So Windows 8 is so bad it’s been speculated that it may actually be hurting PC sales. Anyone know what Microsoft’s reaction is, what’s actually going on at the company, not what their PR people are saying.
“Guess we did lay an egg. Better keep publically proclaiming how good it is while we revert to a real desktop and Start button for Windows 9”
“We’re Microsoft so we get to tell people that they need to use a tablet interface and go buy a touch screen whether they like it or not”
“Maybe people will eventually quit complaining if we give it enough time”
“Maybe people will quit hating it if we run enough advertisements saying how good it is”
Pure speculation you’re asking for, it sounds like. My speculation goes like this: “Windows 8 isn’t eroding PC sales, tablets are eroding PC sales. We haven’t done a good enough job selling people on Windows 8 turns your PC into a PC -and- a tablet. The complaints are from the naysayers who hate every change ever, they’ll get used to it and then complain again when we change it next time, can’t let them hold back progress.”
A related question for speculation, how did they come up with the idea in the first place
“We’re Microsoft so people will love whatever we do”, or alternatively “We’re Microsoft so it doesn’t matter if people love what we do so we can do whatever we want”
“Gee, all the focus groups we’ve had have told us they hate using a mouse and keyboard and want a touch screen, and could we get rid of that annoying ‘Start’ button”
Windows is getting like Star Trek movies - every other one sucks (but even numbers, not odd numbers this time.)
While tablets are the main cause of the decline in PC sales, the decline in this quarter was far worse than expected, and that is due in no small part to Windows 8 and the bad reviews it has been getting. (Apple is down also, clearly just from iPad erosion.)
Business sales were actually reasonably good, but not good enough to make up for plummeting consumer sales. I doubt many business sales are of Windows 8 - I just got a new work laptop which is Win 7, thank Og. I doubt many large companies want to transition any time soon, especially since you’d have to get touch screen PCs to make it useful.
I have not heard any horror stories about it, only that it is not as much an advancement as Windows 7 was. Most of the new GUI stuff can be bypassed or disabled and the core system runs pretty much the same as Windows 7. When Vista came out, on the other hand, it was a nightmare; there were real issues with stability and hardware/software compatibility. Many legacy programs did not play well with the new security framework that was introduced.
I suspect the reason was to have a common look and feel across platforms. Not allowing overlapping windows makes perfect sense for a phone, but is really stupid for a PC where lots of people use it with large flat screen monitors.
Touch screen devices require new UIs and ways of interacting. That’s part of why Microsoft’s previous attempts at touchscreen devices failed. They just threw Windows on it and gave you a stylus, but nothing was designed with touch in mind.
On the other hand, PCs are still very important to Microsoft. So they chose to try to make a single OS experience that would work on both. The downside of this approach is that it’s not really perfectly suited for either. The upside is that it’s (more) consistent across both than their competitors’ products. Someone who uses Win9 on a desktop will already know how to use a MS tablet.
It doesn’t appear to be working very well in the market, but at least they took a shot. They may have to try something else for Windows 9, but I doubt strongly that “let’s just go back to a 20-year-old UI and watch as our market share and profits quickly erode” is seriously under consideration.
I’ve been out of the Windows world for a long time (I still have an XP machine that I use regularly), but I don’t really buy the idea that Windows 8 is causing a slowdown in sales. I’ve never known anyone who goes out and buys a new computer because a new OS comes out. Most people buy a new computer when their old one gets intolerably slow, or a new game comes out, or something like that. People who actually follow OS updates are relatively few, and they can of course just buy the OS.
who says they came up with those ideas at all? You seem to be pulling all manner of things out of thin air.
I think it’d be something more like “The PC market is saturated and no longer a vehicle for growth, so how do we try to break into markets which are growing?”
I swear some people still honestly believe Bill Gates is secretly monitoring everyone from his sunless warren below Fort Redmond.
