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Get the true story behind Windows 8

if one of the companies that needs to stay with an XP compatible system due to very expensive mission critical software that won't work with Win 7 or Win 8 were able to help them out with funding.

There's nothing wrong in introducing the "touch experience" to the OS interface. But even if it was desired, the UI should not have been made so that it becomes an almost mandatory feature. It is only good when working on small screens that fit in your hand. Good for smartphones, good for tablets.

But now? We've got also giant screens and notebooks and desktops, for which the touch interface will EVER remain almost unusable or unpractical. And that's the bad thing about it.

The Windows 8 UI is really ugly on large screens, it does not display enough things, and makes all operation longer to realize than before.

What is worse : if you don't have any touch interface on your PC, now you need to point your mouse on extremely tiny screen areas, without any visual hint just to perform basic operations.

And why is the UI so poor with 2 colors ? Why isn't there the keyboard shortcuts we were used too ?

And why text input has been alsmost completely removed, forcing us to slide tiles on screen just to find and select an element ? Why do we need to always scroll on screen? Didn't Microsoft learn from Web designs that having to scroll to find the relevant content constantly was a bad design ? The important and most used items should be visible on screen.

Windows 8 has been made for smartphones and tablets, or for browsing contents in the Media Center for sites like Youtube, where the main interaction is just about BROWSING available contents randomly. It is not made for working on any content. The UI is also not customizable at all as at was in all past versions.

And if this was not enough, the applications (NOT JUST the menu) that use the tiled interface are now extremely slow to startup. And this interface is also extremely unstable and crashes almost constantly. I really hope that most applications won't use this interface, or that it will just be an optional featured view. People still want to have a more classical interface available for EVERYTHING that is about content edition/creation: at work, we don't spend our time just browing contents randomly, we need to work on forms, we need to be able to integrate various contents from various sources. The keyboard is NOT an option and nobody will like using a touch screen just to create a document. Even if this is in Word or Excel. Microsoft is even killing its own Office suite.

Windows 8 is just meant to be used like a web browser for viewing contents created by others. Or just to play some games. Really not professional.

Additionally Windows 8 does not work correctly in a VM for virtual installations as a guest OS. And this is unexplainable given the poor display requirements it needs for just displaying a few things.

Even the most basic games for Windows 8 are crashing constantly : just try Freecell on Windows 8 : not only it consttantly takes minutes to launch, but also it first required you to create an online account on the Xbox site, but there's no way to terminate any game : the game crashes after just a few moves, just because there are SO MANY implementation bugs in this unstable interface. May be you don't care about those free games but they are supposed to demonstrate the usability and stability of this interface, and the demo has failed completely ! This is just enough to justify that application developers should NOT develop anything for it, and that they should continue to use their own designs.

IF you want a really usable touch interface, better look at what Google proposes : it works, it's fast, it's reliable and won't crash, it's visual design is also much better and does not look like a childish game for people under 8 years old. With Windows 8 we really feel that Microsoft consider us as stupid uneducated people. And still its interface is completely unintuitive.

Finally I don't like putting my fingers on the surface of a screen : greasy tracks will look ugly, and we'll contantly need to cleanup the screen.

Windows 8 is just horrible, unusable, unintuitive, full of bugs, slow, it requires too much gesture with just a mouse and no touch device..

what was the Microsoft intent when reinventing an interface that is just a lot of menus? Even if this interface was made for being usable wth a finger, it does not change the fact that it is just a lot (long) scrollable menus

I am going along the same lines as being practical. Playing around with smartphone and tablet technology is great fun for the person on the go, but for those of us who are hardcore keyboard clickers really don't have much love for Windows 8. I did the beta thing on my old computer, which is a odd to really say old because it's not even 12 months old, but technology does not stand still with computers, so things get old fast. The new computer came with Windows 8. After two months I replaced it with Windows 7. Yet, as much as I try to keep up, I am bored with it all. I'm going to make the leap and go back to one of my earlier loves in my computer history and purchase the new Commodore products. They are capable of running multiple OS and can easily be switched back and forth. I can have my Windows 7 and the Commodore OS and enjoy my twilight years.

Sorry guys if this has been covered elsewhere but...

