A 2 dimensional surface of patterned squares and rectangles has a disorienting visual effect on me.
If true, then do you hate iOS too? The main interface is a 2 dimensional surface of patterned squares.
I see the iOS interface as akin to a naive windows user who has a desktop full of icons. Do you agree?
A different form of the same effect is what I personally experience with users who don't want to use Windows Explorer to organize data into folders. They put up a full desktop mass of disorienting icons which are damn near useless for quickly finding any but the half dozen most used icons and those are usually in a row or column starting at a corner of the screen.
Basing my opinion on about as much fact as you do here ....
I am more and more getting the feeling that Windows 8 will not only be a flop, but a flop of Vista like proportions. The clients I see daily that are still using Windows will generally use whatever comes on the machine so sales-wise, Microsoft is safe as it always is. People will buy it because they have no choice. On the other hand, despite all the superficial changes, Windows has basically stayed the same in general layout for about 17 years now (since Windows 95 when they worked out their first basic GUI).
All Windows until now has used the Start Menu as a way to organise access to programs and devices. This time it's different.
It seems rather obvious that Microsoft will have to provide a way of putting that Start menu back, at least as a hack. If they don't, it's 100% certain that third parties will do so anyway. This means that most installations of Windows 8 (call centres, factories, offices, businesses, etc.), will Immediately remove the Metro "layer" and never think about it again.
If Microsoft sticks to it's guns though (and they will probably try to for at least 6 months), and doesn't put the Start menu back, huge amounts of Jane and Joe Average folks who go out to buy a new computer will be totally lost, and totally pissed off that the Start Menu is gone. There will be outrage, there will be calls for a fix, and almost overnight there will be many hacks to get rid of Metro. The biggest search trending on Google a week after Windows 8's release date, will be "How do I get the Start Menu back?"
The consumers will get shafted by MS as they always have been. The business customers that are MS's true customers will get a "fix" on the sly, and people will start talking about "how to fix Metro" (for Windows 9).
I'm going one step further than you. I expect that Microsoft will be forced to offer a free downgrade to Windows 7 upon request.
I hate to be picky but your (or business insider's stats) are very out of of date, iPhone sales are now over 200 million, iPad sales 55 million (Tim Cook Feb 16th 2012) prior to the new iPad launch . According to http://gs.statcounter.com/ there are still more iOS devices being used in the wild than Android devices, neck and neck last time I checked, so combined iOS and Android devices make up around half a billion portable computers. Most of those devices would have been bought within the last 3 years. Compare that to Windows 7 which has been out for around 3 years and has been installed on 431 million computers. I haven't included Mac OSX devices here (probably around 35 million over the past 3 years). So iOS + Android + OSX devices = Approx 540 Million computers Vs 431 Windows 7 devices sold in the last 3 years or 55.6% vs 44.4%, (I haven't included Linux, Chrome,Rim Windows phone 7 but you get the idea) compare that 44.4% to the 92% dominance of Microsoft just 5 years ago and you get an idea of where the future is heading. So although as you correctly pointed out there are still lots of windows boxes out there (many of them with a decade old OS installed i.e. XP), it's clear that the majority of people are now buying portable computers and this trend will only continue. Microsoft may well come out dominating the new mobile era with it's metro interface, I'm not sure it's compelling enough or even suitable for most people, lets wait and see. At the moment Windows is still very relevant, but every day it appears to be becoming less so.
I re checked my photos. The store opened last Thursday. On the construction hoarding there were depictions of some of their products. A thin laptop (rip off of a MBA), a win-tablet, (rip off of an iPad), a win-phone (attempt to remain relevant in the mobile phone market), and an X-Box. (which has never made them a profit). So, good luck with that store, guys.....
A phone is not a real computer. If you can't do Enterprise-level development with something, it may be really "neat", but it is not a legitimate computing device.
Hey, my iPhone has replaced my Windows XP Netbook for travel. It does all the travel computing I need.
My iPhone doesn't realize it isn't a computer, phone, music player, etc.
I think there are very good arguments in both directions here.
I think the biggest hurdle MS will have to get over is to convince all it's customers that this "metro" feature is a better way of computing than the previous ways. They really need to do a full-on Apple-esque demo on their website and really go through the new features point by point.
