Now that Windows 8 has gone gold, Microsoft can move on to other things. With Windows 8, the most important of these is probably to make sure people know how to actually use it. Metro is filled to the brim with hard-to-discover features, but Microsoft has a plan. Will it be enough?
The plan is actually remarkably straightforward. People who’ve installed Windows 8 preview releases will recall the installation spends a little while setting stuff up in the background after selecting a few user settings. During this part of the setup, Microsoft will play a short animation, explaining to both touch and mouse users how to activate the Charms bar – and that’s it.
It’s all quite elegant and simple, but it only explains this one tiny little thing of Metro – and yet, there’s so much more stuff that’s just hidden and hard to discover. I think Microsoft’s hope is that by pointing users to one single gesture/location, users will be enticed to explore and discover the rest.
Other than discoverability, I think Metro’s major issue is just how volatile it all is. Bringing up the Charms bar or task switcher is one thing, but getting users accustomed to just how easily they are dismissed is going to be a tough task. Current interfaces are relatively persistent, and things don’t easily disappear without user interaction. The volatility of Metro’s core user interface elements is something that still bothers me – and I’ve been using Metro every day for months.
Back in ’95, this was enough to get users to use the Start menu. I’m very curious to see if this is going to be enough to get users to use Metro.
It is called “Windows-8-Style-UI” now:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/microsoft-met…
Just like they tried to rename the “ribbon”. It failed miserably. Metro is stuck in people’s minds, it won’t be going away.
So everybody will call it metro, except Microsoft. Lol!
Mind blow time: the System Tray is not called the system tray, and never has been by Microsoft. It’s called the Notification Area and has been since Windows 95.
Mind blown.
Well they shouldn’t have released such a buggy OS with a “notification tray” applet called “systray.exe” or whatever it was, that killed two or three icons in that area every time it crashed… and man, did it crash a lot.
Combine a constantly-crashing “systray.exe” with the immediate removal of a couple icons down there and it’s not hard to see why most people–myself included–call that little thing down there the system tray.
Edited 2012-08-03 20:57 UTC
And we are still at war with East Asia. ;-p
The Windows 95 animation was added based on usability lab testing. Without it, people would just sit and stare at the screen, uncertain of what to do. With it, people quickly understood that they should click on the “Start” button. It didn’t teach them all about how to use Windows 95 — but it was enough to get them started exploring.
Presumably, they’ve tested the Metro animation in the usability lab as well, and verified that it was enough to get people started.
I wouldn’t presume anything.
Sinofsky and Ballmer have gone of the rails.
Someone posted the results of trying Windows 8 on over a hundred enterprise users on the Windows 8 blog and Sinofsky deleted the comment. This is not software that is designed around user feedback.
A tutorial won’t save Windows 8. If anything it will just add to the negative reputation.
A well designed UI is intuitive and can be learned through exploring. Windows 8 has a shitty UI as part of Sinofsky’s plan for “one windows UI across all devices”. This is incredibly stupid given that 99% of Windows users don’t have a touch-screen device, nor will iPad owners run out to buy a Windows tablet just to have some new crappy UI.
Hell look up “tries Windows 8 for the first time’ on YouTube, its practically become a meme. I like the Nan one myself, sweet little old lady, just as lost as can be.
I have let so far around 400 users that came into the shop try Win 8 on the Athlon dual I set up in the corner for that purpose and so far? NOBODY liked it, not a one. personally i thought it was for the teeners/tweeners but they all said the same thing “I already have a cell phone duh! This is just lame” and walked off.
I can say ONE nice thing about metro, well two actually. 1.-It let me finally get some of my business customers that were dragging ass in getting off of XP (including one that still had 2 Win2K boxes going) by showing them what they had to look forward to if their machines died after Oct, so that got me plenty of new triple and quads builds so thanks for that MSFT, and 2.-If the backlash is anything like what I’m seeing I can look forward to another year and a half of wiping 8 for 7, just like I did Vista for XP. Since a nuke and install is fully automated it was easy money, thanks MSFT.
In the end while this may be good for a cell phone or a tablet it is NOT good for a desktop or lap. its not intuitive, not easily discoverable as the video shows, and it doesn’t really follow cell phone or desktop conventions, and finally the switching back and forth between metro and desktop “app” (God how I hate that word) is jarring as hell. Its just not a good design folks and if any of you get stuck with Win 8 I’d urge you to try “classic shell”. Its free, its easy, and it kills metro like Raid kills bugs…dead.
