Microsoft's Dumbest And Smartest Moves Of 2011

[commodorejohn]

Feh, more Wired bullcrap about The Tablet Future. I've been a longtime Windows user, but one look at Win8 killed any hope I had of things remaining tolerable. I'll keep running XP until I can't get a new laptop that will run it; from there I'll see if 7 can be tweaked to be acceptable to me, and if not I'll just pray that I can get the XP desktop environment running through WINE on Linux.

[commodorejohn]

It looks annoying, but I haven't actually done much with it, so I don't know if it's easily tweakable to be more like XP...

[commodorejohn]

Even supposing that's true (I think there's a lot of people who might think they want a controlled, web-specific environment, until they're actually forced to live with one,) they'd be alienating a lot of users (professionals especially, but more than a few personal users as well) if they don't give the option to keep the standard interface. Look how much hell's been raised even by GNOME 3's comparatively small changes, and try to imagine what happens if the best-selling OS in the world tries to force users into even bigger changes.

[commodorejohn]

I really don't think that's true. I think it's a sort of half-truth (half-lie) that people have heard repeated so often that they've begun to accept it. I know plenty of non-techies who use their computers for well more than Facebook, and who are quite happy with the standard desktop UI model and don't really want change. (In fact, I just spoke with a friend/tech-support client the other day who expressed a desire to go back to XP!)

People are mostly okay with Vista/7, I think, because despite the aesthetic tweaks it doesn't really screw around with what already works (too much.) But if Microsoft tries to force users into a different model, I think there's going to be a lot of backlash.

[commodorejohn]

Well, you do live in Portland...

[commodorejohn]

Tablets are trash.  How are you supposed to program on that touchy-pokey doucheinterface.

You're not. The whole idea is to keep you from unauthorized activities like programming by giving you one controlled source for all your software. Tinkerers are dangerous!

Microsoft's problem is that older windows variants are still perfectly usable.
 
 Something tells me Win8 will not be that great a success and that WinXP, Vista, and Win7 will be around for quite awhile longer.

This is exactly it - they've been struggling to keep people upgrading ever since XP, the only real architectural improvement 7/Vista has to offer is better integration of 64-bit mode, AFAIK. Everything else they could just as easily release as XP service packs.

Windows 8 is like Windows 1 - you can either have a bunch of small panes tiled together, or a full-screen.
 
  Remember how popular Windows 1 was?

 Not really. We had it on the shelf for sale.

Psst, the answer is "was laughed out of the market." The difference, of course, is that the Microsoft of 1985 knew it was stupid, and only disabled free placement of windows because Apple was going around suing everybody, whereas whatever idiot design students they've got on the Metro team probably think they're being "elegant."

That aside, the market for desktops is dismal, it hasn't gone anywhere in years.  The GROWTH is in mobile devices.

HP doesn't seem to think so, they decided to keep manufacturing PCs after toying with the idea of quitting, but they didn't feel the need to keep their tablet business alive...

Touch interfaces are here to stay, at least until direct neural input is possible.  On the desktop we'll see traditional keyboards and trackpads/mice augmented by touch.  Nobody wants to do database entry on a touch screen, but what about occasionally touching to get a photo in the right angle?  Or on a browser?  Or in iTunes?

Why would I want an interface that requires me to lift my hand up to the screen when I can just as easily (if not more easily) point and click by moving my hand over six inches to the mouse (if it isn't there already?) Touchscreens at least make some kind of sense on smartphones, where the screen is small enough to be easily covered by finger and wrist motion - on desktop screen sizes (and desktop screen positions) they just make no damn sense.

[commodorejohn]

When mice first came out I heard a lot of people complaining "why would I take my hands off my keyboard to go way over to use the mouse?"

Yes, but the mouse offers the concrete advantage of being faster and more intuitive in some situations. Touchscreens aren't faster than a mouse at desktop screen sizes, and they aren't so much more intuitive that they'll make up for the annoyance of using them in a desktop situation. Try holding your arm aloft for long stretches of time, and see whether that's more comfortable than resting your mousing arm on the desk (with an armrest) for long stretches of time.

