'Dated and cheesy' Aero ripped from Windows 8 Microsoft must really love Windows 8, or hate its legacy install base. The Aero interface introduced with the hated Windows Vista and perpetuated with the loved Windows 7 is being canned from Windows 8, the company has revealed. In another achingly long Windows 8 blog post, Microsoft called the Aero interface it once …
"Using journalists as your defence while expressing a problem with the negative comments of your actual audience on the Windows 8 blog? Things must be worse than we thought."
Everything that I have seen about Win 8 simply tells me that I am going to have to stick with XP, but really, the people most moved to used forums are people who want to complain. So the prevalence of negative comments on the Sinofsky's blog has to be taken with a little grain of salt. I would hope that Microsoft, and devs in general, have better ways of judging the opinions of their actual paying users, than *simply* and *solely* judging by the responses on official blogs. (Not that I am all that enthused about relying on journalists and bloggers either...)
I hope they put blanks in the gun, or they might really shoot themselves in the foot over this.
However, sadly it will prevail as it will come standard on all new PC's.
I have always upgraded, but not this time, I hate the look of a mobile phone on a PC.
I shall wait for windows 9 which will, no doubt, put things right.
"Using journalists as your defence while expressing a problem with the negative comments of your actual audience on the Windows 8 blog? Things must be worse than we thought."
My thoughts exactly. Is this not what happened with the Mass Effect Game? But that's ok, as MS can patch Windows with an extended ending too. :D
(Anon, because it's only an opinion, the OS could end up good after all...)
Lets see here:
Windows 95 sucked
Windows 98 was decent
Windows ME sucked
Windows XP good
Windows Vista was the second coming of ME
Windows 7 good
Windows 8 I predict will suck worse than the other failures combined.
And yes I know that there is more than good or bad with each of those OS but this list was to be general at best.
Thumbs down for Microsoft on this one. They need to find something that people don't want to kill then for and nurture it instead of piss off their customer base. As a pc gamer the choice for me is ovbious but the time is going to come where an alternative is as good or better. Mark my words.
Go to the server versions. From a desktop point of view you have everything you need, without all the crappy stuff in the "consumer" versions, like simplified access right dialogues which allow you to lock yourself out of your data.
Just face it, Windows is legacy software, Microsoft won't make something affordable to replace Windows 2000 or XP. What they want to do now is consumer stuff.
havre to slightly disagree with that list
Windows 95 pretty good
Windows 98 buggy unstable mess
Windows 98R2 was Decent
Windows ME sucked
Windows XP good
Windows Vista was the second coming of ME
Windows 7 good
Windows 8 I predict will suck worse than the other failures combined.
I too disagree with that revised list
Windows 95 Buggy
Windows 95 OSR2+ not bad
Windows 98 buggy unstable mess
Windows 98se was Better
Windows ME sucked
Windows XP Buggy insecure mess
Windows Xp SP2+ Good
Windows Vista Good, but too demanding
Windows Vista Sp2, Good and Not that different to Win 7 but to late to the game
Windows 7 good
Windows 8..... Im not going to comment because I think you should just use it for a few weeks are see for yourself, Love it or Hate it, I don't care but do yourself a favour and try the bloody thing yourself and don't just assume or take other peoples words for the whole truth
So anyhow, this tick tock nature of Windows, good bad, that people seem to dream up is somewhat "rose tinted" with a couple of exceptions almost all Windows Major versions have been "fixed" and turned in to decent Operating systems after a service pack or two. Windows XP people was not good by a long shot to start with
We also seem to have forgotten 2000, and Windows 3.11 Both of which are good, which doesn't fit with the tick tock. Of course there is some irony with 3.11 given hat we are essentially moving back to that style of UIin Win 8 but, its worth pointing out that people of the time were in uproar about the Win 95 UI, saying its slow and inefficient.
im not sure what you mean by those lists of Linux Distros, with out version info I assume That's your experience and your trying to be funny about ditching MS and moving to Linux after Vista? So since Vista was released, you've changed your OS at least 6 times?
give than Vista is what.. 5 an a half years old? and lets also assume that you actually tried out the OS for a while before binning it, means you have changed your OS once every few months. The really funny thing is that XP was like that, after a year it tended to grind to a halt oh the good old days ;) I upgraded my Vista PC to 7, vista in turn hadn't been reinstalled since 2008, so essentially ive not clean reinstalled for over 4 years and yet you feel the need to reinstall every few months a new distro…
Curious, but I cant say your selling the idea of Linux very well though.
apologies if I got you all wrong, but your list makes no sense.
I was at the UK launch of Windows 95 way back then. It was gratifying to hear the Microsoft presented say how bad Windows 3.11 was and how much better '95 was. So, that is their sales strategy. Tell the punters what a load of c**p they are using and promise them something, err, different!
Everything is supposed to look grey, flat and boring instead now?
This is part of the problem with Windows. It's can't simply evolve gradually, Microsoft have to keep knocking it down and rebuilding it all the time. Have they not learned from Facebook that a good number of people don't like drastic change?
If we're still using Facebook as an example, that probably means that people will bitch and moan for half an hour then actually notice that yes, the extra functionality that's been introduced in the new UI is actually quite good and then just get on with it.
Not to say that this'll happen with W8 but stranger things have happened.
I'll be sticking with Windows 7, I just don't want to have to get used to the way Windows 8 works, it feels overly complicated, having to go through a billion windows just to add a user (who needs a windows live account) is a pita. Can see it being good for touch screen though but touch screen for a desktop isn't exactly an upgrade over a mouse.
Gnome Locker on Youtube though seems to detest Win 8 on tablets, got his father using it and his old man was all "yeah, if it's the same price as an iPad I'll go Windows on a tablet" so he led with questions where the only answer would be "oh, I'd go iPad". So, if a tablet comes with Windows 8 and is the same as or cheaper than an iPad, get it.
"Can see it being good for touch screen though but touch screen for a desktop isn't exactly an upgrade over a mouse."
