Microsoft's Dumbest And Smartest Moves Of 2011

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Would be business suicide for them to release it without an easy 1 click option (or registry tweak) to default to the standard Win 7 traditional style computing desktop, at least on the x86 platform.  There is simply too much corporate business they would lose if they forced the Metro UI, and we're a long ways from people being able to productively use a PC with a gesture/touch UI for real computing or data input.  Win 8 is not a heck of a lot more than Win 7 underneath the Metro UI anyways when it comes down to brass tacks - they would prefer you not know this, as most serious users won't buy Win 8 knowing that, heh.  Try the Win 8 beta and you'll see it plain as day, and the differences between the current beta on x86 will not be all that different than RTM versions.

The ARM version of W 8, I do expect that to be Metro only though - it'll be the "tablet" version of Win 8.

The day comes where I am forced to use my hands like an ape fighting with coconuts on the monitor to input data into a database is the day I change to another real computing OS with a real desktop interface.  We simply at not at the point where touch is a workable enough solution to force upon serious computer users, and the corporate market is a vast % of MS's business - which will be using keyboards and a mouse for a long time to come.

Win 7, for a MS product, as painful as it is to admit - is a quite pleasant experience.  Win 7 is a walk in the park on a sunny day with a cute girl compared to Vista, which was nothing more than a never ending root canal comparison/pain wise.  It's no classic, friendly OS like Amiga OS, but it's light years ahead of what Windows used to be.  Vista was bad, comparable to Windows ME, Active Desktop, and MS "Bob" on the pain-o-meter.

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MS are not forcing the Metro UI on anything but tablets with Win8.  All signs indicate the traditional desktop is going absolutely nowhere and will be available on Win8 on the x86, it's just the ARM (WoA) Win8 that will be touch/Metro only.  There was an 8,000 word blog post from MS just a week or two ago stating this.  This has been stated over and over, but people keep ringing the doomsday bell for the desktop OS, and are blatantly wrong.  Unless MS change something last minute, you will have the option to use Win8 in the similar and familiar way you've used every Win release in the past, in a mouse and keyboard, point and click, icons and desktop format.  The RTM/consumer preview release comes out at the end of the month, so we'll see then, and I'm confident the Metro UI will be entirely optional on the x86 desktop.  Your Start Menu is being tweaked, but other than that I don't see much difference than W7 than W8 for desktop users, at least until ReFS hits the consumer level MS os's, if it does.

Anything else would be financial suicide for a company with such high profits in enterprise.  Enterprise sales is what made MS rich - consumer OS sales are nickel and dime compared to enterprise for them.  Even the nicest to use (iOS, IMHO) touch/tablet interfaces simply are not an effective substitute for the desktop for productivity, and that doesn't even factor in dinky screen sizes, lack of processing grunt, and lack of storage and traditional connectivity found in a desktop.

I'm no apologist for Apple or any other tablet maker, but they are quite usable appliances, stuff like the iPad.  Note the "appliance" denotation - you are not going to replace a traditional computer with a tablet anytime soon, which they can both do a lot of shared tasks, there's some things that tablets simply are not productive with, like heavy data entry, content creation, etc.  A tablet is a computer, but in a lot of ways it simply isn't - it's a consumption device first and foremost.

Many people slamming tablets and touch devices are viewing said machines as desktop competitors, and in my books they simply can't be compared.  Most guys derping and whining about touch keyboards and tablets in general being entirely unusable in any capacity have never even tried them, and are likely still the types to own 7 year old feature phones  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.

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The dev preview of win 8 has been out for months, and the RTM/Consumer preview will be out on the 29th.

RTM means ready to manufacture, the version coming out on the 29th will be very similar to the end retail product.

Dev preview was freely downloadable, so will the RTM/consumer preview version.

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Valid point - Dev version was a waste of time for the most part.

The RTM version hopefully will be a bit more usable, and I am curious to see how much they have actually changed the desktop experience.

The Metro UI and any MS tablet specific interface holds no interest to me.  They are too late to the game to make a dent in the market with that side of things.  I doubt the actual Windows 8 desktop interface will differ much from Win 7, tbh - so needless to say I just ordered an OEM copy of Win7 64 bit for the new gaming rig I am building vs. waiting on Win 8.

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Thanks for the correction on RTM, Phil - was 4 AM here and wasn't paying attention.  

Transition, while I loathed Vista (and still do), our definition on the word "failure" must differ.  140 million copies of Vista were sold between late 2006 and early 2008 alone.

I found Vista an unmitigated disaster, like most people - but by the numbers, it didn't do half as bad as people think it did.  But in overall scope of things, you know your product is loathed when you are forced to offer downgrades to XP on machines that came with Vista pre-installed, so in that case it was a real shambles.  Hell, I even "downgraded" a Toshiba laptop that came with Vista, back to XP.

I disliked Vista enough I almost made the switch permanently to Mac, in fact - but Win 7 is actually an excellent product.  It's no Amiga OS, but for your OS for the masses offerings, it's one of the best I've used, Win7.

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Iggy, if you don't see the differences between Vista and Win 7, we're on different planets.  It's like comparing Windows 3.x with Win 95/98.  I don't mean on a UI front - Windows in Windows that way, but in actual usability and functionality.  Vista was a train wreck compared to Win 7.

