The reason we don't have Metro Office yet
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 6th Mar 2013 19:00 UTC
Microsoft One of the major lacking features in the newest Office: no Metro applications. In fact, the only reason Windows RT has a desktop at all is because the Office team was unable to create Metro applications in time for the release of Windows RT. I often thought this was a classic case of two important divisions within Microsoft not getting along and not being aligned, but now that I have my own Surface RT, I'm starting to realise that there's a far simpler, and thus more likely, explanation: Metro is simply not ready for anything serious - or for anything at all, really.
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Bill Shooter of Bul
Member since:
2006-07-14

Instability and cooperative multitasking aside, the UI just had so much work put into it before Jobs started making changes by fiat.


Other way around. OSX was NextStep. Jobs didn't remove things from Mac OS, he gradually added them back from Mac OS to OSX. Until there came a point where people had been living for years without certain Classic features and no one complained about them missing ( except john siracusa and you), so they stopped.

Stability and multitasking are much more important than the neat little UI flourishes that Mac OS had.

Reply Parent Score: 3

tylerdurden Member since:
2009-03-17

there is also the matter that a lot of times "usability" is confused with "stuff I'm used to"

Reply Parent Score: 7

Bill Shooter of Bul Member since:
2006-07-14

I'd agree in general. Some people really hate any change. With the smart phone industry, I'm really amazed that so many people have completely switch operating systems multiple times.

Dumb phone => feature phone => blackberry => iphone => android.

It kind of makes me optimistic about the human race.

Reply Parent Score: 2

ssokolow Member since:
2010-01-21

Other way around. OSX was NextStep. Jobs didn't remove things from Mac OS, he gradually added them back from Mac OS to OSX. Until there came a point where people had been living for years without certain Classic features and no one complained about them missing ( except john siracusa and you), so they stopped.

Stability and multitasking are much more important than the neat little UI flourishes that Mac OS had.


I didn't say he removed things. I said he changed them.

I'm talking about things like replacing semi-iconographic titlebar buttons in a layout that inspired Windows 3.1 with gumdrop buttons or making irritating minor adjustments to how Finder works.

...the sort of things that irritate not just me but also my Mac-using friends.

As for stability and multitasking being important, why do you think I run a Lubuntu LTS release? I get a desktop that's stable once I update away known crashers in the 12.04 versions of PCManFM and LXPanel but also doesn't fight attempts to get the desktop i want the way OSX does.

Pre-OSX MacOS is downright primitive. What I'm saying is that, when I'm encountering it sparingly to play games like Escape Velocity in BasiliskII, I don't trip over the crashes or run into the shortcomings and I end up really feeling the polish and consistency in the UI that OSX has piddled away.

Edited 2013-03-07 08:14 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 4