PC-makers hope for Windows 8 hero to sweep up sales In the current tight economic climate, manufacturers of PCs and laptops are eagerly looking forward to the arrival of Windows 8 to rescue their sales. It's worked before: the launch of Windows 7 in 2009 got off to a galloping start, more than doubling equivalent sales of Vista two years earlier. A few corporates even advanced …
@Paul Shirley - It's MS' fault that things have changed between OSes released a decade apart? Well, yes, it is, but good. I don't want a stagnated OS which doesn't develop, just so that a few support guys don't have to bother learning anything. That argument leaves us with Win 3.1, which I assure you, if you run today, will seem piss-poor.
Eeek, touched a nerve (sorry).
"Professionals would be able to remember what to type and where to click"
Quite, but explaining that over mobile phone connection can be somewhat fraught. But as they say you should try everything in life except Morris Dancing and Incest.
"They would also know how to use remote support requests so they didn't need to tell the user anything at all..."
Depends if the actual problem was actually related to the network, (i.e. wireless/dubious hotel setup/Windows 7 weird unknown network type problem for instance), otherwise Logmein is fab.
dx 12 (possibly 13) will be metro only
regular desktop apps will be limited to dx 11 with dx support being phased out, this is one of the reasons Microsoft is dropping Aero Glass from the desktop, because it wants to drop the 3D / DX acceleration from there as soon as possible, new drivers for dx 12 cards will probably not be required to support the legacy desktop for certification leaving non-metro as a poor choice for gamers and game developers. This is how games will be driven to Metro, Windows Live and the Windows marketplace rather than competitors.
Its the fact that MS are deliberately stopping people from not using it.
IF Metro was the right choice for a windows mobile device then people would use it, over trying to hit tiny menus and scroll bars.
But forcing it on desktop users, then going so far as the specifically thwart attempts to allow people to use old UI elements is just crazy.
Even worse when its on Server systems as well.
Pretty much saw it coming when the "Ribbon" was forced down peoples throats.
No "old style menus" option available, you MUST USE THE RIBBON , IT IS BETTER, IF YOU DON'T SEE THAT YOU ARE DEFECTIVE.
And lo and behold, the person running Metro is the person behind the Ribbon as well.
That's the goon paid to downvote anything that is mostly negative towards MS stuff. (one for each post so far).
This is going to confuse him/her.
Win8 Is currently seriously broken for desktop users.
Win7 is quite usable finally.
Citrix and RDP use is actually better from Linux.
"Win8 Is currently seriously broken for desktop users.
Win7 is quite usable finally."
Win8 is almost identical to Win7 on the desktop. You don't HAVE to use any Metro apps at all if you don't want to. The start menu is now full screen, yes, but what were you looking at while you were in the start menu that's so important?
Viz. the security discussion at the end.
"The philosophy is called 'de-perimeterisation'. You harden every device, so every device has its own perimeter, only runs the services it needs to, and only communicates with things it needs to. So there is no single perimeter. The servers in your office only talk to services that they intrinsically trust. So they don't care what the platform is."
So you can't do that in addition to an external firewall? "You harden every device..." It's the company's device then, and they couldn't do that before as well as have a firewall, no? I rather think they could.
There's a reason animals are crunchy[*] on the outside and squishy inside, it's the best way, perhaps only way, of constructing an organism to survive in a hostile environment. It's an energy thing. Why does the author suppose that companies are any different.
[*] by which I mean adequately defended, if not with actual armour then speed, a thick skin, a strong immune system, physical aggression coupled with teeth and claws etc.
Microsoft and the vendors will advocate it...
People will bitch
Vendors will roll it out on new PCs
A majority of people will continue bitching
Microsoft will update it's features
Most people will stop bitching as they've gotten used to it and 'accepted it'
Sure, some of us will use our downgrade rights to Windows 7/Vista or even XP, but rest assured that a large majority of new PC owners over the next 5 years will be Metro users..
Lusty,
Imagine I've a couple of RDP sessions going, email etc. and I want to fire something up quickly without loosing sight of the other stuff that's on going, no good geek stares at a progress bar so tasks are sandwiched in real time and visually.
Metro is like the bighead fat kid at school, all I want to do is start a program or command in a small quick and non intrusive way, Metro wants to get in your face show you it's new toys and talk about his dads new Merc.
Metro shut up, go away I've stuff to get done.
The people who have designed Metro are in the market of designing interfaces.
Remember the quote "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail" could it be that to fire up a another task you don't need a big interface, acres of screen and to be offered stock prices instead.
If you are sort of person who watches progress bars you wont get it.
