The UNTOLD SUCCESS of Microsoft: Yes, it's Windows 7 Microsoft claims it has now sold more than 200 million Windows 8 licenses, in the first update to public sales claims it has offered since last May. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Microsoft executive VP of marketing Tami Reller described the sales growth as " …
When they forced a touch interface onto desktops without a touch interface.
If the idiots had left the start bar alone and allowed desktops to default to the desktop mode, they would have never had this problem.
If MS bothered to ask consumers this would have never happened.
With 8.1 you barely have to use the "touch interface" if you don't want to. Laying out the start-menu as a tiled full-screen affair may not be to everyone's taste, but it IS a totally valid non-touch mechanism for the desktop - fiddling around inside nested menus in a quarter of your screen when you can see everything spread out using your whole screen. If anything, it's more like OSX and I don't remember people rampaging about how that is stupid without a touch-screen.
How do the more popular Linux setups approach this? I didn't think they aped the start-menu, or do they? Don't they mostly let you view your programs in lists or tiled pages?
For the record, I find OS X's Launchpad to be stupid without a touch screen. But it was added as an extra: nothing else was taken away. If anything OS X has become more accommodating over time to those of us that keep regular use applications directly on the dock and the /Applications folder over on the right for start-menu like access to everything else, as Apple has introduced the speech bubble style folder that makes a better show of most /Applications folders.
You are probably correct. My personal upgrade licence sits in a drawer after my three days of hell.
My company has bought around 140 machines with win 8 preinstalled since its release and we scrub it for XP and now win7. Then we realised we can ask the OEM to ship with win 7 and the following dozens of PC's are win7. :)
Of the 100 million I bet a very large % are nothing at all to do with actual end use, and merely 'shipped' licences.
Well... the problem is STILL that Microsoft makes it difficult to use "legacy software" (read, software that isn't dumbed down for the tiled, "Metro" environment and the Microsoft store). That "start menu" is still dysfunctional.
Fuck that... it needs a shell replacement (e.g. ClassicShell) at the very least.
In Linux distributions, at least you have choices on the desktop environments you can use, window managers and GUI behaviour.
Well... the problem is STILL that Microsoft makes it difficult to use "legacy software" (read, software that isn't dumbed down for the tiled, "Metro" environment and the Microsoft store). That "start menu" is still dysfunctional.
I understand that some folk don't like Metro, but in my experience this claim simply isn't true. I can't think of a single item beyond Ext2Fsd that hasn't worked flawlessly when moving from Win7 to Win8, and even with the ext2 drivers I just had to run the installer in Windows 7 mode.
WebEx does not work in IE 11 on W8.1, although it does work in both chrome and FF. Java does not work in the TIFKAM environment, although it does in IE in the desktop. We have several Surface Pros and Pro 2s here. People are giving up both their laptops and their Ipads with them.
Desktop software is no harder to find or use in Windows 8 than it has been in any previous iteration of Windows. If anything, the fact that Windows 8's search is better than previous versions makes it easier to find applications, regardless of whether or not they are Metro apps.
I never used search before 8 because I always found that I could find what I wanted quicker manually, that is no longer the case and for anything that is not pinned to my start screen, I almost exclusively use search to find it where as I used to just open an explorer window and go spelunking in program files.
The whole Metro thing is open to debate, but the claim that Desktop apps are any harder to use than they have been previously is simply false.
"If anything, it's more like OSX and I don't remember people rampaging about how that is stupid without a touch-screen."
You're joking, right? I assume that you're talking about Launchpad...
1 there were (and are) legions of people who hate, hate, HATE Launchpad and who delete it from their systems on sight. A quick look into any Mac-centric forum will show this; Apple's own fora have had several threads removed by the mods 'cause the hate was getting knee-deep. And the hate was _precisely_ the 'iOSification' of OS X.
2 Launchpad is an application. It can be ignored. It can be removed. It is not the default. It does not replace the old interface. I have several Macs, running several different versions of OS X, including versions which have Launchpad (Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks) and I have never used Launchpad beyond a brief experiment with it when it first came out. I decided that it wasn't for me and I dropped it into the Trash. Problem gone.