Massive differences in terms of day to day operational use, you'd have to be borderline daft to not notice how much better 7 runs than Vista ever did if you used either, lol.  Even on the exact same hardware base.  My old Vista machine used to lock up 3 times a day, on a good day.  This PC hasn't been rebooted this year thus far, Win 7.

Early Vista releases were barely functional in regards to stability and actual usability.  7 is a treat in comparison.  Even the Mac fanboys find it usable.

Yes, Iggy.  "I disliked" Vista ****ting the bed everytime I tried to do anything with it.  What's silly about not liking an operating system that works poorly?  "I disliked" indicates I no longer use Vista, and I didn't have much fun using it.

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My hardware is state of the art, and I've been a MCSE/MCSA for over 10 years.  I'm not clueless in the least with MS software.  It's not a hardware issue, isn't not a 3rd party of poorly cfg'ed software issue, lol.  I built machines and did IT support for many years.  It's a Microsoft issue in which Vista is crap, and it's well documented.  Vista was not a financial failure by any sane stretch - but it did earn MS their first financial Q loss in 23 years.  It's in the list of the 10 biggest tech failures of the last decade for a reason - it was widely seen as a train wreck.  Peoples standards are different, I guess - that's good by me, and certainly some people were happy with Vista.  Check how many Windows 7 downgrade to Vista programs vs. Windows Vista downgrade to Windows XP were offered, and how many people took the optional downgrade to Vista from 7 vs. Vista to XP  Vista was widely seen as a step back, it offered very little over XP, and the adoption rates were absolutely horrible compared to other OS releases, past or present for MSFT.

SP's have done a lot for Vista, but it's still garbage compared to 7.  And I never liked XP all that much to begin with, but Vista was a step back.
If you count UAC in the way it was implemented at first as a "security buff", wow - people turned that crap off the minute they could.  Was the most intrusive thing ever.  Unintuitive, bloatware "protect me from myself" crap.  Vista now is to MS in 3 short years what MS Bob took them 10 years to add to the "big mistake" list, lol.  

The fact the entire machine could be brought down by a driver crash means nothing with Vista?  I'm a big gamer - Vista was a train wreck for us guys with that.  Gfx driver crashes, the machine needs a hard reboot.
Was fixed in 7, you will note.  Having any driver take a machine out of commission rather than have a recoverable driver system is bad, bad, bad.
XP was under a similar stack regarding drivers, but never ever had half the issues that Vista did.

Install Vista on a PC.  Test drive it.  Hell, Install XP after that.  Vista will be dog slow compared to XP even, where as 7 if anything is faster on equal HW than XP.

Install 7 on the same PC a week later.  You will find Vista to be garbage in comparison if you use the machine for anything other than puttering around with email.  For people like that, it could be Win 98 and they wouldn't know the difference.  If you are the type that simply putzes around on PC's for email and not much more, anything will work.  It doesn't for me, I'm hooped without stability - and yes, I know the glaring irony in using the term "stability" in conjunction with the term "Microsoft Windows"  

Comic I always liked, and I'm no Mac fanboy by any means:

http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/915.html

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Apple hasn't had a white plastic/polycarbonate iMac since August 2007, and they weren't particularly hard to work on.  All iMac's since then have been the aluminum (silver) bodied ones.  While said machine may have looked cutting edge, it's a 5 year old machine.  The Core2 plastic cased models were known for some display issues and banding on certain models, which was fixed with a software update.  I do fully agree though, none of the more modern iMac's are much fun to work on, especially compared to something like a simple tower PC case.

As for Windows key re-activation, I have had the same go around with MS in regards to switching licenses.  They have got better over the years, but it's still a complete PITA.  I remember doing it with a Vista license a few years ago and being stuck on hold for the better part of an hour, but recently I did it with a copy of Win 7 and was done with it within 5 minutes.

The fact they have outsourced everything like that to India and such is the biggest pain, as you said, Smerf.  But I guess that's happened at a lot of places providing support - Dell was the worst I ever encountered years back for that.

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Vista worked, and worked well enough to use on my daily driver PC's after SP's arrived.  Entirely usable for the most part, but in comparison to 7 still a complete pig to me.  If all a person had ever used was Vista, one would be none the wiser.  I've installed Vista on a machine, run it for a week, then thrown 7 on the same machine and the difference to me is incredible, even with older hardware.  Boot times with 7 are significantly better, among other things.  7 is actually quite pleasant to use on a system with a SSD - my gaming PC boots up as fast as my SAM 440, and that says a lot.

Used all variations of it, 32 and 64 bit.  Tbh, not sure I ever used the search functions of Vista or 7 much.  I'm a bit particular about how I do things I suppose, and fell into habits 20 years ago I still use today, heh.  I use the Start Menu and quick launch functions almost exclusively when mousing around, but for the most part I just have programs bound to G keys on my systems.

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OSX has Windows beat in the command line front, hands down.  If you like to tinker around in shell/terminal, modern Windows versions aren't the best bet.

They are now merely MS-DOS emulations when you enter that CMD command.

Then again, any terminal junkie is already running a *nix or BSD variant and doesn't give 2 ****s about Windows or OS X.  

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I realize CMD is no replacement for DOS, but it's what you get for command line out of the box these days on modern Windows.  DOS was phased out some time ago in Windows, and you have a valid point with the fact there's a lot of good add ons to get some of that back, but none come packaged with Windows, where OS X has a much more robust command line system by default without downloading addons.