Windows Windows 8 Marmite thread... Because you either love it or hate it

Greetings!

 

Found this on Yahoo news, its basically that the new 8.1 update has been leaked. Think i'll wait for official release

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/windows-8-1-1-leaked-ahead-release-download-093131364.html#H6NdwMM

 

As usual, Microsoft focuses on the wrong thing. It should be improving the desktop chrome to be more visually coherent with Metro, and make it possible for Metro apps run windowed on desktop. Not add layers of confusion through more ways of doing exactly the same thing. I mean, even amateurs can come up with a better design.

Ars Technica makes the good observation that the real problem is that people still interact with Windows as they did with Windows 95. Any changes or improvements that have been made since have been mostly ignored by the majority of users, to the extent that Microsoft has had to preserve old paradigms where new and better ones are available. Technology has moved on tremendously in the last twenty years, it seems, but people have not.

I wonder whether part of the problem is how Microsoft approaches Windows. Ballmer said recently that nobody buys Windows OS; they buy machines that happen to come with Windows. It has always been seen as business software; something that does its job reasonably well, but that people basically put up with in the same way they put up with office furniture. It doesn't look nice, it is not particularly comfortable, but it's functional so you put up with it at work even if you wouldn't buy it for your own home. OSX or iOS is furniture you buy for the home: not just functional but also aesthetically pleasing, comfortable and a delight to use.

Windows isn't delightful. It never has been. When I used OSX and iOS I would raise my eyebrows in pleasant surprise every time I came across a new feature (the magnifying glass that pops up when you want to move the cursor on iOS; the way that when I installed a printer on OSX, it would appear in the listed peripherals looking exactly as it did in real life, rather than as a generic printer icon). Having to work out how things worked wasn't frustrating but an exciting exploration.

Microsoft needs to stop thinking as engineers and start thinking as graphic and product designers. Steve Jobs did, and Apple does. Windows needs to be not just functional, but delightful.

 

My response to that is "How else are we supposed to interact with a computer?".

Touch is a good UI for situations where a keyboard and mouse are not available, but I feel that it's way too clumsy and imprecise to be considered a better system. IMHO KB + mouse is still the gold standard, but touch works OK for most things when you don't have a better option.

I've got a 10" tablet and I find it much more difficult to do even simple tasks such as web browsing due to the imprecision of trying to use my fingers rather than a real pointing device. Typing is barely possible, but editing is a colossal PITA and so while I can browse the web, even posting to bit is very difficult for me. I couldn't write this post on my tablet for example because I haven't found a way to select and remove blocks of text when quoting.

 

I don't think that he was arguing about input methods. I think that he was arguing that people expect Windows Vista, 7 and 8 to work exactly like Windows 95, even though there are better ways of doing things by now.

 

Better is in the eye of the beholder though isn't is ?
Like it or not people are slow to change, even when it is demonstrable that something is better or even harmful to them it takes a great deal of effort to get them to adopt new practices. I would have thought in your line of work you come across that all the time (hope I'm not being to presumptuous), sometimes it can be harder to unlearn something than having to just learn a new thing.

 

Yup, but in my line of work and in life, change being hard is not a reason to avoid it. Things change and we have to be able to adapt. So says natural selection, anyway.

 

Natural selection take place over generations not every 4 or 5 years, and I'm guessing in your line of work its change or something very bad is going to happen to you.

EDIT: Maybe if we give people a high voltage electric shock each time they powered of their PC in the old way instead of just hitting the power button

 

Shows how much you know about natural selection. But I must admit I like your behavioural approach.

 

Are you trying to suggest that natural selection doesn't happen over generations ?

 

It happens over as few as one generation. And if those generations are fast-reproducing, the results can accumulate very quickly, well within 4-5 years.

Behaviourally (we are talking memes now, not genes) it can happen much faster than that, of course.

 

But we are talking about people, not rabbits.
Maybe if Microsoft made an OS for rabbits they could get away with changing things up every 4-5 years.

 

People are behaviourally more flexible than rabbits. Presumably.

 

Just because we can be more flexible in our behavior doesn't mean we are.

 

Nope, but life doesn't care about that. We all have to adapt.

 

I know I'm late to the party, but I slept 14 hours last night and I'm not going to apologize for it

In an evolutionary sense "better" is defined as promoting the survival or procreation of a species. Unfortunately, unless MSN dating has improved a LOT, we probably can't use this standard to judge what is better software. One objective metric is sales, any by that Win 8 isn't doing so hot, either. Of course, there are so many factors that go into the sales decision, that it's probably meaningless for judging what is a better OS. I don't know how we decide in any meaningful way what is a better OS or a better way of interacting with an OS. Even functionality decisions are highly individualized and subjective.

In many ways this reminds me of the debate of Dvorak keyboards. They are theoretically better laid out and the people who take the time to master them can type much faster, but the vast majority of users have decided they are too difficult to learn and so adoption has been microscopic in terms of market share. Maybe the Dvorak IS better, but if no one uses it, does it matter?

Adaptation is driven by noxious stimuli, and I guess that's perhaps what is missing here for me. The old ways of doing things are working just fine. Yes, other people interacting with their OS in new ways might have an advantage, but as a hope user, so what? I'm not in competition with them for resources (or jobs). In my personal little ecosystem there is nothing pushing me to adapt and so I'm continuing to do things the same way,

All of which is another way of saying that MS has not made a compelling case for how W8 is better than it's predecessors or the other options out there.

 

I recall the first review of MacOS. It was slated. Icons were "unintuitive", windows seemed pointless and the mouse was seen as a gimmick. Of course people can still stubbornly hold onto doing things the traditional way. I for one would be curious to know how many people here can write a good CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to free up enough working memory to launch a program --via CLI. I wonder how many people know how to upgrade their graphic card without the luxury of Plug and Play.

 

Because Nexxo says it is

Me sir, i do, oh, oh, pick me sir, i know...

 

Would you say Windows 7 is better than Windows 95?

 

No, not for me.