Creating the Windows 8 user experience | Hacker News Reader

Creating the Windows 8 user experience

blogs.msdn.com

40 pointsdavux35 comments

I see this as nothing less than a massive misstep by Microsoft. Trying to create a primary OS based on mobile devices is a great way to give market share to the companies that already own those spaces while giving up the one that you own. Microsoft even says that "some people" still need desktop PC's, then names 'video editors, financial analysts, scientists, gamers, PC enthusiasts…'...so everyone who needs to actually do work on a PC.

I get it - Microsoft thinks that they want the big market, and that the big market is content consumers. But 50% of Microsoft's revenue comes from Microsoft Office - and that hasn't changed. Furthermore, Google and Apple already own the market on smart phone OSs and nothing Microsoft has done in the past has shown that they have any ability to crack into that market.

So effectively, Microsoft wants to create an OS that abandons their core revenue base while going after one that has rejected them repeatedly.

At best, it's Windows ME. At worst, it's the rise of Linux and Apple as the future of the desktop.

Although the linked article ignores certain MS OS's, like Win ME (for good reason), it does accurately convey the message that MS often does fairly innovative things that run against conventional wisdom and, in most cases, this has worked out rather well for them. MS spends way more on research than Apple and occasionally good things make it into MS products.

Even with that in mind, Metro is a pretty big gamble. They're trying to bring a unified experience across mobile and desktop devices when there are practically no mobile MS devices out there! It would be an ambitious idea if Windows phone (or tablet!) was well established and had a decent amount of market share but, as things stand, it's appears almost insane. MS is taking a huge risk with their core market to expand into markets that they're almost completely locked out of at present.

However, if you look at the trends in computing its absolutely true that more and more is being done on mobile devices, often at the expense of the desktop. The argument could be made that MS, as a company, would be in serious trouble if they just stuck to the desktop market. It very well might be "go big or go home" time for Microsoft, and they are clearly choosing to go big.

I say good luck to MS. I hope Metro lets them push into the mobile market without alienating their desktop core. It's better for consumers if there's more choice.

So effectively, Microsoft wants to create an OS that abandons their core revenue base while going after one that has rejected them repeatedly.

Exactly. There may be some precedent for a successful OS built on a bifurcated strategy like what MS has outlined for Windows 8, but at 43, I'm not old enough to remember it.

I think DOS/Windows is a pretty good analog, and it was very successful.

An interesting point, but I'm not sure it applies. Microsoft knew they could never really commoditize computing with a command-line OS, so Windows was an absolute necessity. It was demanded by literally billions of customers, most of whom didn't even know they needed it. Even then, Windows took several years and three major versions before it really caught on.

These days, desktop computers are as ubiquitous as they are ever going to get, and few people are demanding a replacement for the traditional Windows UI on the desktop. Unlike DOS, what Microsoft has is good enough for the mass desktop/laptop market. The fact that it's not good enough for mobile does not in any way justify tinkering with their successful desktop strategy. IMO, what we're seeing is yet another panicked, reactionary twitch from the Ballmer executive suite.

Makes sense. The first 3 versions of Windows ran on top of DOS. This first version of Metro runs "on top" of a classic Windows desktop... And both were responses to products Apple launched (Lisa/Macintosh and the iPad). What Microsoft is doing is using Windows as the platform that introduces Windows+1 much like it did with DOS.

Alternatively, could they be attempting to embrace a "tik-tok" model? Enterprise tends to move slowly, and Win7 is still going strong. Could they not produce Win8 targeted at mobile, keep enterprise on Win7, and come back to enterprise for Win9?

Seeing as Windows 8 still includes full desktop mode, exactly how does any of this "abandon core revenue" logic make any sense?

I get it, despite being in the tech world, geek-types remain incredibly resitive to change, but I'm tired of every tiny change that Google or Microsoft makes turning into "they're jumping the shark".

To be fair, people said the same about Gnome 3 and Unity and both work very well...

But... If you are not a "geek-type", what are you doing on "Hacker News"?

I am a geek type, and one who accepts that technology changes and different != automatically awful.

