Windows 8 Plans Leaked: Numerous Details Revealed
msftkitchen.com
msftkitchen.com
I can't say much... but these slides are laughable (and if real, designed for some other company's execs/marketers) I joined Microsoft this past September having never been a Windows person. I've done most of my professional development on linux, and you can pry my macbook pro from my cold dead hands.
With that in mind, Win8 is looking awesome and it's something that I want to use right now. Microsoft is really getting their shit together. Win8, if it's even a fraction of what is planned, is going to change things permanently. This is a good thing considering Steve Jobs seems to have given up on the desktop as of this most recent WWDC.
If you haven't taken a look at Win7 mobile, you might want to. It's a pretty decent and novel approach to mobile UI. Microsoft has stepped up it's UI efforts in the past year or so. You're starting to see this in most of their products. They finally got a kick in the nuts after resting on their laurels for too long. Win8 shouldn't disappoint.
Perhaps MS has changed, but frankly given the history and considering its size and the amount of office politicking involved I find it fairly hard to believe.
You could've said that 10 years ago, and it would still hold the same value of truth.
Fact of the matter is, consumers and companies are still interested in desktops and laptops, and Windows is the default OS.
Also, I know it's trendy to say this (since we are on HN and all) but this is wishful thinking.
I had a bunch of offers but mostly looked at Amazon and Microsoft. I chose Microsoft because they are doing some amazing things internally right now. They also have some ridiculous talent (and their hiring changes over the past few years have only made it better). There is nothing better than working with other brilliant engineers.
In the end though, it was just about interesting work. Microsoft has acknowledged that they need to step up their game, and convinced me to come along for the ride. I've been there for 10 months now and so far they've stayed true to their word. It is a lot of fun there. I wasn't sure how it'd compare to Google, but Microsoft has surpassed my expectations. The only thing I miss is the free food.
It was never about what operating system or programming language, Microsoft offered me the most interesting challenge. So I took it.
At least, that's my answer.
Microsoft has a monopolist strategy.
That means, among other things, that their products need to be hard to both clone and/or be compatible with.
Microsoft systems then need to have too much complexities and oddities to be bug compatible with. It should be hard to clone APIs etc as parts of other operating systems. And so on.
The implementations also need to vary over time and be replaced periodically.
Just look at their "open" document standards of thousands of pages...
All that can't be fun to work with.
Edit: Word choice, a bit grammar.
Mac, yes. Linux? No. The key word that Linux distros (including Ubuntu) still miss is usability.
Btw, Windows _and_ Linux user here.
The real problems with Linux are much lower-level -- its vital desktop infrastructure has been ignored for too long. Look at X; there is a concerted effort to change it now, but rather late to the game if you ask me, and it still is very neglected for how important it is and all the work that's left to be done on it. Sound is the same way, and other vital components for desktop.
Yes, but ever since the iPhone it's growing. My old Java/.NET corporation now has teams doing iPhone/iPad applications. This is huge! Long ago it was all Windows with Linux/Solaris on the server. Now they are actually buying macs for developers.
That's more than 95% of them :)
I haven't gone through these slides thoroughly because I'm done with Microsoft peddling vapourware and getting our hopes up (coughCouriercough) only to sack the entire team (or whatever they did recently), but whatever I saw showed me a tighter integration with using the cloud as storage. The problem here is that Microsoft is trying to make a faster, leaner and better looking truck (to borrow Jobs' description) because it has lost the mobile game; at least for now. They're trying to maintain the status quo, but nothing in the last 10 years has shown me anything that tells me they will succeed. I don't believe in their ability to execute.
The first iPod, iPhone and iPad were game changers, the subsequent updates were not. The only revolutionary place that OSX can go is the way of the marketplace/app store and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Not every update needs to be revolutionary.
No offense, but I don't believe you.
Honestly this kind of thing is exactly what makes me think they don't "have their shit together". They're going to run out and say "look everyone! We have a desktop OS that's slightly better than OSX!" right as most people have moved off desktops.
Seriously. Look at what most people do. How much time does the average computer user spend consuming? And how much time producing? Just from the hip I would put this at 80/20 but it might be even more slanted than that. So does Grandma really need a whole PC to email her bridge group and surf the web for recipes? And one that has a "reset this PC" button? Why does she need to know any of this stuff?
What Steve said wasn't that Mac will be giving up on the desktop. He was just acknowledging that in the future it's going to play a vastly smaller role. It's still going to need to be really good because those of us that produce on it will be powering the mobile/appliance devices. I don't want to develop on an iPad but I like consuming with it.
