Not sure what to think about Windows 8

Ok now, that all sounds pretty ridiculous... [Full disclosure: I’ve been using Windows 8 since around launch and, I like it.]

First-off, I just really don’t see how a 13 year-old’s ability to install a beta operating system has anything to do with the merits of the product whatsoever..? And, from my experience installing it and guiding a few less-technical people through it, I’d say that if he can read it’s actually quite simple (download setup tool, run it, click ‘next’ a few times, wait, and done). The degree of difficulty is no greater or less than that of installing any other application on a PC or MAC (sure, it’s not as easy as installing Temple Run on an iPhone, but it’s not rocket science either).

Also, "...once I found my way to the desktop..."? It’s the giant rectangle with the word ‘desktop’ on it.. I realize the Metro UI is relatively new and can be a big shock compared to the traditional Windows experience, but I have a hard time believing you (based on your descriptions, I’d say a pretty intense power user) are unable to figure out something so basic. Beyond that, once in the desktop, everything works essentially the same as it did in Windows 7. Only real (possibly negative) exception is that the the Start Button is missing from the taskbar. You can still access explorer, go online, download all your applications, use all the same shortcuts, etc... So what exactly is the issue you’re having? In addition to all this, and in place of the Start Button/Menu, you now have the ‘Start Screen’ which provides the same functionality and more (very easily-discovered tip: just hit the Windows keyboard key anytime and start typing (just like before) to search for applications, documents, settings, or anything else).

I’m not really all that technical as it relates to all this (I work in finance; have no idea what any of "...from mechanical design with Solidworks to elecronic design with Altium Designer and FPGA design with Xilinx and Altera toolsets ... and occasional stints into NetBeans..." is), but I know how to use a computer and I know how to poke around to discover things when I’m presented with something new or different; I’d assume, based on the above, you would be as well. It took me all of 5 minutes to figure out how to navigate and I’m actually really liking many of the new Metro features and enhancements specifically related to ease of use and navigation.

The only point that I absolutely agree with you on is that it can be pretty confusing at first start for someone who’s unfamiliar with the new ‘Metro’ interface. MSfT should, and almost certainly will, include some sort of ‘welcome/WTF is this guide’ at first launch to explain things. But just as in past versions of Windows, or any other OS, or anything for that matter, people will eventually learn what’s relevant for them to do what they need.

I’d say (if you really are an objective user) try it out a bit more and poke around. If all else fails, I believe Windows 8 still has the ability to open a browser (it would be the giant blue/white 'e' tile on the start screen, or taskbar, by default) and search the internet for answers to any ‘issues’ that come-up. After that, get back to us on what you actually think; It’s always good to bring up actual issues and discuss them. I’m not here to say the OS is perfect, there’s plenty that needs some serious work, but at least give some specifics beyond it was hard to imagine how I’d do something on this that I was able to do before, but haven’t tried yet..

Sensationalism aside, how many 13 year olds need to install an OS from scratch.

People love doing these 'I gave x Microsoft product to my great-grandfather's second cousin twice removed' and then spell out gloom and doom for M$ yet in attempting to be so realistic they become unrealistic.

A not-so-tech-savvy friend of mine got an iPhone 4S and aside from the amusing mistakes in messages when I saw her next she exclaimed she was having a difficult time figuring everything out. Now, she's quite smart — if there any other Australians on here from Queensland, she got an OP 1 and is studying engineering.

How many people press F1 and seek help? How many people read manuals at all for anything new they get? Windows has continuously changed and somehow the world hasn't ended yet. People would go out and buy Macs at the site of Windows8? Haha. Yes, those people with no experience outside of Windows would suddenly want to go get a Mac and there would be such a minimal learning curve for them that would be less than Win8.

In the rush to criticise Win8 people have forgotten that the new Metro interface is already widely being used, at least in some form, on Windows 7 Phones, iPhone, Android, etc — grid display of apps, app store, the way Metro apps are switched, gestures, etc. All Windows users do not live in a complete bubble though I see how that's a convenient imaginary land to make neomodern comments on the internet. :P

You could try using the classic desktop because.. I don't know how else to say this, it's the classic desktop. Hell, you can completely ignore the main Metro side of things. ;) When I tried the Consumer Preview I was able to just do that. At work one of the guys is only using Windows8 and does so in that fashion and he uses Dreamweaver, Fireworks and other misc. apps like FileZilla and whatnot.

Forgive me for the rant, I will try not to sound like a troll, as I am not one. I rest my foot upon my sacred BeBox and attempt to engage.

I kind of feel on a near-/mid-term view that the "age of the OS war", wherein the OS was the central watering point for app vendors, is dead and over. For the customer, for the user, it no longer really matters what OS is on the computer, as long as the thing works. If the thing has an App store, they'll use it. End of platform worries.

Yes, I really said it: the proprietary OS is dead. And so what we're seeing here with the way that Microsoft is addressing Win8 et al., is the long-tail/carcass of the 'one OS to rule us all' monster doctrines of the 70's and 80's, actually sort of a bit stinky, still left out on the playing field. The reality is, the OS value to the user is dead or dying. Most seriously useful apps in use will run on whatever is available, hardware-wise, and of course that means x86, ARM, and so on. A cross-platform, multi-build target codebase can be quite well served from left to right on the spectrum, if the proper tools are used, and those tools are done and out there.

