Windows 8 forum: How real prople will use Windows 8

You seem to be the defender of all that is new. Good or bad you always think it is great. Do you always think change is good no matter how bad it is?

From a person who worked in the field when all these releases came out, you seem to have your facts a bit off. I remember when Win 95 came out and all the people lined up at midnight to buy it. I also remember those same people calling me asking me how to install it. They all seemed to love it even tho they just could not figure out why drivers did not work or why it BSOD so much. M$ got close to getting it right with Win 98 and then dropped the ball again with ME. With ME people begin to get leery of M$ and it releases of new OSes. I do admit that people did push back on XP but that was to be expected because the original XP was junk and M$ did not begin to get it right until SP2. Now that Vista has solidified the M$ good release bad release schedule people have caught on to how it works. If you need a reminder, it failed to break 25% of the OS market. Win 7 had to be rushed to market and shot by it in less then a year. People jumped ship on Vista faster then rats jumping from a sinking ship. That was a dismal showing, did you say the same thing about it before it was released. If you want to see just how bad Vista did, check the link below and see how it just basically lays flat and how fast 7 jump in use.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-200807-201203

METRO is going to be a disaster, no matter how hard people try to sell it by bringing up false facts about the past.

Remember, we do not have good stats on how people liked or dislike things prior to Win 98. The internet was in it infancy and no one even knew what a blog was. AOL was the leading internet provider during those days. During the Win 3.2 and before that all we had was bulletin boards. I know by experience because I lived and worked in it. I just wondering what your occupation was and how many puters you built and install M$ during the days you claim to know what the people where thinking. How many people called you up asking for tech support or if you knew what this was or what that did.

I hope you read other sites beside CNET forums. I am not the only person who thinks M$ trying to make the desktop, laptop look and fell like a cellphone or tablet. Did yo read the link in this post. It says a lot about how Win 8 and this new change we must except.

http://forums.cnet.com/7723-33042_102-557840/windows-8-survey-half-who-have-tried-the-os/?tag=contentBody;threadListing

As far as being bent on trying to tell the world, I think you give me, my opinion and CNET forums to much credit. We are just a speck in the universe and the internet. But, I do enjoy expressing it and reading replies like yours which express all change is good and must be excepted. I think it comes from our different backgrounds. In Merica we take pride in not falling in step when we are told to. I have no idea how it is across the pond.

For example. You say that those in your office and the 150 plus user resisted the upgrade to 95. That is surprising to me, at least by what I saw. Here, M$ was just another player in the business market. I use to get a kick out of the different system I ran into. Shot, most business still had dumb terminal and had no desire to move to M$. The thing I remember was the long lines at midnight and the excitement 95 generated. It seems every store that sold software had 50 or more people with home puters waiting for the store to open to get the new Win 95 so they could get away from 3.1. Why it was so much different across the pond baffles me but that is what makes our world so much fun. I bet anything if I could find most of them they would still tells us that 95 was a great OS. But then again they did not have to support it. My favorite saying when someone ask me why it BSOD was, oh it suppose to do that, just to remind you that M$ wrote it. To be fair, at least half of the BSOD in Win 95, 98, ME, XP and Vista had more to do with badly written programs and drivers then the OS.

The thing M$ and those who are saying that we are stuck with this Metro is missing one important fact. M$ does not have the hold on the market as they use to. They think by making the touch screen a dominate input device and writing the OS around it, that they can capture more mobile market share. They where able to leverage almost total control over the browser market back in the day with IE by making it free and including it in the OS. Those days are long over and we no longer have to take what they try to jam down out throats. Vista proved that. Remember it never captured the market share it was suppose to. When Metro turns around and bites them in the rear and people give up and move to other devices M$ will not be their choice for anything.

Like you said, time will tell. If we use past history we can make a prediction. It is going to fail. It is going to make ME, Vista, Google Firefox and the new ZoneAlarm v10 look like pure genius wrote those changes.

