Windows 8 damaging PC Sales

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Wall Street Journal article is behind their freaking pay wall. :rolleyes: This Fox article quotes from it.

This is no surprise to me. Adding tablet features to a PC is the stupidest move imaginable. I have zero interest in using my PC that way. Instead I’ll use my PC for real work and video editing. Internet surfing is for my tablet.

See thats what the idiots at Microsoft don’t get. The PC isn’t endangered. The original market for word processing, databases and spreadsheets will always need PC’s. Thats what made them popular in the first place. Read this three times Microsoft. A PC is first and foremost a business tool.

Tablets just shift internet surfing onto a more suitable platform. Why expose your PC to the web and viruses? Keep it safe and use it for real work.

This reminds me. I need to do a voucher at work for more Win 7 licenses. My employer doesn’t want Win 8 on any staff PC’s. It’s a POS. Any new PC’s we buy get formatted and Win 7 is installed.

2

I read that in this morning’s paper. People need to quit whining about Windows 8. It’s not as intuitive as previous versions, and I do miss the ‘start’ button to bring up the program menu, but it’s a short learning curve even for an old fart like me. My new HP laptop has Win8, but without the touchscreen, which I didn’t want. The touchpad mouse has some of the features of a touchscreen, but I don’t use that, either. Also, there are programs out there that will allow you to make your screen look and function like Win7.

3

Or, you know, Microsoft can give people what they want instead of telling them what they want and to stop whining about it.

Fortunately, I have a relative who works for Microsoft and had him get me a cheap copy of Win 7 Professional (cheap since he works there) which I’m holding in reserve for next time I build a system. He did try briefly to talk me into Win 8 but dropped it without much fuss. Don’t get him started on a superior brilliance of the Surface tablets though :smiley:

4

I am a PC user. Windows 8 is designed for portable devices (tablets and such). Not only does it have no new features for someone like me, but it also makes the computer more difficult for people like me to use. Yeah, I can do some fiddling and add in some free add-ons that would make it mostly functional again, but why? Why should I pay any money at all to get exactly what I have with no new benefit at all?

That’s not the whole picture though. Windows 8 doesn’t take all of the blame. Hardware manufacturers have been focusing their efforts on making portable devices faster and more powerful. There hasn’t been much focus on desktop and laptop performance. I would buy a new laptop if it could perform up to the level of my current desktop, at a reasonable price. That doesn’t exist in today’s market. I would upgrade my desktop if it would give me a significant performance boost, but the performance boost I would get right now would be fairly minimal.

I have absolutely zero incentive right now to upgrade or change anything.

I also have no desire to buy a tablet.

5

The intended hardware for Windows 8 is obviously the laptop, and Microsoft is betting that pretty soon every laptop will be able to click-swish-flip turn into a tablet. Laptops are going to turn into tablets with integrated keyboards.

If you don’t want a Windows 8 machine, that’s fine. I’m still using my Windows XP desktop at home.

6

Type WIN+D to switch to the desktop environment. Really. That’s the extent of the ‘fiddling’ you need to do. I mean, ok, you don’t need the Metro environment, fine, but it’s not like Win8 makes you move the city of Redmond a few inches to the left.
As for the article mentioned in the OP - Ars Tech’s take on it is more interesting. They point out that slumping sales affected HP & Dell - companies in transition - but Lenovo, which is in a more stable place at the moment, remained steady. Also, this:

It’s true that Win8 is not a popular OS but the sales slump for desktop machines is not limited to Win8 machines and also isn’t strictly true for all PC retailers. Blaming the OS is missing the larger picture: consumers are shifting to more attractive and lightweight form factors for casual computing needs (which is pretty much most every computing need outside of work or gaming.) This shift would still be happening even if Microsoft had held back Win8 and we were all still using the wonderful Windows 7.

7

I expect that Win 7 will be the futures Win XP. People and businesses will cling to it for the next decade.

By then who knows what the market will be.

Microsoft seems rudderless without Bill Gates. I’m not seeing much vision from Microsoft these days. Win 8 was a sad knee jerk reaction to tablets. OMG we have to make PC’s work like tablets. :stuck_out_tongue: All they did was hurt their brand.

8

Chefguy:

I’m not bothered by the learning curve. I’m bothered by the removal of useful features. In another thread in which I complained about Windows 8, I was told that I could get those back for free by going to Microsoft’s on-line store. How is anyone expected to know this? Why can’t they keep the stuff that people are used to, and apply the new interface over and above that?

9

This image, from a recent Cracked article, pretty much sums up my opinions about Windows 8.

10

On the other hand, according to this article in the New Yorker, the latest North Korean Missile Test was delayed by Windows 8.