3 Anyone who thinks that Launchpad and MetroSexual are even vaguely alike has serious issues.
Now, if you weren't talking about Launchpad, well... what in Christ Jesus' name _were_ you talking about, 'cause there ain't no bloody tiles roaming around in OS X!
People are still complaining about Windows 8's touch interface when Windows 8.1 is out there without that touch interface.
Try to keep up people.
And how did Linux approach this? Linux's approach shows it doesn't matter if MS had performed as well as Linux, since Linux isn't taking over the desktop marketplace.
>People are still complaining about Windows 8's touch interface when
>Windows 8.1 is out there without that touch interface.
>
>Try to keep up people.
Whilst that may be the case, the problem is that to Joe Public "Win 8" means Win 8.n. So to them, a PC displaying the 'modern' interface in PC World etc. is a Windows 8 machine, whereas one displaying Win 7 or carrying the Apple logo is perceived as being different. Given the teething problems with XP, suspect MS may have to release 8.2 which is effectively a complete rewrite or do a Vista and move on and launch 9 with a noticeably different UI to 8.
"And how did Linux approach this? Linux's approach shows it doesn't matter if MS had performed as well as Linux, since Linux isn't taking over the desktop marketplace."
The challenge is that most people find their current desktop just as good and do not want to upgrade.
This is what happens when software becomes mature. Then you switch to yearly licensing instead of a one time purchase.
And that is one of the reason Linux don't go anywhere on the desktop - too many different GUIs to target and learn. Developers like some kind of standardization - it greatly help design and development...most users also like it, to switch on a PC and find a familiar environment, not something totally different. Extreme customization is good for just a little percentage of users.
"most users ... like to switch on a PC and find a familiar environment"
That's probably why tablets are taking the marketplace by storm.
Most users don't need or want a full featured PC to connect to Facebook or browse the internet. It's an appliance like a washing machine or vacuum cleaner.
Trying to force a dumbed down tiled UI on people who know what they are doing and can sort things out for themselves was always a stupid idea.
See also Unity on Ubuntu and Gnome 3.
Wildly popular?
I think not.
I quite often use a full-featured PC to browse the internet. Meanwhile my partner did a work assignment yesterday on her iPad (with bluetooth keyboard and cover/stand). There is no single use case for a particular kind of device. That's where Microsoft has gone wrong. The software needs to be able to detect if it's connected to a touch screen, ditto a keyboard, and deliver a suitable experience for that hardware setup.They need to stop trying to guess how people might choose to use their devices.
spot on. I used ubuntu when I have the choice, and I really like unity (so shoot me!) however I also use terminal *a lot* and as a rule much prefer terminal to any of this 'windowing sh!t'. But the point remains, no railroading and you know, I get to choose what works best for me.
I wish people would stop saying "Windows 8 is fine, you can totally avoid Metro".
The ENTIRE point of Windows 8 is to push Metro and their app store.
If you don't use that, you may as well be using Windows 7. Using Windows 8 gives Microsoft the wrong idea in stats. The idea that they pushed out a worthy update.
I'm running it on a 2012 MacBook Air (no OSX at all) so, yes, I do use an SSD and it has reasonable RAM.
That is, however, irrelevant as my comparison was between Windows 7 and 8 *on the same device*.
I'm sorry I didn't point out I wasn't comparing Windows 7 on a 486 with Windows 8 on an ultrabook but I sort of presumed it would be pretty obvious.
> Run leaner? RAM is cheap these days.
The glaring issue EVERYONE that trots out that tired excuse seems to miss is that every machine has limitations on how much memory it will support. And many times users will have already hit that limit before trying to upgrade. And as long as we continue to be mired in an economic depression, no one has the money for new kit either.
My win 7 PC boots from power off to ready-to-go in under 30 sec. If I wanted it any faster, I'd use 'hibernate', faster still - 'sleep' - instantaneous. Even faster than 'sleep', just shut off the monitor before going to 'sleep' myself. So boot speed is NOT the issue. 'Lean' is also not the issue for most modern PC's. Or most newer laptops, for that matter. So tell me again what Windows 8.x is supposed to do for my desktop PC? It sure doesn't strain my GPU, that's a fact...
(OK, I know that deep down the OS is a wee bit more secure. However, I am not entirely convinced that the Win 8 version of UEFI does not have an NSA backdoor baked in. That concern is enough for me to stay away for the nonce.))