I think it’s far more plausible that it’s because people who bought Windows 7 PCs have no incentive to upgrade. Seriously, they’re not going to go from a three year old Core i5 system to a new Core i5 system and see any noticeable difference.
Not speaking for its accuracy but the argument is the opposite: People are reluctant to upgrade into a new computer because all the ones at Best Buy and Dell.com are Windows 8 only and the customer isn’t sure about owning a Win8 system. They’d rather keep making due with their known XP/Vista/7 box than take the plunge into Win 8’s alien looking interface.
I can’t see anything wrong with Windows 8 as an OS. The only change that anyone might notice is the tiles instead of the start menu, and anyone with a IQ above room temperature can figure it out in ten minutes. It’s just people complaining “It’s different! It sucks!”
That’s me, but it isn’t totally about the interface. I’ve been doing this long enough that I don’t care - but the reviews I’ve read of Win8 seems to indicate that the interface on a PC has significant problems beyond just being different.
I have a fairly old Vista machine which I might have upgraded fairly soon - but I don’t feel like going through a lot of trouble to get an early version. I’ll wait until they get it to work a bit better, a few service packs from now. So, they lost a sale from me, and I’m not alone.
Maybe Apple will drag John Hodgman out again - and make him lose the mustache.
I am the kind of user that fights change tooth and nail. My very first action upon opening a new OS is to change it to “classic view”. I still run and love and protect my XP installs on my Pcs - both work and home. I fight my IT husband on changing or updating anything - it works fine. I will get no new usability out of an upgrade. Don’t touch my computer! Hubs had 7 on his PC, and it looks like an ugly resource hog.
That being said, I recently had to buy a laptop for the first time, and decided to just go for it and get Windows 8. You know what? I like it. I like it a lot. There was some small learning curve, but since it’s radically different from XP, and much closer to my iPhone/iPad, I understood it quickly. I love live tiles, and apps. I like the colors and the look. My only bitch so far is that I cannot close an app without going back to the Start screen. That makes me worry that I am going to have 500 apps running in the background and it’ll grind. But, other than, I’m quite happy with it.
Leaving aside the awful design of the Office Suite, I think Windows 8 is the best since XP. This is probably MS’ last chance to be relevant in the next tech wave, and I think if they can integrate as they’ve promised, they might make it.
Where did he say you had to “work hard”? From what I’ve seen, it’s not hard at all to bypass the touchscreen stuff.
I work with a few people who have upgraded or bought new computers that came with Win8, and the overall response has been “it’s not all that different, everything works fine.”
Granted, Microsoft has done a lot of stuff that’s pissed people off, but nowadays, what they’re putting out tends to be pretty good IMO. But I’m not sure they’ll ever get over the negative publicity and general hate that everyone seems to have towards them.
Would you buy a car that had a shag carpet headliner, pink hubcaps and a horn that played La Cucaracha? It wouldn’t be too hard to get those things changed, after all.
Yes I know a PC is not a car. But most people who are going to spend upwards of a thousand dollars on a PC don’t want to go futzing around with it to keep it in their comfort zone.
I, for one, find the tile interface to be less efficient than the Start menu when using a mouse. It’s a “flat” (not hierarchical) list that spans many pages so it can take a long time to find the right icon. I’ve dealt with it by pinning the most frequently used icons to the task bar, and making shortcuts on the desktop for many of the others.
Wait, I thought the benefit of the system was that you could do the tile interface for touchscreen and a standard desktop and start menu for mousing. Is that not the case?
Windows 8 is not bad, if you avoid using the parts of the new UI you don’t like. It has a ton of nice improvements in visible and non-visible areas. I like that people are retaliating about the interface stuff they’re trying to pull, but it’s still basically optional. The other features are nice.
Me either. I have it on this laptop, but without a touchscreen, as I don’t need that feature. It’s a bit awkward to use when you want to access the program file menu, control panel, etc., but it’s certainly a functional system.