Windows 8 'sales' barely half as good as Microsoft claims Microsoft claimed last week that it's made '100 million' Windows 8 sales and the claim has been widely repeated. But channel feedback and the experience on the ground point to a very different picture. The Guardian's Charles Arthur has made a stab at estimating the true figure, and suggests it's much less, at between 57 …
I've got a non-touch Windows 8 laptop (high spec cos I perform Monte carlo calcs on it) and I wish I had bought W7 instead.
I really miss the Start menu. It was my single port of call for all my programs. I listed them all. Now I have to open a search box and type in the name (if I remember what it was) to get to my program (especially the former built in ones, like calc or paint!)
Viewing photographs is also a pain. I open the photo, and get the metro application opening. I minimise it, and it's gone! Nothing in the task bar, so I have to go to Explorer and open the photo again.
Sometimes, and I don't know whether this is the computer itself, or Windows, but I am using the trackpad and I suddenly get the widget/gadget/whatever thing appearing at the side of the screen. WTF? All I did was move teh mouse pointer to another part of the screen (and not the corner either!).
All in all, I find Windows 8 to be very frustrating. I can't find anything and the reliance on a Microsoft account is also annoying.
Not impressed.
I really miss the Start menu. It was my single port of call for all my programs. I listed them all. Now I have to open a search box and type in the name (if I remember what it was) to get to my program (especially the former built in ones, like calc or paint!)
That's a common problem. Or at least it used to be. Then someone brought GUIs to PCs and the problem went away.
Oh.
At least You can *See* the UI to try & figure out WTF is going on.
Close your eyes, and attempt to navigate that bastard child of an MC Escher & Rube Goldberg nightmare entirely by the Audio Cues it gives you.
Now you've got the barest inkling of an idea of what it's like as a Blind/VI Windows 8 user.
Not much fun, is it?
=-J
"You can then arrange them, group them, add and remove them as you see fit."
No crap. Or you could have them grouped by the publisher into little "folders" so that all the pieces of one "app" are grouped together... Oh wait. That wouldn't be "modern", would it?
Also, you could arrange, group, add and delete Start Menu entries a long time ago (Win95+IE4?). Strange thing is that most people didn't arrange them, and it just turned into a mess of entries based on the order they were installed. Which is why they dropped that again in Vista.
I think they were rolling with the 'fake it until you make it' style of thinking. If they just put out enough good chatter about Windows 8, and maintained it long enough, it would, in time, demolish the 'hump' of old biases, and everyone would embrace the new interface, praising it as the new way of doing things. Very marketing, very psychological, very wrong. They made the same mistake that venture capitalists complain about when interviewing potential candidates -> you need to be profitable from day one, or, in this case, the interface needs to sell itself from the get go. Techs need to pickup a copy of the new Windows 8 interface, and find that it scratches an itch they didn't even knew they had....something like buying a new car, pressing a button, and finding a drinks dispenser / ice chest.
And the techs have been telling MS, since day one, that Windows 8 not only did not do that for them, but that it went in the other direction. The computer industry would have been happy with Windows 8 being Windows 7 SP3, and paid for the privilege of running it. See, this is how bad MS messed this up...they took something that worked, made it worse, then publicly denounced everyone that said so, right up until the larger players started weighing in, then MS started backing off....long after antagonizing everyone in the industry.
The truth is that Microsoft's "innovation" stopped at XP and Office 2003.
There are sort of fundamental things, like hammers and nails.. that once they reach a certain degree of technical proficiency, any improvements from then on, are generally cosmetic.
And really, Office 2007 and the IDIOT non removable ribbon, was just window dressing on a shit product.
Docxs ? was just a way to force all the people without the newest version of MS Office, to go and upgrade to the latest version.
Windows 8? In looking at XP, how many REAL technical improvements, were genuinely needed to move the product with the times and advances in technology, security and functionality?
Without getting too hair splitty - underneath all the hype and bullshit, it's probably about the same as giving your car a full service, with a grease and oil change, new plugs, filters and a clean up.
In other words, not a lot.
From XP and Office 2003 onwards, 95% of these "improvements" have been made solely to keep people on the upgrade tread mill.
The Microsoft Operating System, and MS Office, kind of reached their technical epoch, just like the Hammer and the nails did, a long time ago.
"Looking at OS stats on Steam, Windows 8 64-bit in third place (behind Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit), so I think there are more people using it than you realise."
Windows 7 64-bit 54.18%
Windows 7 13.39%
Windows 8 64-bit 10.86%
Windows XP 32-bit 8.25%
Windows Vista 64-bit 4.45%
...
Win8 might have a third place, but the two places above Win8 take 67.57% of the cake, vs. 11.65% for Win8. (I'm adding the measly 0.74% for Windows 8 32-bit.)
The difference is, of course, that on OSX you're changing the UI paradigm to the one that MS originally ripped off anyway. Instead of a Start menu, you get Spotlight (search for apps), the Apple menu (for system-wide stuff) and the Dock.