Even OSX is starting to rot a bit in the sense that its OS vendor seems to be acceptably abandoning their Developers, or forcing them to choose sides, in order to control access to and rights of the User market. OSX is going to get less and less 'open and general purpose' while becoming, itself, a huge capital in the real $$-making realm of computers: selling candy apps on commodity hardware, directly to the user.

Developers as a reason for OS lock-in? Well, I think there that we're headed for walled gardens, with the trick being that ultimately, now that anyone can build their own walled garden for free or next to nothing, the OS as a host for Big Apps doesn't matter so much, so OS product managers are going to reduce the general-purpose/free nature of it.

If one builds ones app stack from boot to user with whatever one needs, and if the app is good enough, people will abandon making the OS decision as a necessary 'accessory', soon enough. It has happened many times, and now recently with iOS/Android app stores, its a huge win for the makers of hardware, and some of the makers of software.

Another thing though is that there is still nothing, and I mean nothing, stopping Samsung from having their own wide-open developer/OS front, in face of Microsoft. Nothing stopping them, but for groupthink. Say Samsung build and deliver a small footprint Linux machine for watching movies and home content, with the difference being the machine is 100% open, has its own onboard compiler/build-system, access to a common App store (namespace) .. well .. all this is a deadly affront to Windows8, come to think of it. I'm sensing "Panic!" in the product.

We just simply don't need Big OS. If your app is well-written, it can run on them all. Or, if you want, you can have your own OS and App sphere; CPU dies support such ideologies, they just haven't happened yet because there isn't .. yet .. a demand of the general public for having computer systems that will self-sustain through development.

Some hardware company will profit from this idea breaking through, soon enough, I think ..

I've seen kids aged about 4 and 8 see Windows 8 on a tablet device (one of the ones they gave out at build) for the first time, and they both 'got it' within about 15 seconds of using it.

I can't dispute that this W8 works on a tablet. I think that the force-feeding of a tablet interface as the "open box" experience on the desktop is what causes friction.

Most of the comments are focusing on the installation. That was not the point of the post. In fact, the installation was simple enough that a a 13 year old did it without any help whatsoever.

It's a usability issue. The paradigm shift is great enough that most everyone is talking about sitting in front of W8 absolutely dumbfounded.

I agree that it looks like a nice interface for a tablet or phone. I don't have a Metro-interface-equipped phone or tablet but concede that the interface seems nice for type of a device.

So far, I simply don't see it for a classic desktop computer. I'll put more time into it, but my first impression is that people will hate it during that critical "open the box" experience.

This is very similar to what happened in the transition from Office 2003 to, say, Office 2007. If you were a capable user of '03 you found yourself slowing down to a crawl to figure out how to do things in '07. Could you do exactly the same things? Absolutely. Yes. And more. Was the pain, aggravation and productivity loss worth the new look and feel? Absolutely not. I'll argue that there are zero incremental gains from forcing users to switch from the '03 to the '07 interface. In fact, one could very well argue that there was a net loss due to the fact that users had to invest a sometimes not trivial amount of time to figure things out. And all of this to do exactly the same work they were doing before the transition to Office '07. The interface did not magically turn them into productivity masters, it actually damaged productivity.

So far I see the Windows 8 paradigm as a step in that direction. Frankly, In my opinion, it has been going downhill since Vista. XP was good. And, yes, it could have been improved, but there really wasn't anything fundamentally horrible about the XP experience and UI. I don't personally care about bling-bling. I work with my computer, it's not a toy. Maybe that's not a typical consumer use case scenario where bling-bling might be a requirement.

I feel very strongly that MS should have taken the approach of incrementally improving upon XP rather than going off in these ridiculous tangents. For example, it would have been nice to have really intelligent copying of files. You know, where if you are copying 500 files and file number 23 fails the copy routine would log it and keep going rather than killing the entire run? And there's more.

But, you look at Vista and some of the decisions made and you really have to wonder what they are thinking. Sorting of folders in Windows explorer is but one example.

With W8 I see a transition that is going to be jolting for most people. Take anyone who's been using XP, Vista or 7 and plant them in front of a W8 machine (that was the point of using my 13-year-old as a test subject) and they grind to an absolute halt.

Keep in mind that they will be trying to do what they were doing just minutes before on the older OS. Except that, this time around, they'll be utterly confused as to how to do it. Sure, eventually they'll figure it out. It might take a couple of weeks to get comfortable, maybe more for some, less for others.

The argument here is very simple: The time required to learn to use the new W8 paradigm to, in the end, accomplish nothing more and derive no productivity gains is completely wasted. If you had a business with, say, 50 or more employees you'd be nuts to switch to W8. The office would grind to a halt virtually overnight and it would take weeks to get back to where it was before. In the end, not one person in this hypothetical business would be more efficient at their job due to W8.

BTW, just in case readers think that I might be an Apple fan-boy, know that we own about 25 Windows-based workstations, several Linux and three Macs. Definitely not a Mac shop here. The only reason we moved some of our machines to Vista is to move to a 64 bit OS as required by some of our Finite Element Analysis software, other than that, I've seen no point whatsoever in moving beyond XP. If an XP+ was available with true incremental enhancements I'd jump on it, but we are not here to play games and I really don't have time for the latest consumer bling-bling experiment in UI.