What changed between XP and Vista being released is that lazy journalists started picking up online bitching and releasing it as news.
Didn't stop it from having a big impact on Vista's fortunes.
For delivering apps to consumer tablets then having everything go through the app store is actually a good idea. It's worked well for Apple, the alternative is Android and it's not really worked out too well there.
However making it hard to install unsigned apps is actually very important. Social engineering to persuade people to disable signing checks would make tablets very insecure.
Absolutely
not. Windows is and has always been an open platform, at least in the area of third-party software development. We might all have a good laugh about "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" but the fact is that Ballmer was absolutely right, albeit in a completely apeshÃt way; any version of Windows lives or dies by its third-party support. Windows 95 was buggy as hell, but it captured developer loyalty quickly because it combined NT's easiness of coding (far less of a mess than Win16!) with a halfway-decent amount of backwards compatibility with existing software, and introduced DirectX, which made getting games to work on a variety of hardware much, much easier. Even Vista only saw a lot of what limited adoption it got because developers took a shine to DX10 and suddenly gamers had to switch if they wanted
Bioshock to look as pretty as possible.
The Windows Store is a naked cash-grab on the part of Microsoft, at the expense of all of their third-party developers. Any talk about security is just obfuscation; they saw how much Apple was getting by screwing over iOS developers, and they wanted a piece of that pie. But the fact is that they're not Apple, they've never been Apple, and if they try to go up against Apple on Apple's home turf, they're going to find that they're not as good at being Apple as Apple. I think it's going to be their undoing. They want developers to switch to Metro and the Windows Store, so that they get more money, but they've left in the option for unsigned (i.e. old) software, because it would've been suicide not to.
Some developers might switch, but how many are going to decide that it's just not worth it? Some of them are already outspoken critics; Notch of Mojang has outright refused to take part in certification, and while
Minecraft might not be huge in terms of purchase price and necessity, that means that
every single Minecraft
player who uses Windows 8 will be getting accustomed to non-Windows Store installation right off the bat. Other high-profile developers, like Valve, have expressed discomfort with the idea, and no friggin' wonder - you think they
like being asked to bend over? Microsoft may very well have initiated their own developer revolt. Add to that the fact that Windows 8 already has more negative buzz
before release than Vista did a year after, and who
knows what's going to happen to it.
The open source developers will have to learn how to fund their hobby, because nobody else should be forced to subsidise it.
And screw you, too.
