What Windows 8 Haters Don’t Understand About Windows 8 | Hacker News Reader

What Windows 8 Haters Don’t Understand About Windows 8

7tutorials.com

25 pointscarusen52 comments

> I hate the ribbon in Windows 8 - that’s what most people said about the ribbon when it was first introduced in Microsoft Office 2007. And yet, it has become a great interface paradigm which makes features more visible and easier to use.

Not 100% related to Windows 8, but am I in the minority of disliking the ribbon in Office? When it first arrived I was excited by it and thought it was awesome, but after years of using it I still don't find it as useful as plain old menus, for the most part.

i think you're in a silent majority.

Same here. The ribbon requires more steps to get to the functions you need. It might be good for discoverability, and it might not hinder experts (since they'd use shortcuts) but I feel that it is a big let down for power-users that know what they want to do but don't use it enough to be able to do everything with the keyboard. That and that it is ugly and takes a lot of space.

With menus, it was still possible to page through the menus until you found what you were looking for.

With the ribbon, I still find myself going through every option to try to find something, only to end up googling where on earth they hid the function I was looking for.

So basically, Clippy could be helpful here? Bring him back! A bing-powered Clippy! lol, Ok, just kidding.

Ribbon sucks. It sucked then. It sucks now even more. It doesn't work on desktop, and it certainly does not work with touch. Almost nobody has adopted ribbon. Even MS does not use it outside Office. You are not alone.

I think you are the minority. Ribbon is much better.

Does it matter? What if ribbon is not so popular, would that mean that Microsoft would actually listen and change? Or will it just go on like it always does?

I would consider myself a longtime power user of both Powerpoint and Excel. I HATE the ribbon - it's much less efficient for most tasks (although it is prettier).

The whole hater/fan mindset about OSs/phones/technology perplexes me. Why do some people feel so strongly about these things? And where does these strong feelings come from? To me these things are just not emotionally engaging in the way that, say, a book or game or work of art can be - and I wonder if this engagement is trivial or actually quite important.

Are so many people identifying as haters of fans because these things are genuinely emotionally engaging? Or is it an amplification effect of the internet echo chamber? Or because some of us make career investments in these technologies?

I develop on the Windows platform and have done for about 20 years. Its okay and practical and I'm comfortable with it, but I don't feel that that makes me a fan of Windows or a hater of other platforms. Same with my Android phone. I don't particularly like Apple as a company. Their products seem okay, but I alternate between wondering if they focus on surface appearance over substance or whether this might actually be a great thing. Does this make me an Apple hater?

If I try and get inside the minds of these people, here are my impressions of their thoughts/emotions:

- Apple. Haters see an authoritarian company obsessed with style and controlling its customers. Fans see the long-time underdog finally triumphing through attention to design and vindicating the fan's loyalty.

- Microsoft. Haters see a big, stupid, evil corporation deservedly slipping into insignificance. Fans see solid engineering and persistence in supporting their customers in the long-term.

- Android. Haters see a lazy, poor imitation of iPhone that is unworthy of success. Fans see the last hope in a titanic struggle for freedom.

Obviously these are stereotypes and I'm emphasising extremes because that seems to be what haters/fans do. But how does technology do this to some people, and is this new?

I'd be very interested in other people's opinions on this.

> Are so many people identifying as haters of fans because these things are genuinely emotionally engaging

I think they are genuinely emotionally engaging. Many of us spend 50% or more of our waking lives in front of computers and smartphones. If you are used to a PC or Mac, and you sit down at the other one, it can be infuriating trying to do what you think should be a simple task.

I also think that the reasons for people loving or hating particular brands/products are many and varied. But there is clearly a bandwagon effect with some people - and this happens with everything. You can see it in these comments very clearly - people attacking Windows 8 who clearly haven't even used it, or even taken the time to understand how it works.

An interesting question - that was my first thought on seeing the headline too - "Why categorize everyone who's expressed dislike a 'hater'?"

I can offer no better explanation than Man's tribal nature - his tendency to form In- and Out-groups (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups). Before we had tech we did it about red vs blue football/etc teams (and of course still do), which is equally if not more arbitrary.

I'd like to think we'll grow out of it, but that's probably a vain hope, and even if we do it'll be a loooooooong way in the future.

