I have a list
on my wall - rather morbid thing about dying and what people regret. The link is, seems to me that some one at MS in their old age has finally understood that making things that ordinary people find easy to use is a good idea and that presenting content well should be the priority. Perhaps its that final effort to relive the glory days.
On the other hand, I expect it is the same old MS that has always been. 64bit dlls go in the x86 area and 32bit in the x64 folder. Countless meaningless 'uninstall' and 'digital certificate for vba...' icons will still fill up the majority of tiles. MS paint will still be the same as will notepad. Email will be turned off and then come back later, programs like Outlook will consume more resources and still not be able to render basic html emails. File explorer will be even more neutered and peoples data will be splattered across the entire folder structure in a random fashion so that search will prove its worth.
And yet I am vaguely optimistic that things may in fact improve once the dust settles, maybe it will take till windows 9, on the other hand our windows xp workstations are now seriously old and most of our third party apps are still windows only, so inertia may again rule the day and keep MS on top.
My recommendations:
- Call them tile apps but make them a desirable alternative rather than rubbing poo all over the vast majority of software on the platform that will remain old school for the foreseeable future.
- Tidy up that mess of a file structure, get rid of active directory and joining domains etc it no longer makes sense. People use many contexts, home, work, cloud, offline. AD is a dog you've turned relatively simple configuration information into a rocket science for no good reason. If you made Microsoft live sign on business friendly then that could replace AD for smb companies.
- work harder at making developers building for windows understand physical hardware, life-cycle, support and good file and icon management.
- Give badges to companies that make quality software. Why is it that all UK software we've had the 'joy' of using is so antiquated, poorly supported, hard to use with stupid dependency issues.
- ditch the registry - the central database for everything the compost heap of knowledge.
- wrap all files in xml meta data. Search is everything types tell us to fire data anywhere in a projectile vomit kind of way - it is better than creating structure apparently. Only problem is that files often don't contain nearly enough meta data to ensure I get the right one back when searched for. I want to get the latest data not a file written years ago with the same name, and many similar issues. I note that the symantec web guys have been saying that of Search for years.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