A couple people have posted similar comments on the Windows 8 blog but they have since been removed.
A. Windows 8 is not an enterprise-focused release. There are some features (fast boot, shutdown, lower power consumption, built-in hypervisor, etc) that would be appealing to Enterprise. But …
B. Enterprises have just deployed to Windows 7. They generally don’t upgrade to every OS release but, rather, skip every other. I think that Windows 8 will probably follow that same pattern.
C. I would expect that the Windows8-style-UI will evolve over time as new data is collected. Metro is a bold move on Microsoft’s part — and definitely controversial — but it’s something that the company definitely had to do to compete with the encroachment of the iPad.
Not sure what you mean by “save”. Even Vista, which was a mediocre OS, sold a couple hundred million licenses. If that’s failure, Microsoft would probably not mind failing.
I don’t think you have a firm grasp on the future. More and more devices are moving to touch every day. It’s going to be difficult to find devices that don’t support it within the next 5 years.
Seems like the name “Metro” is already obsolete:
http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/02/microsoft-ditches-metro-name/
More than just the name will soon be obsolete
Sometimes you really got to love the marketing department.
Actually I was wrong. It seems that the German Metro group was getting ready to sue Microsoft over the name.
So Microsoft decided to change the name, instead of waiting for the suit to follow.
http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/08/02/microsoft-ditches-metro-now-u…
Metro group is no small fish, so after recent rampant product bans in Germany their lawyer made a wise choice.
True! They also own Media Markt – in some European countries the most important consumer electronics retailer (especially those countries without a strong online retail culture).
Those stores were a godsend…until you could get everything online with better customer service and lower prices.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRTngtsOY8Q
Its either that or they looked up “Metro” in the urban dictionary. Before Microsoft started using the term, that is the definition I was aware of. There are men in general that would avoid it, or would not dare to use it in a sentence with another guy who might not be familiar with it. Although, there really isn’t a need to use the name for the interface, you could just call it the new windows 8 interface.
Seriously? More than, you know, metropolitan rapid transit networks, or many public transport networks in general? (quite a few with the word in their proper name; in many languages, the word being a general term to describe them) Or “metro” overall as a shortened “metropolitan area”?
(also, there’s the Metro newspaper – with its many worldwide edition, possibly the one with largest circulation)
I expect at least 3 articles complaining about how the bullies at Metro AG are forcing Microsoft to degrade their product name.
Bullying the bully? Who cares?
Not that I give a rats-ass but I’m puzzled…Metro is a common moniker for all sorts of stuff…the local ‘Tube’ in Newcastle is called the Metro & am sure it wouldn’t take long to come up with a long list. So unless Metro AG are in the computer interface market why would MS give a monkeys?
Yes, well, Microsoft Excel ran into a trademark dispute in the late 1980s — and it’s not like the other company was in the spreadsheet business, either.
Pod is also a well used term, still trademarked by Apple.
Metro AG is quite big in selling Windows PCs market.
They can keep windows 8. I guess I’ll have to keep Windows 7 working for the next few releases. Seems simple enough to let us choose to get rid of metro.
Microsoft will be selling and supporting Windows 7 for quite a while. I wouldn’t worry about that.
As a PC user who installed the release preview on my computer with plain old mouse and keyboard, I took about 5 minutes to figure out how to use and to mostly understand that damn sidebar. Why? Because I was looking at it from the standpoint of a PC user, with mouse and keyboard: click buttons, it does things. No gestures usually, except the few I can use in certain web browsers. Gestures just don’t normally work well at all… unless you’re actually using your fingers. That’s a good enough reason right there that they’re not often used in traditional desktop systems.
If I was running it on some tablet computer with touchscreen, most likely I would have figured it out much faster. Bottom line, Metro SUCKS for a mouse and keyboard setup, and I just could not get used to the clunkiness of using mouse gestures that require moving the pointer all the way to the right corner of a 20″ 1680×1050 monitor and sliding up or down just to bring up a very poorly labeled menu of some sort.
In its defense, though, on a small touchscreen-based device, it makes perfect sense, and I could see touching one of the corners with my finger and sliding toward the center. It would work there–I just know it, although I haven’t actually tried Windows 8 on such a device. It would work, because it is obvious that that is the kind of device the Metro interface was designed for.