Hardly any arguments in that article at all, besides 'if you use Windows 8 long enough you will eventually learn how it works' and 'stop complaining, Windows 8 is the future'.

Windows 95 and XP/2000 didn't actually have a user-friendly interface either, in fact, I think it was downright terrible. Yet, everyone knows how to use it, which makes it appear 'easy' and 'user-friendly'. This article completely steers around the fact that user-friendly interfaces have to be intuitive, consistent, and predictable.

Metro could become all of these, but as long as Microsoft keeps insisting on trying to fuse it with the traditional Windows desktop interface, it will never reach it's full potential.

They were very user friendly. They might not have been beginner-friendly but that is a short-sighted goal to aim for.

I have to disagree. The traditional Windows interface is full of undiscoverable hidden stuff, inconsistent and illogical ways that make doing simple things hard, the start menu was never a good UI paradigm to begin with, the taskbar has always been a big mess that basically became unusable if you had more than 5 windows open, the way you interact with the file system is completely arbitrary, task management is basically limited to a list of running processes, nothing like Spaces or Mission Control like OS X has, and so on.

Really, after installation and configuration, any Linux system with Gnome 2.x or XFCE is more user-friendly than Windows before W7, even though both basically try to copy almost every aspect of the Windows desktop user interface.

Don't you think there is a reason why almost anyone who has ever used a Mac says OS X is more user-friendly, or why both Gnome and now Microsoft are moving away from the classic Windows desktop paradigm? It never was so great in the first place.

All your points can as easily be stated for Gnome 2.x, XFCE or OS X as well. Only that windows UI is in my opinion vastly superior just because it is consistent and well thought out compared to the rest.

Don't you think there is a reason why almost anyone who has every used a Mac says OS X is more user-friendly...

Yes there is a reason. OS X might be more beginner-friendly but as soon as you actually start to use it you realize it isn't user-friendly. As on most/all simple systems (including OS X) doing stuff that wasn't intended is extremely cumbersome.

Doing things on Windows is comparatively both easy and logical, which enables you to do what you want (and not what the designer thought you wanted) way faster than OS X allows you to.

Just see how well OS X handles multiple windows, it's a joke compared to Windows.

> All your points can as easily be stated for Gnome 2.x, XFCE or OS X as well. Only that windows UI is in my opinion vastly superior just because it is consistent and well thought out compared to the rest.

Half of what you are saying is exactly what I said myself: Gnome and XFCE indeed follow almost the exact same desktop paradigm as Windows, so obviously they share many of the same problems. Most notably the problems of having a start menu to do things or a taskbar that quickly gets cluttered if you have many applications open at the same time. The other half of your statement doesn't make any sense to me. What exactly is more 'consistent' or 'well thought out' in Windows 9x/XP/2000, compared to Gnome 2.x/XFCE?

> Yes there is a reason. OS X might be more beginner-friendly but as soon as you actually start to use it you realize it isn't user-friendly. As on most/all simple systems (including OS X) doing stuff that wasn't intended is extremely cumbersome.

I guess one of us must live in some kind of bizarro world, because what you are saying is completely the opposite of my experience.

OS X = easy out of the box, consistent, great window management, powerful CLI for power users. Yes, it has 'hidden settings', but so does every other OS, and for almost all of them you have nice GUI tools to control them

Windows = cumbersome to use and many non-discoverable functions out of the box, inconsistent in almost everything, very basic window management (basically min/maximize/close plus a taskbar), a CLI that is almost an insult to the user. Yes it is also full of 'hidden settings' which are all stuffed in some kind of binary blob called the registry, indexed by cryptic keys.

Care to give some examples of things that are easy in Windows and hard in OS X? I'd love to hear them.

> Doing things on Windows is comparatively both easy and logical, which enables you to do what you want (and not what the designer thought you wanted) way faster than OS X allows you to.

You can't be serious about this, if you are, you have never used OS X (or any modern Linux desktop environment, for that matter). I've been using all 3 platforms extensively over the last decade, and Windows is decidedly the worst when it comes to doing things faster. OS X is hands-down the best in that respect. Just count the number of clicks or key presses required to do anything. In OS X most if not everything I regularly do takes at most one keypress and/or 3 clicks. In Windows I often have to click through 5 or 6 windows, dialogs, dropdowns, tabs and whatnot. Just launching applications in a 3-level deep start menu already takes 5 clicks.