Powernumpty, my point was that when you press start you were not looking at those other things, you were looking at the start menu to find what you wanted. You can remove all of the extra stuff from the new start menu if you like and just have the program's you use in there. If there is any scrolling involved you probably have too much crap installed and need to have a tidy because I can fit 32 items on my start menu in windows 8 and not scroll, and that's at the default zoom level.
Command prompt use..
Yeah I'll use one of the modified terminal prompt links from my quick launch bar, won't loose sight of more than 15% screen - oh wait.
Rather than trying to question why people don't like it what about some real good reasons for the change in a desktop environment? Those real program/CAD/Photoshop etc. users at MS (not just people who massage the front ends) how does this improve things?
Don't give me that "spend time cleaning up the thing", if you don't put crap in my way I won't need to use my shovel.
If I get off Win8 case for moment this is where I assume (hope) its going, we will have touch-pads as integral parts of a PC setup, while tethered they have the Metro interface and you use an "upright" or "upleft" gesture to send the program to the main screen left or right, once the main PC is shutdown (or some lower power mode for American minds) the touchpad can be
un-docked and used as iPad wanabee.
While tethered you can chose to have email alerts, skype call or some other simple task/ buttons that leaves the main screens for work.
Who here using CAD thinks touching the CAD screen is a good idea? designed to micron accuracy but hidden under a layer of finger fat...
Photoshop, DTP users oh last nights KFC fingers are really going to help you get that final "blemish free" proof checked.
I'm off to buy shares in a screen cleaning company
---
For the record powernumpty is ironic, sort of play on words like turbochargeidiot not some claim to abilities. Brit humour maybe.
I still don't understand why you think the start menu gets in the way, or why you won't be able to use CAD or photoshop just because they redesigned the start menu. Metro is not the same thing as the new start menu, metro is the new touch interface which some of the included apps can use. Internet explorer for instance has both a touch (metro) and non touch (windows 7) interface and you can use both at the same time if you like. I now run Windows 8 as my main OS and often have Visio, remote desktop manager, word, excel and several putty windows open at once, just like I did in Windows 7. The new start menu allows me to see significantly more search results than did the one in Windows 7. You did realise that the Windows 7 start menu was designed around search, didn't you? And you do realise that despite the lack of a search box you can just start typing in Windows 8 and your results appear full screen and organised? And that you can zoom out, or choose all apps to see the tree view?
...Microsoft will hit their revenue targets in the consumer market over the Christmas period, and follow that with an "onslaught" on the business market to encourage operating system migration during February and March.
Just in time for the big EURO KABLOOIE, the US PREZ PROSTITUTION SHOW, possibly the WAR ON PERSIA's nonexisting nuclear program and not totally impossibly the WEIMAR DOLLAR. We are all set then.
Yes indeed.
I have to say this is painful to read. After 20 years of The Road Ahead and product national-socialism, Microsoft is still hoping that people will try to avoid "connectivity" and "security" issues by standardizing on Windows Eight (weight?) a product with as-yet unknown "features". Yes indeed.
At least for the desktop. Win7 is still running in many places and for those, (lagging) places, a new UI is not a feature, its a bug.
For those which have done the migration, doing another one probably isn't on the cards.
Where Win8 will go ahead is on consumer OEM PCs (no options given) and probably in servers where moving the GUI out of the kernel is a plus. However, companies which like that are probably either *nix already and just moving windows platforms - no hurry or much profit there.
The other place is the laptop-cum-tablet combination for home use. Requirements are simple and you save buying an extra (expensive) screen & battery. I suspect MS will put "co-marketing" funds into this to prevent the same hardware designs appearing with android.
Mostly business use involves clicking a a few desktop icons, one for each app. Employees are generally discouraged from using OS features.
The problem with the PC market is not the OS, its the lack of hardware innovation. Why does the best PC thing in recent years (thunderbolt/lightpeak) have to come from the most closed company? We want more connectvity and more availabilty. Faster CPUs and higher core counts only go so far. I've noticed recently that dual-gig ethernet seems to be disappearing from desktop boards. Bzzt, there goes AoE, decent iscsi at home etc.
Personally I'm mad at intel. I've got a socket 775 mobo. Since then, we've had 1366, 1156, 1155 and 2011, but a top end 775 CPU (Quad-9650) is about the same as a good i5, upper-middle i7 and costs the same (if you can get it). So much change, so little benefit. You might think it was all for the benefit of the chipset makers to prevent pure CPU upgrades.
Win8 won't save the pc market. The PC market just got boring. Look at all the identical PCs - that's the problem, no innovation. Has anyone seen a PC with an extra ultra-low-power core for when not much is going on? If anyone can find a high-power graphics card which can sleep while the PC is on, please let me know. I don't mean just put the screen to sleep, I mean turn off that loud fan on the GPU so I can sleep while downloads continue or while my wife streams video from it to her tablet.
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