The fact that everyone said the same thing about Unity and are now coming around to it, proves my point. I happen to love Gnome-Shell. I don't mind Unity and I think Win8 is great after you take some time to get used to it.

Your generalizations are incorrect. While a lot of people were very vocal on their opposition to Gnome shell and Unity, I wouldn't say "everyone" opposed them. In fact, I didn't. I considered the move risky, of course.

I think Metro for desktops and notebooks makes very little sense unless you use a multi-touch pointing device like Apple's trackpad. With a mouse, it's painful.

Yes, heh, I did not mean literally everyone, but even much of HN is still full of Unity hate. I managed to get down to at least -8 or -9 by my calculations the other day for trying to combat nonspecific Unity hate-rants. I understand skepticism, like I said, I really just roll my eyes at the "it sucks [with no reasons]" that are evident even in this thread.

And it doesn't completely answer your criticism but many Synaptic touchpads for a looong time are multitouch capable, they're just not utilized. It's different, I'll grant that, I didn't think it was painful, but I adapt quickly and I don't mind scrolling with the wheel to move horizontally. (The proverbial) You get used to it.

The fact is almost every HP, Acer, Dell and Toshiba will come with it pre-installed. There is basically no way it will be labeled a failure, even if nobody uses it.

Remember Windows Vista was considered a great success (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2130290,00.asp).

When you buy a generic x86 computer (any non-Apple x86, that is) you have 3 choices of OS: you can leave whatever came on the machine (most likely Windows), you can install a previous version of Windows you already had floating around or you can install any of the fine *nix-based OSs that will run on it. Most people opt for #1, some resent change (or just dislike what came with the machine) and opt for #2 and a tiny minority goes with #3 (me included).

That means I am part of Vista's and 7's success stories - I bought computers with them installed and never bothered to return the licenses, although I never used either. From a sales perspective, I'm a happy Windows user.

But if people delay purchases or go with competing products instead of buying an HP, Acer, Dell, Toshiba, etc. with Windows 8 pre-installed, then they've all got a problem on their hands.

Also, do you remember how long manufacturers were offering laptops with Windows XP pre-installed? I think you may still be able to buy one somewhere.

That's great for the desktop and notebook market. But now you have to convince people to buy Windows based tablets.

Microsoft OEMs will build them in order to qualify for discounts in desktop and laptop W8 licenses. And x86-based tablets will be able to go into classic mode (and JIT JavaScript) and run current x86 apps.

Why would anyone desire a W8 ARM tablet instead of a much cheaper (as in "you can buy two of them") Android-based one or an iPad is an excellent question, but we should never underestimate the power of advertising.

Where Microsoft used to primarily focus on reducing memory consumption, now we are also laser-focused on improving battery life while still delivering a fast and fluid user experience.

If Microsoft's previos focus on reducing memory consumption produced prior versions of windows, their new focus on increasing battery life should produce Windows 8 tablets that last a half an hour, tops.

While I'm at it, in general, fuck Windows 8. The UI may be nice, but Microsoft is taking such a massive power dump on developers and users alike with this turkey that they have a tough road ahead of them if they want to even get within spitting distance of the iPad in terms of mindshare.

Microsoft products often annoy me, but "too much memory consumption" is pretty low on the list. Does Windows 7 really demand a substantially higher amount of memory than similarly-capable competing systems in most categories? (Linux running FVWM isn't comparable for most categories.)

I agree that Windows 8 is so far rather unconvincing with regard to providing a realistically strong competitor to the iPad in market terms; but if I were to hear that the Windows team was focusing on some technical aspect, I'd expect, based on history, to see them have pretty good success with it.

"too much memory consumption" is pretty low on the list.

The reason it isn't high on the list is because they already tackled that for Win7. You may not remember, but it was a growing problem before 7.

They aren't saying here that they need to reduce memory consumption further; they are saying that they will do the same thing with battery life for Win8, that they did with memory for Win7.

I think you've misunderstood my point which was that Microsoft engineers are very capable of reducing memory usage if charged to do so (and, as you say, history bears this out) and that I would expect them to likewise be able to reduce power usage [within the constraints provided by environment and hardware requirements].

