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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

Rounded corners and touchscreens, is that windows 8/vista again? What i want from windows is speed . More and more people are going to be using them to work from home, and not on a tablet or a laptop, but on a good old desktop pc, their sales are going up. What's the rationale behind this kind of regression to terrible windows 8? Can i plz have snappier windows 7 with slightly cleaner look?

> app developers can now bring their own commerce into our Store and keep 100% of the revenue – Microsoft takes nothing. App developers can still use our commerce with competitive revenue share of 85/15

This is great. That's how it s done

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> Can i plz have snappier windows 7 with slightly cleaner look?

I wouldn't mind a complete visual regression to Windows 7. In fact, I remember that Win 7 Aero only had rounded corners.

> Win 7 Aero only had rounded corners.

Except that the rounding only happened on the window decoration, which took space. The client rendering area was a full rectangle. Now, they’re cutting corners out of the client rendering area.

> Rounded corners and touchscreens, is that windows 8 again?

Windows 8 distinctly had no rounded corners. The metro design language was quite square

Guessing they’re confusing 8 and Vista? I have no other explanation.

right, win7 had some roundedness, but the unbelievable annoying launch screens for touchscreens were in win8 IIRC

I use Linux now but keep windows VMs around for some legacy stuff. It takes about 5-10s to boot win7. It's snappy as heck, and reliable, even in a vm with minimal ram.

And, every program works

Touchscreen laptops and convertible laptops are becoming increasingly common, they can't just ignore this market segment.

increasingly common but still a tiny minority of their user base. others shouldn't suffer for that

I don't think so, the studies I've seen actually show the number of touchscreen devices is growing, and desktop PCs are shrinking.

but how are their sales doing? given the kind of apps that run on a PC, i think the touchscreen is just a gimmick that is barely used. Windows programs are just not made for tablets, and will never be

The sales seem to be increasing, I wouldn't say it's a gimmick. Also touch support is not just for touchscreens, most laptops now have multi-touch touchpads where you can do gestures. Making a program support those already puts it significantly closer to having real touchscreen support, so it's not as hard or difficult as you'd imagine for older Windows programs to gain good tablet support.

maybe, but windows programs are so heterogeneous that i dont see how i will be able to use blender, browser, word, excel etc on a touchscreen .

Besides, this "touch-first" approach has been tried with win8 and in my experience it was atrocious

The point with those laptops is, you use the keyboard when it makes sense, and you use the touchscreen when that makes sense. I think you're confusing "touch-first" with "having any support for touchscreens at all," some concessions need to be made if you don't want it to be totally unusable on a device like that which has an optional touchscreen.

> i think the touchscreen is just a gimmick that is barely used.

I'll just say that my laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga) has a touchscreen and I love it. Every laptop I buy from here out will be a touchscreen merely because the ability to reach up while I type and just tap where i want my mouse to go next is such a better system than working with a nipple or trackpad.

I think as laptops with touchscreens become more affordable lots of people will change across. When i'm forced to work on my work laptop without KB&M, I really miss the ability to touch my screen instead of working with the god awful trackpad.

I would assume part of this is due to the trackpad. The only trackpads (of those I have used) that I would describe as better than "decent" have been on mac laptops.

> App developers can still use our commerce with competitive revenue share of 85/15

But there isn't a perpetual Agreement guaranteeing MS won't ever increase its cut in the future when its store becomes more popular. The Store hasn't yet been terribly successful. Most of my Windows apps are installed outside the MS store: Notepad++, VSCodium, Steam, and so on. So MS will try to get more apps in the Store and then lock down Windows like iOS once it has enough apps, then increase its own cut so that it can transfer wealth from the middle class to billionaire MSFT shareholders, just like AAPL does.

It doesn't even matter, unless microsoft stops allowing programs outside the app store. But that will never happen given their ecosystem.

You know I kind of wish windows had a store, but then I tired installing apps using the current store and it's a terrible experience. They make it so hard for people with more than 1 hard drive to manage what goes where.

> Rounded corners and touchscreens, is that windows 8 again?

Transparent windows and widgets make it more like Vista.

Looks like a new version of KDE

... which the KDE will soon copy and the loop will continue forever

>> app developers can now bring their own commerce into our Store and keep 100% of the revenue – Microsoft takes nothing. App developers can still use our commerce with competitive revenue share of 85/15

> This is great. That's how it s done

It can't go on, though. Why won't every developer turn their app "free" and use Stripe or something to shave even more off the commerce fees? Meanwhile Microsoft eats hosting/maintenance/development on the store for zero return. We saw why Apple went the IAP route even if it's unpopular among developers and the fees could afford to be reduced.

This is fine? It means more people are on the platform and using Windows. Remember, Microsoft still makes money from every Windows computer sold.

Indirect revenue is why this is sustainable! Good on Microsoft for making the right choice here.

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