I'm a general IT support guy, computers, smartphones, tablets, corporate phone systems, you name it I support it. So I use Windows 8 on my PC with various virtual machines running other operating systems as required, and Android on a mk. 1 galaxy tab which I uses as a phone (sad I know). I've been using MS products since DOS 2. and Windows 1 (now that was c**p!

What I see is Microsoft running a broad marketing strategy trying to increase the uptake of each of their existing platforms by using the customer base of all of the others.

"Hey, they all look the same, run mostly the same apps and most important you learn one you can use them all!"

Now I know that the quoted bit above isn't completely true but that's the direction I believe they want to go in. I ran the concept past my non IT geek wife who finds learning software use a chore like many of the general punters out there and she LOVED IT. So maybe, just maybe Win 8 will go some way towards increasing Microsoft's market share in phones and tablets which let's face it is what they want in the end.

As far as I'm concerned from hating W8 RC I now use the released version of W8 pro on a 2 year old non touch screen Dual monitor setup and it's OK. Not great but I can use it and it does nothing which bugs me too much. I also mix both old and new Windows software with apps reasonably happily and my Microsoft ID integrates with my domain logon, what's more my progress from one of my games has followed my id and when I re-installed the program there it was.... Hang on where the heck did that come from again?

OK as a network admin with security as a consideration that rings some potential alarm bells but it just means I need to give more consideration to what I'm going to allow my users to do before I roll out Win 8 PCs onto corporate domains. Which in turn means they may be a bit hacked off when they see the security restrictions I'm going to be imposing.

But then consideration for the needs of Sysadmins are not apparently the top of the pile when OS changes are put in place.

But I ramble so I'm going to shut up now. ;o)

And everyone's fear of the missing start button will be forgotten

I used to joke about people who believe in reptilian aliens and things like that, but after experiencing Windows 8, I don't see how anyone from this earth could have come up with it.? Now that I think about it, I'm not sure that Redmond is physically connected to the rest of earth either, considering the year after year of hassle after hassle, nightmare after nightmare, we have trying to keep a Windows OS functioning properly. When Vista came out, I bought a non-oem version, just to get MS support, but after months of email exchanges with their so-called support, they never did fix (or figure out the cause) of one particular annoyance (how files kept getting corrupted that sfc could not fix.) I go to Microsoft Answers to get their advice, and it appears that their response to my latest issue (with Win8)--to reinstall, or "refresh," Windows--is the best they could do. (A simple registry fix from elsewhere solved the problem.) The greatest annoyance I have with Win8 is the protocol I've developed over the years to keep Windows running is more difficult: just make images regularly, then restore a complete image when something happens. By making regular images, when I figure out the cause of a problem, I can choose an image that predates whatever it was that led to it. But the built-in image tool (WindowsImageBackup) is a nightmare. It warns you that it might overwrite a previous image, but you would think that, if your image is, as in my case, 68 GB or so, and there are 244 GB of empty space available, that it would add a new image (as it did in Vista and Win7). Oh no: it decided to delete the old image anyway--not that having more than one image available to choose from would help, since my experience with WindowsImageBackup is identical to my experience with Ghost--it doesn't necessarily see all the images when there are more than one, and, on occasion, it won't see any, even though you can see them with explorer. Microsoft has stopped dancing with who brung them, so to speak, when it comes to the ease of doing simple things, like getting to safe mode. And what is the deal with system restore? It used to be that it would automatically create restore points before installs, but now--who knows. I have screenshots of 48 different restore points on a Vista machine, but on my brand new Win8 machine, I had gone through a couple of days worth of third-party software installations, then I needed System Restore. Guess what: there were 3 restore points, and it wasn't that it had used up the space, either--the first thing I do is give it tons of space. System restore is the only thing that brought me over from my Amiga to Windows: when it came out with WinMe, I said, finally, someone at Microsoft had an actual thought. Little was I prepared for the all-nighters fixing one issue after another. I thought I was smart, much later, waiting until SP2 came out to get Vista, but, oh no, that was still nightmare city. Win7: I think, by accident, they did something right there, but Win8 is proof that doing something right will get you fired in Redmond. I don't have downgrade rights on my Win8 laptop, and I will most likely buy a Win7 Ultimate to do a clean install, just to get something that human beings can use. Tiles are wonderful for the illiterate among us. Go back to kindergarten--play with your fingers.

