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That's easily explained: Windows 8 is disliked because it forces a touch interface on a mouse/keyboard system.

Metro should have been restricted to tablets/smartphones, and Microsoft should have saved the desktop for regular PCs.

Based on my experience, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a marketing/upper management decision.

Its not just that Thom the whole Metro UI is completely inconsistent with the rest of the OS, things will be in one area of the desktop and a different area in metro for no good reason, you have a completely new UI but little to nothing telling you what this or that actually DOES and trying to use search to get the answer is pointless since you have to know what the MSFT terminology is for what you are doing which if you know that you'll know where to find it.

Check out the little animated video i linked to earlier, he lays out all the problems better than I ever could, I would merely add I had no trouble picking up Android, iOS, Linux, etc but Win 8 with its lack of context or explanation made me give up in frustration, yes its THAT bad.

Microsoft's idea of Windows innovation is putting a tablet OS on a desktop, so of course people are going to reject it, and rightfully so. Metro on Windows 8 sucks so much ass, it's amazing that it even went past the conception stage. It is a joke. A complete clusterf**k.

The difference between MS and Apple is that when Apple tries to innovate, they're reasonably competent at it. MS can't innovate shit. Hell, MS has tried to copy Apple in many areas (*cough* Zune *cough*) and they can't even get that right.

You clearly have never used a Zune.

Change can be good or bad. Microsoft's change was bad, that's why its getting slapped around. That isn't to say that all change is bad.

Smart companies are always looking at how to do what the customer does today, better tomorrow. Apple has made major attempts at improvements to ios : Cut & Paste, multi-tasking, the app store and siri. Some of those are so basic as to be embarrassing, but major improvements none the less. Apple has also always been super secretive on its R&D, so no news isn't necessarily good or bad news.

That said, it was a stupid article which could be summed up as : people who criticize apple tend to criticize apple. Then it throws un sourced numbers out of the air to indicate that Apple's doing great because people are buying their current products. Rim and Nokia were doing great a year after the iphone too...

Those "improvements" are the marketing strategy. How else could Apple sell 5 iterations of the same phone. If thy would've included those features in v1 (which they mostly could) then mere CPU/memory improvements would've not created such a rush from consumers to get the latest and the greatest. Maybe screen update but if the software would've been from version 1 what it is today, then it would not have been created such an interest.

It is very regular Apple strategy to pump massive amounts of money out of a single product by initially releasing a thing with half the features intentionally and then in coming years enabling/implementing those must-have features one by one and claiming that the new is better than the old and getting the point over very clearly by not back porting the features to previous gen models.

Edited 2013-01-19 10:44 UTC

Rubbish.

The problem isn't with Microsoft innovating, the problem is with Microsoft removing freedoms and useful functionality and forcing round-about ways of doing things in the name of innovation. The complaints are about Metro's short-comings, not about Microsoft trying to innovate, and you seem to be terribly confused about that. You do realize that one can appreciate development and innovation while still criticizing the short-comings, yes?

That seems to be Apple's way of innovating. So the article author was right, but the double standard goes the other way. It's a case of projection.

Nobody minds if MSFT innovates, what they mind is when MSFT puts out a BROKEN interface.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo

Watch the video, here is a guy that writes TECH ARTICLES and has written about multiple OSes and even HE can't find what should be simple tools that everybody will need, simple things like "how to make a restore disc" and "How do i close metro Apps" because MSFT doesn't explain anything or give ANY context for the user to learn the new UI, which leads to frustration.

I had a PC running win 8 at the shop for nearly 7 months for users to try and I can tell you he is NOT alone, none of my users could figure out how to do squat without using one of the other PCs to Google what to do which when you need a Win 7 PC just so you can Google how to use the Win 8 PC? I'm sorry but that isn't innovation, that is just broken.

I've been using PCs since the VIC 20, I'm always up for trying and learning new OSes, but after a month of Win 8 I wanted to pull my hair out. its so obviously built for touch that it hurts. "Well what is wrong with that?" most will ask. Simple less than 2% of the PCs on the planet are touch and that isn't gonna change anytime soon and using a trackpad with it is just agony, it can't decide whether you are swiping or moving so half the time you'll get one, half the time the other, the whole OS feels random and out of control.

That's been almost exactly my experience with it, and I've mastered some of the most esoteric and backwards interfaces out there under GNU/Linux and other OSes. I got the basics of navigating Metro and the slightly tweaked classic desktop, but anything beyond web browsing seems to be purposely hidden. Using a keyboard and mouse in Metro feels like using a Nintendo WiiMote to navigate Windows 7: Inaccurate, slow, painful, and confusing.

And I get what Microsoft is trying to do, but they are trying too hard and too soon. I realized something else about Metro: It's almost as if it's designed to eventually work with a Kinect device for input. A lot of the touch-friendly gestures would work well with such a device, to the point that I wonder if they actually used it during development (in parallel to the version of Metro that's on the Xbox 360).

Of course, as far as I know the Kinect isn't fully supported on Windows 8 yet; RT doesn't support it at all and there are only basic drivers for 8. Perhaps they realized what kind of monstrosity they had built and scrapped those plans, assuming they even had them to start with. I guess we'll never know.

Totally agree.

It took me absolutely ages just to figure out how to shut down my god damned PC in Windows 8.

It's now a game I play with guests on my media PC. I see how long it takes each of them to figure it out. Most just give up.

In case you're wondering, you have to hover you mouse over the right side of the screen, click a totally inappropriate cog icon (which is the universal icon for settings), and then find the icon amongst five other down the bottom of the side bar.

And this is just one of many such bizarre UI decisions in Win8. It really seems like they came up with this stuff while under the influence.

Man, that was absolutely hilarious.