsoft never really woke up after the Vista debacle, I would say they doubled down. They produced the Mojave experiment which is their veiled way of saying that the user
"just wasn't doing it right", the customer is wrong and the company is always correct. Win7 has some minor tweaks but all the underlying stuff is really the same. I'm not even going to justify Vista or the Windows 6.x decision-making (major screwups in core architecture with the 32/64 design being a monstrous mess) but picking on the Vista
appearance is just plain wrong at this point. Microsoft never really said '
we screwed up' or mea culpa, they just managed to convince enough people they did in order to move on to their next projects. If anything they were only sorry that they got bad press selling a lemon OS for the average computer of the time. The arrogance up there is astounding really, they must really despise their customer base to double and triple down now with the
Windows 8 and
Metro decisions.
And what if you try to follow the logic of using Aero as a scapegoat for Vista? Right, because when I think of waste in Windows it just has to be that 'garish' Aero that immediately springs to mind. I mean when I fire up ProcMon it's that nasty Aero and DWM just filling up the screen with thousands of entries per second, wasting all that electricity and destroying our environment right? No. It certainly couldn't be endless disk indexing to optimize searches so that typing in C-A-L saves me a whole letter 'C' or other similar nonsense. It certainly couldn't be CPU and disk gobbling from saving countless restore points for every single update even a KB sized monitor driver. It certainly couldn't be the innumerable tasks and services that do nothing except make work for other tasks and services with only a handful ever being useful to the owner of the system. It couldn't be the non-stop event recording producing an unmanageable collection of logs that save everything except the one event that helps solve a problem. This is but the tip of the CPU and disk wasting iceberg, an ongoing problem since Win2k became WinXP. So I think that singling out Aero, the most visible
improvement to the visuals in a decade, out of the vast array of components making up the Windows Rube Goldberg machine is a fine example of BS from Team B
&S. Here is more BS from them that focuses on the real problem ...
- 'We're doing it wrong' by carefully organizing our own desktop and start menu with multiple levels of flyouts instead of a garish sidescrolling Sesame Street selector that blasts
all our program shortcuts right across the screen for our airplane seatmate or any nearby stranger to easily read without even trying to be nosy.
- 'We're doing it wrong' by enjoying the visuals of
our personal computer? It has been a long slog for many of us to get to this point where we have tons of CPU and GPU power and memory available for visual frills and aesthetics after years of busting our butts on prehistoric 2-color systems with a 4.77 MHz CPU and mere KB's of memory. I believe we've earned our chance to relax in front of a computer with our own themes, colors, fonts and everything else chosen by us, not Microsoft or Generation Xbox fanboys.
- 'We're doing it wrong' by choosing to have many freely moveable and overlapping Windows open and truly inter-operating with multitasking across multiple displays and applications (since WinXP for most people, but even earlier with the right tools and parts). Who knew that we should have limited it to just two windows.
- 'We're doing it wrong' by deciding what actually appears first on our display after logging in to our own computer, perhaps a custom application, or game server, or messaging program or email or webcam or music center or an empty desktop. Steering the thing automatically to
Metro is like previous versions somehow booting up into a clicked-open start menu clicked again on "All Programs" and autoscrolling through a few groups at a time.
Microsoft has an extraordinarily severe case of Apple-envy, an incurable case of jealousy which is really inexplicable because the two companies rarely compete head-to-head. It is a complete role reversal from the 80's when Apple was inexplicably anti-Microsoft with nothing but venomous and hateful criticism sent towards them and also IBM (the latter made some sense since they both competed in computer systems). But here we are today and Microsoft's plan SHOULD be crystal clear for everyone to see with the outrageous arrogance of the Start Menu removal and the patronizing
"You were too distracted by the beauty" dumbing down of Aero, now set in motion since
Windows 8 hit RTM. It would have been so easily solved simply with user choice yet they failed to listen, so we know their current operative plan: phase themselves into a walled garden model with a super-sized Xbox point of sale using
Metro. The gradual phasing out of the desktop and x86 independent software but for a select few, using their huge monopolistic presence as the vehicle. They see the vast x86 computer user base as their own private pickings even though most of them never really chose Windows, it came installed on their computer thanks to the years of OEM backroom deals. All the other discussion is really just fluff and obsfucation and serves only to waste time and avoid focusing on the big issue. And if you are Microsoft, why not do this? They already have lots of Apple-like fanboys in place begging them to take over their personal computers -
"Please dumb down my computer, please kill the Start Menu, turn Aero glass off, select my theme, make my computer easy for my 5-year old, give us uniformity!". It pains me to even think this but with all things considered, with a billion computers out there at the mercy and benevolence of couple of Redmond bureaucrats, I would support Microsoft being broken up now. I am definitely making my voice heard with my own representatives (everyone in the USA has one Rep and two Senators) and I hope others are doing the same. There is far too much at stake to be trusted under the control of a handful of people at Microsoft of very questionable temperament, ethics and intelligence.
Metrosoft Windows 8 : If you don't like it, tough! ( We got you right where we want you )
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And if not, then how will the market react as people come to realize that these devices aren't everything they thought they would be?
