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

Doubleclick (Google) showing country specific ads, in your case German computer ads. I usually get ads for czech or slovak websites.

 

Windows 8 usage: Let’s do a little math

Don't shoot the messenger pls

 

Crap. Only 88.5 million users? Well, that OS bombed.

 

Greetings!

His reasoning is wrong on the downgrades.

Microsoft reports sales to OEMs, not activations. The 141M are not actually used licenses. He can not get to the conclusion that 1-in-3 are downgraded licenses. They can be only unused licenses, like the one I have.

If the reasoning is correct on the 88,5M, that number is pathetic. Its less than 10M\month for Microsofts flagship OS. Looks even worse if compared to the success of the previous Windows.

 

Its not great though I have a windows 8 licence myself thats unused and id imagine alot are in the same boat.

The fact is on launch the Windows 8 key was £25-£30 compared to Window 7s launch price of around £130+ ( None OEM editions ) Windows 7 had alot more usage within 10months.

I will ignore the rest of his very biased article lol. Hes more pro windows than Impar is Anti windows and thats saying something lol

 

Greetings!

:ahem:
Not anti-Windows, anti-forced-Metro-UI-on-all-W8-users-without-an-official-way-to-use-the-classic-UI. Even if W8.1 has some useful corrections.

 

@Impar, well he does say "(or not otherwise used)"

 

Pretty sure my W7 was not OEM and I got it for £49.99 as a pre-order. Also lets not forget that W7 was taking over from Vista and XP, one being pretty old, the other being universally hated.

 

Surface 2 in the works according to Nvidia http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57597706-94/nvidia-ceo-were-working-hard-on-surface-2/

 

Greetings!

 

Well... although I jumped on the win 8 hate bandwagon a year ago. I jumped off again and had to walk quite far back home after buying it and liking it.

It has utterly amazed me recently.

My GF's 2007 vista laptop had windows 7 home premium 64 on it for a couple of years but it became so slow it was unusable. In fact it never really ran fast. The laptop originally came with vista on. It's a single core celeron with 2gb ram and a 30gb OCZ vertex 1 (1st generation).

A month ago I installed linux mint for her because win 7 home prem 64 was too slow....

Mint was faster... faster booting and a bit better performance.

A few days ago GF told me she couldn't get used to linux so I installed Windows 8 pro 64 on it...

Wow!

I have never seen any OS boot so fast! It boots faster on her laptop than it does on my desktop! (I have the hybrid boot disabled on my win 8 cos it causes hard disk error checking when I boot between win 8 and win 7).

Win 8 on her laptop is also incredibly smooth once loaded. I am blown away by it's performance in 2gb ram with a 1.5ghz single core cpu. That's some seriously efficient coding.

 

What Microsoft needs to do is release a Surface RT, in exactly the same format as the first model but with an Atom CPU and Windows 8. Price it at £350,-- inc. Touch Cover. Make Office an optional extra for £80,--.

Stand back and watch it fly off the shelves. There, that wasn't so hard, was it, Ballmer?

Meanwhile, just unlock the desktop on Windows RT. Publishers will start porting their legacy software to ARM, and the platform will have a little more life in it.

 

Did you not say that would be a bad idea stating things like performance and battery life as issues. I'm going on memory though so I could be wrong. I certainly wouldn't use one with that configuration but I think you are right it could sell well.

 

I don't think MS really understands that inflated prices damage sales. I don't think they'll ever figure that out. Win 8 Pro still has a retail of £198.

If they make a new entry level surface based on x86 (as they should have done the first time) they will inflate the price to encourage people towards nexus or ipads.

They're obviously keen to push people towards PS4 over xbox one. Perhaps they have double agents working for them to ensure they keep making the same mistakes.

 

I did. Technically it would be a compromise. The new Atoms work as well as an ARM chip, but have a dismal GPU in comparison (which Intel allegedly is working on). When they run legacy software, the performance and battery life start to plummet. But it's what people seem to want, and they appear happy to put up with the compromise. Rule 1 in business: give people what they want.

In the long term it makes sense to keep going with Windows RT because the development of ARM CPU's is not sitting still either. People make the mistake of comparing the next generation of Bay Trail Atom CPU's with the last generation of ARM CPU's (Tegra 3) and then crowing how much better the Atom is. But Qualcomm and nVidia's Tegra 5 may have something to say about that.

However Windows RT is never going to get acceptance unless the desktop is unlocked and publishers can port legacy software to ARM. Again, it would be a compromise on Microsoft's vision but you have to sell devices now to realise the vision later.

 

At no point in time Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun-Huang blamed the slow sales on Windows RT. You can't ask a bigger fan of Windows RT and Surface. The Verge assumed he was pointing to Windows RT.

 

He blamed the lack of Outlook as a big problem.

 

Nvidia didn't sell as much chips as expected because microsoft didn't sell as much RT as expected. Its pretty straight forward. His own statement is just politics. He's hardly going to come out with some scathing report on a company they are partnering with.

 

Recently switched over to 8, and I haven't really been having that many issues with it, and enjoying the benefits it brings.

Win 8.1 looks like it will fix the major usability flaws in it (reintroduction of a classic style option), and exposure over time will fix the rest. Though, as a user experience designer, I have to wonder how the hell Microsoft's UX design team let the thing out the door without a large training and support package to assist end users with a complete paradigm shift in the way a fundamental peice of desktop software they rely on operates. Professionally, that was an absolutely epic failure, though the end product itself is still quite good if you are able to overcome that hurdle

Most on bit here are quite capable of doing so, but as the coming of 8.1 proves, the majority of end users are not.

 

So, the old Start Button and Start Menu?

More seriously, I would say Rule #1 is to convince people that what you're giving them is what they think they want, when what you're actually doing is giving them what they didn't realize they want, but once they get it in their hands they totally need it. It's what Jobs did with the iPod/iPhone/iPad.

Microsoft tried with Windows 8, but they didn't count on lazy tech journalists tainting the market with poor reviews, and now they have to fall back on an update to give people what they complain about wanting - the implementation being a pseudo-Start Button that may result in more confusion.