Microsoft just doesn't seem to grasp this somehow and keeps trying to win a battlefield that everyone else realizes will just get less relevant as time goes on. Are they just concentrating on business users? MS had them at NT.
You can say "oh but we've got that covered, look at the new <insert newest MS mobile OS here>" but it doesn't exist right now. All the buzz I see/hear is about iPhone, Anroid and Palm. Is MS really committed to mobile to the level they need to be? If it is I don't think they're getting it across very well.
Funny enough, MS does have a nice install base of a an appliance device: the X box. Are they planning an App store for it (not a game store, an app store)? Can I purchase songs that sync with my media player?
I wonder if they did any market research on that feature. Every time I tell someone non-techincal that they should re-install Windows to fix their problems the answer is almost invariably either "You can do that?" or "No, that sounds hard."
I guess it makes the local/family geek's job easier when we have to help someone out though. If it's 100% reliable.
In any case piling more hacks and bloat on top of the OS is not the way to mimic Apple. To be fair they would probably need a much bigger reset than the one in 2006 to fix such deep problems.
I don't even need to search too hard. A few weeks ago I wanted to install bootcamp but found out that the bootcamp helper refused to partition my drive because it couldn't find a contiguous 30gb slot on my 80gb free drive. Oh! I could just defrag, I thought to myself... but not so fast, Yuri, Apple does not support defragging because Apple knows best. What do they recommend?
"Another option is to back up your important files, erase the hard disk, then reinstall Mac OS X and your backed up files." (source: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375)
Anyway, personally, I think the push button reset is a natural progression from the System Restore Points, which are great.
I had the same problem last year and I used iDefrag to solve it.
Well, they designed and implemented the system, so they should know best.
And they do support defragmentation. Read that page again: "In this case, you might benefit from defragmentation, which can be performed with some third-party disk utilities".
The reality is that few users ever have to worry about fragmentation of their HFS+ drives. And if you are concerned about fragmentation, I suggest 'hfsdebug', a free command-line tool.
My experience is that Windows' performance deteriorates over time just by using the OS normally. Installing programs and using them, etc. That's one of the things that drove me away from Windows several years ago. Vista and 7 may have changed this but Push Button Reset indicates to me that's not the case. While I agree that the solution to the Bootcamp problem is lame, the situation is quite different. Apple is not recommending you reinstall just to be able to use OS X normally.
Maybe it's not that different, maybe my bias is too strong for me to see it clearly, but I don't think it is.
That is:
I think any OS will deteriorate over time with use. The question is how the OS deals with this fact. The Windows method of memory management and defragging is... passable, but not nearly flexible or versatile for modern machines. For one thing, it's horrendous at dealing with boot configurations. And that reminds the user that Windows (up to 7!) doesn't appear to have any sort of actual boot configurator that even a hard-core geek could use.
What's more, while I see where you're going, and I agree with the thrust, I actually disagree with you that "Push Button Reset is great for geeks." It's the opposite of great for us; what we'd like to do is be able to manage clean reinstalls, and most of all to be able to partition hard disks to our liking. Considering that Windows 7 offers less partitioning options and capabilities than Windows 95 did (seriously, think about that for a moment) and that Vista was the first in a decade even to allow partitioning, we're far from a Windows which affords actual control over the machine or the media that goes into it.
That's really the thing here to me, as a geek. What does Windows 8 have to offer me to impress me and make me happy as a user? The ability to partition seamlessly; the ability to force a partitioning over errors if I want to; the ability to reinstall seamlessly as many times as I need to, to burn reinstallation software as many times as I need to; the ability to easily and directly configure boot parameters, and to make a boot sturdy and permanent for all users on a machine running multiple partitions with differing encryption levels; finally, direct manipulation of inodes/indexes. These are all things which are still, so far as I can tell, flatly impossible within the context of Windows; and where any of them is possible, it's only with the help of expensive software. Whereas a person with a free, burned copy of Knoppix on a disk can do all of them in five minutes with any computer she choose.
I'm not even saying Windows is evil here, or anything like it. It's just that it doesn't in any way meet what I need out of an operating system; there is no control over even the slightest thing, like indexing or bad-sector flags or defragging or partitioning or anything. And I sometimes wonder how Windows developers convince themselves that they're producing a powerful system.
Maybe some of them can answer this; I know they're reasonably intelligent. Do any of you know why Windows won't offer these things? And what we're supposed to do in a world where more and more operating systems do?
I think any OS will deteriorate over time with use.
