Valve's Gabe Newell predicts Windows 8 will be a 'catastrophe' - Page 4

 

What Metro needs is "Whiter Whites!"

 

Seriously, there is an advantage with equally-sized icons -- that have badges, to denote activity, placed in fixed locations.

 

It appears that MS went a bit overboard with the colors and multi-sized tiles on Metro -- in the same way they did with bigger-than-life partial-words on the Zune...

 

The UI is supposed to be appealing, intuitive and utilitarian -- not just artsy-fartsy!

This isn't about Metro. The summary in this article is poor (and the summary in the linked article isn't that great either, since they mis-represent something up top that they quote toward the bottom, but anyway...). In Newell's case, a lot of what he's criticizing is the direction Microsoft is wanting to take the Windows ecosystem, both with hardware and software. It's going from a free-for-all to a more closed system. He believes (probably rightly) the Valve will suffer as this process takes place, and he thinks other companies will suffer as well.

Told you all so in my previous posts. I installed it a few days ago just to do my eTax (Australia), then promptly nuked it. Total piece of nonsense. It's Windows XP with some half-baked square-interface-thing on top of it. Lipstick on a pig.

I call again for Bill Gates to remove himself from anything technology-related and focus only on charitable work.

Also, I propose the Xbox division be spun off to operate by itself and close everything else within 10 years.

It's not even artsy. It has elements of a "professional look" but is so jumbled it's worthless.

 

I disagree!  This article is about Windows 8 and the likelihood that it will be a catastrophe.   Like it or not, Metro is a big part of Windows 8, as you have no choice whether it is there or not!   As many have said, Metro may be the major deterrent to implementing Windows 8.  

 

You can impute whatever motive or agenda you wish to Newell's statements -- but you cannot deny that Metro (with its advantages and warts) is part of Windows 8!

You can group apps in Metro as well, shrink the screen if you want to see all the groups.  You can even show all apps.  Simple, efficient, easy to do.  The side bar lets you easily flip through running apps. You can also run two apps at once on the screen, haven't seen iOS do that.  Looks like you lose.  

Dick, the real question is, what has happened to Microsoft? How can they do something so bad, Vista, and then 7 which is XP+, then now 8? Windows 7 was alright, because it did 64bit decently. But Windows 8, along with RT and what not other rubbish... What happened man? This is definitely Microsoft's peak (or just off it, actually)... It's all downhill from here for the next 10-15 years?

Unfortunately, most users will not care. They won't have time to group, show, whatever with the "apps" because Metro in Windows serves no basic purpose. You have the Start menu (which is now gone), Taskbar, and different windows. That's all you need. Sure, Metro is another layer that can enhance the basic windows functionality but for most people it's just one more chore to deal with, they already don't want to be using Windows anyway.

I think "catastrophe" is a bit of an overstatement. Microsoft deserves credit for being bold. But as some other posters already mentioned, it's as if they bolted two completely different UIs together (Windows Phone + Windows 7).

 

They can say "first!" but I think Apple will do the hard work of building one cohesive interface if/when iOS and OS X merge. Yes, I know Tim Cook has compared that to adding a toaster to a fridge. But they say a lot of stuff. The metaphor is a little frivolous anyway. A toaster and a fridge do opposite tasks; a mobile device and a personal computer have tons of overlap. 

 

It's rather un-Apple to have 2 different operating systems, 2 different interfaces, and 2 different development environments. When people are adding physical keyboards to their iPads and instinctively swiping at the iMac's display, the distinction is a little bit artificial with sufficient technology and thoughtful design. 

Sure they will.  If they just get on their laptop to browse the web, they don't need the desktop.  They can use the Metro version of IE.  And realistically, the majority of people use computers just to go online anyway.  And there will be tons of metro apps which will negate the need to go to the desktop.  And holy crap, people might need to be taught a thing or two.  Just like they had to be taught how to use other devices.  No one uses the start menu anymore, they use desktop icons or since 7, they pin them.

What everyone is forgetting is that Microsoft has a reputation to uphold. They alternate good operating systems with crappy ones:

Windows 95 - bad
Windows 97 - OK
Windows ME - bad
Windows XP - OK
Windows Vista - bad
Windows 7 - OK
Windows 8 - must be bad to keep up their pattern.