You really come off as a lifetime Windows user who got so comfortable with the desktop environment that you simply don't notice how backwards and inconvenient it is.

"a CLI that is almost an insult to the user"

In my opinion Windows PowerShell is superior to bash or tcsh.

(I know PS is not installed by default, and I agree that the default windows cli is awful.)

I have never used it, but supposedly Windows PowerShell is pretty good. But Windows 9x/XP/2000 don't have it, and no matter how great the shell features are, it's severely crippled by the fact that Windows has never had anything like your typical Unix userland. Meaning that most of the CLI programs still have their old and crippled DOS CLI interfaces, none of which were ever made to be easy to combine into anything more than a simple .BAT file.

When the web browsers on a platform cease rolling their own half-assed tab windows and start using a platform's native window manager, that platform will be the first which can be said to have great window management. So far they're all kinda crappy.

Not sure why you have been voted down, I agree that there was very little to persuade me in this article. In fact, he directly contradicts himself in regards to the ribbon - first he says it is awesome, then he says it sucks on a tablet interface. He really can't have it both ways.

Oh, let me see: A person that has vested interest on Windows(with a page about Microsoft Windows tutorials) defends Microsoft products against people that don't like it.

"Haters" is too strong a word. I had used windows 8 too see where Microsoft is going and I don't like it but hater is too much because honestly I don't care, if other people is happy using a product, good for them. I'm happy using mac and Linux.

I hear fear on his words. I remember feeling the same with the people that wanted to continue selling CDs, calling those wanting to sell digital wanting to "destroy the music".

No, some people don't like ribbon, or text going outside of screens like in windows 7, buttons without 3d shadows, or vibrant colors for anything unimportant and the most important of all, the "we are going to force you to use this and you will like it because we can with our monopoly" attitude.

Most people bashing Windows 8 have not really used it, or were not using Windows 7. I recently upgraded, and most of the time, I hardly realise I am in Windows 8. All my desktop apps work the same, I have all my apps pinned to the Dock (like in OS-X or Windows 7), and the few times I need to go to the start menu, I move my window to the left and then type in the name of the app I am looking for.

I have had zero interaction with metro or any new windows 8 features, because they stay completely out of your way. When you see someone demonstrating windows 8 on youtube, it looks like you will suddenly be plunged into using metro only or things will change, but that's just wrong: Windows 8 is practically the same as Windows 7 for anyone who actually works with Windows.

That was my experience in my 2 months of using it. Then I had to format (bought a new SSD), and came back to seven. But I have to admit that I was a little worried at first about the changes. And some weren't of my liking. But in my day to day there was no difference with seven.

Regardless of the other arguments, the ribbon does suck immensely.

Ever watched a "normal" person try to use it, even after enough time to have supposedly become proficient? The damned thing is useless.

I came here to make that exact point. We are 5 years on and I still think the ribbon bar is the worst design decision made in a UI. It's useless, it makes things harder to find.

I introduced my grant parents to Office 2007 from the offset, not an earlier version and they found the ribbon bar a pain in the ass. Even late adopters have a hard time with it.

Sorry, not going to drink the kool-aid.

There is something to be said when almost everybody you talk to hated their first experience with Windows 8, and those that didn't, feel the need to make excuses for all the faults they found: "this and that isn't very good, but you get used to it."

Being new and different doesn't imply being "innovative" and "better". Sometimes it's just worse. And Microsoft is, again, touting something new as something better. We all know how that worked out for Vista...

If Windows 8 is about the future, then it's a future I'm not interested in.

They are still fighting the popularity of Windows XP which is a tough act to follow. I upgraded to Windows 7 about 6 months ago, and despite tweaking it to get it very close I still suffer bouts of profound exasperation when using it.

I'm not saying that XP was flawless by any means (and I was using the much reviled 64 bit version), but it accomplished an excellent balance between simple ease of use and access to more complex features, which no Microsoft product has managed since.

There has been a gradual shift toward automation which in a few cases is welcome but in others has become an impediment to actual use. The automated functions just aren't up to task at this point, either technologically, or because of the assumptions the designers have jumped to about what you want to do are just wrong.

In addition some people don't cope well with context sensitive menus (and I am one of them I freely admit), they are messy and unintuitive after a certain point. Sure once you learn them they can be helpful but if you have to learn something it's not intuitive.