> The ENTIRE point of Windows 8 is to push Metro and their app store.
> If you don't use that, you may as well be using Windows 7. Using Windows 8 gives Microsoft the
> wrong idea in stats. The idea that they pushed out a worthy update.
I'm sure I read they binned the start menu after analysing "telemetry" from Windows phoning home now and again - that automated customer feedback thing?
So if same telemetry is still in use, they'll see no-one uses the Metro stuff anyway.
Linux offers CHOICE!
Personally, I use Gnome 2, Mate, or Cinnamon, which offer a conventional start menu. You add frequently-used apps to your task-bar or desktop. I find the menu paradigm perfect for locating one from the many programs that I use infrequently.
But you don't have to be like me. You can install your window manager of choice, and select which window manager you want to use at login time.
I'd have had no complaint with Windows 8 if it had come with an option when I logged in to see the familiar Windows 7 (or even better, XP) manager. But it doesn't, and I hate it.
> With 8.1 you barely have to use the "touch interface" if you don't want to
Actually... a few weeks ago I've purchased an entry-level Acer notebook for my kid, with Windows 8 ex works. It was in an after-Xmas sale, and was quite a bargain. A haswell Celeron with 8 GB of RAM... I'm a PC techie, so I know exactly what I'm buying.
Even before I bought that, I knew that I would try to massage Windows 8 (after an upgrade to 8.1) into looking like XP.
The first thing I tried to solve was... get rid of Acer's recovery partitions (like 35 GB total) and repartition the drive to be ~100 GB for the system and the rest for user data. I prefer to handle system backup in my own way, using external storage - and I prefer being able to restore onto a clean drive from the backup. So it took me a while to build an image of WinPE on a USB thumb drive, as a platform for Ghost... from there it was a piece of cake to learn to rebuild the BCD on the EFI partition (typically hidden). Ghost conveniently only backed up the EFI and system partition, and ignored the ACER crud altogether :-)
Not counting the learning process, it took me maybe 3 days almost net time to achieve my goal = to have lean and clean Win 8.1 with XP-ish look and feel. The steps were approximately:
1) uninstall all Acer garbage (leaving only the necessary support for custom keys and the like)
2) update Windows 8 with all available updates
3) clean up other misc garbage, the most noteworthy of which was the WinSXS directory. I did this using DISM.EXE still in Windows 8, which was possibly a mistake. The "component install service" in the background (or watever it's called) tended to eat a whole CPU core doing nothing... but after several hours and like three reboots it was finally finished. I later found out that it probably had a bug in Win8 and was a breeze if done in Windows 8.1... BTW, I managed to reduce WinSXS from 13.8 GB down to 5.6 GB (in several steps)... and, the system backup size dropped from 12 TB down to 6 GB :-)
4) upgrade to Windows 8.1. This also took surprisingly long. It felt like a full Windows reinstall. The installer asked for several reboots, and the percentage counter (ex-hourglass) actually wrapped around several times... it kept saying funny things like "finishing installation", "configuring your system", "registering components", "configuring user settings", "configuring some other stuff" (literally, no kidding!) but finally it was finished...
5) more crapectomy (delete stuff left over from Win8 etc.)
6) install Classic Shell, adjust window border padding, create a "god mode" folder (only to find out that it's actually pretty useless), install kLED as a soft CapsLock+NumLock indicator (the Acer NTB lacks CapsLock+NumLock LEDs), replace the ludicrous pre-logon wallpaper, get rid of some other user interface nonsense...
Somewhere inbeteween I did a total of three backups: one almost ex works, another with a clean install of Windows 8.1 (after basic post-install cleanup), and one last backup of the fully customized install, just a snapshot of the system partition stored on the data partition (for a quick rollback if the kids mess up the system).
It looks and even works (at a basic level) as Windows XP. Some aspects of the user inteface work slightly different - such as, the Windows now dock to screen edges. No problem there. Even when I install some software whose installer expects the old style start menu, the installer still creates its subfolders in the ClassicStartMenu (technically alien to Windows 8) - great job there.