I think the next biggest hurdle MS will face is how to convince the business world this new version of windows works well for them as well. As I browsed the MS website to get a closer look at the "metro" UI...i did notice that you can turn it on and off. The Start Button is still at the bottom left, and you can hover over the bottom left corner to bring up a start menu. But, like all MS products, there is a lot of redundancy there. Since a huge percentage of users of Windows are in the business community, this "metro" feature only distracts from the work at-hand. There is nothing inherently "business" about the new UI. If you couldn't turn it off, business productivity (IMO) would severely decrease because of all the distractions that sit on the home screen.
Personally, my line of work is a Windows-based business and will probably never go Mac. So I will be forced to learn it. I prefer using my Mac for personal use, but having two laptops and the idea of syncing information between the two (since I don't want to mix the use of either...seeing as my company paid for the PC and not my Mac) would be quite tiring. So I have to just suck it up and have all my personal stuff on the Mac and keep a clean PC for just work. My point is, I still think MS has a long road ahead of them...but the overall strategy of connecting the UI to your personal life is quite appealing. But in reality they're really just trying to keep up with the rest of the world (i.e. iOS, OSX, Android). They've taken much too long to do that.
This "metro" interface is very confusing. They should have at least created an organized strategy with the colors. Apple's OS's doesn't really do this either but at least most of their system apps are quite distinguishable from each other. If MS wants to do the colored tiles at least make sense of the colors. For example: Communications could all be colored green, Social networking in blue (meaning twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.), with productivity in red (meaning MS Office apps) and so on and so-forth. Nope, not MS, they want to do some other way of coloring things...god forbid they tell us on their own website why we have these different colored tiles. And for the horizontal scrolling...i know this is geared more towards the tablet market but if you have this UI on a desktop PC, you can't scroll with your mouse that way. Huge flaw IMO.
I actually kind of like that you login to everything in your life from the OS and not a web-browser (i.e. facebook, twitter, mail, etc.) That seems to be a hurdle that Apple hasn't quite got full control on yet but they are getting a lot closer. Granted secure website aren't all controlled from your @live.com login but I do like how MS has done this. Granted, Apple has the @me.com and the iTunes login to control a lot of things in the OS as well.
This windows e-store is a good solution in comparison to the iTunes store. Let me say how horrible and bloated the iTunes store has become. Why the heck can't i search for books from the iTunes store? It directs me to the iBookstore on the app. How stupid! Plus you can't specify your search criteria. If you know you're looking for an app, you should be able to only search the App store...why include movies/TV music, etc. in the search if you know you're looking for an App? Really fisrt off, Apple needs to rename the iTunes store (maybe the "iStore" or "iMarket" or just something). Second they really need to take iTunes and completely overhaul it. Maybe break it out into sections...better yet. Rename iTunes to iHub or iLife or something so its name actually indicated the multitude of information that it carries. Lion already does this with the Mac App Store. Why not go one step further and make the Mac App store the one stop shop and then make iTunes (which needs renaming) be the hub for you digital life. It seems to be going that way in iOS (i.e. "videos", "music", "iTunes" and "App Store" all seperate apps now, but I think they really need to take it about 5 steps further and into OSX as well.
So regardless of what you think about MS, you have to hand it to them that they kind of took their time and gave it the ole-college try with Windows 8. It looks like they really did try to make it a holistic approach to the UI. Time will tell how successful it will be. If it is successful, I think Android will be the one in 3rd place when it comes to the general one-stop user experience.
Well all i could find for mac sales is that by May 2010 the number of Mac users was at 93.96 million - the report said that the number had doubled from three years prior! Wow that kind of increase is hard to believe. Anyway the Mac continues its long-held, industry-leading rate of ascent.
All the concerns about market share of Mac are becoming increasingly less relevant. In fact, I feel that the Mac OS (especially now that its being coupled with iOS) has passed the tipping point of developer adoption. And that was my biggest concern being a Mac user.
Let the masses continue to seek the lowest common denominator of commoditization while we continue to take sizable bites of market share - insuring more developers will code for the Apple platform for years to come. Also iOS is showing us that people who buy commodity systems spend far less on buying software.
