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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I disagree that he missed the point. People use Windows because they already use Windows. If a new version of Windows is as hard to learn as OS X or Linux, then there's not much point in continuing to use Windows. (The same goes for Office. People use Word and Excel because they know how to use Word and Excel. Otherwise, they'd be saving themselves the license fee and be using Libre Office or Google Docs.)

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I'm no Windows fan (I can't imagine ever going back to Windows), but you've got to be kidding me if you think people only use it because they already use it. How about because it's far easier to use and less fiddly than Linux? How about because the software selection is vastly superior to both Linux and OS X? How about because almost any computer (including Apple's) can run Windows AND all your hardware will work just fine with it, while if you want to run OS X, you'll have to buy an expensive machine from Apple, and if you want to run Linux, you better pray there's decent driver support for your peripherals.

The situation has gotten a lot better over the last decade for OS X and Linux users (though Windows has also improved a lot), but we're a FAR cry from a world in which the only valid reason to use Windows is momentum.

I won't even bother trying to list all the reasons to use Word and Excel (especially Excel) over Libre and Google Docs. Google Docs is a child's toy compared to Excel.

Really, they use it because that's what they are used to. Or mainly that's what was forced at work.

For example for years we've used Outlook Express, then people moved to Outlook. Everyone uses Excel, Word, etc. - because the company provides it, and people if they want to finish their work at home, would use whatever they learned.

I for example learned so much P4Win (the discontinued Perforce client from years), that even if it's less performant (syncing for example, because it's done by 4096 bytes), I still use it more than P4V (the new client), because I simply know it all, so much that I feel P4V as step-back (it's not, but because of slower redraw it feels that way. P4V is way faster than P4Win, and multithreaded).

So color me stupid, but since then, I'm using P4V for heavy tasks (after carefully, and consciously clicking here and there), and then for day to day things - changelists mainly - I'm with P4Win...

Sorry for dragging into this, but I'm just showing an example. And at home for my projects I don't even consider perforce, never use it. (But if it was like office app, I might've).

So why would I want for my productivity tools (which I don't have much fun, but more work) a change?

You're a student. You don't really know much about computers. You need a notebook to type papers on. You have $500. What are you going to buy?

From my experience, students don't usually have $500 laying around, hence all the student versions.

They do when that sweet financial aid check comes around.

Of course, I've seen many a financial aid check go to Apple

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/campaigns/back_to_school?ai...

I got my last Dell for just about that, wth Linux pre-installed.

And everything, from IDEs to LibreOffice, to R, to programming languages, to databases came for free.

> How about because it's far easier to use and less fiddly than Linux?

It really isn't. Unless you cherry pick the wrong hardware, it just works. And keeps working for ages.

> How about because the software selection is vastly superior to both Linux and OS X?

I'll agree the selection is larger. As for its superiority, that is debatable. In fact, I consider OSX's experience less confusing. And the package managers you find on Linux are vastly superior to the Googpe-browse-download-run-next-next-finish experience most Windows users have to endure.

> How about because almost any computer (including Apple's) can run Windows AND all your hardware will work just fine with it, while if you want to run OS X, you'll have to buy an expensive machine from Apple, and if you want to run Linux, you better pray there's decent driver support for your peripherals.

It's hard these days to buy a computer that won't run Linux properly. You really need to plan your mistake. As for Macs being more expen

sive, they are also better built. There is no Mac competing with the US$300 HP notebook, of course, but the US$1000 MacBook has feature parity with US$1000 machines from Dell, Acer and Lenovo. Plus, it's pretty.

It's true that the computer components themselves have good support, but that doesn't yet extend to many printers, smartphones, gps devices or suchlike.

It's been a long time since I last met an unsupported printer. Multifunction devices are a sore spot, but they are the epitome of amateur equipment in any case. Any half-decent printer has very good support from CUPS. And what smartphone are you talking about? I don't have much experience with iPhones, but my iPod works just fine (as much as the lack of iTunes allows) and my Android phones work perfectly. I wouldn't be surprised if Windows Phone has problems, but I woulnd't call Blackberries and Symbian devices smartphones by current standards.

I'll admit that I was mainly reminescing about hardware from the previous decade when writing that. But the general point of "windows officially, linux maybe" remains.

How about because almost any computer (including Apple's) can run Windows AND all your hardware will work just fine with it

Ah, no. Having been a windows support/user for nearly 20 years, I am all too familiar with the 'find-the-drivers' dance, in particular, find-the-network-drivers, from which you can manually search the internet and find the rest. Then you get the fun of having a series of different things keeping themselves updated. A friend of mine even when so far as to make a 'golden XP installer', which was a standard XP install disk slipstreamed with 686 different network card drivers.

And boy it's fun trying to find the right Windows drivers. Easy for us experienced folk, because we know what scam sites look like. But to naives, it can be hard to tell the difference between what might work and scam sites, let alone actually trying to find the name of the chipset you're hunting for.