Still though, the way I see it Metro is not Windows (not in the traditional sense with full, complete backwards compatibility–that’s why the traditional desktop is still in there for a while longer), so by that point, I’d be better off just using another OS.
Edited 2012-08-03 21:19 UTC
I’d have to disagree, the Windows Runtime is just a new flavor of API presented in a better way. Its all COM underneath. All of the subsystems that make up Windows are there.
There are just now two traversable paths for development. Traditional Win32(For legacy app maintenance mostly) and the new Windows Runtime for modern apps.
I think a lot of the grumbling around Windows 8 is because we’ve been getting half of the story. This fall the hardware will rise to match the software.
All in ones will be touch enabled, mice will be touch sensitive and laptop track pads will be optimized for Windows 8.
I will concede that using current hardware, things are slightly more frustrating, though not terribly, its always something that either Microsoft or the App developer can engineer around.
The grand story here I think is the fact that Windows will finally have a centralized software repository and an OS managed installation experience. It should mean a lot less rot and issues with corrupted states due to faulty uninstallers, and a lot less malware.
I think Microsoft if you look at their SDKs and general direction, is more Androidesque in developer freedom (look at huge strides in WP8 leaked SDK which shows a lot more dev freedom) and I hope they’ll keep those ideals over time.
I think the Linux Desktop is in an abysmal state right now. KDE is frankly a mess and Gnome is floundering. Maybe someone will do something disruptive soon to change all that, but I don’t think most other OSes are better off wrt the future.
This is THE DUMBEST BUSINESS PLAN I HAVE SEEN IN YEARS.
Microsoft makes billions from selling upgrades to an established product and they have designed a UI around hardware that 99% of their install base doesn’t own. Even worse is that they are pissing off their install base by artificially forcing a UI that the majority doesn’t want.
I’m gonna go start a vegan restaurant in a part of Texas that is 99% meat eating. If anyone grumbles it’s only because they want to eat meat. You want to buy stock in this company?
Goodbye Sinofsky, Goodbye Ballmer. Good riddance you two jackasses
Will you shut up already, you annoying little troll. You stopped being rational about 80 mentions of Sinofsky ago.
Well, he’s got a point, and his analogy is not too far off…
Are you going to run defense on mainstream news sites when this thing bombs? Are you going to defend Sinofsky and Ballmer when shareholders demand their heads?
Ballmer has already been named worst CEO by Forbes. But I’m sure Forbes is irrational as well. Everyone is irrational except for Ballmer, Sinofsky and Windows fanboys.
You should look in the mirror and ask if being an unpaid prostitute is really what you want in life.
Also, most Windows sales are on new PCs, not existing ones. There is a regular churn as people upgrade their entire hardware and not just the OS it came with.
Of course, don’t let me get in the way of armchair CEO ze_jerk face
One startling prerequisite for being a smartass know it all is actually, you know, having some insight.
Oh I’m sorry, I forget about all the OEMs lining up to build Windows tablets. I’m sure they also secretly have a gamut of laptops with touchscreens. They’re just keeping them hidden.
But don’t worry, I’m sure their $600 surface tablet will sell like hotcakes in this economy. More expensive than the iPad with less than 5% of the game selection.
Everything Microsoft makes is totally awesome and will sell like crazy. Hang on while I take a call on my Kin while listening to my brown Zune.
You continue to impress me with your astounding ability to miss the point.
Actually last numbers i could find had it between 4%-6% but that included POS and kiosks so I’d guesstimate around 2.5%, still dumb as hell. I just wish i could find the link again (it might be WinSupersite) where a Win 8 apologist did a review and was “Now we’ll show how great Win 8 works with older hardware! Here we have this touch enabled Athlon laptop and see how great it runs?” and i of course LOLed since even when THEY try to sell Win 8 couldn’t do it without touch!
In the end though we ALL know what it is, okay? Its a Hail Mary pass. MSFT is down by 20 points, the clock is running out, so they are gonna give it one last throw to try to gain some ground before the clock runs out. They really have nothing to lose as while PCs will not being going anywhere, despite what all the “post PC” pundits blather on about, what HAS happened is they went from being replaced every other year because they would struggle to run the latest software to insanely overpowered. Hell is there anything Joe average or Bill businessman does that won’t run just fine on that Phenom I triple desktop or Core Duo laptop? Nope which is why they ain’t buying.
