As you may have seen, David's been taking care of OSNews for a few days because I'm quite busy with work. Still, there's one thing I'd like to talk about: the desktop mode in Windows 8. I wish I could've added this to the first impressions article, but I only arrived at this conclusion yesterday: desktop mode in Windows 8 is Microsoft's equivalent of Mac OS X's Classic mode.
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Member since:2011-01-28
sphere2k,
"Switching back and forth between classic desktop and Metro all the time is simply ridiculous. I hope they realise that in time."
MS know this too, and though this might sound silly, part of their goal is to make the traditional desktop as annoying to use as possible to convert people to metro. The windows desktop has a long term marketing problem in that it forces microsoft to compete with it's older windows versions. The more mature and "rounded" multiwindow interfaces have become, the less MS can justify making people upgrade to new "better" versions every 3 years when by far and large the previous versions would work just great with bug fixes. It's already apparent that people are holding back in droves.
So, microsoft's top brass came up with a plan to kill the desktop, and generate longer term review streams. What they came up with is metro, and what will become an app store with exclusive distribution rights so microsoft can take a cut of 3rd party software instead of being so dependent upon "upgrades". Of course they want to make metro good, but they also need to make the desktop bad, which is fairly apparent with these win8 previews. Many people are aghast at how poorly the integration is taking shape in the previews, but it's likely a deliberate strategy rather than an accident.
Member since:2005-07-06
Very good analysis.
We OS X users are lucky, in a sense. Apple makes its money from hardware and gadgets, so it can't afford to disappoint its users with a poor OS.
If only they could sell their computers at more reasonable prices, MS would lose a very large share of their users in no time.
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Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
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Member since:
2009-04-17
I could very well live with Windows 8 -- if MS were to bring back the classic start menu as an option. Switching back and forth between classic desktop and Metro all the time is simply ridiculous. I hope they realise that in time.