I was having this conversation with a colleague and made more or less the exact same point as the above. I said that I thought it was absolutely great on a tablet, but that for a desktop, whilst it wasn't exactly a disaster, was definitely a bit of a downturn.
They replied that the future was tablets and that desktops were on their way out. And I suddenly realized they might be right. In business use, people still want a monitor and keyboard. But outside of developers, most users would probably be happy just having Metro launch their "apps". They're not power-users. For leisure, browsing, etc. people are increasingly just wanting something they can lie on the sofa with and surf or ping friends or whatever. For which a tablet is better. There are a dozen scenarios where a proper desktop is better than a tablet. But they only add up to a smaller fraction of the total times a computer is used compared to when people are just surfing, doing v. light email and whatever. I was sure Metro was a real mistake. Now, I'm starting to wonder if MS have actually just skipped forward and taken things to their logical conclusion.
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@AC -
Your response indicates you think developers are too stupid to use a launcher.
Actually, most responses in this thread seem to be "I am too stupid to use a launcher".
And requiring business software means using the launcher to launch the business software. It's not rocket science, unless you're absolutely retarded.
I can't believe how many people commenting on the Reg forums consider themselves to be stupid and incompetent.
Have you seen Gnome3? They just tried the same "Radical" "Innovative" & "belongs-on-a-damn-tablet" changes we see in Win8. I hate it just as much as Balmer's Metrosexual CP. I hope people have some choice other than what the Metro Consumer Preview looks like. At least with 'nix you have MANY choices for appearance.
Kde3 TO kde4 - cough sputter, cough sputter... Gnome2 to Gnome3, cough, sputter, bleah... where did the vomit bucket go.
Windows is actually late to the "let's through decades of productivity research out of the window and make everything Tablet/Phone-like" party.
KDE and Gnome tried to get there first. KDE is also the worst of the two by far because it tries to retain some backwards compatible look while replacing old UI concepts with "Activities" and other similar iPhonesque/Androidesque abominations in their APIs.
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With KDE on Fedora its pretty stripped down straight off the USB Drive, cant speak to how it is on any of the other distros, but you dont even really need the 15 minutes trying to make it not look like some kind of mutated android-satan spawn.
In regard to unity, I think the only thing that can save it is a mercy killing. And Canonical seems to behave like Microsoft, if people hate it, they spend time, money and development resources on fixing it instead of making something right the first time.
In regard to Windows, whoever said buying the server versions seems to have it dead on, though from what I understand they're taking the GUI out of Server in the next version, which isnt the end of the world, but it will slow many many users, technicians and admins down, and honestly Id rather train to be more proficient in Bash than have to get pissed off that the Windows Shell doesn't do the same things.
Cinnamon. Problem solved.
For Debian base: http://linuxmint.com/
For RedHat base: http://linuxfordummies.org/installing-the-cinnamon-desktop-environment-in-fedora-16/
(Please also contribute to the Fedora bug here https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=771252 to help push the Fedora maintainers to include Cinnamon as a first class desktop environment in FC17!)
I don't know where you get your information on KDE from but it is seriously misinformed
KDE defaults with a traditional-Windows feel with a slightly Mac-ish aesthetic, aand a lot better than that sounds. Unlike either of them two (or Gnome 3/Unity for that matter), KDE is infinitely customisable. That's where the whole Activities\Widget thing comes into it. Activities gives you a way to predefine what is displayed on the desktop (alongside desktop icons, you can get KDE to display other useful items too)
Put simply, Activities is not about redefining the desktop by any stretch, but allowing the end user to do so for their own needs if the traditional desktop doesn't work so well for them. The whole thing is about choice. Something Win8 won't give us
Nope - it was that when it was released ... seriously - does anyone think that metro is going to make inroads into the main commercial installed base?
The UI is getting to be really stupid for many applications - I was watching the teller at my bank entering a deposit last week ... keyboard, mouse, keyboard, mouse, keyboard, mouse, cashdraw, mouse, keyboard, mouse .... print receipt ... duh!
I went from being a die hard Amiga fan to a die hard windows fan and wouldn't have anything to do with the hated and mysterious Linux.
Then I installed the Win8 developer preview on a spare laptop. What the f*** are they thinking? I stuck with it for a few weeks but it was utter garbage. And this was a touch screen laptop too. Now (thankfully) I've seen the last of it and, though I never thought I'd ever say it, I have Linux Mint running on the lap top.
When Win8 is out and is the only option on new machines I'm pretty sure there will be an awful lot more people switching to a familiar windows based interface too.
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My own usage pattern would be similar, except I was an Atari ST fan and never the evil Amiga! :P
After >20 years of loyal Windows usage, Windows 8 is a sign that I no longer trust Microsoft in terms of competency and judgement. I am now making plans to switch all my PCs to a KDE-based Linux distro as the main OS, possibly OpenSUSE.
KDE 4.8 >> than Windows 7 too.
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> I've been platform-agnostic for years now
You assert not only that you don't know what platform you're running on, but that ultimately it's not even possible to know? Fair enough, but you do then go on to refute your own assertion using several counter-examples...
"I call bullshit"
You can call whatever you like, doesn't stop it being 100% true. The laptop is a touch screen acer that I picked up ex display. The win8 developer preview was highly anticipated specifically because of the touch screen capabilities of the laptop. A week after I began using it, the compulsary Metro interface was pretty much impossible to navigate. I had office, visual studio, numerous IDE's and the CS suite installed, along with lots of other tools. every single Metro panel was identical. A typical installation that might result in a folder containing 5 or 6 easily identifiable icons in the old windows start menu will result in another half screen of virtually identical plain coloured metro panels. I haven't 'run off' to anything. I have a spare laptop that I couldn't wait to get the Win8 preview off so thought I'd try Linux. I'm baffled by the complexity of Linux for the most part but since every other machine I have is running Win7 I think it'll be nice to stick with Linux on the laptop for now and see how it goes.