[commodorejohn]

I didn't say it was an either/or proposition, I said that touchscreens simply have no advantage over the mouse in a desktop environment at all. They cost more and don't offer any improvement, and are therefore useless in that context, whether you use them in addition to a mouse or not.

[commodorejohn]

Yes and no. Certainly desktops are losing some of their niche to laptops, but I don't buy this "death of the desktop" nonsense. For one thing, computer miniaturization is not an unending linear progression - there's hard physical limits to these things, and practical limits well before that. And desktops still offer some definite advantages over laptops - much greater expansion capability and ease of repair/upgrade, for example. Aside from the introduction of the "netbook" form factor, laptops haven't really made any steps to match that - you can't upgrade a laptop (aside from adding RAM,) only replace it, and replacing it hasn't gotten any cheaper. A mid-range laptop now costs about what a mid-range laptop cost in 2004, only the specs have changed.

And I'll note that while the bulky, workhorse portion of mainframes and minis was superceded (for most purposes) by desktop PCs, the fundamental user interaction (typing on a keyboard and, later, using a mouse) remained just the same...

[commodorejohn]

Yes, but frequently people like having real keyboards because the things they do have been designed with keyboards in mind....

As more and more work/time goes into the touch interface, people will find themselves wanting a real keyboard less and less.

Yes, I suppose when literacy finally gasps its last and the alphabet is discarded as arcane devil-runes that distract us from the right and proper path of licensed media consumption, we won't need keyboards for much anymore...

[commodorejohn]

Looking at twitter, texting, and the general decline of our language in society..
That will also play a significant role...

If one were feeling uncharitable, one could phrase it as "in the future, dumb people will use tablets..."

That and voice to text and gesture recognition...

Uh, yeah. Yeah, that's really been a satisfactory substitute, doesn't bottleneck your text output by limiting it to your rate of coherent speech, and doesn't at all make you look like a goon for talking to an inanimate object...

[commodorejohn]

You're right..
Because it hasn't been done properly so far, it never will be...
Good point..  ;-)

I'll admit that the technology will doubtless get better - but my remaining two points I stand by: it imposes a bottleneck (rate of coherent speech) that's typically much more restrictive than the keyboard bottleneck (rate of precision typing) (unless you're a professional auctioneer or the Micro Machines guy,) and it's just a damn nuisance to the people around you (I guarantee you that if offices full of people jabbering at their workstations ever become commonplace, so will workplace shootings.) It may have specific applications, but as a general replacement it ain't going anywhere.

[commodorejohn]

True, but I said initially that PCs will still have a place in business..
I'm talking non-business devices in general...

I don't see those issues as any less problematic in a home environment. A bottleneck is a bottleneck, whether or not you have a financial incentive to minimize it; if someone gets a taste of decent keyboard usage (i.e. if they ever work a desk job) I just don't see them ever needing text-to-speech again. And the noise factor may be reduced in terms of absolute decibels in a home with 4-6 residents, but how would you like to have the entire composition/revision process of your daughter's email to her school friends drifting down the hall while you're trying to do something else? Would it be that much less annoying for being less loud?

Actually, that assumes someone doesn't come up with some type of verbal language shorthand, so to speak...
So people say partial phrases and the computers fill in the rest...

I'd laugh, but I can actually see that happening..

People walking around talking to their bluetooth headsets speaking truncated English stubs..

The whole text nightmare brought to speech...

Annoying jabber is annoying jabber, whether it's in full spoken English or truncated syllable combinations. I'm sure someone will try something like this eventually, but I doubt it will make any more of a lasting impact than text-to-speech in general. Both may save on manual labor, but both are frankly just too obnoxious to survive in society at large. It's like farting Morse code; sure, you can do it, but sooner or later it's going to wind up in mob violence.

[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...