Daring Fireball: Ice Water Enthusiast
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
Business users, who have no choice anyway since IT installs their machines. As businesses are actually the main force behind Microsofts keen upholding of legacy code, there is little reason for them to get excited about a new interface. So here we have a very low adoption rate.
Non-Computer users: The kind of people who almost accidentally bought their PC at Walmart, still run Windows XP (maybe even 98SE), and mostly use the system to print ugly birthday flyers or play Solitaire. They would probably enjoy Win8, but they won’t ever notice it exists until they go and buy a new PC at Walmart. Here, we have another low adoption rate.
The enthusiast Computer user: These are people that grew up with Windows, know (and sometimes love) all of it’s kinks and quirks, and use it for a variety of tasks. They’re its avid defenders in Engadget comment threads and tend to be a tad regressive, since Windows has always worked for them quite well and as they fear loosing the high investment in Windows knowledge that they accumulated over the years. The less regressive, the higher the chance that this particular person has already switched to Mac or Linux. The more regressive, the higher the chance that he/she would actually reject or even despise radical Windows interface changes as it deviates too much from her/his well known Windows. The adoption rate should be pretty solid, but this market segment is also heavily courted by the alternatives.
For Microsoft, and for two out of these three groups, backwards compatibility is of uttermost importance. And that's why most energetic Windows users will love the Windows 8 approach of having everything, and this is also why most of them won't understand the complaints of Gruber et al: Because they like the looks of modern ui like iPad (or Windows 8 for that matter), but they love their 25 years of cruft.
Strange how this whole argument seems like a step-by-step repetition of "GUI vs. command-line", a quarter of a century ago.
On one side, we have the beautiful new Apple system with no backwards compatibility. On the other side, there's the "industry standard" provider who has announced plans to extend their existing system with a cool new interaction layer while retaining full compatibility. (In 1986, this role was played by IBM with OS/2, but the GUI software was Microsoft's.)
Gruber even mentions DOS drive letters as an ugly wart of compatibility. This same argument could have been made in support of the Mac back then...
These fundamentally aesthetic points seem pretty weak in face of the appeal of backwards compatibility. If Windows 8 can make the "convertible tablet" finally work, it will sell.
The argument is not that personal computer OSes and mobile device OSes won't be converging down the road. Actually that's the big thing with Lion, isn't it. And I'm sure it will be a similar thing with iOS 5. The argument, though, is that they will never meld completely because it is impossible (or at the very least very, very unlikely) to have both full backwards compatibility and full and proper casual computer, or tablet if you will, experience.
My point was that he was making a response to a general feel from a group of people specifically about his individual response, and saying things in the authors article were wrong/misleading because he himself did not say them.
The only useful part in the whole article.
(I'd like to be able to plug a keyboard+monitor into my phone and get a Chrome-esque environment, but I'd also like it not to drain my battery or otherwise irritate me...)
Total protonic reversal!
Update:
Just saw a video of Windows 8 and it looks great but I still have worries about trying to combine the old with the new. Interface looks great until you run one of those old windows apps (ughhh). And when will be ever rid of those drive letters? ;-)
Update 2:
There are two skills that will not go out of fashion: windows/x86 programming and HTML/JS.