Oh, and if you have to use Office, even with the latest 2011 version you still have MENUS. You know, the ones that MS excised in the Windows version. Yes, 2011 has the Ribbon, but it is less annoying as it doesn't take that much space as in Windows and you can bypass it mostly thanks to the menus.
Thanks to Windows 8, jumping to OS X is now less painful than jumping into the Fabulous Fred toy OS...
Same here, only a few use it and everyone I know who does immediately installed a 'start menu replacement'. Most of the people around me who were still on XP bought Windows 7 instead (a few of them because of me; I warned them that if they waited too long they couldn't buy Win7 anymore even if they wanted to).
I'm much more curious how much Windows 7 has sold in the past months. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the 'sale spike' Microsoft was hoping to get with Windows 8 actually happened with Windows 7.
I used to think you could convert a lot of things [to an all-in-one smartphone] but I'm older and wiser, I think. You end up with a 'spork' - a combination of a spoon and a fork. It's no good as a spoon and no good as a fork.
They do actually exist (an example being the Splayd, and ironically they're actually quite good for the job.
As for the software, one has to wonder why there isn't any kind of industry-standard way to judge this. Or would that be too simple and straightforward rather than allowing all the trickery and marketing wordplay that now goes on?
and consumers are desperate to downgrade.
Which customers are these? last time I checked, only nerds could reinstall an older operating system anyway, unless they're taking their PCs in to be downgraded.
The vast majority probably wouldn't even notice if Windows 3.1 was installed.
The vast majority probably wouldn't even notice if Windows 3.1 was installed.
Okay, who is the MS tard who keeps downvoting anything against their redmond friend?
The aforementioned quote is the truth, doesn't matter how downvotes it gets from MS sales droids.
If you actually worked in the PC repair business, I'm sure you'd understand.
The Spife is a combination of the spoon and the knife.
Unlike the spork the spoon part works, but its sharply ground knife edges cut everything that they contact.
This makes it hard to use for eating as the food slips out of the now lacerated mouth; additionally when you drop it in pain, it cuts everything else, especially wildly optimistic estimates of its popularity. If dropped in the wrong way it may also decimate future population forecasts!
Then more and more people will realise that MS Office is not really vital to what they are doing.
If I worked for MS in their Office division, I'd be trying to put it on more and more platforms. That would be the only way to keep the revenue stream up if the volumes of windows sales was declining. Sadly and after a few chairs had been thrown the politics of MS would prevail and the head honcho of the Office division starts to think seriously about giving it all up and growing garlic for a living (Garlic to ward off the MS Ghouls)
I think the 'spork' comment is the best parallel here. There will be people for whom the Windows 8 experience goes well but they will be people with a fairly light requirement who would probably have been equally happy with almost any offering (Apple/Linux/Generic tablet etc).
The problem comes with people who put some serious mileage on their PC through a variety of paths be it spreadsheets or large documents or even just gaming. These people will not be happy with the Windows 8 experience and mostly because it does things differently for no significant gain. It may well be that the hardware requirement is lower, it may even be that it boots faster or makes perfect toast but the effort to either relearn how to get to everything or to remap all the functions to where you expect them to be is just too great.
Anecdata is not evidence....
My non-techy father hates it, possibly more than he hated vista. Of course to him it's the computer that's evil rather than the interface, so the Vista laptop was horrible, the Win 7 all-in one was perfectly pleasant and "this stupid new machine doesn't seem to do anything properly". I must admit it took me ages to do anything on it either, and I had to resort to poking around in the program files directories to try to figure out what was installed on the damn thing. I had a better time with Unity and that's saying something.
I have a techie friend who's been evaluating it under the MSDN license too. His got stuck in an update loop. Update, fail, reboot, revert, update, fail...
So there you go, two or three counterpoints to "it works well for me".
I've used every version from MS-Dos up, even a bit of Millenium edition. I've always got on with them. (And CP/M before that, and BBC Micro before that and currently Linux MINT )
But Win 8 on a desktop is a right royal pain and I hate it.
And I'm not an idiot, Unlike the d***head who throws that kind of comment out
Our clients skidded all purchasing orders to a halt when Windows 8 came out. This is in spite of an XP to Windows 7 migration project going on corporate-wide in at least one of our clients. And I'd like to note, the project is still Windows XP to Windows 7 migration. Windows 8 is banned from corporate premises. Only one exception was made for a consultant who was hoodwinked into buying Win8. Said consultant has since switched back to Win7 because Win8 blows.
For the clients I'm talking about, this would be a "sample size" of at least 2500 users. Not one of them wants Windows 8. The real idiots are Sinofsky and whoever thought the Metro/Modern UI was a good idea to force upon Windows users.
On my side, I congratulate Microsoft, as they ended up making me switch to Mac, even though I hate Apple's wall garden policies and Jobs dick moves and control freakery that seem to still haunt the company, even 2 years after his death. At least Apple seems to be better at testing the waters on UI changes.
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