But: the control panels are still Windows 8 style = bloated and incomprehensible, if you're looking for something that was "right there" in Windows XP. The search tool is still absent from the explorer's context menus - you have to use the global search box in the upper end of the Win8 sidebar. The dialogs that you need to deal with when occasionally fiddling with file privileges are just as ugly as they ever have been (they weren't much nicer in XP before the UAC kicked in in Vista).
I'm wondering if I should keep the Windows 8.1 start button, only to have that nifty admin menu on the right mouse button. The left button = direct access to the start screen (even with smaller icons) is little use to me.
There's one last strange quirk, apparently down to the hyper-intelligent touchpad: upon a certain gesture, possibly by sweeping your finger straight across the touchpad horizontally, the Win8 sidebar jumps out and also the big floating date and time appears - and they just glare at you. This typically happens to me unintentionally - and whatever I was doing at the moment gets blocked away by this transparent Win8 decoration. It is disturbing - I have to switch my mental gears and get out of that Windows 8 shrinkwrap to get to work again... I hope it will be as easy as disabling all the intelligence in the touchpad control panel. For the moment I cannot do away with the Win8 sidebar entirely (even if this was possible) because I still need it now and then...
Some of the control panels are metro-only - and THEY ARE A MESS! There's no "apply" button... it's disturbing to me that I cannot explicitly commit the changes I do, or roll back in a harmless way. Typically when I happen to launch some Metro panel by mistake, I immediately kill the ugly pointless beast using Alt+F4. Thanks god at least that still works.
The new-generation start screen with mid-size icons is not a proper Start menu replacement. For one thing, the contents are not the same. Legacy software installs into the classic start menu, but its icons don't appear in the 8.1 start screen. And vice versa. The new start screen with small icons is better than the endless Metro chocolate bar of Windows 8, but still a piece of crap.
I hope my trusty old Acer that I use daily at work (XP-based) survives until Windows 9 - by then I'll have a chance to decide for myself, whether Windows 9 is back on track in the right direction, or what my next step is. If this is everybody's mindset, it's not surprising at all that Windows 8 don't sell.
"How do the more popular Linux setups approach this? I didn't think they aped the start-menu, or do they? Don't they mostly let you view your programs in lists or tiled pages?"
Linux gives you options and customisable desktops, so you can configure things how you like. Windows 8 offers no such thing (unless you count 'boot to desktop' and changing the colour scheme).
For example, Linux Mint has a menu button very similar to the start menu in the Cinnamon and Mate desktops, but the thing is you can remove it, move it about or ignore it, all using out-of-the-box funtionality. You can even use someone else's third-party menu if you want.
With Linux you have a wide choice of customisable desktop options, Gnome 3, KDE, Cinnamon, Mate and Unity are just a few of them.
If MS bothered to ask consumers this would have never happened.
Beta testers did tell MS that it was awful for desktops. Freakin' UI designers told MS the interface sucked donkey balls. The only thing they did was to disable the registry trick that allowed you to bring back the Start Menu and excised the Start Menu code from Win8. The results are obvious; Win8 ain't selling. Even those 200 million W8 licenses aren't a sure thing; there's a good chance those Win8 boxes were purchased but immediately wiped clean and had a fresh install of Win7 in its place. MS did that with Vista, giving "XP downgrade rights" just to fluff up Vista "sales" numbers. It's just doing it again with Win8.
I find it funny that JDX thinks Win8 looks like OSX. Nope, it doesn't. There's no fullscreen tiled interface here, and the only iOS-ish thing would be the Launchpad. And that's optional, not mandatory like the Start Screen.
"The results are obvious; Win8 ain't selling. Even those 200 million W8 licenses aren't a sure thing; there's a good chance those Win8 boxes were purchased but immediately wiped clean and had a fresh install of Win7 in its place."
I bought a new Lenovo computer with Windows 7 Professional on it. When it arrived, I found out it was really a Windows 8 Pro downgrade because it included some Windows 8 DVD's and no Windows 7 product key sticker. I hate that Windows 8 does not always include a product key. How many other Windows 8 licenses were sold that were actually only used to downgrade to Windows 7? Furthermore, how many of those Windows 8 licenses were for desktop or laptop computers?
Statisticians can do anything with numbers.
They keep on harping on about Chromebooks increasing sales by huge percentages, yet the over all figures show they only have a small single figure market share.