So if the argument is 'ease of installing', Windows most definitely does not get a free pass.

Windows, Linux, and OSX are about equal in terms of ease of driver install. That is, it either has the driver or uses a fall-back driver while it goes online and grabs a new one. Only difference is, most Windows drivers work this way because companies make drivers for Windows. There are a few too many Linux exceptions because companies don't make drivers for Linux.

If you're bringing 20 years of experience into the driver discussion, you're not giving enough weight to Windows 7, where drivers are rarely a problem. For the naive, there's generally a restore DVD/partition with all the drivers included. If you can't hunt for drivers, chances are you didn't built your PC yourself.

The argument of 'but drivers are hard on linux' is a throwback to the days when drivers were also hard on windows, it's just that we were used to the Windows way of doing things so it was familiar. I'm just saying that Windows doesn't get the free pass that the OP was implying.

When the Ribbon first appeared (in a radical redesign of Office) I heard relatives and friends say they "didn't like the new Windows". They didn't even realize at the time that only Office had changed, not Windows. The upgrade was being forced on them by their workplace IT departments.

That's what it boils down to: people don't like it when change is forced on them. It's one thing if you see a cool new product on a shelf, choose to buy it and are happy to try something new; it's quite another to have your existing products keep changing.

This is human nature. And that's why Microsoft is insane to radically change Windows; they're going all "new Coke" on their cash cow. If they really wanted a new product then they should have created a new product: new name, new marketing, new everything, leaving the existing product alone!

This problem isn't limited to Microsoft. I've been disappointed by several iPhone app purchases for instance, as companies keep "improving" their apps with updates and occasionally destroy the essence of the original that I liked so much (e.g. maybe they mess up the UI so it's not as good, or they add in-app-purchasing crap). That's not the way to treat existing customers. Sometimes products should just be left alone.

The thing is that Windows isn't Microsoft's cash cow.. in the consumer space. It is and mostly always has been the enterprise market.

I'm very curious to see whether they will use the Metro UI in their server OSes. My bet is, they won't, or if they do they'll either put out a new edition fairly quickly, or will roll it back even faster to the traditional UI.

What is "Metro"? Server 2012 does use the new start menu, if you want to call that "Metro"

Metro is the wp7 style tile interface, with one fully maximised app open at once.

"Metro and WinRT may be at the heart of Windows 8 on the desktop, but they're purely adjuncts on the server. The charms and contracts are there, along with the Start Screen, but you're hardly likely to see them as you can manage much of a server from inside Server Manager or via PowerShell (or externally via RSAT and System Center)."

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/reviews/server-os/2012/06/11/screensh...

This is going to be funny. When ME came out, enthusiasts started using Windows 2000 on their desktop.

Now with MEtro, maybe they'll again go Win 8 Server.

I agree that change for change sake is frustrating, but I jumped from Office 2003 to 2010 and a year later I still hate it. It's not just a matter of it being different. It's demonstrably worse. Things that took 1 click now take 3 or more. I also went from XP to Windows 7 and I can't stand it either. Why do I need libraries and all the confusion that comes from a library location and a 'real' location?

I'm enjoying Office 2010 a lot. Especially OneNote and Outlook. Everything is so nicely done, and I'm a power-user so I'm actively using it to the limits.

But I'm a power-user and I use keyboard short-cuts, categories, search folders, write my own add-ons if I need them etc.

If MS didn't do a radical redesign now and then, people might catch on to the fact that they're being sold the same thing over and over for each new computer they buy.

> (The same goes for Office. People use Word and Excel because they know how to use Word and Excel. Otherwise, they'd be saving themselves the license fee and be using Libre Office or Google Docs.) reply

I can tell you that this is definitely not the case. I've used Word a lot in (non-software) engineering setting, and there are a large number of features used on a regular basis that simply are not available in LibreOffice or Google Docs. Things like citation support, text wrapping for images, and a good equation editor.

> Things like citation support

http://download.zotero.org/integration/Zotero-LibreOffice-Pl...

I've written grant proposals and papers published in peer reviewed journals with LibreOffice and that plugin.

I have to agree with this comment.

As unglamorous as it is, Excel is great, and you can also create some _very_ powerful software rather easily with VBA.

I hate excel. For some reason, it has become the standard for creating any grid-based documents, even though the table support in word would often be far superior when equations aren't needed.

I hate the lack of smooth scrolling, especially when you have differing cell heights. I hate the lack of cell padding, leading to manually sizing every row.

Most of all, I hate the total lack of focus. What sort of document is it aimed at creating, these days? The answer is certainly not what is was 10–15 years ago, but the basic interface hasn't changed much (ribbon aside).

I agree with what you're saying, I've seen it used to write up a text document! Talk about missing the point...

Often equations are needed, along with graphing. It's very expandable and customisable by a non-programmer with VBA.

I'm not saying it's the best, but it's pretty good at what it does, and there's not a better spreadsheet application that I've found.