11

Is this for real, or has The Onion infiltrated The New Yorker?

Seriously?

Back on topic, I actually like Windows 8. There are a lot of improvements over Windows 7. For instance, multi-monitor support is greatly improved. I can now have a separate task bar and wallpaper on each monitor, where I previously needed additional software such as Ultramonto accomplish this. Not really significant to a non-IT user, but Powershell has improved tremendously. Chkdsk finally has a GUI, and can finally scan an active drive (though you still need to reboot to fix problems on your boot volume). Boot times are improved, etc.

And then they go and add the horrid “metro” crapola. So where I previously needed Ultramon to handle my multiple monitors decently, now I need Start8to bring back my start menu, and my Sanity. At least it’s cheaper. :rolleyes:

12

The article states that PC sales are down, and then speculates without any evidence that it’s because of Windows 8. While I like to see Microsoft bashed for producing crap, this just seems like lazy journalism to me.

13

The Onion has infiltrated the New Yorker, in the form of Andy Borowitz, who writes a satirical column.

14

Eh, not quite. The clearly intended hardware for Win 8 is a touchscreen device, either a smartphone or tablet.

I really, really wanted to defend Win 8. I’m a PC hardware/software enthusiast, and I’m an early adopter when it comes to MS O/S releases. Looking back 15 years or so:

[ul]
[li]I was one of the few consumer-types (as opposed to business environment) to have Windows 2000 installed on my personal machine[/li][li]I had Win XP up and running the day it was released[/li][li]I honestly didn’t think Vista was that bad, used it for a couple of years with few complaints[/li][li]Windows 7 is pure joy, probably my favorite[/li][/ul]

But Windows 8, ugh, misstep. You can tell people within Microsoft were panicking - tablets and phones are the future! That’s where we need to be!

Trouble is, a desktop/laptop is fundamentally different than a phone/tablet. Different UIs are justifiable. But Windows 8 seems to be trying to say, “No they aren’t!”

So upon installing Win 8 on a new PC early this year, I was struck by all the wasted nonsense on the main - I dunno, Start Screen? They don’t call it the desktop, because that’s a separate app or whatever.

So on the Start screen is a bunch of pretty (I really do like the aesthetics of Metro, just not the functionality) large colorful rectangles. But 90% of them I don’t use, and couldn’t with minimal effort clear them. On the other hand, say I want to get to the basic control panel, or computer file tree, or basic computing things like that. Those I had to relearn, none were intuitive.

I found myself, every single time on boot, just switching to the classic desktop. Add on to that I had a few programs that (bafflingly) ran fine on Win 7 but were a no go on Win 8. After a month or so, I just said to hell with it, wiped the drive, and went back to Win 7 where I remain today.

15

Ideally, consumers would have a choice. Those who wanted a touchscreen system could buy Windows 8 and those that were happier with a traditional system could still buy Windows XP.

But Microsoft’s apparent belief that all computers should be running the same system. Not just every computer should be running Windows, but every computer should be running what Microsoft has decided is the correct version of Windows. When they released Vista, they stopped selling XP. When they released 7, they stopped Vista. Now they’ve killed 7 in order to clear the path for 8.

16

I read a tech article several months back that indicated that Windows 8 is about half as popular as Vista based on the number of installations in the same time period.

From what I’ve seen and heard of Win8, I can believe it.

17

Thankfully Win 7 is still available. New Egg has both the 32 and 64 bit versions. We buy licenses through the Volume License program at work.

I’m sure at some point Microsoft will kill Win 7. Hopefully not for another year or so.

18

Are you kidding? Microsoft is still actively supporting Win XP. Don’t worry, Win 7 isn’t going anywhere for a long, long time.

19

Windows XP stops being supported a year from… last Monday?

Windows 7 will be supported until 2020.

20

I initially hated Win8 and went along with the odd-even Star Trek Movies thing.

But… Win8 is growing on me. It’s stable, fast, and actually, I prefer the flat, minimal look of application windows over Aero. I never really saw the point of the Aero Glass thing.

I think the removal of the Start button in the desktop environment is a real mistake - but it’s very easily remedied using third party replacements.

I don’t really know how Windows 8 is meant to fit into the business desktop environment, which still often wants something that behaves like XP or Win7 - a desktop with icons, windows, etc. Not everything is web-based or platform independent yet, and not everything is or ever can be an ‘App’ - so businesses still need a Windows environment, and although Win8 has that, it acts like it’s ashamed of it.

But for home use (especially for non-tech users who just want things to work), Win8 is really quite good - I just helped my mum make the transition from a horrible slow WinXP laptop to a new shiny Win8 one, and she just loves the fact that the Start screen presents an at-a-glance overview of anything she might want to do that day.