I actually believe that Windows 7 represents a real improvement on how memory and fragmentation are managed. Vista wasn't bad, either. They both do pretty well.
It happens on new systems too. I've done it dozens of times, install Windows and be happy about the fresh, fast installation. Install some apps so you can use the machine and it slows down. Office was always the worst, even on a brand new install.
Then use Knoppix. Seriously. You just described yourself in the top 1% of computer geeks, and geeks are not part of Microsoft's core market anyway. You want to directly manipulate indexes and inodes?!?! Come on; Microsoft has no time for you, nor should it.
Of course things like different encryptions for different users of the same machine might make sense (although probably not, since that is pretty enterprisy, so probably happens on a server), but low-level disk partitioning is not the right way for Microsoft to handle them, even if they chose to handle them at all.
> Maybe some of them can answer this; I know they're reasonably intelligent. Do any of you know why Windows won't offer these things? And what we're supposed to do in a world where more and more operating systems do?
1) They don't want your business. 2) You're supposed not to use Windows.
I use an iMac at work. I like it. (I prefer the way my mouse feels in Windows but aside from that, I enjoy the iMac a great deal).
Still, I think Win7 is the best consumer OS i've ever used.
And specifically to the point you're making -- I got used, with the iMac, to keeping the box up for ages, 30, 60, 90 days at a time. Just by habit I've done the same with my Win7 box at home. Wasn't even stunning to me until I realized one day "Oy! I've got a Win box that's been up for 40 days and feel as snappy as day 4."
I tell you what, you can hold on to your bias or not, your choice, but this is a great OS and a great starting point for them in Redmond for Win8.
It's way too late for me now. I prefer Unix and there's no going back to Windows. I'm a command line junkie. :)
And pretty much the only time a normal user would ever need to reinstall OS X is if something went seriously wrong with the system files. It's a very abnormal thing to encounter. And even if you somehow need to do so, the option to preserve user information has been in OS X for a long time.
http://msftkitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Windows-8-...
1. Substantial in size
Just my personal tinfoil hat marketing conspiracy theory.
edit: removed unnecessary potshot.
Instead of piping text from one command to the other, you pipe entire objects back and forth. A lot of bash commands are aliased to Powershell commandlets out of the box. And, as of Powershell 2.0, you have remote scripting similar to SSH.
I choose to do Python Web development on Windows, and I spend my whole day on the PS command line, and I'm really pleased.
What, instead of actually using the ubiquitous, widely installed SSH? Some things don't seem to change.
That will get you far, right?
Also, when I pipe an object to another program, can the receiver call methods on it and are the changes visible to the sender?
Look around in the rest of the world mate. Look at the checkout lines at Target! They're exactly like Walmart! Which are exactly like Safeway! Look at the layout of every grocery store you've ever been in. Look at each boutique in the shopping mall. All the same!
When people say "intuitive" they mean "familiar." They may not realize it, but that's what "intuitive" _actually_ means.
You've got an e-commerce site? You should liberally borrow/steal from Amazon's checkout process. You've got an OS? Take from Apple who've been setting a baseline for OS usability.
Christ. "X is copying Y" is about as inane as it gets to me.
If the best Microsoft can do is to struggle to keep up with what Apple was doing two years ago they're not going to look very impressive to OEM's like HP as they decide to move forward with their products, with our without Microsoft.
However, your "doing it badly" is a matter of opinion, no? I use a mac at work as I mentioned elsewhere. I enjoy it a great deal. It's hard to go back and forth between the Mac there and Windows at home because the way the mouse moves is just... different. But I do it...
I was planning on dumping my Vista laptop at home for a macbook but then I gave Win7 a try. You can scoff at my experiences if you'd like, but Win7 is the only OS i've ever purchased. I think Vista is one of the worst OS experiences I've ever had (2nd to ME) and hands-down I think Win7 is the best.
It's built-in keyboard shortcuts for moving and docking windows across multiple monitors are invaluable to me. I installed the 3rd party app to give me similar function on my mac and it was... dismal.
My Win box is as reliable as my Mac. I restart them both on average once a month or so.
There are several places Mac kills Win7. Tasks like adding a network printer, for example. But those are rare, relatively speaking.
The Win7 taskbar is no doubt inspired by the Dock but it's far more useful IMO. The context menu per taskbar item is brilliant.
And once my cache is warmed (a day after restarts maybe) it's faster to/from Hibernate/Sleep than is the Mac.
If you've not used Win7 and you're criticizing, eh, you're entitled. But as an analytical guy, as a software developer, it seems odd to me.
It works well for small teams, but breaks down pretty quickly as team size grows.