There's a big difference between reducing memory pressure/performance (which kind of solved itself once applications stopped increasing memory usage faster than the price/Mb dropped, and the move from 32-bit to 64-bit helped a bit too; handling stupid things like XP swapping everything out to disk overnight were easy wins as well) and improving power efficiency (requires application and OS redesign, which Microsoft have done and judging by the moaning about WinRT in this thread by developers the uptake will be a challenge; even then if you improve efficiency people just keep using the damn devices even more so it's really difficult to win whereas with memory there's a typical usage value that changes safely relative to RAM increases as applications grow over the years, whereas battery capacity isn't improving as rapidly).

I'm throwing another 12GB of RAM (making 24GB total) into my system tomorrow when I install Windows 8. Together with my new SSD it'll help crunching through some large data sets so that I can hit 100% CPU utilization. It cost me $100 USD to do so in a country where we often pay double for electronics. Few "normal" people can utilize all of that during the normal course of using a PC. Memory pressure is an easy problem to solve.

Memory is cheap. There's probably better things to focus on then squeezing more bits out of the memory usage.

> The reason it isn't high on the list is because they already tackled that for Win7

It's not tweaking memory management that solved the problem - it's that our computers started coming with 4 gigabytes of RAM.

I dunno, Win7 runs just fine on 1GB, and while XP can be installed on 128MB I'm not sure it will run that well.

> I dunno, Win7 runs just fine on 1GB

That's not what I experience with VMs. Unless you restrict yourself to the desktop and Windows Explorer, it doesn't feel good.

Dunno if VMs are the ideal reference case.

The memory reductions in 7 were pretty drastic. Give some credit where it's due.

Either that, or the memory increases in Vista were enormous and 7 brought it down to the kind of hardware that was available at the time.

My favorite part was where you didn't justify or substantiate any of your angry rant.

In what way are they screwing developers? I feel that the three avenues for writing apps (C#/xaml, c++, and html5/js) are actually pretty good for us.

By giving you a crippled, nerfed WinRT API to develop to instead of Win32. Apple's iOS APIs are crippled, too, but the iPad is so much cheaper, niftier, and more pleasant to develop for (seriously, Cocoa APIs are pretty awesome). The key advantage of Windows -- backwards compatibility with prior versions of Windows -- is going to be to some significant degree, lost with WinRT. In short, Microsoft is going to have a hard time attracting a critical mass of developers to this new platform without... incentives[0].

[0] http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2000/10/23/

You're just all over the place aren't you? WinRT APIs are available on ARM, so the devices will eventually reach price parity. Otherwise, WinRT APIs are neither that crippled given their target usage (Metro apps), they're designed to be power friendly from the start and you can choose any language that there are projections for.

Windows 95 Media Player could do more than play wav files, you could certainly watch videos.

Also there was a lot of evolution between Windows 95 and XP that gets glossed over, as the internet became more important. XP, with some minor tweaks, could behave like a stabler version of 95/98 (I must admit that I stripped much of the chrome away for a few months, till I got more comfortable with the slightly different look and feel of the menus and task bar).

The also ignore one significant trend-following dead-end from the 95/98 era: Active Desktop- Vista wasn't the first time they headed up a blind UX alley.

Even with Windows 7, I think they overstate the differences with its predecessors: the Start Menu remains as important as ever.

I think that people here are too pessimistic in general about Windows 8.

Look at the current trends in computing. They're using those trends to influence this release. And I think that a lot of the design decisions (especially ones like "content over chrome" are really damn good).

It's going to be super interesting to see how this thing is received by non-techy people come the holiday season.

True, but with the exception of tablets, the trends themselves sound problematic at best. To wit:

"Today, this is increasingly how we see many people use their devices, obsessively switching between different websites and programs on their PC and apps on their phone, checking to see if there’s anything new to see or do."

Just what I want my OS to facilitate. Perhaps the new OS should come bundled with an Adderall prescription?

Personally, I've found that the new Start Screen works well . . . once I've _removed all the tiles_. Similarly, one of my gripes with iOS has always been the home screen's tendency to remove the first page if it doesn't contain at least one icon. Surely I'm not the only one that launches things from Spotlight and the "double tap" bar 99.9% of the time? Organizing icons is shit work.

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