<div class="quote-container"> Quote: <div class="quote-block"> Originally Posted by <strong>BoxMacCary</strong> <a href="/t/149556/mostly-complete-release-preview-of-windows-8-coming-in-june#post_2099852"><img alt="View Post" class="inlineimg" src="/img/forum/go_quote.gif" /></a><br /> <br /> Vista ....<br /> Windows 7 ....<br /> Windows 8 ....<br /> And, I understand, Windows 9 is just around the corner ....<br /> Who. The. Heck. CARES .....</div></div><p> </p><p> I'd say a lot of people care, as virtually all computers around the world run Windows. </p><p> </p><p> Or didn't you know that?</p>
No, Sh** sherlock... yet MICROSOFT Wants 200 dollar per upgrade every 3 years...
hmmm, on an apple-centric web site... you are either trolling or fail at comprehension.
Care to list any of those few reasons? I've played with Windows 8 a bit. I think it's a horrible mess of conflicting user interfaces. FYI I love Windows 7 and actually run it as the only OS on my iMac since Lion is such a POS in terms of stability and performance.
Every time I see promotion for a new Windows OS, I think, "wow..that looks pretty good". Then I get to use it and it's horrible.
I'm consulting for a company that uses Window 7 now (last time I was there, there were still on XP) and I thought I was going to like it, but so far, I kind of hate it. I find the application icons to be ugly and confusing. When I have multiple documents open for the same app, it's a pain to have to click on the icon and choose the document each time.
And maybe there's something wrong with the installation, but whenever I try to copy Visio screens to Word, the system frequently hangs up for several minutes, then I get a popup saying that some other app is doing an OLE transaction or something of the sort, even though no other app is doing anything. If I tell it to proceed anyway, nothing happens and I have to kill the app, losing work. If I cancel, after another minute or two, Word reports that it has a problem and when I click OK on that popup, the Visio screen finally gets copied into the Word document. But as soon as it copies, Word decides to do a backup save and that takes an inordinate amount of time. This happens all day long. Didn't happen in XP. You can keep Windows 7. I don't see what benefits it provides. As far as I'm concerned, the last decent Windows OS was Win 98. Before that, the last decent Microsoft OS was DOS.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by BoC
A 2 dimensional surface of patterned squares and rectangles has a disorienting visual effect on me.
If true, then do you hate iOS too? The main interface is a 2 dimensional surface of patterned squares.
I see the iOS interface as akin to a naive windows user who has a desktop full of icons. Do you agree?
A different form of the same effect is what I personally experience with users who don't want to use Windows Explorer to organize data into folders. They put up a full desktop mass of disorienting icons which are damn near useless for quickly finding any but the half dozen most used icons and those are usually in a row or column starting at a corner of the screen.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gazoobee
Basing my opinion on about as much fact as you do here ....
I am more and more getting the feeling that Windows 8 will not only be a flop, but a flop of Vista like proportions. The clients I see daily that are still using Windows will generally use whatever comes on the machine so sales-wise, Microsoft is safe as it always is. People will buy it because they have no choice. On the other hand, despite all the superficial changes, Windows has basically stayed the same in general layout for about 17 years now (since Windows 95 when they worked out their first basic GUI).
All Windows until now has used the Start Menu as a way to organise access to programs and devices. This time it's different.
It seems rather obvious that Microsoft will have to provide a way of putting that Start menu back, at least as a hack. If they don't, it's 100% certain that third parties will do so anyway. This means that most installations of Windows 8 (call centres, factories, offices, businesses, etc.), will Immediately remove the Metro "layer" and never think about it again.
If Microsoft sticks to it's guns though (and they will probably try to for at least 6 months), and doesn't put the Start menu back, huge amounts of Jane and Joe Average folks who go out to buy a new computer will be totally lost, and totally pissed off that the Start Menu is gone. There will be outrage, there will be calls for a fix, and almost overnight there will be many hacks to get rid of Metro. The biggest search trending on Google a week after Windows 8's release date, will be "How do I get the Start Menu back?"
The consumers will get shafted by MS as they always have been. The business customers that are MS's true customers will get a "fix" on the sly, and people will start talking about "how to fix Metro" (for Windows 9).
I'm going one step further than you. I expect that Microsoft will be forced to offer a free downgrade to Windows 7 upon request.