Even if you take Windows 8 out of his talk. The "message" itself makes it worth watching. Excellent principles.

I really welcome every attempt of Microsoft to cope in every market they can, but why, WHY they don??t have made that stupid metro interface an optional item?
Maybe Microsoft must learn from the automotive industry, if something works well don??t change it. For sure today we can build cars with joysticks and touch sensitive brakes on a screen, but cars still have wheels and gear shifts and pedals just because is what we expect when we drive a car (and i know that some concepts have joysticks and stripes and so on but how many of them have you seen in the streets?).
So Microsoft has dumped the wheel, ther gear shift and pedals and replaced all with a "concept user interface" that suits well only to certain devices, and forget the huge quantity of us that works in front of desktops or notebooks.
And because human fingers are not stylus or 3 pixel width sticks, you can say goobye to precision, not to mention the fact that i don??t like my finger messing over my screen and my own arm hiding what i am doing over a 23" vertically shaped LED screen.
Is excellent for tablets, is excellent for phones, is crap for PCs.
Please, do not get my wrong, i love tablets and i love smartphones and i use them everyday, and i love the idea of one unified OS behind all these devices, but i also believe that one user interface can??t cope with all the situations, so let??s give the user the choice.
Give us back that desktop!!

I have used many versions of Windows for 20 years before it was overhauled into a phone OS for power hungry devices. It used to be a very interesting, and significant product, it was actually a general purpose Operating System that supported many windows at the same time, and was useful for many general purpose computing tasks.

Now when one of my friends or customers calls in desperation and says, "I just bought a new computer with Microsoft Window version 8, and I can't get it to do anything" I say, "Calm down, that is normal, neither can anyone else, bring it back to the store"

I can understand how Microsoft would like to develop a touch screen based operating system similar to what is on the tablet surface. I don't understand how they expect corporate environments to replace all their computers with touchscreen computers in order to functionally use the operating system to be productive. In order to recapture the corporate market, they will have to remove the touchscreen component and provide a usable GUI as I am sure that corporations are not going to go out and replace all their computers with new touchscreens. They should rebrand the OS, Windows 8 Touch or something, leave Windows 7 support forever, or develop a new OS that will not include a touchscreen interface.

There is something wrong with this presentation. I understand the "Content is King" philosophy. But in business - all I want to do is access office and view my directories. The last thing i need is a million different tiles distracting my users from doing their work. Further -more, the deal breaker for me with the surface tablet is that it doesn't support Outlook. Even with the lack of support for a domain, Outlook would have been the clincher for my mobile staff.

It strikes me all Microsoft have done is add an extra GUI that windows 8 boots into (yet another thing to crash?). I have experienced enough problems over the years just getting explorer.exe to boot on start-up. Never mind an extra GUI? So are they really innovating, or just copying Google and Apple.

Show me some true innovation!

I too have to agree with Earnest. If they had added Metro as an optional primary interface and not broken the desktop, I'd be wildly enthusiastic about Win8. As it is, I'm still quite thrilled with some of the technical improvements.... But that means nothing since the UI is more of a hinderance than a help. IMHO, Win8 comes across as MS going into a blind mans house and not just replacing all his furniture with new, slightly different and occasionally better furniture, but then rearranging it too.

I thought about this for a while. It seems like there are 3 ways to interact with your system... Mainly Mousing, Mainly Keyboard, and Mainly Touch. It seems that in the rush to push Touch on everyone/everything, they lost sight of the other two.

This is not a big deal for those who fall into the Mainly Keyboard category. If anything, they seem to have added to the capability of getting around with the keyboard. Then again, this may just be the higher visibility that keyboard commands have, as I see them used a lot as workarounds or 'answers' to navigation issues in Win8.

Those of us who Mainly Mouse though... We seem to be Microsoft's forgotten children. I'm assuming that those in this category are like me - Visualy oriented. If I want to do something, I want to see the option for it. Close a window? Look for the "x" and click it. Search for somthing? Click Start and type in the entry block. Configure the techy details on my system? Click Start, Click on Control Panels. It seems like most of my visual cues for what I can do have been removed and I'm now expected to remember a laundry list of keyboard commands or have the dexterity to get my pointer to the right place on the right corner for what I want to do... all whithout those visual cues to tell me which functions are hidden where.

Now, don't get me started on why a single page PDF document MUST consume an entire 24" monitor's worth of real estate....

