MS Windows 8 Consumer Beta

[commodorejohn]

I installed it under VM Fusion on my Mac, and it's absolutely awful as a desktop OS. I had to install mouse drivers. Mouse drivers! PCs haven't had to deal with that since early DOS.

devicehigh = c:\[strike]dos[/strike]windows8\mouse.sys :roflmao:

[commodorejohn]

OSNews calls these trends the War on General Purpose Computing. Windows is turning itself into a digital toy like the iPad. I wonder if this will sink them in the business market?

That's what baffles me about this. Microsoft had a huge presence in the workplace with Windows XP, because it was easily tweakable (and I mean easily, like your-grandma-can-figure-it-out easy) into the same no-nonsense user environment that was the standard since Windows 95. Come Vista, they started to nerf that capability, and I suspect that may be one of the reasons I see far fewer Vista/7 workstations than XP workstations in business environments (the other, of course, being that businesses don't usually feel the need to upgrade something that already works if doing so will cost money or a significant time investment.)

Still, though, excepting a few changes that annoy the hell out of some people (i.e. me) but probably not most, 7 is still pretty much like XP. 8, though... By all accounts I've seen the classic-desktop mode in 8 is hardly more than an afterthought (no Start menu? Seriously?) I don't know what they're thinking. The home market isn't exactly chump change to Microsoft, but compared to the massive number of business licenses, you'd have to think it'd give them pause to consider who they're more worried about pissing off - are they really going to try and leave business customers without a proper classic environment? That's not going to make anybody very happy...

[commodorejohn]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/03/andrew_does_windows8/

Nicely put. It's good to see someone publically calling this out as the forcible takeover of Windows by the self-styled "designers." Art students who think they know interface design are bad enough in web design, where they're absolute farkin' endemic, the last thing we need is for them to successfully worm themselves into the operating system itself.

But I can see switching to 800x600 with Windows 8 and it being very usable...

According to the Register article, though, it requires a minimum of 1366x768? Or does it simply require a device capable of that?

As far as 7 goes, personally I absolutely despise, loath, and abhor (not to mention just about any thesaurus word for "hate") the Vista interface.

I agree. The inability to switch back to even the standard XP behavior (let alone the nice, simple Classic look) is basically the only reason I haven't upgraded to 7 and don't plan to if I can avoid it.

Perhaps they should have made a tablet and desktop version. Both tailored to the environment in question. I can see a lot of desktops sticking with 7.

That would've made too much sense, I guess. Or rather, it wouldn't make the Metro team feel as validated as they will by forcing their design on everybody...

[commodorejohn]

Hardly "inevitable." The only reason this exists is because the tablet fad is in full swing. It's not as if this is some kind of logical evolution of the GUI that is the only possible future direction.

[commodorejohn]

Yes, and they're wrong there, too.

[commodorejohn]

I'm not so certain on that. Doubtless Microsoft are hoping that the non-techies will eat this up, but there's two factors that I think they either haven't considered or have brushed aside.

One is that there are still a hell of a lot of desktops and laptops in use in home environments. I can't dispute that tablets are selling well these days, but I don't believe there's more than a few people who have only a tablet. Even "average users" are still users, and I don't think any initial infatuation Win8 does manage will last too long in the face of millions of people trying to use an interface designed for tablets and phones on desktops and laptops.

(And that's assuming that this doesn't turn into something like Vista, where word-of-mouth spreads so quickly that even ordinary non-techies start avoiding it.)

The other, of course, is that I still don't see how they can possibly hope to reconcile this toy shell with the needs of business customers. By what I've read they keep saying "oh, yeah, we've got that covered, don't worry about it," but they haven't revealed any kind of plan, and if the insistence that Metro is The Official Way Forward has any basis in reality, it suggests that they're just ignoring the issue and hoping it'll go away - good luck with that, MS.

We'll see how it all works out, but given their apparent blithe disregard for any issues of practicality, I don't see this going anything like how they apparently hope it will.

[commodorejohn]

Hey, we can all have a good laugh at the days of front-panel switches, but at least with the Altair there wasn't a third party controlling every software installation...

[commodorejohn]

Windows 8 isn't dumbed down, at least on x86/x64 platforms. It's just different.
 
There are many improvements unrelated to metro, which is why they allow you to install on a machine that doesn't meet the resolution requirements of metro. Task manager & the file copy progress are much better for instance.

It may indeed have tons of architectural improvements under the hood - by all accounts it's quite snappy, which is always nice (and a rare pleasure for any version of Windows at launch.) However, the Metro UI absolutely is dumbed down - there's the inherent dumbness in trying to push a tablet/phone UI on a desktop/laptop environment, however nice of a tablet/phone UI it might be, but by many accounts there are things that are just plain stupid (they tried to kill Alt+Tab. They didn't succeed, because of all the screaming, but the mere fact that they tried should point to how wrong-headed they're being about serving the needs of Windows users. And the "Start screen" is quite frankly a massive, pointless waste of space in a desktop environment, but they're not giving you the option to get rid of it.)

I have no problem whatsoever with performance improvements - in fact, I am all for anything that makes Windows lighter and faster. I am less pleased at the attempt to move away from native code and the Win32 API and onto Microsoft's proprietary VM (primarily because any VM is a waste, but also because backwards compatibility is half the reason I use Windows in the first place,) but for the moment they haven't ditched it, so I'll leave that argument until its proper time. What I cannot tolerate is a bunch of upstart "designers" telling me that I need to just get used to them changing things on me because they need a prominent place to display their little art project, so that people will appreciate it as is their due. Yeah, here's your appreciation, Metro Team: I'm not buying it. Not unless someone in management reins you in and makes your tablet OS entirely 100% optional on my non-tablet. Period.