Or, they'll just buy an iPad and save a couple hundred dollars and have something useful.

dictated on my iPad

Personally, I think Win 7 is the disaster.    I have to use it at one of my clients and it's very problematic.  Maybe it's configuration issues, but it drives me crazy.   Whenever I have large documents in Visio or Word, the whole system hangs up every time it does an auto Save and it takes forever to do the autosave.     If I delete files from my USB key, the filenames disappear right away as they always did, but if I delete files from the hard disk, the filenames stay up there until I refresh the listing.     It takes forever to close a document, even after it was just saved.   It also constantly "forgets" my mapped drives.     No one of these things is a showstopper, but when you put all of these things together, it's a royal pain the butt and makes me NOT want to use that PC at all.    I come home to my Mac and everything just works. 

 

Having said that, unless Microsoft is changing the way they charge manufacturers to license the OS, no one is leaving the market solely because of Win 8.   That's completely absurd.    There will always be plenty of buyers for Windows-based PCs because you can buy one for $400 or even less.    And the reality is that if what you mainly do is email, web surfing, some Facebook, Tweeting and watching YouTube videos, it's perfectly fine for those kinds of applications.

The problem is that you can buy a "cool" iPad for the same price (or less)... to do those same things... Better!
Edited by Dick Applebaum - 7/26/12 at 8:09pm

I've heard good things about more GPU acceleration and Direct X 11.1.

 

But GOD I hope Microsoft kills that Metro interface! It's OK as a billboard on the XBox when you want to make it look like 4 apps and Netflix is a LOT OF COOL STUFF -- but it absolutely is total interface Hell if you actually have a lot of stuff to interact with. Where the heck do you LOOK for the vital info?

 

And the ribbon -- I still hate the ribbon with a passion that goes beyond any features an app might have. 

 

My theory is that Metro and the Ribbon is to sell Windows 9 like "Classic Coke" -- people will be relieved that the abomination is gone.

This is the crux of the matter. Microsoft just doesn't get it. For most users, who the heck cares about GPU acceleration and Direct X 200 or whatever. As detailed above, most of the benefits of Metro and Windows 8 are... iPad like. Which runs on a minute amount of GPU and CPU power yet still delivers generally smooth and quick response.

Game over Microsoft.

 

Um what? Dumping on customers? How?

Leopard is now something like 15% of the entire Mac user base. Well over 80% are using something newer.

I wonder what percentage of Windows machines are still using XP?


This chart from Wikipedia on OS installed base is including all OSes. It was just for Windows then XP would be much higher. Of course MS has to support it just as Apple supports XP with iTunes.

Note that this is only looking at a percentage, if we look at the more relevant stat of the number of installations then you need about 15x as many Mac OS version installations to equal Windows versions for the same percentage between OS types. Of course, Leopard will be a much lower percentage than XP so we're probably talking about at least a 60:1 difference in unit numbers.
Edited by SolipsismX - 7/26/12 at 10:01pm

 

Of course he's got an agenda, but this particular point is only relevant for drawing in new customers. Steam has an integrated social platform with a loyal community, and Valve's games have brand recognition.

 

As far as Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace is concerned, the PC/Mac versions are only available on Steam. How many people are playing TF2 or L4D2 on the Xbox 360?

And the App Store is just a store. That is why I only use it to buy regular applications. When there's no SteamPlay, I bite the bullet and go into Boot Camp. That being said, I'm not poo-pooing competition, and I know that porting houses have issues with business models and contractual obligations that prevent them from wanting to adopt Steam to the fullest.

 

 

Who the heck cares about them? The PC-building enthusiast computing and gaming crowd, namely. Those who like to spend upwards of $200-$500 on Newegg for high-end dedicated graphics cards, and think that a large-scale adoption of "post-PC" means choking off the part vendors and forcing them to buy Xbox 720s. They might be right, if Nvidia's shared GPU experiments don't end up being viable.

 

Hate to be pedantic, but it was Windows 98, not 97. Windows 98 was the reason why Bill Gates was shot in the South Park movie - Bigger, Longer and Uncut.

 

 

Loved the cartoons!! Very awesome!! :)

That's 100% true, and being Da Boss of Valve, he definitely knows a lot about controlling people's access to stuff.

Of course. Valve wants to make a console, and they should. If you read all my posts, I talk about how rubbish PS3 and Xbox360 is relative to where we are now, in the middle of 2012. PS3 and Xbox360 have 2004-quality hardware. Game developers though, are gearing up to completely eclipse movie and TV studios in so many ways.

Just look at Deus Ex: HR, Mass Effect and Assassin's. Immense, remarkable storylines that put traditional media to shame. Educational too... Show me a tourist brochure for Florence and Venice and I can recognise quite a number of them! And I thought I was having fun!

