The dumbing-down of Windows 8 | Hacker News Reader

The dumbing-down of Windows 8

cringely.com

24 pointsevo_922 comments

Flagged. The title is misleading and the very first sentence is factually inaccurate.

MS is not eliminating Aero (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero) they are eliminating Aero Glass (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/micros...).

Basically they just dropped transparent window chrome in their default theme.

This article draws some truly insane conclusions, that dropping Aero Glass had anything to do with "dumbing" down Windows to put it on phones is ridiculous.

The real key here is integration, it's more in the line of Smart Glass - having a compatible and familiar UX on all their lines of products, and I think it's about time.

I don't know why the article considers the only two possible options as "Metro" and "Aero". I'd go for "Classic". I still set my Windows boxes to that style immediately after install, along with separately turning off most other visual enhancements in the System control panel.

I'm not a complete luddite; I know that on a modern system Aero is not going to have a terrible effect on performance, and that UI elements can be customized, and that I like some of the Windows 7 enhancements to the taskbar and start menu. But the visual style of Aero is just extra visual distraction.

I can see the point of using GPU to accelerate the UI, but there should always be an option of minimal visual distraction.

Good news for you: With windows 8 DWM is a core system component which you can not even kill it from Task Manager or disable it with Services.msc. You can say "where is the good news?" here it is: Shake, snap, preview, peek and all other aero features are enabled for you even you GPU is not very capable for them. It falls back to software based rendering if your GPU is not capable.

Instead of disabling Aero, I just installed a custom theme and turned off all the transparency. I too found Aero to be too much of visual distraction; too many different colored elements with no consistency.

However, a subtle Aero theme is a considerable improvement of classic.

Goto ctrl pnl->system->advanced->performance

Select manage best performance (ie remove all the features) then turn back on the bottom 4 options. It gives you almost all the aero look but without the CPU/memory load

Honestly, the CPU/Memory load is pretty minimal and disabling Aero for performance on a modern machine is micro-optimization at best.

Unless you are running CUDA or openGL shader code, then anything that uses a GPU function brings you to a halt.

It took us a long time to work out why we getting crappy performance on some people's machines when the dev's with identical hardware were doing fine. Aero transparency does terrible things to the texture memory

I can't believe the Aero interface won't be an option - Does anyone really believe Microsoft has forgotten where their corporate bread is buttered?

After chrome.exe and eclipse, the most memory consuming app on my Task Manager's process list is DWM. I think i can give up on some effects to gain more memory.

And you could have been doing that all along simply by changing your theme.

I don't think you will save much memory unless Microsoft is also removing desktop composition. When I turn off transparency in Win7, the amount of memory used by DWM.exe does not change.

Transparency is one of the features of DWM. If you want to get rid of DWM, you have to select Windows Classic theme.

Corporate aren't going to buy this. Just like bad star trek movies, corporate users only buy every other edition.

Right now MSFT is trying to get corporate to switch from XP->Win7 in 3-5 years they will be looking to move Win7->Win9

We agree that corporations aren't going to buy this ... but they'll also worry that Windows 9 will be patterned more after Windows 8 than 7/XP.

There used to be corporations that were in the opposite release cycle, but Vista effectively killed that for Microsoft.

There are probably smart people in MSFT who hope that there won't be a Windows9 desktop.

If MSFT can get everyone at home AND at work onto their services, running Office on their cloud and with all your line of business apps running on their servers.

Charging customers $100/month/user for SaaS certainly beats selling them a new $100 cdrom every 5years

> Charging customers $100/month/user for SaaS certainly beats selling them a new $100 cdrom every 5years

These numbers don't make a bit of sense. The most expensive Office 365 plan (excluding the ones that include desktop Office) is $14/user/month. And a license for desktop Office costs a whole lot more than $100.

They will make sense on somebody's Powerpoint !

There was a story on here about MSFT moving the FAA users to the cloud which worked out at $71/user - and currently nobody 'pays' for for Office ;-)

With everyone now having a PC and less reason to upgrade to a new OS every 2years - the only way for MSFT to keep up revenue growth is to start charging for biz and home users for continual service stuff.

You misunderstood. I wasn't saying that these numbers don't make sense to businesses. I'm saying that the numbers you provided are completely wrong. There is no $100/user/mo option for Office 365 and a desktop Office license costs a lot more than $100.

Why on Earth would corporations care if they get the Aero interface? There are a lot of reasons for corporations to choose (or choose not) to upgrade to Windows 8, but lack of the glass effect on the desktop is a purely aesthetic change. It doesn't affect the function of the UI, and it hardly seems like this is something corporations would even factor into their decision.

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