So even though I think metro is deep fried garbage I can see why MSFT is doing this, as the smartphone/tablet market is going through their own MHz wars where a year and a half old device won’t run the latest apps and they ain’t getting a cent of that. Don’t think it’ll work but I can see why.
+1. I may disagree with some of what you said, but at least your response was coherent and thoughtful unlike the troll above.
It definitely is a power play, and I have my own reservations about its success, but looking at it purely from a PC point of view, a centralized app repository is a universally good thing.
I know other OSes have had it for a while, who cares, what’s important is, it will help cut down malware and registry rot significantly.
Thanks, as anyone who has read my posts anywhere can attest i just call ’em as i see ’em, too dang old to waste time trolling.
As for why the appstore won’t work just take a look at Zune Market and GFWL, neither of which was worth crud. MSFT has become such a big bloated designed by committee mess that getting good UIs through all the PHBs is practically impossible, it all becomes “vertical integration” and “product synergy”. Have you ever used Games for WINDOWS Live? Good luck finding a WINDOWS game on games for WINDOWS live as they are buried under 20 pages of Xbox games and DLC!
As for a central repo, you can have all the benefits without all the MSFT bad design right now friend, its called Ninite. com Sorry about the lack of links but frankly this site has always been hit or miss when it comes to me and links, but that gives you the programs everybody wants, your flash, LO, browsers, media codecs, etc and its as simple as “check boxes and hit run” and NO toolbars or other crud.
Finally i got rid of WinRot years ago friend, its not free (you can get the older one for free, but it doesn’t work on Vista or 7) but frankly once you use it you will NOT go back, and that is TuneUp Utilities. Just install it and leave it alone, that’s it. it cleans the reg, the temp junk, defrags based on what % your drive is fragmented and whether it is affecting performance, you really just let it go and it takes care of everything. I’ve tried all the free tools but nothing has come close to TuneUp for me, my Win XP install at the shop feels as snappy as it did when it was installed 6 years ago and my win 7 has been purring since Oct 09 and runs like the day i put it in, just perfect.
But again i can see why they are doing it, they aren’t getting squat from mobile and X86 has become a commodity like washers and dryers, nobody replaces them until they croak anymore. Kinda hard to sell a new OS to people who have more CPU, RAM, and HDD than they know what to do with and are perfectly happy with what they have.
So MSFT will throw the pass, it’ll either buy them some ground or fail miserably and frankly MSFT won’t be any worse off afterwards. After all there are so many millions of X86 home and business programs that will never be ported that the users won’t go to Mac or Linux anyway, so there really isn’t any risk here to take a shot.
First of all Microsoft has billions in safe profits for years. Very few companies have that type of security. Sure the stock has been flat but when it comes to company health (IE paying the bills) they are fine.
They don’t need a hail mary pass and even if they did it they could do it without angering their existing customer base. Why force Metro on enterprise? Why force Metro on Server?
This plan is so incredibly stupid and I expect business analysts to use it as a future case of what not to do. Microsoft has over 50 billion in the bank, they can buy marketshare/take huge risks without angering existing customers.
Because you don’t see what the plan is, so I’ll explain. The PHBs at MSFT have decided “Its not that the WinPhone design sucks, its that people aren’t USED to our exciting new paradigm!” so they believe by jamming it onto everything you will have NO choice but to “get used to it” and thus will no longer ignore their WinPhones.
Is that smart? Nope its retarded, and as you said it makes even less sense on servers and enterprise, but if they allow exceptions for that the users will scream “Why can’t we have THAT instead? We like THAT, we want THAT, give us THAT too!” and their goes their “get used to it” right out the window. After all with Windows using the same code base since XP frankly it wouldn’t be a week before the “Make Win 8 Home behave like enterprise” hack would be all over rapidshare and the pirate bay so its either all or its nothing.
Personally I think Win 8 will bomb, the OEMs will demand and get Win 7 and Ballmer will retire, years later than he should have but as long as he’s gone who cares. if they refuse to allow the OEMs to sell Win 7 I can easily see a “gang of nine” style revolt by the OEMs which are frankly hanging on by a thread as it is and aren’t gonna give up what sales they have so Steve can pretend he works at Cupertino.