My point was that when Vista came out there was a huge number of people who decided to 'upgrade' their new computers to WinXP. This time I think things will be far worse for MS. Non-technical users who have become accustomed to the look of Win7 will be more open to the idea of switching to Linux than ever before.
I was at a recent tech expo and a bloke from MS previewed a load of their up-comming technologies. For a start, I was very surprised that they worked, and worked well, even though they were all in preview state.
Beyond that, I thought they were great ideas, even though they had all been done before (in other OS's etc), with one exception: Metro. It is great on a "slate" or anything with a touch interface. Using it with a mouse feels clunky and awkward, a bit like using Windows without a mouse attached. I could see the benefit of a single interface accross all their consumer platforms (phone, "slate" and PC), but this is not the way to do it.
I for one will be giving Win8 a miss till touch screen monitors for PCs come down to a reasonable price (and I've tried it out to make sure it's not too awkward).
Even if they are cheaper than a normal monitor are you really going to be comfortable keep moving your hands from the keyboard/mouse to the screen every few minutes... and if you are okay with this, do you think this is an example of really good computer interface design?
"we all seem to agree"?
No, not so much. "we" all pretty much hate everything MS on principle and "we've" become a little self-reinforcing club, like Apple cultists or conspiracy weirdos all telling each other how "right" "we" are.
That's cool though. It could be hilarious if "we're" wrong.
I'm sure Windows 8 will be a huge success for (a) people running new Windows 8 tablets (x86 or ARM), (b) people who are primarily content consumers, (c) people who tend to do one thing at a time on their computer. For everything else, it is going to be anywhere from annoying to a nightmare depending on what you are trying to do.
I don't know how bad it will be at launch, but over time you will see two trends emerging:
1/ simple applications (photo editors, image viewers, PDF viewers, etc.) will move to Metro;
2/ complex applications (desktop publishing, advanced image manipulation, music creation, etc.) will remain as desktop applications.
This is driven by the fact that the Metro programming interfaces lack a lot of the more advanced features (no date/time controls, etc.) and the more complex interfaces do not fit within the Metro design language.
Couple this with the inability to say "use this application in Metro and this other application on the Desktop" means that users working in the desktop are going to be constantly kicked into the Metro world to view content (images, documents, etc.) unless they say "use a desktop version (if I can find one that works on Windows 8)" in which case the Metro experience is broken as that will put you into the desktop world when viewing those files from the Metro environment.
I also wonder how all this is going to work on the server. Microsoft may default to the desktop there (it is for corporate/business environments, after all), then charge people extra for it.
Sure this is the consensus among XP, OS X and Linux 'enthusiasts' along with the Microsoft haters who look to the future through a veil of wishful thinking.
There is also the fact that many organisations have only recently upgraded to Windows 7 and others are mid-process. Given corporate refresh cycles, another area for consensus - few expect any institutional rush to move to 8, in fact many orgs will probably skip 8 entirely except for tablets etc.
Back in the real world the jury is still out on what the reception will be to Windows 8. Certainly there are some annoying features/bugs in the customer preview but anyone experienced with beta software will be used to that. For example those invisible hot border areas give me grief on multi monitor but not going to rant until its proved the problem isn't fixed by final.
Windows RT devices don't even exist in the wild yet so premature to prognosticate.
We will see what progress is seen in next months preview. I'll reserve full judgement until the project is complete.
Bomb sound highly unlikely though.
Many of us find Metro fugly, partly because it looks so bloody plain. It's like a visual tranquiliser fighting the stimulant of brash fugly colours. Microsoft have to simplify the desktop UI to a plainer, more metro like style, otherwise users might just choose the prettier desktop version to use over Metro and ruin the whole convergent cross promotional plan.
Maybe they should resurrect the old Win3 look, remembering to disable any window decoration customisation and impose a monochrome look&feel. That might just be enough to drive despairing users to Metro.
For a new job. He should have been working on something that was new and revolutionary and not pulling out Bob 1 and forcing it to mate with iOS to come out with this bastardized Bob 2 interface. While I really don't like to see anyone fired or put out of work this is one guy that clearly needs to boot put to his ass and hard so he catches some major air as he leaves MS.
"With millions of people using the Consumer Preview for their daily work, we’ve seen just as many points of view expressed. Many people – from David Pogue of the New York Times to Mat Honan from Gizmodo and many more – have been quite positive, and others less so, most notably in the comments on this blog, where we’ve seen the rich dialog we’d hoped for."
"So that's all good."
I never really liked aero - it seemed like a pointless way of just using up more resources and making things on screen more complicated that necessary. I tend to revert my machines to 'classic' windows.
Having tested the Win 8 preview on a laptop, it really doesn't work. I understand Microsoft's desire to have a uniform look and feel, but Metro on a computer is clunky and replacing the excellent start menu with search box in Win 7 with the start page is a disaster. Full screen apps ruin the whole point of a windowed OS.
I love the look of Metro on a phone, and for tablets it will probably be great too. But forcing it on PC users will be a disaster.
I have my fingers crossed that abandoning aero means MS is going to do what they should have done all alone - put a bit of metro look and feel on the familiar windows interface without forcing the actual metro interface on us. I am hopeful, but not very confident.
That's fine until you buy some new hardware whcih will not have drivers for XP.
That was the only reason I moved from W2K to XP, a new videa card I had didn't have W2K drivers.
I now use Win7 for all my new kit for the same reason (I still have XP boxes in use for older hardware), but I actually prefer W7 now though that is partly because I use the 64bit version with 8GB ram which is ideal for having multiple VMWare players running other OS's.
I have also found W7 currently runs faster than XP as it seems to have better disk performance (vastly better than Win-D'oh!s Fester).
Personally I see W7 being MS's next XP, they will not be able to kill it until they actually have something business will buy, and noone I know who does real work with computers uses tablets.
