Windows 8 flops

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532 posts

Ultimate Geek

#820482 16-May-2013 09:57

KiwiNZ:
networkn:
nathan:
robjg63: Now that I have had win 8 on a non touch laptop for a while I would say that I dont find the metro front screen too useful - but popping classic shell onto it means I have mainly worked with the regular desktop.

Ignoring the metro part win 8 installed easily - runs quickly enough and has never hung up.
I was playing with a 4 yo injet printer the other day - I just plugged in the usb cable and was looking at something else and was surprised to find it just installed all the drivers without asking and just worked - nice.

The 'charms' are dumb - you dont intuitively know they are there and likewise - closing an app requires you to grab the top of the screen and drag to the bottom - who thought that up! - an X button is easier.

So maybe its stable and fast enough - bring on 8.1 - with a few tweaks it could be quite good.

X button would be ugly

leave the app running and let Windows 8 manage it

close the app by alt-f4 on keyboard like always

or use mouse/touch to close it down, by swiping down

personally i think that swipe down gesture is quite natural, to "throw" the app away

I can't disagree more strongly. Not ONE person I know of that uses windows 8 knew that pull down app meant close it. It's NOT intuitive. x has been universal since 3.11. I have used apps which put an X in Metro Apps and it doesn't change the look significantly. It's frustrating that MS has touted the use of features for 10+ years like the x and start menu and start button, to have a sudden turn around and say it's old and ugly and slow. The idea that to close an app requires the KEYBOARD when MS is pushing TOUCH so much, is beyond odd. Long Holding the title bar of the app (or where the titlebar would be) which resulted in a popup option to close or just hide app, is intuitive.

I don't want Windows managing my apps. I want them closed (If I specify to ensure content in them isn't visible to the next walk in user.

interesting, I knew the pull down to close from immediately after install.

Took me only a moment to find it. I'm dismayed when IT people claim that it is not intuitive and the suggestion of restoring the X is just plain silly and pandering.

Frankly, even kids (and some of those like myself at the opposite side of the age spectrum) know to explore the corners and sides of the screens for clues in touch oriented apps. I hit the top of the screen with the mouse cursor, saw a hand and pulled down - ah, so, it closes the app, easy.

While on the subject Win8 touch oriented full screen apps, why are some continually complaining about them? If you don't like touch oriented apps, don't use them and remove the default installed ones.

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#820483 16-May-2013 09:57

It's a personal thing. It doesn't impact the IT abilities of some (also note not everyone posting in this thread is an IT professional. Some are just consumers).

As for not having NZ-made critical systems for industry, that's an interesting assertion. I worked for a large US-based system integrator for 16 years in their telco practice and I was in a team delivering critical systems for telcos around the world (Telecom NZ, Vodafone Australia, Singtel, Telefonica of Spain). We were not afraid of doing new things because that was our job description. And the work was done here in New Zealand.

John2010

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#820489 16-May-2013 10:08

freitasm:
...As for not having NZ-made critical systems for industry, that's an interesting assertion. I worked for a large US-based system integrator for 16 years in their telco practice and I was in a team delivering critical systems for telcos around the world (Telecom NZ, Vodafone Australia, Singtel, Telefonica of Spain). We were not afraid of doing new things because that was our job description. And the work was done here in New Zealand.

But your experience with those systems has no relevance at all to the ones I have worked with, and it was my experiences I was referring to. They are systems which are beyond the past and current abilities of any organisation in NZ to build, and will likely always remains so due to their specialisation.

freitasm

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#820494 16-May-2013 10:12

John2010:
freitasm:
...As for not having NZ-made critical systems for industry, that's an interesting assertion. I worked for a large US-based system integrator for 16 years in their telco practice and I was in a team delivering critical systems for telcos around the world (Telecom NZ, Vodafone Australia, Singtel, Telefonica of Spain). We were not afraid of doing new things because that was our job description. And the work was done here in New Zealand.

But your experience with those systems has no relevance at all to the ones I have worked with, and it was my experiences I was referring to. They are systems which are beyond the past and current abilities of any organisation in NZ to build, and will likely always remains so due to their specialisation.

You wrote:

"Frankly I am dismayed at the apparent inability of some claiming to be IT people to get to grips with IE 8 - some of their comments as to things they claim are hard or awkward to do indicate a low level of ability (or maybe stuck in the past). Maybe I'm biased, while I am not an IT person myself my involvement in IT has been with highly professional software engineering teams building mission critical systems for industry (all overseas contractors, can't be done in NZ)."

Based on that, my IT experience is as relevant to this thread as yours.

networkn

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#820496 16-May-2013 10:15

John2010:
mandrazhoid: Using 8 for 5 months. Fully satisfied with OS. I don't use metro apps at all and the lack of start button doesn't bother at all.