Doesn't "mostly complete" describe every version of Windows?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gazoobee
Quote:
Originally Posted by kotatsu
I'd say a lot of people care, as virtually all computers around the world run Windows.
Or didn't you know that?
This is quite a vast overstatement.
Then read it as 90% or so of all computers around the world run Windows.
I hate to be picky but your (or business insider's stats) are very out of of date, iPhone sales are now over 200 million, iPad sales 55 million (Tim Cook Feb 16th 2012) prior to the new iPad launch . According to http://gs.statcounter.com/ there are still more iOS devices being used in the wild than Android devices, neck and neck last time I checked, so combined iOS and Android devices make up around half a billion portable computers. Most of those devices would have been bought within the last 3 years. Compare that to Windows 7 which has been out for around 3 years and has been installed on 431 million computers. I haven't included Mac OSX devices here (probably around 35 million over the past 3 years). So iOS + Android + OSX devices = Approx 540 Million computers Vs 431 Windows 7 devices sold in the last 3 years or 55.6% vs 44.4%, (I haven't included Linux, Chrome,Rim Windows phone 7 but you get the idea) compare that 44.4% to the 92% dominance of Microsoft just 5 years ago and you get an idea of where the future is heading. So although as you correctly pointed out there are still lots of windows boxes out there (many of them with a decade old OS installed i.e. XP), it's clear that the majority of people are now buying portable computers and this trend will only continue. Microsoft may well come out dominating the new mobile era with it's metro interface, I'm not sure it's compelling enough or even suitable for most people, lets wait and see. At the moment Windows is still very relevant, but every day it appears to be becoming less so.
Quote:
Originally Posted by xxSampleXX
A phone is not a real computer. If you can't do Enterprise-level development with something, it may be really "neat", but it is not a legitimate computing device.
Hey, my iPhone has replaced my Windows XP Netbook for travel. It does all the travel computing I need.
My iPhone doesn't realize it isn't a computer, phone, music player, etc.
I think there are very good arguments in both directions here.
I think the biggest hurdle MS will have to get over is to convince all it's customers that this "metro" feature is a better way of computing than the previous ways. They really need to do a full-on Apple-esque demo on their website and really go through the new features point by point.
I think the next biggest hurdle MS will face is how to convince the business world this new version of windows works well for them as well. As I browsed the MS website to get a closer look at the "metro" UI...i did notice that you can turn it on and off. The Start Button is still at the bottom left, and you can hover over the bottom left corner to bring up a start menu. But, like all MS products, there is a lot of redundancy there. Since a huge percentage of users of Windows are in the business community, this "metro" feature only distracts from the work at-hand. There is nothing inherently "business" about the new UI. If you couldn't turn it off, business productivity (IMO) would severely decrease because of all the distractions that sit on the home screen.
Personally, my line of work is a Windows-based business and will probably never go Mac. So I will be forced to learn it. I prefer using my Mac for personal use, but having two laptops and the idea of syncing information between the two (since I don't want to mix the use of either...seeing as my company paid for the PC and not my Mac) would be quite tiring. So I have to just suck it up and have all my personal stuff on the Mac and keep a clean PC for just work. My point is, I still think MS has a long road ahead of them...but the overall strategy of connecting the UI to your personal life is quite appealing. But in reality they're really just trying to keep up with the rest of the world (i.e. iOS, OSX, Android). They've taken much too long to do that.
This "metro" interface is very confusing. They should have at least created an organized strategy with the colors. Apple's OS's doesn't really do this either but at least most of their system apps are quite distinguishable from each other. If MS wants to do the colored tiles at least make sense of the colors. For example: Communications could all be colored green, Social networking in blue (meaning twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.), with productivity in red (meaning MS Office apps) and so on and so-forth. Nope, not MS, they want to do some other way of coloring things...god forbid they tell us on their own website why we have these different colored tiles. And for the horizontal scrolling...i know this is geared more towards the tablet market but if you have this UI on a desktop PC, you can't scroll with your mouse that way. Huge flaw IMO.
I actually kind of like that you login to everything in your life from the OS and not a web-browser (i.e. facebook, twitter, mail, etc.) That seems to be a hurdle that Apple hasn't quite got full control on yet but they are getting a lot closer. Granted secure website aren't all controlled from your @live.com login but I do like how MS has done this. Granted, Apple has the @me.com and the iTunes login to control a lot of things in the OS as well.
