Microsoft's Dumbest And Smartest Moves Of 2011

[commodorejohn]

Many people slamming tablets and touch devices are viewing said machines as desktop competitors, and in my books they simply can't be compared.

Agreed; I see them more as laptop competitors - and they don't stack up there, either. Of course you've got your "well, it's for passive, bovine consumption of industrially-processed content!" proponents, but I've yet to have any trouble watching movies or reading books on my laptop, and I can do a damn sight more with it much more easily than any tablet.

and are likely still the types to own 7 year old feature phones

Proudly so. It places and receives phone calls, holds my small personal directory, and takes messages, and that's all I damn well need!

They aren't for everyone, but even the naysayers would find them quite usable even after using them for an hour or two or they simply wouldn't have taken off like they have.  For emails, quick docs and such, tablets and their onscreen keyboards are more than usable, and I dare say pleasant to use if you understand what they can and cannot do.

I never said they're unusable; as far as text-entry methods for cell phones, they're probably the best solution (certainly more pleasant than the button keyboards I've used.) What they aren't is as good as a real keyboard.

[commodorejohn]

I grew up with lots of brothers / sisters..  That happened without voice-to-text.  ;-)

That's not an answer to the question...

Reminds me too, when I saw my granddaughter entering her extra-credit homework via the Wiimote on our TV without any complaints or apparent issues, I realized that keyboards might not be the big selling point they used to be...

She had the option of using the laptop, but she was already on the Wii and it didn't bother her..

Yeah, something tells me that's not going to carry over to college and term papers, as cutesy as it is...

[commodorejohn]

Desktops are currently irreplaceable for a significant minority of computer users.  That group is not growing and will at some point shrink.  There will likely be a significant number of desktops for a decade or two, but their ultimate demise is pretty much certain.

Based on what? The idea that current trends will continue on to infinity? That's the one thing trends never do.

[commodorejohn]

Some people hate change, I remember when XP came out and how unpopular it was with the 9x lovers. Then Vista was terrible and XP was great, etc etc. However change is innevitable, so if there is a backlash it will be a minority and in a couple of years nobody will care anyway as there will be a new version to hate.

There is truth to this, but XP is something of an extraordinary item by these standards - Windows 95 didn't remain on sale for eight years after release, wasn't still getting active support/updates eleven years later, and didn't remain in major use until present day (estimates I've seen put XP at somewhere around or just below 7 for market share.)

95 was a step in the right direction, but it never got to become a really mature, stable OS; XP has, and consequently it's got a lot of users that aren't going to give it up until they absolutely have to. Tons of businesses still use fleets of XP workstations, many of which are definitely not 7/Vista machines, which means XP isn't even going to come close to going away until they're ready to do mass upgrades. (And in this economy? Good luck with that.)

[commodorejohn]

Yeah, a flop up button that just basically lists your applications folder is kind of brain dead.  Even AmigaOS realised this decades ago.  The whole MS Windows desktop interface could use a serious redesign with 21st Century GUI principles in mind....

What, pray tell, are "21st century GUI principles?" Who codifies them? What are their merits?

[commodorejohn]

I don't know and no longer want to know where everything is kept, so I too now just use the search.  Most of the people I work with are Gen Y and they all work with the search.  Its fast, and I don't have to think "Now where is xyz?"

Lately I've been using this cool new thing they just invented in the 1970s called a hierarchical file system, it's kind of like searching to find what I want, only there's no delays while the search happens and I can organize everything to my exact preference instead of having to rely on the computer to do it for me!

[commodorejohn]

Also, there are files eg system files/preferences that you can't organise wherever you want but need to delve deep to find, sometimes several folders deep. Sometimes you know what it does, what might be its name, but not sure where it lives.  In that situation, I bet an indexed Vista/Win7 will get me there faster than you will clicking through folder, guessing where the file might be.

I expect not; the important arcane-wizardry files are really not that hard to find in Windows. System components in (Windows directory)\system32, application preferences in Documents and Settings\(user | All Users)\Application Data, etc. The few that are really hidden deep are corner-cases; I'd imagine the time saved on finding everything else in a well-organized system more than pays off against waiting for the search routine to do heuristically what you could have done intelligently from the get-go.