[commodorejohn]

The problem in IT has always been forecasting the future.  It's an industry younger than a lot of the people in it.  Personal computers started out in people's garages and a plaything of geeks and have become a household appliance.

IT has been a full-fledged industry since the '50s. And forecasting the future is always tricky, but one consistent lesson from those 60-odd years has been that change for change's sake is going to be derided, disliked, and usually ultimately ignored. Technologies that don't offer concrete improvements don't tend to stick around.

(Even technologies that do offer improvements have to justify the cost of the transition in time and effort - which is why the US still uses the imperial measurement system and not metric. Moving to an entirely different UI paradigm on a device not even designed for it is likely to be a hell of a transition cost.)

What percentage of people prefer a touch or touch like interface?  The tablet marketplace is exploding while laptop and desktop sales stagnate.  If I were a manufacturer I could easily read that as the market demanding more touch devices.

And thus we see the folly of making all decisions based on sales-driven market research. If Microsoft had bothered to look further into the question, they might've realized that people aren't not using laptops and desktops just because they aren't buying new ones as often. And if they paid more attention to use instead of sales, those countless fleets of XP workstations out in the field might tell them something...

"You can't invent a customer to fit your research." It's a lesson that somehow we keep failing to learn.

The click the windows ball and have all your programs listed is an outdated paradigm, most people just pin their favourite apps to the non-dock dock bar at the bottom and never touch the "start" ball.  The question is what makes the most sense to replace it with.

The question is whether it needs replacing at all, and the answer is "no." "Outdated" as a slur in UI design is a warning sign that you're entering change-for-change's-sake territory, and UI is the absolute worst place for that kind of thinking. The Start menu has survived from 1995-present by being a useful feature, even if not everybody uses it all the time. It doesn't need to be changed just because it's old. I'm older than the Start menu, and I might guess that you are - should we be thrown out and be replaced with vapid stand-ins simply for being "outdated?"

Would metro make more sense if your computer had a kinect connected to it?

No.

[commodorejohn]

Have you ever heard one Mac user say "Gee, what we need is a round ball that you click that lists the contents of your applications folder?"?

No, I have not, but here's the thing:

A. Mac is not Windows, and their users do not expect either to be the other. It would be generally unreasonable of them to. (Any given user probably has a few behaviors they'd like to see carried over, but if they were really unhappy with one they'd probably switch.) Windows users do expect Windows to be Windows, though, and rightfully so.

And B. Mac OS has actually had equivalent functionality for a long time (since its inception? At least since System 6.) In classic Mac OS, you can add program shortcuts (or even programs, period) to the Apple menu simply by placing them in the Apple menu folder, exactly like the Start menu - in later versions, it even supports sub-folders. OS X moves this functionality to the Dock, but the end result is roughly the same. (Minus the sub-folders, annoyingly, but that's details.)

Having an application-shortcuts menu is a tremendously useful thing - note how many implementations of this functionality are available on Aminet, for instance. Even Microsoft isn't trying to ditch it entirely, because that would be stupid even by Metro standards - they're just trying to make it waste enormous amounts of screen space and cover up everything you're doing every time you want to launch a program.

[commodorejohn]

"Ambitious" is only a positive if the aims are good. Windows 8 with Metro is a retrogression to the attempts at operating systems for the computer-illiterate of the 1990s, like Microsoft Bob and Packard Bell Navigator. It's ambitious in the sense that Smith & Wesson switching all their product lines to Nerf guns is ambitious - ballsy, yes, but a completely terrible idea in every other respect.

(Also, I don't know how "unfinished" it can possibly be, when they're talking about rolling it out this fall...)

(According to the previously-mentioned Register article, the developer preview attempted to ditch Alt+Tab, but as I haven't used that I'll defer to those who have.)

[commodorejohn]

I don't get the whining about Win8. They replaced the start button with a start screen and added a new application layer for metro stuff. I've been using the developer preview for a few months now, it's the same Windows we've been using forever with some minor tweaks to things like explorer and task manager. Big deal.

I like the start screen, it's easier to find stuff there than the horrid start menu, and easier to configure. I always launched applications from the run box or pinned commonly used stuff on the bar.

Well, I can't say you're "wrong" for liking the Start screen (or rather, I can and would go on at length about it, but I don't think either of us would convince the other on that front,) but I will say this: I don't object to its existence as much as I object to the idea that I should have to use it. They say that Metro is "optional," but as I understand it there's no way to turn off the Metro Start and get the old Start menu back, and that's a deal-killer for me. I want my options.

(Hell, the inability to get back the classic, proper hierarchical-folders Start menu is one of the reasons I haven't even moved to 7 yet.)

[commodorejohn]

Yeah, I've seen Classic Shell, and I'm sure I'll be taking advantage of that if I ever do move to 7. For now I'm sticking with XP while I can get hardware to run it, and looking at alternatives.

[commodorejohn]

One of the great things about new versions of Windows is that you get to watch people blow their gaskets over the new changes, then 5 years later you get to watch them blow up again while vigorously defending the very same version they previously lambasted.

Maybe so, but I've been a fan of the (Classic-tweaked) XP interface since I first started using XP, and I remain so today, eight years later. Good design is good design (or at least decent design,) and developers today could stand to re-learn the value of leaving well enough alone.

[commodorejohn]

And that says it all right there - instead of a zero-day crack, we have a [strike]zero[/strike] negative-day restoration of old functionality...