This is why you see Dell in talks with canonical, Valve coming out with a Linux client, they all don’t know just how nuts Steve is and want to have an option if he refuses to see reality. Frankly with everyone living on FB and Valve covering the games if the OEMs all pitched in it really wouldn’t take much to make a LTS Ubuntu into the new OEM choice. Simply pay Crossover to have built in support for the most popular windows apps, your Quickbooks and Photoshop and the like, and then if Ballmer refuses to give up his “LOL We’re Apple now LOL!” fantasy they can just move on like they did with IBM and the MCA bus and leave MSFT playing in a corner by itself.
So do I think it’ll happen? Nope, I think the board will revolt when the OEMs make it clear they’ll leave Windows behind if they have to, Ballmer will retire after declaring win 8 a winnar, and things will go back to normal. That is unless win 8 is a hit but so far the backlash I’ve seen made Vista look like XP so i just don’t see that happening.
Oh I see, you’ve not very good at reading between the lines. I suppose that makes sense given your lack of judgement.
Here is something for you to figure out:
Windows 8 sucks.
That would be quite a good idea actually, since you would be the only place the Vegans would go, you would have a monopoly.
Why is the Linux Desktop in an abysmal state ?
Why is KDE a mess ?
Backup your comments with some facts please, because I am sorry but maybe you wish the above was true, but that really isn’t the case, in fact its the exact opposite the news about Valve porting Steam to Linux and them putting so much support into the Linux Desktop is huge news for the Linux Desktop and its acceptance into the main stream. If Linux runs the latest AAA games, what possible benefit does windows provide ?
KDE is great now and only getting better, the Linux Desktop is great and is only getting better. Gnome is going through a hard patch that much I do concede, but Gnome3 has the ground work to be a solid Desktop environment. E17 is finally getting stable releases. Wayland is progressing nicely, same with BTRFS, a proper next gen filesystem.
You forget this centralised software installation method you are so happy Microsoft is getting has been an intrinsic part of Linux for decades and we don’t have a shitty registry system that gets bloated
As for your final comment about other Os’es Apples OSX Mountain Lion seems to have been met with universal praise, I cant see how they aren’t doing “any better” if any thing they are doing much better with a market capital twice that of Microsoft, in fact larger than Microsoft and Google combined.
Also Google, no idea what direction they will take with android and chrome os, but that just adds more competition with Windows 8 on the desktop. Nexus 7 has received major praise and is selling out where ever it has been released, Android on the tablet market is now a success story. In fact android 4.1 is truly outstanding and the nexus 7 is excellent value.
I had a really long reply all written, but my Asus Transformer force closed the browser. Heh.
But to sum it up, I think KDE lacks a designer or 12, and a direction. Qt is in a questionable state. The Linux Desktop as a whole needs a unified rallying cry.
Its fine to have niches and fill them, but there needs to be a standard bearer somewhere. Let’s stop rewriting the sound subsystem for the 12th time and work on fixing some gaping ux issues.
Don’t think I’m saying the Linux Desktop is doomed, it just isn’t good, at this point in time. Things will change. Look at what Valve is doing.
I was editing my comment and cleaning it up made massive changes and OSnews refused to accept the edited version, out of time , oh well ..
You think so therefore it must be ? QT is absolutely fine, in fact version 5 will soon be released, its all GPLed so there is no taking it back regardless of what happens to Nokia. It is in fact in a much better state than it ever has been because it is now completely open.
KDE has always been about flexibility, I posted this a while back but this was my kde desktop:
http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/609/desktopkde472kubuntu111.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AIgyGmHH50
It took me a whole half an hour to get it looking like that. Currently it looks pretty much like that but I am running kubuntu 12.10 alpha. Its the way I like it, its the way I work most efficiently.
It may not be to your taste as it ships from the developers but they have built in so much flexibility that it takes a short period of time to make it look the way you want, it gives me the option to download more themes directly from the different theme locations, could it be any more simple ?
It is ultimately down to you, its your choice how you want it to look. Any distributor can hire a graphic designer or 12 and make kde look amazing the development team is doing an outstanding job with it.
The planned KDE 5 changes also are smart are exactly the right things to do.
Why was this post voted down?