Nowadays there should be no reason to learn technology, it should just work.

There is waaay too much focus on metro. Which is kind of natural since it is new and different, but because of the focus on metro people get confused and honestly think that there is nothing but metro in windows 8.

Metro is targeted towards Media Centers, tablets and casual consumption. Not workstations. If you are not doing your work on an iPad today you probably won't do work in metro tomorrow. Simple as that. The media and the PR department of MS of course would like you to think otherwise (just to hype it) but that is pure lunacy, of course you will have a real workstation OS as well (and that is also where you will do your work).

The thing I look forward to in windows 8 is that it will probably be the first OS that is suitable for a tablet as well as being able to actually do something useful with it. For the first time the tablet will not be a toy but actually real, albeit niche, alternative to a laptop. That is huge, and that is what windows 8 brings to the market.

So I don't really understand Metro. If it's been designed for tablets, and not workstations, what UI do you use for day to day work, on a workstation?

The (about) same UI that you have in windows 7.

Windows 8 has two environments. One looks pretty much exactly like Windows 7, but with no start button, and the other is Metro.

If you don't run any Metro programs, the only thing that really changes is that the start button is replaced by a start screen with all those live tiles and icons on it.

This is what I think that a lot of people is misunderstanding. You will use the desktop as always in a workstation. Only while launching apps you will use the new start screen, unless you pin your most used ones in the taskbar. That way, you could work all day long without using the new start screen.

So I guess I'm not sure what compelling case there is for Metro on the desktop then. What does it give me that the old UI didn't?

"There is waaay too much focus on metro."

Arguably Microsoft haven't exactly been helping here. I recently attended a Microsoft conference on a topic unrelated to Windows 8 and it was very noticeable that the official PowerPoint template for the show used a "Metro" theme. Which I have, to admit, makes a pleasant change from the usual PowerPoint bullet points...

However, one of the most amusing things I saw at the show was when I sat behind someone who was using a laptop with a touch screen and Windows 8/Metro. Guess what happens when you have a laptop with a touch screen balanced on your knees and you go to touch the screen.... As you might expect, your latop falls over and lands on the floor.

Maybe, this kind of excessive focus on metro is because its the real novelty in this os. The rest, is just a stronger and faster Windows 7. But understandably, that doesn't seem to be that interesting in comparison

Yeah, pretty weak arguments there. Somehow what some people claim or have said is supposed to apply to me?

I don't know about others complaining about ribbon on office, but I loved it when it launched, and I loved every Facebook iteration except the last one. I'm an early adopter, and not only does stuff I adopt early have an incredibly high success rate, but there aren't many things that are successful that I don't like (twitter is the big counter example for me...still don't really use it).

However, from what I've seen of Win8 it's a terrible step backward in a blind attempt to compete with Apple. What Microsoft doesn't understand is that Apple has a separate OS for their desktops for a reason. iOS is a useless piece of gimpware for doing anything productive - it is primarily a consumption device, and the iPad will never replace the desktop as productivity (don't cite some anecdotal story as a counter example - we're talking broad strokes here, not one weird dude.). Hopefully one day the keyboard and mouse will be replaced, but currently they're the most efficient mechanism for interacting with a computer that is available. It appears Microsoft is pushing a product that is abandoning it's entire revenue (businesses) for some small market of people who buy iPads. (Which is a market they will likely have trouble in, given how successful WP7 has been.)

Now to the ribbon. It's a great design for applications that involve rich editing - like office, or even photoshop or 3dsmax. Something that requires a complex set of verbs that are hard to remember. Explorer is not an editor - it's a browser. The ribbon is wasting space, and is obviously the result of some bandwagon PM that thinks copying everything successful is a good way to design because they have no creativity or understanding themselves. Instead of figuring out why things work (ribbon, ipad), they simply try to copy them, but miss the whole point and make it bad.

Win8 is the new Windows ME. This is coming from a Win7 users, who thought Vista was awesome, had every iteration of the Zune, and thought Zune HD was the best music player ever.

I remember the initial design post about the Windows 8 Explorer was all, "We saw that very few people use the toolbar to get around Explorer. So we decided to make the toolbar bigger, and put more things in it."

Who is voting these comments down? This is actually a pretty reasonably thought out argument. Even if you don't agree with it, for goodness sake make a comment - don't downvote it.