This windows e-store is a good solution in comparison to the iTunes store. Let me say how horrible and bloated the iTunes store has become. Why the heck can't i search for books from the iTunes store? It directs me to the iBookstore on the app. How stupid! Plus you can't specify your search criteria. If you know you're looking for an app, you should be able to only search the App store...why include movies/TV music, etc. in the search if you know you're looking for an App? Really fisrt off, Apple needs to rename the iTunes store (maybe the "iStore" or "iMarket" or just something). Second they really need to take iTunes and completely overhaul it. Maybe break it out into sections...better yet. Rename iTunes to iHub or iLife or something so its name actually indicated the multitude of information that it carries. Lion already does this with the Mac App Store. Why not go one step further and make the Mac App store the one stop shop and then make iTunes (which needs renaming) be the hub for you digital life. It seems to be going that way in iOS (i.e. "videos", "music", "iTunes" and "App Store" all seperate apps now, but I think they really need to take it about 5 steps further and into OSX as well.
So regardless of what you think about MS, you have to hand it to them that they kind of took their time and gave it the ole-college try with Windows 8. It looks like they really did try to make it a holistic approach to the UI. Time will tell how successful it will be. If it is successful, I think Android will be the one in 3rd place when it comes to the general one-stop user experience.
Well all i could find for mac sales is that by May 2010 the number of Mac users was at 93.96 million - the report said that the number had doubled from three years prior! Wow that kind of increase is hard to believe. Anyway the Mac continues its long-held, industry-leading rate of ascent.
All the concerns about market share of Mac are becoming increasingly less relevant. In fact, I feel that the Mac OS (especially now that its being coupled with iOS) has passed the tipping point of developer adoption. And that was my biggest concern being a Mac user.
Let the masses continue to seek the lowest common denominator of commoditization while we continue to take sizable bites of market share - insuring more developers will code for the Apple platform for years to come. Also iOS is showing us that people who buy commodity systems spend far less on buying software.
No, Sh** sherlock... yet MICROSOFT Wants 200 dollar per upgrade every 3 years...
hmmm, on an apple-centric web site... you are either trolling or fail at comprehension.
Windows (fa)RT
or Windows ReTarded ?
Juvenile, but who can resist?
Quote:
Originally Posted by I am a Zither Zather Zuzz
Then read it as 90% or so of all computers around the world run Windows.
Or how about if we simply read what the other person wrote?
Some of us prefer to stick to what people say rather than constantly making things up and pretending that's what they said - as you do.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eksodos
Care to list any of those few reasons? I've played with Windows 8 a bit. I think it's a horrible mess of conflicting user interfaces. FYI I love Windows 7 and actually run it as the only OS on my iMac since Lion is such a POS in terms of stability and performance.
Every time I see promotion for a new Windows OS, I think, "wow..that looks pretty good". Then I get to use it and it's horrible.
I'm consulting for a company that uses Window 7 now (last time I was there, there were still on XP) and I thought I was going to like it, but so far, I kind of hate it. I find the application icons to be ugly and confusing. When I have multiple documents open for the same app, it's a pain to have to click on the icon and choose the document each time.
And maybe there's something wrong with the installation, but whenever I try to copy Visio screens to Word, the system frequently hangs up for several minutes, then I get a popup saying that some other app is doing an OLE transaction or something of the sort, even though no other app is doing anything. If I tell it to proceed anyway, nothing happens and I have to kill the app, losing work. If I cancel, after another minute or two, Word reports that it has a problem and when I click OK on that popup, the Visio screen finally gets copied into the Word document. But as soon as it copies, Word decides to do a backup save and that takes an inordinate amount of time. This happens all day long. Didn't happen in XP. You can keep Windows 7. I don't see what benefits it provides. As far as I'm concerned, the last decent Windows OS was Win 98. Before that, the last decent Microsoft OS was DOS.
Quote:
Originally Posted by zoetmb
When I have multiple documents open for the same app, it's a pain to have to click on the icon and choose the document each time.
CTRL+TAB.
Alternatively press START, type "Customize", press ENTER. Taskbar buttons select "Never combine", press OK.