You just stated the primary problem with Windows 8 METRO. I thought that you had missed the fact that they designed it to turn our desktop, laptops into cellphones, tablets. That will be the reason that puter sells will jump before the release of it. I wonder if anyone at M$ knows how much more a touch screen is going to add to desktop and laptops. The last laptop I priced was close to $200 more with the touch screen. Do they really think people are going to be shelling out that extra money just so they have the touch experience. Time will tell but if we use history and observe how the lowest priced units are the highest sellers we can predict that people are not going to go running to get the true METRO experience.

I understand that M$ has to look to the mobile market if they want to stay in the game. I have stated in comments about news articles that METRO seems good for the mobile devices but M$ is taking it to far by trying to capture the mobile market by carrying it over to out desktop. They succeeded in crippling the browser market and taking control of it back in the 90's, but this will not work in the mobile market.

The key word in your last statement is Win 7 "like" desktop. What I saw and experience left me wondering how they could call that anything "like" Win 7. As I have stated many times that if they make METRO a service so we can go in and disable it, they will be able to sell this to the PC buying public. Once the user gets past METRO screen he still has to deal with other things that is going to turn them off to the whole mobile experience on a desktop, laptop. They have a long way to go to make it Win 7 "like" enough to make the average user except it. Remember, most Windows user ARE NOT power user. I know a lot of people who use a Wintel machine that are going to be lost inside the Win 7" like desktop. I remember when they started having Windows turn off the puter, I think that was Win 98. It did not always work and when the machine did not turn off and froze they did not know that all they had to do was just unplug it. I do not know how many times I got yelled at by a customer as they explained to me that you never unplug the puter while Windows was running. These people are still out there and still use puter. Win 8 METRO is going to blow these people minds. With this release M$ is throwing years of muscle memory out the window and is going to make them relearn everything they know on how to use their puters. The one thing I can say is I am so glad that I will not be out there getting yelled at.

Do you really think that the current (infancy) version of Metro can't develop into something equal to or better than Android for phones and tablets on, for example, Nokia phones. Nokia committed itself heavily to Windows and I think they can make it.

Your calling it a disaster already now makes me think you don't agree.

Kees

The facts speak for themselves. Bob 2.0 won't be picked up by the enterprise customers. It is a radcal change and the fact that MS seems to be promoting the "shopping and social networking strengths" is a huge detractor. Add to that how it behaves by defaulting things to take up the whole screen when I have people in accounting and grants that typically have a six or so Excel files open at the same time as well as a few Banner windows open it is bad enough for them as it is. Bob 2.0 isn't going to make their life easier. It is going to cause all kinds of issues for them. Besides the fact that while I haven't tested Bob 2.0 with our accounting system I seriously doubt it will work with it and I have my doubts it will work with our imaging system.

Really the entitled, spoiled brat, hipsters on the committee that came up with these ideas how enterprise people like things to work didn't talk to any of them. They probably just run with their Playskool (iPad) tablets thinking that everyone wants to work that way. Sorry but no. Hell I still hate the ribbon. I can work so much faster with icons, menus and alt keys than with this big block Playskool crapware.

If you can completely disable it and flip to a fully functional (Classic) environment and force that as a GPO to prevent people from breaking their systems then I'll be fine with it. Don't go there with the reg hack either as that isn't really a fully functional classic environment.

I totally agree. MS has missed the mark, and continues to miss the mark. Programs and functions have been discarded from Windows and labeled bloat despite millions of requests to have them put BACK! The real bloat is the miserable GUIs that users are forced to navigate through. Functions were buried, under multi tiered menu options, and names of others were changed with (In my opinion) no regard paid to the people who actually had to use the OS. The MS response was to direct people to the on line documentation. Yeah right!

I was one of the people that participated in the WIN 7 beta. As I asked questions, I was directed to either registry hacks or 3rd party software. Neither of was an actual fix for the problems. I felt my input was ignored. (Yeah I was pretty negative there also. ) Joe user does not want to hack the registry to get the OS to work right, he just wants it FIXED! 3rd party software does not work the same way as the original, and if it did, they would be sued into oblivion. My productivity in Office and Windows using the new software went down the crapper, as I was forced to navigate through nested menus, with no hint of what lays below. Even after learning where MS hid things, it still takes me longer to get the same things done, while I wend my way through the nested graphic menus, or make due without scrapped tools. Complaints about missing productivity tools or referencing missing features that were in XP in forums, were often handled by advising the complainer to go back to XP. (I still have a machine dedicated to XP.) Posters often referred to this as going backwards. I disagree with that.