I know of machines running some CNC industrial processes that are still using Windows 2000.
When I asked the owner of the plant about W2K phaseout he said that each item of machinery was worth about $700k or more that it was not expected to be phased out for another 14 years--that was last year which makes the phaseout for these Windows 2000 installations as far off as 2025!
(Anyone who knows a little about the metal-bashing industry knows full well that large lathes/mills etc. can have a life of anywhere between 25 and 40 years or more.)
What many IT-ers have little knowledge about is the strange uses to which some IT products are actually put.
Windows 2000 still going strong amongst my clients. Several of them sport these large bits of machinery with some computer buried deep in the guts running Windows 2000.
Are you going to take apart a $500,000 printer the size of a car just so that Microsoft can feel good about your deploying the latest operating system? I choose not to.
Instead, I toss a little Atom box running CentOS with a pair of NICs in between it and the rest of the network. Serves as firewall, does IDP, IDS and traffic logging. Works like a hot damn...and Windows 2000 just sits there, doing its thing.
Microsoft's last great operating system. Still toughing it out. Keyboard, mouse, multitasking and all. Whatever happened to the days when computers were good?
"That's fine until you buy some new hardware whcih will not have drivers for XP."
Nah. You run XP in the VM that you are running on top of the proper OS. That way you get all the driver support and security of the maintained modern OS, plus an ability to run all the inevitable Windows apps that your job forces you to use.
Still functionaly offers less than CDE.
It's true.
But I see what they did there, they removed some overheads to the windowing system that they had previously added and thus making things more stable as less to go wrong, less memory usage, cpu, win win.
This what we call Microsofts Shift Shaft cycle, First they Shaft you and then they Shift you. Windows Vista was in general to most a Shaft as it had new driver models, Windows 7 used the same driver models which were by then alot more robust and stable and removed some of the so called annoying demands for admin rights to do certain tasks. This was a Shift release as it Shifted more versions. This means WIndows 8 Should be a Shaft release, though until its released I could not pass judgment. Though it would appear to be affording more stability for the GUI, but it must have negatives in there to bring it inline though this could be were the ARM branch limitations come in being the common denominator may dictate the level of programs afforded interface usability wise.
Still as long as a command/shell prompt window is the same I'll say again, nothing has realy improved since CDE.
Although I quite like that picture, the whole Windows having alternate good/bad releases thing all over the web is getting old, and it's complete horseshit. I guess people realised Vista was apparently bad, and Windows 7 and XP were OK, so then retroactively cobbled this pattern together on all previous versions of Windows despite the fact it's a load of bollocks.
Windows 7 is just a streamlined Vista, both of which are better than XP, which is a slightly improved Windows 2000. The Windows NT line is better than the 9x line (including Windows Me) - which are all about the same. And the pre 9x versions are more like programs that run on top of DOS rather than an actual OS.
It is not that it is a bit broken and have bugs, no, Vista is on another level entirely: It is blatantly broken *right in yer .!.. face* at a level where even my old Aunt Oda would see the brokenness!!
When they left such a visible bug in there, then scary, negative, thoughts emerge:
The developers, do they actually give a shit about their work? Did anyone actually test this stuff, like, At All? Did MS lose the source code before testing so it cannot be fixed (and it wasn't)? Is this deliberate so the next version looks better? If they left this in, more must be wrong?
And: How can MS fail to see this is a problem, are they blind, retarded, going senile, overdosing on their own marketing - Doesn't Anybody There give a shit?
What do you mean "original"? Is there a pirated version that can do that before the heat death of the universe? .... the patched version of Vista is about that level of performance.
The funny thing is that when doing the same operation through X on Cygwin, yet another fat'ish layer on top of Win32, the copy goes as fast as expected. The trick seems to be to avoid the GUI.
The alternate release thing actually started back with Win3.1, after the legally crippled Win2 debacle. It's been pretty damn accurate since then with only a little fudging the release order. Vista fit the pattern far too well but didn't start it.
[Although I personally don't find Win7 much of an improvement on Vista, I find it painful to use every time I have to fix someone's PC install]
And I mean, really.
There is no other possible explanation of committing such a clear financial and marketing suicide killing Windows8 with such an awful interface as Metro UI really is.
Such a bad design not even a little kid could have come up with.
Metro UI is being forced by Microsoft everywhere, not only Windows8 consumer/desktop editions but even on server edtions! THAT IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE.
They even tried pushing Metro UI lame concepts inside the upcoming new Visual Studio!
Metro UI sucks on Windows Phone already, that is the main reason why Microsoft is non gaining any market percentage.
Pushing such an awful badly engineered interface that Metro is everywhere it's going to be a huge disaster for Microsoft.
Only people paid by Microsoft would tell you that Metro is cool. Otherwise anyone using their PCs or mobile or servers for work first but even for gaming would tell you that it sucks. Because it sucks. It's just that simple. Metro UI sucks. It doesn't work. it's flawed at the core. There is nothing to fix. Only fix is getting rid of Metro UI.
I tried out Windows 8 as a virtual machine on my MacBook. It is certainly faster than Windows 7, and about the same speed as XP, which is what I usually use When I need to run a Windows-only prog.
But, the start menu replacement just doesn't work for me. Having to scroll through hundreds of icons to find the program you want to run, with no way to organise them in a logical fashion is no good. Having to find the relevant pixels to click to get the dammed thing to appear is frustrating, and pretty much impossible if you are running it in a window, either a VM window or as a remote desktop session, or if you have set up OSX to use that corner of the screen as an active corner to activate a screensaver or similar.
For a fondleslab, it might be an improvement on the current start menu, but it is like iOS before they introduced App folders that you can organise things into.
Well, only about Aero looking cheesy. On the visual appearance of Metro, a little conflicted. It does look nice and crisp, but also kind of harsh. Of course there are serious usability problems that that outweigh the good or bad or the aesthetic, so I won't be using it anyway.