So that said, let's look at PS3: 720p graphics, which iPad will easily eclipse in 2015. Xbox360: same. Unit sales: iPad will outnumber them.

The field is rife for someone to make a decent console that is a controlled ecosystem (or worst-case "walled garden" like, oh, the PS3 and Xbox360) that can run the demanding games this world now needs. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft aren't going to do it, they're busy trying to push obsolete hardware through millions in marketing and stupid namby-pamby "motion detection" nonsense and even more Mario... Hitman Mario, Need For Speed: Mario, Avengers vs Mario, Team Fortress: Mario, Mario Mario Mario, who cares, we don't need to come up with anything original... (actually the above suggestions would be good Mario mashup games, not the generic stuff, which, while fun and Mario is well-loved, Nintendo needs to get sensible for a while).

All someone needs to do is this:
Create unix-based platform using OpenGL as a console
Brand it (Valve, Steam, whatever)
Make App Store for it
Make OpenGL stop looking crappy and make it look like DX11
Make console and sell it outright without annoying "exclusives" and hand-waving garbage

Put this into it and sell it for $399 ~ easy I tell you

Intel Core Duo 1.6ghz equivalent
120GB HDD (enough for games, download from cloud etc)
1GB RAM
1GB DDR3 VRAM
8600GT-class GPU
1080p DX11 Unreal Engine 4-quality graphics

Hint: The above is so, so bl**dy cheap that nobody wants it anymore ~ you can find the above hardware in junk piles. Obviously you need new components but the standard they need to meet to push 1080p DX11 Unreal Engine 4-quality graphics is extremely, extremely cheap.

Yeah, he's also talking about the Valve console hence bashing Windows. But Windows is rubbish anyway regardless of Gabe's motivations.

 

Where is Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3, 3.1 and Windows 2000 on this list?

 

and 98 not 97

 

Perhaps you should change your windows 7 setups, as I have never had those issue.  Now, on my mac, I do get a lot of those issues, especially mapped drives.  Or the one I had the other day, copied file, saw it in the new  directory, refreshed and it was gone... wtf

 

You're equating Microsoft to Star Trek movies? 

WinNT as well, but, that was kind of related to win2k wasn't it?

 

Was this pie chart created by someone completely devoid of intellectual curiosity with regard to Apple? No consistency at all there… Except for Apple, everything is defined by Operating System, and/or Operating System version… come to Apple, and suddenly it's defined by hardware product line?

 

How about using their Operating Systems as well? iOS and OSX?

 

Do that and it shows that about 17.4% of the overall market is using an Apple OS… 9.98% using iOS, 7.46% using OSX… more meaningful than dividing iOS by device would be a breakdown of iOS and OS X versions in use (like with the Windows divisions), but this is obviously more about comparing recent versions of Windows...

 

This sounds like rubbish...

 

You're using OSX? What does that mean, 'saw it in the new directory, REFRESHED…"?  I don't know what that means, 'refreshed'… what did you do *exactly* to "refresh" a directory listing? Using a Finder window? Which version of OS X??

 

Without details, I guess I have to throw the same advice you gave right back at you:

 

"Perhaps you should change your OSX setups, as I have never had those issue[s]."  

When I played with it, it seemed like a proof of concept. I didn't think they would really dare ship it. But, lol, they just might.

Stop worrying about MS and get to work on Half-Life 3!  What a joke that it's taken this long to create it.

Huh - he views touch screens as kind of a stepping stone between mouse and in-the-air gestures. That's interesting because gestures could be retrofitted to both iDevices and Macs, since they both have webcams. And companies that have a lead in the touch screen space would have a head start. And the kinds of "reactions" the GUI has to a touch would be even more important to an in-the-air gesture, so frameworks like Core Animation become even more important.

 

Conceivably Apple could release gestures purely as a software update.

Sorry, '97' popped into my head - probably from Office 97. Doesn't change the story, though.


I call BS. According to these figures, the Mac OS X installed base is larger than the iPhone and more than twice the size of the iPad? They're selling 25 M iPhones per quarter - somewhere around 100 M per year. Assuming that the average iPhone lasts 2 years before being discarded (which is almost certainly too conservative), there would be 200 M iPhones in use.

They sold 4 M Macs last quarter - so call it 16 M per year. Even if that rate had been unchanged and the average Mac was in use for 10 years, that would mean 160 M Macs in use. That is probably too generous, so the actual numbers would be lower.