Except the masses DON”T CARE ABOUT FLEXIBILITY and never have. Never read “the illusion of choice” and how choices tend to make the users frustrated and angry?
The reason linux sits practically off the chart because its so low is because its a mess, pure and simple. the defaults suck, both KDE and Gnome simply don’t have enough devs, in fact Gnome Shell is practically a ghost town when it comes to devs, the sound and video subsystems are deep fried poo that break waaaay too damned often, the entire thing from the kernel on up is in constant flux and is frankly in many cases beta quality, its a mess man!
Here read this, and i apologize if the links don’t come out right, one is from one of the Red hat devs pointing out how broken and unsustainable the current system is, how there simply aren’t enough guys to allow any quality control AT ALL because the thing is just too big and the devs are trying to control too much, and the second is a list of over 100 obvious problems Linux will have to fix before getting any real mainstream support or OEMs to really get behind it. if you are truly open minded and not a FOSS zealot these will illuminate the true situation for you.
https://plus.google.com/109922199462633401279/posts/HgdeFDfRzNe
http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.c…
KDE wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t have to sit on top of X.
X is the least of anyone’s problems, its just become the whipping boy of the Linux crowd.
There are serious deficiencies in the Linux Desktop, and KDE frankly does almost nothing to alleviate any of these. The UX is absolutely emarassing and its reached the point where I’m certain they’re joking. This can’t be something they seriously put out.
Almost every platform, concept, or paradigm they’ve introduced has been second rate and detrimental to their own progress. Its like they’ve been jerking the chain of their userbase for half a decade while they try this stupid ass science experiment.
Gnome, ironically, looks like a more sensible approach, just completely without product direction. Its almost tragic.
Yup.
No the criticism of X is well deserved.
KDE is a poor copy of the Windows interface but it gets the job done. You click on programs to run them, use the taskbar to switch between them, etc. The real problem is that it sits on X.
X still has weird issues with resolution changes, multi-monitors, and worse can leave Granny in a command prompt if there is a video crash.
It also still has problems with font aliasing, video playback, and clipping. It sucks.
Moreover, WinRT provides access to these various subsystems across all language types — C/C++, JavaScript Windows Web Applications (WWA), XAML, VB.NET, etc — so you get the full power of Windows no matter what you code in. That’s a big deal.
And this hardware is being held to a far more stringent standard than in the past.
It’s going to be difficult to find machines that don’t support touch beyond the next 3 years. People don’t realize this yet.
This needs tuning. But they’ll get plenty of feedback, and they clearly do listen; which is why we no longer have Active Desktop and other UI patterns which people didn’t like.
Yes! That is the single biggest feature of this OS release. A store. Assuming that people only obtain software from the store, and Microsoft diligently monitors the store for malware, the overall user experience for users will be drastically better than today.
Well, I think it’s a balance between developer freedom and user freedom. Windows 8 puts the user first. The developer doesn’t get to play a lot of the tricks that they used to pull — like stealing focus, sticking pop-ups in your face, jockeying for highest Z-order, using any device they want to use regardless of whether they were authorized to do so. Developers may not like that change because it diminishes their capabilities but, so what, computing is supposed to be about users, not developers. We’re simply the guys who connect users with data. 😉
There are a certain number of people that will continue to use Linux no matter what the big players do. I salute their tenacity because Linux represents a different kind of openness; however, the end-to-end experience is often the thing that gets users excited. Unless the Linux desktop can nail that, it will remain fairly marginal as a desktop platform. Server? Different story.
Gets worse the more programs are installed with some enabling rectangles/squares as if they’re folders not short-cuts to a program
The animation certainly can’t do any more harm. I still have customers who don’t know were their document has gone when they change window and Word loses focus. Hell, until I got her using Linux and turned on the “dodge” effect for window switching, my grandmother still had trouble with the idea. For those who don’t know, “dodge” is an animation of the window currently in focus sliding aside, and the one you’re focusing on sliding out a bit and back in on top of the old window.
I’ve heard they changed the name to “Tiles ‘R Us”.
This is a better intro to Windows 8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ1oPDtdhFo
It’s been pissed on by so many reviewers they want to disassociate all the bad existing reviews from it.
When it comes to the general public it’s not surprising to see Hill & Knowlton derivative distraction marketing campaigns designed to keep everyone talking about ‘how beautiful the Emperor’s New Clothes are‘ — but it’s a bit shocking to see that it works so well on a more sophisticated audience as well.