I wonder what skin they'll be using for traditional desktop applications in Win8. The could probably turn the 95/98 style skin into something very Metro-y with very little effort if the wanted.
Did I read that right? Metro is going to be the only interface choice for Windows 8? I must have misread something, because the only way that could happen is if Microsoft wanted the age of the Windows desktop to end. It's not a bad interface for mobile, but it's terrible on a PC. What the hell are they thinking?
I think Metro looks modern and decent, frankly - in terms of visual appearance. Obviously, it's an ergonomic nightmare and inconsistent mess for using with a keyboard/mouse or with traditional desktop software. Should be very nice on ARM tablets though, where it's restricted to Metro apps only.
People have moaned about every new version of Windows since the dawn of time, in this case it's probably a bit more justified, but still. At the end of the day it'll be sold on all new PCs regardless and most people will put up with it until Windows 9 comes around and we repeat the process all over again. I actually think Microsoft might well have sorted out most of the issues in Windows 8 for whatever version comes after it, as they did moving from Vista to Windows 7.
I like aero. Reason being it works much better than classic (xp style) interface when you are doing CG stuff, because it uses the much faster GPU instead of the CPU.
This has to do with how the framebuffer is used/accessed. Compare doing "playblast"s on Maya with it on and off, and you will see. Aero on Win7 causes less artifacts and works faster.
From a design standpoint I don't care either way. As long as the UI has fewer steps to accomplish my goals (and can be made to be in dark somber colors) I'm game.
I don't care about the (potential) battery hit at all. I'm using a dual CPU with multiple HDDs config anyway.
Personally I'm ready to welcome the new smartphone metaphor
There area couple of 1000 commands in one of the 3D modeling programs I use - it takes forever to find a little used function in the menus or toolbars.
Now that there will be a single intuitive and obvious touch gesture to select between optimising hole placement by tool path as opposed to tool change time my life will be much easier
Remember the new Coke recipe - After the public uprising against it Coca Cola went back to the original recipe....and sales actually rose better than any ad campaign they'd ever done. I think Microsoft will also revert *but* I think heads will roll at MS and the long term damage will already have been done. Developers are already cheesed off with the way MS keep changing the technological ball every few years and so maybe this will accelerate their looking at other technologies more WEB centric. Long live HTML 5 :-)
I've been an OS/2 user since 1990 or so. The Workplace Shell (the "desktop" in Windowsspeak) is funtionally the same interface now as it was when Warp 4 was released in '96 or so, with enhancements added over time. Thus, once I got past the initial learning curve (and my other users did), we coyld focus on more important things, such as RUNNING THE SOFTWARE.
Aero is hideuous, and Explorer is hardly object-oriented (whereas the Workplace Shell was designe from the ground up to be an OOUI and not a GUI).
I'll stick with what I know and with what works.
Anyone want to speculate on which version of Windows will be preceded by a MSDN blog post saying that whilst the text-only paradigm of Metro is absolutely wonderful, research has showed that people often find it easier to identify coloured images at a glance quicker and more easily than monochrome text, and MS now feel it's time to evolve Metro into the next generation of user interfaces by introducing a revolutionary new concept - Icons!
From now on, there will be little colourful images on many of the buttons and toolbars, which can be clicked just like old-style Metro text buttons!!
Then, before the next version of Windows after that, there'll be another blog post saying that the feedback on the new coloured icons was so overwhelmingly positive that MS intends to continue evolving the concept by making all the toolbars and other chrome/widgets all colourful and tactile, with lots of gradients and 3D styling.
Some hardcore nerd will leave a single comment under this blog post saying "But this is exactly what Windows XP looked like decades ago!?", but no one will notice it. In fact, it'll probably get a load of down-thumbs for being so nerdy and mentioning Windows XP, whatever that was. QED dictates that anything from the last century surely existed in black and white, was primitively rubbish, took three hours to start up due to slow single core processors and RAM literally measured in mere MEGAbytes, and was operated by people in top hats who spoke like Noel Coward...
Theres me using Vista and the W7, and did not know I had an Aero interface. I thought Aero was a chocolate bar with bubbles in it.
Maybe bubbles are banned in Win8, along with the start button. All the corporates I have spoken to have said that they are not prepared to pay the mega bucks needed to retrain to use Win8, which means it may have the same uptake as Vista
I mean on the surface, they are trying to make people NOT want Windows 8, and as every week goes by, they just fuck things up even worse for the product. MetroUI is horrendous abortion of a mobile phone tailored UI for your 24in monitor. And now they are making you use it by making the old one intentionally shit.
I wonder if they are trying to psych us out?
Microsoft has a long track record of making things so shit, you can't resist them. Xbox360 for example. I must buy myself one of them, I really can't believe it's THAT bad.
being of an older generation doesn't mean you can SHOUT at everyone ;)
Being of an older generation myself I fully remember the arguments from people complaining about the move to the start menu, saying its slow and inefficient, the interesting thing is that they were correct it is slow and inefficient. Win 8 appears to be moving back to the more efficient method but we shall have to wait and see where it goes as its going to require some rethinking of the way you use your computer.
As for your sticking with the old idea. Good luck with that, when your colleagues send you an office 2016 document and you cant open it.
XP is still supported? so presumably you've upgraded, or more likely bought a new computer with win 7 or vista on it? in which case what are you complaining about? it was your choice to update, unless of course you did it because low and behold you couldn't get a new Win XP laptop with your newer hardware requirements in mind? ;)
If you had upgraded yourself, then again that's your own fault, XP will not suddenly stop working, if you wanted to live in the past then that's fine, you can still get some AV and security software which will continue to update for a few more years, an you'll probably need it with XP. I suppose the only good reason for doing this is that if you are the last windows XP user out there then apart from saving money from not being able to buy anything new for your PC at all, you will have the luxury of using an OS that no one will try an exploit any more either, and thus you wont need your AV software any more :)
After much thrashing around and downloading of Classic Shell et al I've finally managed to make Win 7 work more or less the way I want it to ... ie with the Win2000 user interface. It is not as good as Win XP was due to some upleasant behaviour from the file manager but it is tolerable.