It's great that a company could claim a 50% increase in market share in the last half of the financial year, but if they had only sold 2 items in the first half, a 50% increase is neither here nor there.
No matter what they say about it, Win 8 is not as popular as they might like to think.
"When they forced a touch interface onto desktops without a touch interface"
Thats the main problem, but another minor issue is that they've dragged the desktop GUI back to Win 95 levels of sophistication. Flat , dull graphics with no aero style see-through. Now I know a lot of people didn't like Aero but you always had the option to turn it off. Now its either have mid-90s style widgets or nothing with Win8 (yes I know you can download add-ons that bring it back but they're rarely as good and you always have the potential malware issue).
I honestly get the feeling some interface director at MS had a beef with the previous generation team for whatever reason and decided to bin all the good stuff they did out of spite or because he thought his "vision" was the One True Way. Well its a way - off a cliff.
Because what UI style Google adopted? The UI style of this forum? And many other web libraries and framework also? It's a common problem with designers, they have "fashio waves"... then was flat, now it's all 3D, oooh, add some transparencies - oh well, now we need something new, why don't we do everything flat?
It's like women fashion getting back to the '70s forty years after... and selling you that old stuff as the "new fashion".
BTW, the flat UI works well on space contrained devices like phones - less visual clutter is better there IMHO. But on large desktop screens some hints about the mean of widgets are welcome, to be able to tell what is a button and what is an image is usually welcome...
>But on large desktop screens some hints about the mean of widgets are welcome
This is one of the big problems with all versions of Windows, is it's use of pixel counts to determine the scale of display objects and then only provide very limited capabilities for a user to adjust these settings to take account of the actual physical dimensions of a display.
Obviously, part of the problem is the data provided by the display (via the VESA standard interface) to Windows, but it does seem odd that MS either haven't pushed VESA to include relevant information in their standard, nor have they they given the user the option to use say a 1920x1080 display but specify they want Windows to scale stuff as if the display is a lower resolution such as 854x450 ie. a user gets to see a WVGA display, but with the sharpness etc. that the higher resolution display gives.
> but it does seem odd that MS either haven't pushed VESA to include relevant information
> in their standard, nor have they they given the user the option to use say a 1920x1080
> display but specify they want Windows to scale stuff as if the display is a lower resolution
> such as 854x450
Especially since RadioShack/Tandy managed to do it with DeskMate3; as I remember it, the GUI/desktop was mapped to a large workspace, and then rendered down to whatever your display handled. If RadioShack could do it, why couldn't MS?
You might change your mind if you bought a netbook with touchscreen and Win8.1. I did (I needed a 32-bit system).
Throw out all the adware and plug in a mouse and it's Win7. The touchscreen is much nicer for scrolling and navigating.
W 8.1 gives me the best from the two worlds.
> but another minor issue is that they've dragged the desktop GUI back to
> Win 95 levels of sophistication. Flat , dull graphics with no aero style see-through.
Actually, with WinXP and up, I would usually disable all theming (as in, even disable the "Themes" service) and go back to a Win2000 look. You can't even do *that* in Win8.x. So W8.x is fugly no matter what you do.
they've dragged the desktop GUI back to Win 95 levels of sophistication.
I'd say you went too far into yesterday's future. The Start Screen is basically a revival of the awful Program Manager UI. It's even been commented by TIFKAM detractors, and they're probably right on the spot. App-centric UI makes sense in mobile devices but it never made sense in PCs. The whole Win95 UI revamp copied System 7's (and earlier) approach where files were the main thing on UI navigation, and it was one of the most liked changes in Windows.
And now they backtracked on that.
As many others have mentioned already, the optional Launchpad app which did attempt something similar to what Metro does (stick a mobile UI on a PC OS) is probably the one app that is either unused or hated by most OSX users. Noticeable by the fact that most OSX users are probably iOS users as well, so it isn't that they don't like that UI at all, they like it as long as it keeps to their mobile devices. This is where MS failed: their TIFKAM interface was loved by WinPhone 7 users when they put that on their new revamped WinPho OS. Then they force-fed it to Windows 8 … which has now turned it from "nice mobile UI" to "that fugly thing on new PCs".
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