As long as they keep you thinking and talking about their product in terms they want you thinking and talking in, even if you think you’re being critical, they have you by the — ‘everything‘…
Am I the only one that has noticed the idiot campaign for ‘The only button you need to click for anything; click the wonderful button!‘ obviates serious discussion just about everything anyone that’s conscious and has a conscience, should be talking about?
What about the fact this OS spies on you more then any that came before it? Will be more closed impacting more markets, industry and people then any OS before it? What about the fact that the UI doesn’t even allow a User to effectively multi-task applications (yes the OS can, but no you can’t if you access any part of ‘Metro’ in the process)? What about a thousand other questions that aren’t even being heard or asked?
WTF?!
Edited 2012-08-04 00:45 UTC
Look those are all just details, who cares if its locked down, if it can spy on every part of your life, that it doesn’t allow proper multi tasking… It has “live” tiles and beautiful fonts, that’s what is important after all, everyone just loves text and plain tiles. Who cares that you need to buy new equipment to use it. Ooh look it even has a crappy start video ooh wow..
Apple : You’re holding it wrong..
Microsoft : You’re using it wrong..
I don’t understand why this story is a main story… It seems every windows / Microsoft Story becomes prime focus and anything else becomes a column story ..
Seriously what a junky 15 second video, why is this a main story ?
No they don’t.
That marketing strategy may work for fashion but computers are tools and opinions are not entirely subjective. Negative talk really will keep people away from new technology, see Vista as an example.
Windows 8 is a passive consumption toy, not a tool; with emphasis obviously on style over substance, and form that does not follow function it’s pure fashion market speak being employed to sell Windows 8.
No one that buys Windows 8, products it runs on, or is perceived to compete with needs these products; that obviates ‘tool’ — and technology is no more a feature here then that required to manufacture a pair of pink high heels…
What’s more Micosoft has enough liquid cash to buy Windows 8 in greater volume then Windows 7 sold Scientology style, and have enough spare change left over in the slush fund to buy a few more failing countries assets — we may never know if Windows 8 sold poorly or not.
Edited 2012-08-04 22:55 UTC
Sure there is a lot of style over substance with Windows 8 but it is still an operating system sold on computers that average around 450 dollars. It isn’t a $20 dollar toy that people will spontaneously buy just to play with.
Statcounter will spill the beans.
How ‘spontaneously’ someone can or can’t buy Windows 8 or platform it’s rolled on is not an arbiter of the fact that it’s a passive consumption toy OS.
You can cook real food in a Mattel Easy Bake Oven too, and they’re not cheap — that doesn’t make it any less of a toy…
Edited 2012-08-05 15:12 UTC
Sinofsky is not selling it as a toy OS and in fact called it “Windows uncompromised” (a lie).
If it was an OS marketed at children I might agree but this is an OS targeted at the mainstream which includes existing Windows users.
Edited 2012-08-05 20:13 UTC
What reality do you dwell in? Vista sold 180 million licenses.
http://www.tgdaily.com/business-and-law-features/38485-microsoft-sa…
How so?
That depends on your perspective. You will certainly be able to do anything you want to do as a developer.
Enterprise and Dev
http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/09/only-enterprise-and-develop…
What does that even mean? Metro allows you to put applications side-by-side — docked — and the UIs are unquestionably multi-tasked.
Rhetorical. Not addressable.
Gonna take a lot more than a short animation to save this sucker. Windows 8, meet Vista, which are you replacing in the hearts and minds of the user community.
And, as I pointed out earlier comments, Vista sold a couple hundred million licenses. That’s failure? Huh? Microsoft would *love* another “failure” like Vista.
And how many people “downgraded” to XP with their Vista licenses?
Doesn’t matter, unless Microsoft had to refund the licence fee to all those users who did up/downgrade. At the end of the day, they don’t really case what you do with your licenced copy of their OS, once you’ve paid them the money. Just like Coca-Cola wouldn’t care if most people bought their drinks to pour down the toilet. They still got the sale.
Edit: So, in summary, Microsoft would be delighted if a few hundred million users bought Windows 8 licences, even if the vast majority deleted it straight away to replace it with 7.
Edited 2012-08-07 08:07 UTC