I don't want a new interface every time I get a new computer (which is about the only time I change the version of Windoze). The classic interface does everything I want the way I expect it to. It is not the best interface in the world but it is familiar. If I try to learn Win 8 it will have changed again long before I am half as comfortable with it as I am with Classic.
But using it on machines that can handle many cores, many GB, and periphericals with every modern bus you've ever heard of.
You're right. It would be awful. Every action would just complete immediately and there'd be no time to make coffee or crak open a <icon>.
Funnily enough I am still using as my primary system at home, one where the GUI hasn't significantly changed since before windows 3.1 was released. Runs on Arm chips too.
Looking forward to trying it on a Pi, once USB drivers for it are sorted and my Pi arrives.
By the end of the day that it launches Win8 will be running on a larger number of PCs than Linux has been installed on. Just saying.
And I am loving the weird, yet confused, mixture of emotions on this thread. There is a fear of change mixed with a bizarre sense of schadenfreude, (from the usual haters,) which is somewhat misplaced as the product has not actually shipped yet. These are the same people that proclaim every new MS product a failure before it ships but time after time they get proven wrong.
Me? I am going to wait and see what the finished product looks like.
Ah well, it's all fine and dandy to wait for the release, but many of us have been trying the consumer preview (myself included). It would be a significant surprise if the release turned out to be very different. Personally speaking I hate the metro interface on a desktop but I can see it working quite well on a tablet.
Two problems for Microsoft. First, there's a distinct lack of good PR resulting from the consumer preview. This might actually translate into bad PR once the mainstream press wake up. That's never good for a product launch.
Second, a platform depends on the developers to make it successful. Now developers are never going to use a tablet for this; they do too much typing and want several large screens. They want a good desktop OS, something that Win 8 really isn't. So if their life becomes too hard they might just go to a platform where life is easier. OS X springs to mind. The most talented individuals out there will certainly jump ship as soon as they get fed up.
The trouble is that there aren't enough devs to show up significantly in MS's usage statistics, yet in essence they are MS's most important customers. MS will ignore their views at their peril.
I'm very disappointed with MS. When they first started talking about ARM I thought great, proper Windows on ARM, maybe Metro for mobiles, ARM servers just round the corner, etc. Looks like they've been lazy buggers and tried to do mobile on the cheap and ruined desktop at the same time, and no hint of them innovating in ARM servers.
Ummm, I think you will find that MS tracks devs very, very closely. They have a large team in every country (DPE) whose specific role is to listen to and work with devs. They will be able to tell you the number of devs in each country more accurately than any other company in the industry, as well as the percentage share that .NET represents vs other platforms. MS do realize that devs are important, trust me on that one.
The more specific question is 'does MS listen to everyone who calls themself a dev when posting on the register'. The answer to that in No. The reg does not represent a very mainstream view of the IT industry. Especially in the comments sections.
But I am sure that MS read the comments and enjoy them immensely :-)
AC wrote : "By the end of the day that it launches Win8 will be running on a larger number of PCs than Linux has been installed on."
So we mustn't discuss a new release of Windows, or compare it with Linux or anything else because there are more copies of Windows than Linux?
Like we shouldn't discuss a new Ford model, or compare it with a Chrysler or any other car, because there are more Fords around than Chryslers?
Not sure I get your point or follow your logic.
Balmer & Co need to wake up and actually look at who buys and uses their software, in particular, businesses. My company has 12,000 desktops in the UK and 40,000+ in Europe of which 95% still run XP. Why? because it's stable. Yes, we should have gone to Windows 7 much earlier but political infighting and waiting to outsource IT put paid to that. The Windows 7 rollout is going to start later this year if they think that companies like mine (and I suspect, many others in the same boat) are going to jump to Windows 8 when it's so massively different, is ridiculous. It's simply not going to happen!
Why would businesses jump to Windows 8 when we're all using mice, keyboards and ordinary monitors - NOT TABLETS! Tablets are consumption devices, they are NOT productive devices. The Metro front end is a joke from a business point of view and even getting rid of this the loss of the start button had my tech colleagues and I going WTF?!
When W7 came out I jumped on the pre-order bandwagon and got 3 copies for £45 each from PC World but I'm avoiding W8 like the proverbial plague. W7 ain't perfect but it works, the kids like it, my wife has got used to it - so it's staying!
I think the problem is that they *have* looked and have drawn entirely the wrong conclusion.
They seen that people don't always upgrade and have concluded that the only source of revenue for a new version of Windows will be OEM sales on new hardware. In fact, this is arse backwards. They already *have* a product for new hardware (Win7), whose development costs have by now been amortised to nil. All the cash they've spent developing a new one only makes sense if they can persuade existing customers to upgrade (i.e., selling them Windows for a *second* time). Then there's the fact that an OEM licence for Windows on new hardware makes them sweet FA whereas each upgrade makes them several times as much.
Commercially speaking, upgrading existing customers on existing hardware should be at the forefront of their minds whenever they design a new version of Windows.
"This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now, but at the time, it was very much en vogue."
But big monochromatic squares are so haut couture, oui?
Fuckin' puh-LEEZE awready! Shut the fuck up and just give is what we the customers want. (You do remember customers, don't you?)
Why force a touch-based user interface when 99.9% of people won't have touch screens.
I love my Mango phone but I'm not really looking forward to metro on the desktop as:
1. it doesn't work that well with dual screens
2. While it is quite elegant (perfect for many "content-presentation" apps such as newa, stocks, entertainment) one size does not fit all and the traditional desktop feels like a second-class citizen.
3. I absolutely despise the fact that the IE Metro is not the same as the desktop IE, with among other no support for favorites and no support for flash (hello Youtube).
But I am happy that at least 2 people are bullish with Sinofsky.
