Windows 8 is, more or less, fine. I don’t think it has many major conceptual problems, it just has a few implementation problems and lacks polish in certain ways.
If you use it principally in desktop mode…it’s basically Windows 7 with a few nice tweaks and a handy settings quicklink. I rarely use the Modern inferace elements – when I do, I think they’d be perfectly nice on a tablet and some are perfectly nice on my laptop, but the whole thing is a little too split personality.
I think removing the Start button was a terrible idea – but not for the reason that people always complain about. It doesn’t make the system harder to use AT ALL once you get the new interfaces. Leaving it in place, however, would have made it clear to users that the new Modern interface IS the Start menu, just much more visual and fullscreen. It would be a conceptual link and a touch of familiarity that would help users orient themselves. I can understand the justification for removing it, but…it was the wrong call unless they had a gameplan to overcome the backlash. They didn’t.
This is a good point. I look at Windows 8 and think, that’s crap, I don’t want it. I’m not going to do a lot of research to figure out how to make it like I want it. But if instead it looked familiar, I would be more willing to try it out. Instead, I see a app-ified screen and think it’s a big tablet environment, which is something I’m not interested in.
Yeah, this is the problem MS is having. Windows 8 is still Windows. It revises and streamlines some menus, adds some handy hidden quicklinks, and has the whole Modern / tablet interface and elements that are, functionally, 99% optional. And they have use on desktops – not as a “replacement”, but more like a handy collection of live shortcuts.
I use my Windows 8 Start screen essentially like I use a service like iGoogle. It’s headlines and notifications and shortcuts to simple apps and webpages. It’s easy to customize, handy, and attractive. 90% of my time, I’m either in Chrome or on my desktop, so it doesn’t matter. But it’s perfectly fine to have it there.
The biggest conceptual problem that Windows 8 has is that it needlessly cordons off the desktop and Modern apps. This has some major functional failings, like the fact that the (very nice!) Modern app switcher can’t show your desktop apps. Or the fact that Modern apps can’t be natively made to show on your desktop taskbar, so it’s easy to miss notifications if you use a Modern communication app. And, while the quicksnap side-by-side multitasking of the Modern interface works really well, add-on developers have proven that Modern apps will work JUST FINE as tearaway non-fullscreen windows.
The (good) idea of Win 8 is to merge desktop and tablet functions. It has traces of brilliance in there. But it currently operates as MOSTLY two nice parallel systems. It doesn’t do enough to unify the concepts. I feel that that will come, however. It’s too late to backpedal; they need to make people want to use it.
I’m sure that’s the issue; I got some new hardware and re-did my PC back about 3 weeks after Windows 8 came out, and I bought Windows 7, mostly because 8 didn’t buy me anything that I wanted that 7 didn’t also have, and because 7 is known, proven and works well.
Add to that the fact that 8 is an even release, so it’s destined to suck anyway, and choosing 7 over 8 was a no-brainer.
I also think it’s patently idiotic to try and merge keyboard/mouse functionality with touchscreen functionality; the K/M stuff has been perfected over 20-30 years of use, and the tablet stuff is relatively new. Why force everyone to stop using the signature MS UI, and do some bizarre dodge like “For the gestures that involve swiping in from the side of the screen, you just hold your cursor there for half a second.”, instead of just going and clicking on it?
That stuff is going to turn people right off of Windows 8 for PCs tout suite. It may work for tablets, but there are still a LOT of PCs out there in the business world and in people’s homes, and they’ll all stick with Windows 7 rather than bother with that stupid crap.
Microsoft has a history of trying to reinvent the wheel when all the customer wanted was for the wheel to stop squeaking and work.
I just want the GD thing to work. I don’t like change for the sake of change. You want to make something useful, put your OS on a chip so it turns on like any other appliance. If the updates fail then you click a button and the original version boots up off the chip and updates itself. I want a keyboard. Most of all, I want an Excel formula fixing tool that works every time I think of Halle Berry naked.
It’s not that hard. If you’re willing to fool around with the registry a bit, and if you know how to do that, and if you even know what the registry is. Which is a lot to expect of the typical user.
As bump said above, it’s idiotic to try to merge keyboard/mouse functionality (i.e., laptop or desktop) with touchscreen functionality (tablet or phone). These are fundamentally different ways of using a computer, and they don’t, to my mind, mix all that well.
