I have an old watch. I’ve worn it for years and bought it back before I retired. And when I was working, I sometimes needed to use a calculator. So I made sure I bought a watch with a built-in calculator feature.
It’s kind of awkward because it has tiny little buttons but it served its purpose. But I haven’t used it in the years since I retired.
Earlier today, I needed to do some figuring. I was sitting at my computer with Windows 8 up and running. And when I thought abut the steps I would need to take to pull up the calculator feature (which has been a part of Windows since 1.0) I decided it would be simpler to just grab my watch and do the calculations on that instead.
It wasn’t a conscious protest. I just did it the way that seemed easier without really thinking about it. But after I was done I was struck by the realization that even though I had been sitting at a computer with Windows already running, I didn’t think running a Windows program would be the convenient way to do something. That certainly wouldn’t have been the case if I had been at my previous computer which ran XP - I routinely used the calculator on that because it was convenient to do so.
This is why Windows 8 is a failure. It’s not convenient.
Unlike the Ribbon for Office products. That really was built out of convenience and understanding of users’ needs, not at all to try and lock people into using Microsoft software.
No, just kidding. All marketing-driven and sucks donkey balls.
Not everyone runs an MS-spec media keyboard with a zillion dedicated buttons. They always seemed to be the antithesis of what a graphical interface was supposed to be.
FWIW, I’ve never gotten in the habit of using a screen calculator. Always keep one on my desk.
no. I’ve been running Windows 8 since the release preview, and since 90% of what I do is on the Desktop, it works pretty much the same as Windows 7. A lot of the Metro/Modern/whatever UI stuff is geared for being suitable for touch and kb&mouse, but the legacy desktop won’t go away anytime soon.
Funny it appears I don’t have a start button anymore. I guess I’ll just go look for my “charms” - one of those says start. It must work just like my old start button worked.
No, it just seems to have brought me to a new page. This start page is full of “apps” but none of them is a calculator. Oh wait, there’s some more apps off to the side of my screen. I wonder why they made everything so big they couldn’t fit it all on a single screen? Well, I’ll just scroll over and see if I can find my calculator app.
No, it’s not over there either. I suppose it might be located somewhere on the screen but I wouldn’t know - Windows 8 has helpfully made a lot of features on your screen invisible.
Oh, I’ve got it now. All I need to do is find the invisible charms bar, click on the search charm, close down the pop-up apps window that covers part of the page, scroll through the three screens full of app icons until I find the calculator icon, and then click on that icon.
Yes, that’s every bit as convenient as clicking on the start button and then clicking on the calculator icon.
I don’t love Windows 8 either, and spend most of my time on the legacy “desktop” where I have the calculator shortcut pinned to the taskbar like ThelmaLou. However, one of the big features of Windows 8 is the “search anywhere” function in the Metro UI. You don’t need to hit any buttons at all. From the main Metro screen, just start typing calc and see what happens…
You can’t really compare the two systems like that. Microsoft intentionally doesn’t let them compete against each other. Most users simply buy whatever version of Windows Microsoft declares is the current one and has factory installed on PC’s.
To me, it appears Microsoft made a big mistake by tying two projects together: a new operating system (Windows 8) and a new tablet platform (Surface). Windows 8 is designed to work best on a tablet like Surface. If Microsoft had just sold Windows 8 with Surface, its users probably would have liked it.
Microsoft should have kept Windows 7 around for PC’s. Instead by pushing 8 on to PC users, Microsoft ended up giving 8 a bad reputation by forcing its use on a platform it wasn’t designed for. And ironically that bad reputation has now hurt Surface sales. People are avoiding buying a tablet that uses Windows 8 (where it probably works fine) because they’ve seen it working poorly on a PC.
I’m not saying it’s an insurmountable problem. I’m just saying it’s an issue of inconvenience. But that’s important because people judge products on little things like how convenient they are to use.
A lot of people can do most of what they want to do with an tablet instead of a full on laptop. But there is a fair amount of stuff that people need a laptop for. My wife is in a ton of meetings at work. She would love to take a ipad with a keyboard instead of the laptop but the ipad can really only have one thing open at a time, The laptop can have email, her note taking software, the documents that are being discussed open. You can have document up side by side to compare and refer to things. The ipad cannot do that. The new windows 8 UI gets rid of what makes windows better than a tablet and tries to turn your laptop into a tablet.
The new windows 8 UI is just complete junk that most windows 8 users ignore. So windows 8 is selling but what is really selling is the windows part the 8 part is crap.
I agree with this completely, and have told my sales rep the exact same thing. As someone who buys PCs for my company, Windows 8 is a complete non-entity (we image our PCs with Windows 7.) It’s a tablet OS that they tried to shoehorn into their standard OS. But the calculator is still easy to find…
If everything is “too big,” can you go in and change the screen resolution? I have my res set as high as possible, and stuff on the desktop is small, but I can see it fine and I can fit a whole lot of crap on there.