I'm mentioning XP, Vista and Win 7 here, but I promise I'll try to get to the point as rapidly as possible.

Vista in my opinion was one of the WORST operating mistakes short of ME, that MS ever produced. Driver problems plagued it from the beginning, and despite assurances from MS, were never fixed properly. People left Vista in droves; Upgraded back to XP, and never went back. When I saw that WIN 7 was built on Vista, I became sure, MS was trying to turn the proverbial sows ear into a silk purse. I know there are quite a few people who love Vista, and don't get me wrong; there are some wonderful improvements in WIN 7 It's an extremely stable OS. Now Win 8 is in production, and from what I hear, the user is still being ignored, and existing problems with Win 7 have not been fixed yet. I too, stay as far from the social nitworking scene as possible. It has turned into just another marketing tool. I also object to having my browser and OS turned into a marketing tool. The next gen OS I feel, is not only doing this, but also compounding previous problems.

The OS is so far as I can make out is NOT configurable. You will not be able to not install features you don't plan on using to lower the OS footprint on your drive; and MS has no plans to correct this problem. Turning off or disabling features completely is an extremely complicated process, or impossible to completely achieve. Registry hacks sometimes fix one problem and create another elsewhere. Registry hacks and third party software are not the answer. Put my tools BACK in windows. Fix existing problems first. Bring back the "Classic" interface. Take your stupid ribbons, and graphics back. Give me back my productivity.

I realize this was a pretty negative post, and this forum is not a direct line to MS. It is the way I feel however, and I want to thank everyone for letting me vent.

Just out of curiosity, were those Uproarians in the office or in the home? And where were you in all this? A casual outside observer or in the middle of it all?

I've been working in IT for 20 years ... I never heard one bad word about the impending upgrade to XP back in the day when it became the next best thing coming down the pike. Computer users I knew couldn't wait to upgrade since huge numbers of corporate users were mostly using NT or Windows 2000. Which in actuality was just Windows NT 5.0. While 5.0 was an improvement over 4.x, it still lacked the general ease of use that office workers wanted from a desktop operating system, and the reliability that support staff needed. People had Win98 on their home machines, and comparatively Win2K was less user friendly and less reliable in some aspects. WinXP took the glossier and friendlier interface bits from the home fork of windows and married it to the kernel of the Windows NT fork, and from there Windows NT v5.1 was born - aka Windows XP.

Going back another step, I also never heard any complaints about moving from Windows 3.x to Win95 or NT. Nobody I knew preferred 3.x over 95. Maybe in some darkened corners of the corporate basements there could be heard the plaintive cries of a small corps of old dogs who lacked the ability (or just didn't want) to learn new tricks. Same kinda guys who lamented the move from mainframe green-screen terminals to unix-based client-server systems.

Radical change is hard in all cases, but when the benefits are obvious the complaints quickly fade away.

The problem here is that there are no directly observable benefits to the new idiom presented by Win8 Metro.

The Windows paradigm has undergone 15 years of evolution, and now in one fell swoop MS is cutting us off at the wrists. The change to 8 is not evolutionary, it's revolutionary. Most people dislike change for the sake of change, especially when they have a vested interest in stability and status quo. Changing the way people interact with a computer is a massive undertaking in this modern age when so much work both at home as well as in the office is done on computers. "Disruption" is all the rage for pundits and market analysts trying to figure the next big thing to make some money on (heh, a decade ago everybody was talking about "the next killer app"), but in reality disruptive technology has a massive cost associated with it and very few people directly or immediately benefit from it.

As a guy who sees all kinds of people who struggle in their daily lives trying to use a frickin PC running Windoze XP, I cannot imagine the uproar if they were tasked with relearning to do their jobs using the Metro interface, which completely obsoletes ALL their long years of learned behaviors. The resistance will be greater than you can possibly imagine. And because of that, the Metro interface will never succeed in the >desktop PC< market which, unfortunately for the pundits and futurists, is STILL where the vast majority of money is.

That made my mourning.