8.1 will be awailable soon - I don't expect any revolutional changes. I expect it to be more like service pack.

I'm the same.

I just hope MS don't stuff it all up by providing too many training wheels (i.e. reversions to the past) for those who seem to need them moving from their trikes (i.e. Win7) to big boys bikes (i.e. Win8).

Frankly I am dismayed at the apparent inability of some claiming to be IT people to get to grips with IE 8 - some of their comments as to things they claim are hard or awkward to do indicate a low level of ability (or maybe stuck in the past). Maybe I'm biased, while I am not an IT person myself my involvement in IT has been with highly professional software engineering teams building mission critical systems for industry (all overseas contractors, can't be done in NZ).

Perhaps that colours my expectations; but I wonder when I see computer numptys get to grips with Win8 in a few minutes.

Nice attack there John. Despite your claims, start button and start menu replacements are among the top numbers of downloads currently occurring on windows 8 machines and there are a LOT of those applications being made. Also applications for making Metro Apps more "usable". (ModernMix for example) The demand wouldn't be there if it were simply a "handful of retarded users" that couldn't "adjust".

The bottom line is that the feedback to MS has been overwhelming and people are saying they don't like the new interface and don't want it on their non touch screen devices, in it's current form so the fact that some people can use it and do like it, doesn't make the product good or usable for the masses. Metro is a huge change to the way people would be expected to work, and MS should have listened to the BETA feedback and provided it as gradual or optional changes.

I'd be curious to know if you RDP to any Windows 8 or 2012 machines?

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#820497 16-May-2013 10:19

it's all a matter of personal choice, i think it would have been more user friendly for MS to have made the Metro or Start options a users preference from day one. That being said I can remember seeing similar objections to the 'Start' button when Win 95 first hit the market.

John2010

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#820528 16-May-2013 11:08

freitasm:
John2010:
freitasm:
...As for not having NZ-made critical systems for industry, that's an interesting assertion. I worked for a large US-based system integrator for 16 years in their telco practice and I was in a team delivering critical systems for telcos around the world (Telecom NZ, Vodafone Australia, Singtel, Telefonica of Spain). We were not afraid of doing new things because that was our job description. And the work was done here in New Zealand.

But your experience with those systems has no relevance at all to the ones I have worked with, and it was my experiences I was referring to. They are systems which are beyond the past and current abilities of any organisation in NZ to build, and will likely always remains so due to their specialisation.

You wrote:

"Frankly I am dismayed at the apparent inability of some claiming to be IT people to get to grips with IE 8 - some of their comments as to things they claim are hard or awkward to do indicate a low level of ability (or maybe stuck in the past). Maybe I'm biased, while I am not an IT person myself my involvement in IT has been with highly professional software engineering teams building mission critical systems for industry (all overseas contractors, can't be done in NZ)."

Based on that, my IT experience is as relevant to this thread as yours.

You are still not understanding. Nowhere have I said that your experience is irrelevant to this thread.

You stated in response to my post that "As for not having NZ-made critical systems for industry, that's an interesting assertion". For the systems in my own experience and which I was referring to there is no "assertion" about it at all, they cannot be built in NZ as neither the relevant organisations not the relevant experiences to do so exist.

You seem to be rejigging my words to mean that I have claimed that no critical systems of any sort can be built in NZ. Of course, some can be, just not the ones of my own experience.

I have said that your experience with Telco systems has no relevance at all to those systems (albeit that the systems I was referring to do have telecommunications components within them, but that is not their complexity). You have no way of refuting that without your having knowledge of the systems I have been referring to as being in my experience (and I am not about to disclose what they have been, as doing so would likely identify me to some and I am shy

).

But none of that has any inference at all that your experience is not relevant to the thread.

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John2010

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Ultimate Geek

#820529 16-May-2013 11:11

KiwiNZ:...That being said I can remember seeing similar objections to the 'Start' button when Win 95 first hit the market.

And objections also being made when the Start button with the word "Start" on it changed to an Orb.

freitasm

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#820530 16-May-2013 11:12

Sure. Your "Maybe I'm biased, while I am not an IT person myself my involvement in IT has been with highly professional software engineering teams building mission critical systems for industry" basically is saying that some IT professionals (whoever they are in this thread) aren't as qualified as the ones you are lucky to work with because they don't like Windows 8.

That's what the writing seems to imply.

networkn

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#820534 16-May-2013 11:18

freitasm: Sure. Your "Maybe I'm biased, while I am not an IT person myself my involvement in IT has been with highly professional software engineering teams building mission critical systems for industry" basically is saying that some IT professionals (whoever they are in this thread) aren't as qualified as the ones you are lucky to work with because they don't like Windows 8.

That's what the writing seems to imply.