As an aside, I've seen it be used for managing portfolios worth millions. Then you get a clever IT dept say 'oh no, you shouldnt be doing that on a spreadsheet' and so a new IT project is created to retire the spreadsheet and copy the functionality. Predictably, the project is late, over-budget and under-delivers, so the spreadsheet lives on. Tragic tale of far too many IT projects.

Then you get stuck with a pile of uncommented VB6 written by accountants. Short-sightedness is its own punishment.

While I agree with you that MS Office has -in general- the most features of any common WYSIWYG document suite (note: that's just how I categorize this kind of software), Word isn't really the best example for it. Pretty much any feature in Word can be matched with LibreOffice and most can be matched with iWorks Pages (while the later is worlds simpler to use). What distinguishes MS Office the most IMO are:

1) smart art in PowerPoint

2) most of the data analysis and pivot table tools in Excel

3) powerful and mature, albeit cumbersome scripting support (VBA)

These features are important for a multitude of reasons, but for those who only need a good word editor, MS Office is certainly not a necessity anymore.

People use Windows because it comes installed with the computers they buy.

The customer market for Windows is already slowly transitioning away from Windows. I think it's logically to say that if the consumer market goes, the corporate market will fall soon after that. Microsoft could have either ignore this, as Apple continues to sell more and more Macs and iPads or they respond with something to take on what Apple see's as the future of their consumer facing business: the iPad. Microsoft chose the action that might have a chance to actually turn this trend around… Time will tell if it works.

Your Office point kind of loses traction since I'd say the Office 2007 was a bigger change from Office 2003 than Windows 8 is to Windows 7.

Honestly Windows 8 doesn't change how people use computers that much. Most people use the start menu to ~search~ for a program. I.E. they hit start and begin typing. You can do the same exact thing with the Start screen.

Aside from the start screen, Windows continues to work in basically the same way it always has.

>Most people use the start menu to ~search~ for a program.

Is this true? I mean it might be but it seems like something MS would have numbers on.

If only there was an OS where you typed what you wanted in an omnibox and it would just work...

Are you talking about Alfred on Mac OS X?

I'm gonna guess he's talking about ChromeOS.

I LOVE Alfred - it beats Spotlight hands down! The best equivalent I've used for windows is Launchy. Honestly Alfred has changed the way I use my Macbook :)

I wonder if Microsoft's numbers (which we're assuming they have and use) aren't skewed by the usage patterns that they create, with users taking the path of least resistance for the given options, which are themselves sometimes paths of a-fair-amount-of resistance.

For instance, I frequently switch windows in Win7 with Alt+Tab, but also dip into the task bar quite often to click the Word icon, then identify the correct Word document open, then move the mouse to the document... neither of which are particularly efficient.

The only approximate solution I can think of would be having a touchscreen above my F-keys to select apps with. I can imagine MS have no data on how well that would work.

I worked at a very Windows-heavy company until last year, and we were still on a very old version of Office when I left. (It was the pre-ribbon Office. 2005?) The reality was all the knowledge the employees had (not to mention their shitty macros) didn't transfer to the new version, so we simply did not upgrade.

The reason new laptops ship with a new version of Windows rather than Ubuntu is because people are used to fighting changes in their software, but they'll notice that they don't have "the real thing" when they buy a $13 Windows-only LED keychain charger and it doesn't work when they plug it in to their computer. Then they'll complain to their computer's OEM, and Microsoft will laugh evilly. (I don't really understand it. The amount of hardware I never got to work in Windows is approximately the same as the amount of hardware I never got to work under Linux.)

> I.E. they hit start and begin typing.

Who are these users and how do I get a job supporting them? I provide support to over 100 people and I've yet to find a single one who uses that particular feature. And now they're supposed to learn how to use "hot corners" (or whatever it's called)? Ugh.

I have never seen anyone do this. Ever.

I do this literally a hundred times every day.

Same, it's a magnitude times more productive than hunting down program's through nested menus with your mouse.

"I.E. they hit start and begin typing." -- people do that because the start menu in W7 has a text box that says "Search programs and file" and a visible caret telling them they can type. In W8 you do not get any visual clues to tell you that you can type to search.

I do like this feature of Windows, although it sometimes leads to the following non-optimal workflow:

Start -> i-t-u-n-e-s -> Hit Enter -> Am now reading "About iTunes" -> Alt-F4 -> Start -> i-t-u-n-e-s -> Choose the second result this time.

Yeah it is horrible at knowing what you are more likely to want. Doesn't even require that much thought, just put applications first.

It's improved in Win8. The results are sorted in some kind of MRU or frequency of use order. So the first time you have to look to not launch iTunes Help, but the second time iTunes will be on top.

People will be skipping windows 8 just like they skipped Vista.

Microsoft operates on an unspoken major version -- development version -- major version cycle that users are accustomed to.

Don't forget people use Windows because that's what comes with their new computers. Almost nobody installs a fresh OS.

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