Jensen said the reason Word usurped Word Perfect was because of a better experience. That's not how I recall it. The organization I worked in at the time (60,000+) was using Word Perfect and only switched because Microsoft offered the next version of Windows for free if we agreed to switch to MS Office. Most users grieved the loss of Word Perfect as it was a much better application (reveal codes anyone?). So sad to say, Microsoft doesn't always win on innovation, they win with shrewd business practises.

Like the blue flash, big deal, yeah it looks bad, but whats worse is trying to do something simple like change the display brightness for the tablet. That requires you to go to the desktop, control panel, and power settings.
Something like that is a huge failing grade.
Or how about how the RT version is running a full windows system, that just has a whitelist of applications that can run in the desktop. The full version just removes the whitelist, and charges twice as much money for it.
But no, they were more worried about the kerning in the Start font, so they added a custom font for that. But wait, don't fonts slow down Windows. They should have just used a vector image.

And why can't the start menu search differentiate between metro and non metro items?
DPI settings, printers, you have to guess which to click, one takes you to the right place, and the other to a useless Metro location.

Did they even consider what people use desktops for? Probably not facebook. Why on earth would I want tiles that update from facebook, or show current bing searches. If they wanted tiles to be useful, make it so win32 apps can update tiles. Then devs could use them in legacy programs more easily.

Microsoft did a great job of making a mobile OS. It looks nice and works well on any multi-touch device. Metro on the other hand is a piece of crap when it comes to desktop computing. It's terrible for multiple monitor support. All Microsoft needs to do to fix their screw up is enable the Start Menu and booting into the desktop as an option. Microsoft needs to allow users to transition from Windows XP/7 to 8 and not force 8 on the user. I have yet to meet a power user that has anything good to say about the Metro UI and it's these power users that make the decisions on what OS the company operates on.

The story of Microsoft trying to make their product sound like a gift to end users reminds me of Jay Wilson at Blizzard explaining that Diablo 3 is fun because he, not the gaming community, knows what fun is.

Microsoft you targeted a niche and will do well with that niche market, but your decision to abandon the desktop was a big mistake.

Anyone else feel like their IQ drops drastically when you use Metro?

> Anyone else feel like their IQ drops drastically when you use Metro?

I usually feel my IQ drops drastically when I use MSWindows in general, but I'm stuck with supporting it on various systems.

then yes.

Windows 8 is the same as DOS.
Both I end up having to google to figure out how to use.
Both end up with tons of workarounds.

Nt

I thought the designers had popped some LSD before designing Win8, and in their drug-induced state of mind really believed they were designing something clever.

The standard excuse of "if you don't like Win8, just keep using Win7" doesn't work if you're supporting machines that never left Win XP. My brother's computer (Pentium M processor) can't even ***RUN*** Win8, and MS has decided you can't buy Win7. Fine by me: When XP support goes away, my brother will just have to move to Linux.

We've hacked this around repeatedly. Yes, you can buy W7, both pre-installed or as a standalone software package. However, you have to work a bit to find it.

go to Amazon.com
Type "Windows 7" in the search box.
Enjoy

I still buy my products in physical stores. So no, no one has it anymore. Next excuse? Like I said, I think I'll be spending the next year setting up a migration to Linux for my brother (I've already been on Linux since before XP came out).

You don't want use an online store to buy Windows 7, the product you apparently prefer. Didn't you have to use an online download site to get your Linux installation media, and an online repository to get applications? I find that ironic, bordering on hypocritical.

It's right across the way from the Apple store.
Unlike the Apple store, it's very chaotic. Most customers walk out of the Linux store empty handed because their "geniuses" can't agree with eachother on which distro you should use.

1. Amazon ships physical installation disks of Windows 7.
2. You can purchase Windows 7 online at Best Buy and ship it to the nearest store if you like the physical store experience. Don't be surprised if the Best Buy clerk looks a bit puzzled at you. Neither of us see the point.

Fatal flaw in their logic is the comment about people carrying tablets and laptops around together and wanting one device that could do both. Hence you need a desktop environment and the tile environment and that is where they fell off the horse, because that mishmash is why people hate it, because it does neither well. What they should have done is had some sort of setting that could lock it into desktop mode with a traditional start menu for people who aren't into tablets. And Windows RT is an even bigger joke, because the desktop mode is largely useless, they should have just not had it in the RT version.