Yup that is how I intrepret that as well. Basically if you can't work out (Or in my case don't like the way it works) Windows 8, you are not fit to work in IT. This actually seems to be the gist of the attitude from a number of MS Employees, in my experience as well.

macuser

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#820536 16-May-2013 11:19

pissing contest

John2010

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#820541 16-May-2013 11:25

networkn:
Nice attack there John. Despite your claims, start button and start menu replacements are among the top numbers of downloads currently occurring on windows 8 machines and there are a LOT of those applications being made. Also applications for making Metro Apps more "usable". (ModernMix for example) The demand wouldn't be there if it were simply a "handful of retarded users" that couldn't "adjust"...

You will need to point out to me where I have claimed that there is not a demand for changes and that there was only a ""handful" that couldn't "adjust"" (also "handful" and "adjust" are not words that I used).

In fact I have inferred quite the contrary; if there were only a "handful" then I would not have said I was dismayed as a demand from a "handful" would be of no concern whatsoever.

If you felt that the "nice attack" referred to your own mention of the Win 8 apps being non intuitive and so was directed at you, then you are mistaken. It may be that you have said they are but you are just one of many IT people from around the world who has said the same. Again, if it was just you rather than many, then I would have no reason for dismay, would I?

freitasm

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#820543 16-May-2013 11:26

I think that adding an emoticon at the end of a paragraph doesn't make it less insulting.

John2010

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#820552 16-May-2013 11:39

freitasm: Sure. Your "Maybe I'm biased, while I am not an IT person myself my involvement in IT has been with highly professional software engineering teams building mission critical systems for industry" basically is saying that some IT professionals (whoever they are in this thread) aren't as qualified as the ones you are lucky to work with because they don't like Windows 8.

That's what the writing seems to imply.

Posts are not written with the exactness of scientific papers, nor with the elegance of literature; it pays to try to seek what is being said with generosity of interpretation. Most can be interpreted to imply several things; that, it often seems, even when they simply state facts.

But regardless of whether it was initially clear or not, I trust that you now understand what was meant. If it is not then (as has been alluded to) this is just pissing into the wind.

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#820576 16-May-2013 12:15

Here is an article written by my son who works at Microsoft Head Office in Redmond:

Blue-turn? Not so fast...

by Daniel Keymer on Thursday, 9 May 2013 at 19:12

(Disclaimer: This is pretty much all my opinion - nothing is official Microsoft policy or anything like that. Since I'm not privy to the discussions, and if I were I'd have an NDA preventing me from talking about it, it's also mostly my speculation - so if I turn out to be wrong on something you've been forewarned. :))

Lately there have been quite a few articles on the internet talking about "Windows Blue" and rumoured changes from Windows 8 - specifically, the re-addition of a Start Button and booting directly to the desktop instead of going via the Start Screen first. The sources of these rumours seem to point out that the latter would be an option, and the former would still end up pointing to the Start Screen rather than a non-fullscreen menu like we had in Windows 7. (I don't actually know whether the rumours are true, and if I did I couldn't tell you!)

These sound like possibly handy little tweaks for desktop users, rather than anything major - but that hasn't stopped tech journalists and pundits reading a lot of things into it. Many cast it as a knee-jerk reaction to Windows 8's "disappointing" sales, citing a recent IDC report where they indicated a record fall in PC sales which they blamed on Windows 8 - without, as far as I'm aware, any causative evidence, since the trend was already underway, but I guess that's their prerogative. (I'm not going to argue that Windows 8 didn't set the world on fire the way the iPad did, but I will later argue that it never had to.) The most amusing overreaction to these rumours was an article by the Financial Times that called it "one of the most prominent admissions of failure for a new mass-market consumer product since Coca-Cola’s New Coke fiasco". They and some others called it a "u-turn", suggesting that Microsoft is about to shift focus back to the desktop and, I guess, deprecate the whole "Metro" experiment.

First I have to get out of the way some of the reasons this idea is ridiculous. We spent a lot of effort getting a huge community of possibly hundreds of thousands of third-party developers on board with Windows 8's new programming model. That required a lot of investment from them, too. Who in their right mind would risk alienating and damaging the livelihoods of that many people if they weren't sure they were in it for the long haul? Also, the desktop is still not good for smaller touchscreen devices, and it never will be; it'd make more sense to split Windows into two operating systems than abandon the newer part entirely.

Speaking of which, why doesn't Microsoft just do that? Well, I have a theory on that one!

I'll start by going back to the reasons Windows 8 ever existed in the first place. It's become increasingly clear over the last decade that computing is changing, and while desktop/laptop PCs are still important, they are not the only thing that is. Eventually, they'll probably be substantially smaller than alternatives to them. For Microsoft to only have significant share in a market that is set to dwindle is not really a good thing for them. They needed to take a shot at phones, and needed to take a shot at tablets.