99.9% ? The Far East supply chain figures suggest factories are currently tooling up for about 15-20% of laptop displays being multi-touch next year. I don't have figures for monitors. Windows 8 has to look to the future not just the installed base.
Its looking like multi-monitor on Windows 8 desktop will be a worthwhile improvement on Windows 7.
I agree with the Microsoft line that once you've experienced touchscreen on a monitor, it feels a bit odd not to have the feature despite the fact that its still mouse/trackpad and keyboard most of the time on laptop/desktop. Most of the criticism seems to come from those who have not tried it but somehow know it will feel wrong.
I just reached out toward my closest monitor. Finger got to about 1cm away from the screen surface. Do I really have to try anything more to know touch control on it is not usable and likely to cause severe RSI?
I look forward to the lawsuits when the RSI aspects sink in.
Modern games on the PC have similar interface problems because the designers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmoneymen want to release simultaneously on consoles but don't want to change the interface to make it more sensible on a PC.
E.g. the second and third iterations of Deus Ex. Absolutely disastrous.
As for Linux - I agree Unity and KDE4 are absolute horrors, but that's why the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) was created. It's basically an optified fork of KDE3.5, which can coexist with a KDE4 installation and run KDE4 apps.
Currently running it on Debian Sid. Very handy.
http://www.trinitydesktop.org/
"Time for you to re-evaluate on KDE 4.8."
I have.
It's an improvement, but not yet enough of one to force me from KDE 3. Actually, I was better impressed with the previous iteration of KDE 4, so I've no idea what they did to 4.8 but it seemed a lot more sluggish to me. Possibly they added another lump of bloat to it to replace what they took out before? I dunno.
The crunch moment for me was when all that "semantic desktop" garbage became a compulsory part of KDE and kmail in particular - I'd been using KDE very happily for most of a decade until then. Still, sylpheed's not at all bad and e17 does what I want very well, desktop wise.
Windows has never, ever been configurable enough to achieve that, leaving aside the ten million other reasons I won't use it.
I agree. Put a 7 desktop and an 8 desktop side by side and one does indeed look dated and cheesy.
Their analysis is correct, it's their targetting that's off.
Those Metro applications look to me like a global implementation of the UI from Windows Media Centre. I always thought that was shit too.
In a previous comment I jested at MS removing support options from Windows (keyboard / mouse) because people could be bothered with the inability to use them.
However, this latest move makes one seriously wonder....
Aero is /much/ more than merely a shiney interface. Its highly functional as well; the option to have status bars display in the taskbar icons is IMO invaluable. In Windows 7 you can /always/ see the progress of a download or copy action.
In Windows 8 you should be using full screen crapola anyway, so who cares about all that Aero nonsense anymore?
Well: I DO!
This is yet another reason to avoid Win8 on the desktop.
...and long overdue for tablets but for a desktop user there are no reasons to chose it over Windows 7.
I really cannot imagine someone buying an upgrade from vista or 7 to 8 and definately not for the amount of money that they are charging.
"Many remain in the dark as to how programming for this thing will work." Euhm Install the developer tools and get programming?
So us software developers will now have to code for 3 OS's that are really quite different from one another. Believe it or not, in most corporations, XP is still the OS of choice. At the moment we have to test against XP SP3 and 7 (we skipped Vista, but if it runs on those two it probably runs on Vista anyway). Now we're going to have the craptastic 8 to throw into the mix too.
I think you are worrying too much. Apart from replacing the start menu with a scrolling screen of pain, the desktop experience on Win8 is not noticeably different from 7.
As I noted in an earlier comment, Win8 is 6.2 at the API level, so you'll be able to treat it the same way you currently treat Vista. Focus your efforts on XP and 7. Perform basic sanity checks just in case you have customers blighted by having to use Vista or 8, but focus the testing efforts on XP and 7.
The people have spoken and Microsoft have listened. People no longer want a grid of static desktop icons and a start menu leading into silo'd applications they want interactive live tiles bursting with useful information that only the Windows Metro Interface can provide. This is the future people embrace it
You are being funny, right?
".... interactive live tiles bursting with useful information ....."
........ priceless!!!! You should be on the stage! It was when I read that part that I went bursting with coffee over keyboard. Worth it though - I am going to remember that soundbite for a long, long time.
Ye right on microsoft because what looks like a not too bad UI on a 4" or less touchscreen is automatically going to scale up to a 24" plus monitor using a good ole mouse and keyboard? Why not leave aero in and let the USER decide which shell they want to use! If I wanted the metro interface I would have bought a windows phone, but instead I bought an android!
The first thing I did, was swtich it off and go to windows classic, with the coffee bean (tiled - so I could defocus and turn it into a sird to save my short range eyesight,)
I also switch off all the other stupid stuff their marketing staff have come up with in the last 5 years, such as menus that don't show you everything (deliberately done I think, to remove any advantage of memory muscle.) and all new features that are style over content, such as "Combine all buttons to one on the taskbar."
My dream would be a restore of the Up button, and the removal of the Ribbon, which sucks the sweat of a dead man's balls.
There should be a simple switch. "Make this look like a really fast, really powerful, windows 2000 installation, that shows you everything, doesn't pseudorandomly change the relative positions of things relative to each other and so on, and doesn't remove features because cocaine addled marketing types don't need them personally." which does exactly what it says on the tin.
These pointless glass effects have looked cheesy even when they were introduced.
And they where completely non-functional: Because the main part of a window needs to be easily readable, they only made the outside border transparent, while the rest of the window stayed opaque. That looked idiotic. And even on the outside border, this caused problems, e.g. for the window title. So they had to add drop-shadows to the text of the title bar, etc.pp. Jut a bad idea that they tried desperately to fix, but it did not work because it was a bad idea right from the start.
Of course power users used the "classic mode" on Win7 because of this. I am glad that MS understands this and will fix it.