Wrt the UI - I disagree that the ribbon is a great UI paradigm. I can't imagine using the ribbon on a touch screen, looks far too fiddly!

You are right with the explorer thing. Even the large toolbar buttons in windows xp's explorer where nicer for touch I believe. Luckily, that new ribbon can be hidden.

Windows 8 is designed for touch devices. Using a UI that's designed for touch with a non-touch input SUCKS!

Do we need touch on a desktop or laptop? NO! I'll never touch my screen on a laptop or a desktop. It's tiring and clunky.

Do we need touch on tablets? Obviously.

Does everyone want a tablet? NO! I don't want one to do my main work on. I can't imagine I'm the only one here.

The problem is that microsoft is slowly transforming their main operating system and its application ecosystem to the touch-friendly metro-style.

So what's happening is ... MS is alienating their non-touch userbase. Which is now oooh ... let's say 99%?

I'll never feel comfortable using an interface designed for touch with a mouse & keyboard. And I'll never feel comfortable fondling a standing screen either from a laptop or desktop. So please don't force developers to develop for your touch ecosystem as I won't be using it.

The entire transition to something new could have been made without alienating the current Windows's big user community. The reasons underlying the adopted changes are weak, change done mostly for the sake of change or because the existing state being "too old", and less considering the potential real benefits in usability. For example this - "the old Start Menu was crowded, forced you to scroll a lot through shortcuts". What the solution could have been? Addressing the mess of having too many useless shortcuts! Every time I was installing a new Windows version I had to manually clean the Start Menu clutter. What Microsoft did? What prevents now the new Start Screen to become overloaded with too many items? You won't be forced to scroll a lot through shortcuts, you'll be forced now to scroll a lot through loads of bloated screens! Where is the real progress here?

I'm not really in to these Windows 8 discussions, basically because I'm not using Windows myself, but the main argument against Windows 8 that I have come across so far was that there are two different interfaces.

As I understand this new interface is called the Metro interface, which (without having it used) looks promising, bu t is totally different than the old Windows interface (which I have used).

It seems to me as if Microsoft couldn't finish the Metro interface so it was a good replacement for the old interface, so they just kept the old interface as a backup.

But then again, this is coming from someone who hasn't used Windows 8 in any way.

In the new Metro UI you cannot run traditional desktop apps - these that use Windows API - and there are loads of them around already. So keeping the old UI system in parallel is the only viable option to get Metro slowly adapted.

It doesn't seem to load, but it looks like I've found Google's cache of it here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&...

That the haters hate Windows 8 cannot be brushed away by saying they are not the intended customer!

Microsoft needs everyone to like Windows 8.

And there you have it. MS needs everyone to like Windows 8. Period. They need grand mothers who might otherwise use an ipad to like windows 8. They need high school kids to like windows 8. They need pc power users to like windows 8. They've come fairly close to betting the company that they can create a singular experience that can be all things to all people.

Complete nonsense.

They only need a sufficient number of people to like it. Even if not a single grandmother in the world likes it, they'll probably be fine.

> a singular experience that can be all things to all people

You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Grandma's ARM tablet is going to use Metro, and Joe Accountant is going to spend all day in the classic desktop environment. The only thing Joe is going to notice is a new start menu, and that's not exactly going to be a deal breaker for anyone.

Regardless of whether you like the new Metro interface and the new start screen or not, it's simply idiotic to say that if not everyone in the world loves it then the company will collapse.

If MS was planning on selling a version of Windows 8 that didn't have Metro as the default UI then that argument would hold more water, but I don't see that being the case. Windows 8 would make a perfectly fine workstation OS in "old fashioned windows UI mode", but you need to go out of your way to get to that state. I think people are just as likely to live with Windows 7 or choose something else (Windows Server as a desktop OS, or ubuntu, for example) as they are to use Windows 8 if they don't like metro.

A lot of people will switch to Mac and Linux soon ;) Why should anyone like this design fail? They really need to explain their operating system to their customer. OS X is simple to use and everyone know how it works if you start using it. Windows was never logical or intuitive to use and Windows 8 confirm it again.

Yes. 2012 will finally be the year of Linux on the desktop. >_>

hehe, like the last 10 years. But Android is also Linux and we may will see Web OS as desktop OS this or next year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com