The choice of merging their tablet OS into their desktop OS comes across as bizarre, however, and counter to what everyone else is doing, but there's probably a reason for that, too. The most obvious one for now is differentiation; if you could have a device that could be both a laptop and a tablet, and do it well, why would you want two devices? (The problem with this is of course pulling it off; it's worked for some people but not everyone is convinced.)

But there's a deeper reason; it doesn't look like we're done finding new ways to do computing. So far, we have desktops and laptops, which are fairly similar; phones, which are not; and tablets, which are somewhere in between the two but with some distinct differences from each. Keyboard, mouse, and more recently touchscreens, all of varying sizes. Sooner or later it looks like we'll roll more into the mix; hands-free/gestural controls through the likes of Kinect or Leap Motion; voice-control becoming more popular with cars; maybe even eye tracking, and then there's the whole deal with Google Glass.

Pretty soon you have a dozen different ways to control computers, and the most user-friendly ways to do so in each case will differ wildly. So, are we going to create a new platform for each one? How exactly is that going to scale - 15 different versions of Pandora or Skype, multiplied by the number of competitors in each case? Heaven forbid you try to get smaller vendors into the picture - it'll rapidly get ridiculous. Thing is though, you don't really need a new platform for each one. The core of the application is still roughly the same - it's always trying to accomplish the same goal - it's just that the way you'll work with it will differ. If you're going to do that, why not just have one operating system and one application with different UIs depending on the form factor?

This is what I think the "Metro" programming paradigm is trying to get at (though not having worked with it at any depth personally, I can't warrant how effective it is at doing so). Eventually Windows might be running on much more than just desktops, laptops, tablets and phones - if it winds up driving TVs, entertainment systems in cars, even headset-style "computers" of the likes of Google Glass, it will need to be extraordinarily flexible, and so will the apps. But since computers are still computers, and are still there to help you accomplish similar tasks - just in different settings - it may actually make sense to have a single OS and programming model to drive them all. You still have to write a lot of UIs, and I admit that winds up being a large part of a program, but it does save you a fair bit of work regardless.

Only problem is Windows 7 was not in any situation to be that kind of an operating system. It was a great desktop operating system, but there was no way it was going to be practical to develop these kinds of "run-anywhere" applications with the APIs available. It's just too slow to develop for, and that dates back to its origins in the 80s and 90s. Highly flexible memory-managed MVC-style frameworks weren't practical back then because they impose a lot of overhead in terms of CPU power and memory usage - which we just didn't have back in the 1990s. Keeping things lean meant programmers had to manage a lot more things themselves, and that led to a very complex API - which just got worse as more and more layers were built on top of it.

To break away from this, Windows 8 had to rebuild things from the ground up, and not just the programming model, but a UI to go along with it that could adapt to multiple form factors. Problem: How do you do that without giving your users a lot of headaches trying to learn a new model? Well, basically, you don't - there's always going to be friction, no matter what you do, and this is what we saw with Windows 8. While it supports the "old" as well - it kind of had to, because the old way of doing things isn't going to just vanish over a single release - it's nowhere near seamless, and it probably couldn't have been. Windows 8 was always going to be risky. Luckily, it came at a good time to be risky. Trying to change how people do computing would have been a terrible idea right after Vista, which wasn't exactly well-received. But after Windows 7, Microsoft could afford to do something new without having to get it perfect right off the bat.

I wouldn't be surprised if the people "in the know" expected this, as well. It's a wildly new interface; is the first revision going to nail it? No. What do you do if it doesn't? You learn from your mistakes and keep trying to improve it. For that reason, I suspect the decision to release a "point release" after only a year was made well in advance - it isn't just a response to poor sales like the pundits like to think it is. The initial release had to be made, because you won't really know how it's received until it's released, but responding to feedback quickly so that things can get on track as soon as possible afterwards is important too. So yeah, I guess it's another "beta version". Sorry guys. :)

So, back to the Start button and the default desktop. Why bring these back? Well, it's still a transitional period - business users and many individuals still have a lot of desktop applications and spend a lot (often most) of their time there. If it'll make the OS easier for them to use, why not? And the desktop isn't going away, either - it remains the most efficient interface for a typical work setting, and it probably will for quite some time. IMHO "Metro" will need to eventually be adapted to work well for this setting too - I don't really know when, whether or how that would happen though. (I also think the Start button never should have been removed; keyboard/mouse users are used to visual cues on the screen that there's something to click there, and there are some scenarios it's just outright better - if you've run a Windows 8 VM in VMConnect/VMWare Player, you'll know how annoying it is to hit that Start "button" or bring up the Charms bar.)

But it's just pragmatism. It doesn't mean the new UI is becoming any less important, and it's certainly not going away.

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