Thanks for giving information about how the Windows 8 operating system was developed.Windows 8 represents the biggest change to Microsofts operating system.

CS Cart Development

Windows 8 will definitly be a successful OS... on moble hardware... as long as Apple will not release an x86-64 version of his own IOS!

Then, Windows will DIE!

However, did you even try Windows 8 on a "non touch" desktop/laptop (even a small factory one)?

To be polite: It's just a pain in the neck!

Just my two cents (and I'm far to be an Apple boy- just too costly for me).

Like most geeks, I have too many computers. But there are 3 that I use the most. There is the desktop that I am writing this comment from. It is running Windows 7 because the Windows 8 UI with KVM, while it technically works, is clunky. Win8 is designed for touch and I don't have a touch screen. And even if I did have a touch screen, my arms are not long enough to touch my screen.

The other one is my android phone. Clearly touch.

But the third is my multi-media PC which is connected to my projection system. I interact with the system through a remote control (although I hope for a Kinect in the future). Windows 8 can work on it, all right, but again, it's clunky.

The point I am trying to make is that different use-cases require different UIs. One size does not fit all.

I've noticed in the last couple of months MS puffing up the Win8 UI in various organs and media. They appear to have called in favors all over to get pieces in respected IT journals and blogs both on how much more wonderful Windows 8 is and, more telling, all the things you can do to make it more like 'classic' windows.

The change management people at MS were obviously sent on sabbatical for a year or more. No supposedly professional software vendor would ever throw something so radically different at their customers and expect to see another year ouside of chapter 11.

I've watched and listened to Mr Harris's presentation and I am still completely underwelmed.
Windows 8 is a toy, for children, it is complete rubbish and the sooner MS put their hand up and acknowledge, and more importantly fix their mistake, the sooner we can look forward to using future versions of what I consider the best business OS, with assurance.

A bad idea.

Not only does the GUI suck, but all sorts of passive content pay per view junk is also jammed in as well. Poison always works better if it has a candy coating. Add that to the fondle and sniff user controls and you get a really bad mix.

I wanted to like it - thinking I would learn something - could not get past 15 minutes of bull.
He conveniently retells history and exaggerates unnecessarily to make a point.
Don't waste your time watching this.

While it is excellent to added new user interface into the new OS, I thought OS suppose to provide facilities and services to end users and not limit users with policies. There is no justisfication in taking away the whole Desktop/Start button interface and leave users with no choices.

However, if you give Windows 8 a try, you may end up asking yourself why you thought you needed it.

> However, if you give Windows 8 a try, you may end up asking
> yourself why you thought you needed it.

You mean asking yourself why you thought you needed Win8??? Yeah, I could see that being the case...

that's exactly the question I reached, not the one JJ intended; at least for this year.

The main problem I had with those blogs was that the MS people writing them make claims about Windows 7 that are simply not true.

Case in point, it's mentioned in a number of them that you cannot change the number of pinned items Start shows in Win7, but it's right there in the configuration dialog so you can change it. This limit is then used to justify the start screen.

I did generally enjoy the articles but there are a few of these "errors" in them which destroys their validity somewhat.

Exercise to try and convince people it all makes sense. However, the section on Windows 8 makes it clear that Win 8 is aimed solely at the mobile user personal entertainment market and totally ignores the real needs of business, the enterprise, and workplace productivity except where they can make it seem to fit in.

That all makes sense for the smartphones and tablets, but is a major slap in the face for enterprise and those after an OS for productivity, and also for those who want to have something they're familiar with to use at home. If they'd left the Win Classic desktop and start as an available option they'd have ha d a winner, but what they've done is make life way too hard for too many users.

Both Google (Android) and Apple (IOS) had the good sense to use the same OS for phones and tablets. I don't understand why Microsoft chose separate Windows RT and Windows Phone 8 OSes.

Add this to the confusion that already exists among consumers (and even some Microsoft staffers according to interviews by CNET) between Windows 8 and Windows RT and I think Microsoft has created some major obstacles for themselves with having such a confusing line of OSes. A few days ago Samsung announced they decided NOT to release a Windows RT product in the US because of the costs of educating consumers, due to all the confusion Microsoft has created.