Why does it matter to Microsoft if Aero is in Windows 8 or not? Surely this is a user preference. If there's a performance problem on a specific implementation, it seems to me an appropriate course of action is to make the default something other than Aero. Maybe no one uses Aero? I do. How many Windows 7 users will this affect?
So I'm cheesy, huh? But then I have about 2 billion CPU cycles per second free so squander. How much effort does it for Windows to process key clicks (that's what my laptop does most of the day)?
Even modern A10 chips run at nearly 2Ghz (I know CPU speed is not always a good proxy for processing speed but we don't have anything else). So another question is: what is Windows 8 doing to consume so many cycle that it can't paint the screen? Maybe malware is built in to the OS?
Not being funny, but how come _everyone_ is a fricking expert? I mean come on - it's an OS, and if you don't like it don't use it. Yes, most versions of the M$ OS have been buggy in the early days - our general rule of thumb was to wait until the first SP before looking to upgrade - but having jumped ship to Ubuntu some time ago I can say the same for the LTS releases there.
_But_ lets be realistic - with a choice of XP, Windows 7, Vista (if you are feeling sadistic) and all of the various Linux distro's - not to mention MAC - I fail to see the vitriol behind a companies release.
News update folks - M$ didn't make it for YOU, they made it to make money. It's their train set, and if it works then great, if it doesn't, well, there'll be another along in a year or so.
This shit is almost as dreary as the Olympics.
Apologies for the grammar/punctuation etc, I'm doing this on mah phone.
You have a point. From my own POV, however, what annoys me is this "we know what's best for you" attitude that Microsoft is adopting here. I want my computer to do a certain job in the way I want it to be done, not how some "expert" wants me to do it.
So when I see that they are forcing me to change (this is a big problem here - the word "change") the interface to a method that is not suitable for purpose just to make some fashion statement, I get annoyed.
And I HATE being annoyed!
The wages of Metro is.... oh sorry. You nearly brought out the Virtue in me!
But, as I said, the word "change" is the important one here. Change for the sake of change will always get up the collective noses of the great unwashed, but change in itself will always provoke some people regardless. That being the case, change should be presented properly, and Microsoft appears to have completely forgotten how to do that. Hence the comments we have here.
Everyone is a fricking expert because the topic is usability and we are all users. I'd guess that most of us here are fairly heavy users and have far wider experience than average of different UIs on various systems past and present.
Not being funny, but the real question is what are Microsoft smoking? Twenty years ago, GUIs were sufficiently close to being "designed" that vendors frequently issued design guides with references to actual research in human-computer interactions and models of how people think when they approach a computer. Every version of Windows in the last ten years is sufficiently far from those models that MS don't dare publish similar guides. They may have something called a design guide, but it doesn't reference research and is instead full of arty comments about the emotions they want the UI to inspire in their users.
I'm gald somebody's said that. My first experience of Vista was trying to fix it on a friend's computer. This was pre-SP1 and it was truly awful. My home PC runs Vista (amongst other OS's) and, with the service packs, is perfectly usable. I can see no reason to upgrade to Win7, let along Win8.
As I have found through rebuilding many Vista Machines from scratch over the past three years, once you put on a clean build and SP2 + patches its fine.
No more disk thrashing, sluggish behaviour etc. Works just as well as 7 really. Customers call me back a couple of days after I've rebuilt them to ask what it is I did to make it work so fast.
The reason Vista was bad at launch was it wasn't quite ready (needed another 3 months of tweaking and the other companies to get their arse in gear and make some drivers) and all the crapware that Dell/HP/Acer/Toshiba etc. installed, wasn't really designed with Vista in mind.
..MS had simply given us back the beloved feature - Custom Install.
Oh how I miss you from Windows 98SE. When I could craft out all the crap I never used.
How mature it felt to be trusted with choosing what I wanted on my PC. Now I have the choice of install what MS deems I must have or not install it at all.
Unfortunately Linux or OSX doesn't do it for me either. So I put up with it. Tough shit!
However, the main point is that MS isn't giving us the choice over Metro because it is desperate, oh so desperate to join the successful apps store bandwagon. So It's prepared to alienate a huge chunk of its currently happy user base by shameful plugging of its crappy apps platform.
How very tacky.
I have tried Win8 and the UI is basically a mess. It may be fast and fluid but it is still less productive and useable.
I am less worried about Aero Glass than the whole mess that is the Metro start menu.
This really is Metro vs 1 not Windows vs 8!
Now where did I put those Bob disks?
Aero was always cheesy and dated, and sluggish, a drain on video ram, and generally sucked. The same was true with XP... it looked more like a Fisher Price toy then a PC-OS.
I have to question the mentality of anyone wanting to give over the majority of their system just to run the graphics of the UI.
If Win8 goes into production like this, a huge number of users will migrate to Linux and MacOS on the desktop. What Vista couldn't achieve, Metro will.
This will safely put MacOS to 10-20% of desktop market share and catapult Linux to 5-10% which will actually make it a relevant desktop OS. Apple and Linus will send a big thank you to Balmer.
(Unless a Win8 SP1 comes out in a couple of months and quickly makes it possible to switch Metro off completely.)
Personally I always liked the Windows 2000 desktop. I never wanted fancy effects, fades, scrolls, transparencies or other bollocks! I want to USE my computer, not just frikkin' look at it!
When feasible I disable the default XP and Win7 looks and go back to 'classic' Windows.
Am I the only one to think that the multitasking in Windows 8 is cheesy and dated?
While there are no doubts that MS is optimizing W8 for concurrency and parallelism (and expecting developers to do as well in their apps) I noticed an incredibly bothering pattern in W8: it looks as if the computer isn't multitasking at all.
Watching a downloaded channel9 video I launched the install of W8 and looking for additional infos on websites. As soon as I switched to the web browser or the setup the video stopped. Like most people I was expecting the video to continue while doing other stuff. If I want to pause the video I pause the video myself.
I must say this behavior is incredibly annoying and I Wonder if this is a 'feature' of the metro interface.
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