So even overestimating Mac installed base and underestimating iPhone installed base, their numbers are clearly wrong.

In addition, they show the iPad as being almost half the installed base of the iPhone - which again doesn't match up with sales figures.

 

iOS runs on small screens, not on a computer monitor.  Not sure I see the utility in seeing multiple apps at once on a small screen.  If what you are after is rapid awareness of simultaneous feeds of information, well, that's what notification center is for.  On the desktop, when I have multiple applications open it's usually because I'm authoring some code or producing some serious graphics.  Who does such things on a smartphone or tablet?  Sure, you can do some cool art with tablet apps, but I'm talking about using multiple windows in Adobe Photoshop, or some such.

 

This is just an example of Microsoft not understanding "use cases".  Metro does not belong on the desktop (even if it didn't suck, which it does).  And full-bore preemptive multitasking and screen sharing of apps does not belong on a small mobile device (with energy and screen size constraints).

 

Thompson

It seems Blizzard agrees with Gabe Newell:

http://www.videogamer.com/news/windows_8_gabe_debate_not_awesome_for_us_either_says_blizzard.html

It seems to surround the requirement to have Metro-enabled apps in the Windows Store thereby making them susceptible to the 30% fee, cutting into their margins.

But usability is still a problem all by itself:

Excellent points tribalogical and jragosta. Since my point was focused on difference in versions of Windows I paid very little attention to the entire chart. The image is from Wikipedia.

I'm going to jump in here...

 

We're talking about three different issues:

1. Windows 8 UI

2. Valve's "App Store" that predates both Apple and Microsoft's

3. DRM.

 

As far as the UI is concerned, I hate it on the Xbox, it's basically 60% of the screen real estate dedicated to ads. This is not what I want on the desktop. I think Windows peaked on the UI front with Windows 95, and should have left it alone instead of bolting on layer after layer of eye candy. If Microsoft succeeds with this, well that's fine. But what's really going on is we're all going backwards (even on the mac) to a time when you could only run one application at a time, full screen. It may not seem this way, but the only thing different about this and pre-1994 UI's is that the applications aren't being unloaded when you switch away. Even on the Mac, It's sometimes rather loathesome to try and figure out where an application was installed to, because this is something that has been getting worse with the increasing amounts of disk space. The entire process of "installing" is a waste of time. Applications should come like they do on the Mac, packaged and moveable anywhere you want it. If you want to take your Photoshop to another Mac, it should be a simple matter of clicking and dragging the photoshop icon to the USB drive, and that's it. But all the dependencies and "integration" applications like CS3+ and Microsoft Office do, make it a huge pain to do this. If I want to switch to a new mac, it should be a simple matter of "plug it in, drag everything to the new machine." This is where Windows has traditionally failed time and time again. I loathe having to reinstall windows because that means I have to activate it, and dozens of other applications, and if I missed deactivating an app, and already erased the drive, I have to beg adobe over the phone to fix it. A huge waste of time.

 

Now, Valve's App Store, is not quite as damning as Adobe or Microsoft is. As long as you aren't sharing the login with dozens of your pals, you can pretty much go to any computer, install steam, download your games, and off you go. What Valve fails to take into account (and anyone else with DRM) is that there are users who like to trade games and movies once they're finished playing it. One of my parents, hates steam so much that he creates a new steam account for every game, plays the game to completion, and then gives it to his buddy, steam account and all. This is hugely annoying and something that Valve needs to rectify. (Gifting games already purchased/played) When you buy a physical copy of a game, you should not have to deal with steam at all. You don't have to do this with the Xbox360/PS3 versions of games. Playing games on the PC is in decline because it's a hugely obnoxious process brought about by the war between DRM and piracy.

 

If Valve wants games to be available on the PC/Mac/Linux/whatever and not have to compete with the Apple/Microsoft app stores, it needs to do what these stores don't do.

Apple lets you run all software on any machine that has been authorized. You can't do this with Steam, if you login to one machine, it kicks it off the other. Valve also needs a way to add games that are in it's library (like iTunes Match) that are already installed on the computer (eg via GOG.com or EA's "Origin" ) so that the user doesn't mistakenly buy games they already have. 

Wait I can see what's going on when I glance at my iPhone's home screen? All I see are three notification badges on three apps -- I have no clue what's going on.

 

I mean, the damn weather icon STILL doesn't update with the actual weather!!!!

Edited by sausages - 7/27/12 at 3:23pm

LOL I've long, long given up.