The Windows 8 interface is totally unsuitable for office use. I can’t believe Microsoft doesn’t know this. I expect that pretty soon we’ll see the fork in the road. The underlying operating system may be the same, but the interfaces will part company.
Huh? You don’t have to fool around with the registry at all to get to the Desktop view. It’s been a while since I played with Windows 8, but I seem to recall there’s a big fat rectangle on the main screen that you click to get to Desktop view.
If you don’t want to click that, there’s more than one cheap or free add-on you can download that will boot into Desktop view. No registry-fiddling needed.
I’ll mention that to all my co-workers using Windows 8 in the office. I don’t they realized how unsuitable it is, because every time I’ve asked them about it, they shrug and say “It’s fine, not all that different than Windows 7, really.”
Pretty much the only reason that I haven’t upgraded is pure laziness. I’m gonna do it one of these days when I get motivated. I’ve heard enough people tell me it’s fine that I don’t really have any issues with the upgrade.
Sorry, I meant that to disable the swiping gesture stuff that’s nicely suited to a tablet, but really annoying if you’re working with a touchpad or a mouse, you would have to fiddle with the registry a bit.
Yes, it’s easy to made the PC boot to Desktop – you can use the task scheduler (or whatever it’s called – I forget at the moment). No add-on needed.
I wonder how it’s installed at your office? I haven’t seen it in a big office yet, just on individual computers. I can’t see it going over all that well at my company (around 4,000 installations).
sorry, I’ve had win8 on my desktop since release and I haven’t had to fiddle with the registry to disable any swiping gesture stuff.
or you can just click on the fucking “Desktop” tile. no add-on needed.
what does the number of seats have to do with anything? you really thing windows 8 works differently depending on the number of workstations at a site?
Ahh, calm down. Yes, one can “just click on the fucking “Desktop” tile.” If that’s fine with you, great. Some might prefer to boot right to the desktop.
As to the number of seats, large companies sometimes configure the standard installation to suite their users. I’m curious to see how my company will do it. So Windows 8 might appear differently than it does on a standalone. As I said, my only experience with Windows 8 so far is on a standalone unit.
I’m more and more of the opinion that Win8 may turn out to be a huge strategic blunder. I currently have it on one of my computers but, even as I type, I’m in the process of replacing with with Windows Server 2008 (R2 or pre-R2 I haven’t decided yet). The reason is that MS SQL Server won’t run smoothly on Win8; I’ve been getting compatibility warnings aplenty and even outright aborts, whether trying to repair or re-install SQL Server or trying to attach .mdf files. I don’t think Win8 is going to fly with developers and administrators, which means they lose the only segment of their customer base that still wants and needs PCs at this point. It almost seems as if someone at MS said, “wouldn’t it be cool if our OS looks and feels the same across all device categories?”, but overlooked all the ramifications. It wouldn’t have been quite as bad if Windows Mobile was a robust player in the smartphone marketplace, which it clearly is not. Either way, MS should have done more to accommodate power users working from actual PCs. No one else is writing operating systems for PCs, so if they don’t do it nobody will.
It’s easy enough to go to desktop mode, and then the look and feel is pretty much like older versions of Windows. Having said that, though, the uniform look and feel was obviously a primary consideration, yet it doesn’t seem to bring any benefit to the user of a PC–unless, perhaps, it’s expected that this person has never used any other device than a Windows 8 smartphone.
I can’t help thinking they designed the marketing campaign before they built the product.
Well, I posted that to get people to provide me a citation if I was out in left field. A slight bit of overconfidence seems to get responses better around here, as someone just has to prove you wrong.
Honestly, Microsoft was right here. Once you’ve been without it for a while, you realize that glass is rather gaudy, almost the same way Windows XP feels. Keeping transparency would have nice (as well as being able to change the Title text color), but all those light effects are just distracting if you go back to Windows 7 after using Windows 8 for a while.
If you want the actual rationale, it was a resource saving measure. Glass used 3D lighting and advanced transparency effects just to figure out how a window should look. Even without tablets, the current trend is for lower powered devices, and Microsoft didn’t want to waste the computing power on something so frivolous.
But, seriously, once you get use to it, it looks a lot better.
I doubt it would have made a difference. When vista came out, aero glass was derided as tacky and a usability nightmare. Now that it’s gone, people are bitching about its removal. One of those damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations.
I wanted a single-click solution to getting to my desktop, not clicking on the Desktop menu, scrolling to the “show desktop” icon, and clicking on that to get my desktop to appear.
