Betting the Company on Windows 8
codinghorror.com
codinghorror.com
I'm guessing:
The Windows 8 Desktop side will be top-notch, comforting, and work as before and as expected.
The Windows 8 Metro side will be top-notch, internally-coherent, well-received, and offer a reduced complexity set for novice users and those seeking clarity and easier consumption.
The core OS will be top-notch, work on a grand range of hardware, and work as before and as expected.
It's not the problem with any of these pieces, it's how they're put together.
The first hour of Windows 8 is maddening, regardless of your technical skill level, comfort with Windows idioms, or level of resistance to change.
Two thirds of system configuration has been gutted and stranded in Metro mode. Login (if set up) is baffling and new. The computer violently flips between Metro and Desktop for reasons you're never quite sure of. It's constantly trying to drag you to this new place with completely different rules, appearance, and behavior. UI is hidden and transient.
There's no guide. You're just dumped there, and all efforts to work your computer like you did before are stymied. Yes, eventually YOU figure it out, but someone who's spent 20 years baking in the same ultra-reduced set of magic rituals to get the e-mail out is going to feel stupid. And they're not going to blame themselves - the era when you had no choice but to blame yourself is long over.
The Microsoft TABLET will be fine. The Microsoft SERVER will be fine. The Microsoft POWER USER base will be fine. The Microsoft GAMER population will be fine. The Microsoft DEVELOPERS will be fine.
It's the people who are only on the platform by virtue of "that's where facebook and my email is" who are going to run away screaming "Vista 2". That's the chip they're gambling with here, and I think they're going to lose it.
I'm a developer so I had no problem playing around with Windows8 DevPreview and ConsumerPreview.
However, if you gave Windows8 to someone who doesn't even know how to navigate the filesystem properly, they will just get mad. Unfortunately this happens to be, by far, Windows' largest market.
I'm a developer and I absolutely had a problem with it. The question I ask of changed software is whether it makes my life easier or if it makes my life harder. Windows 8 makes my life harder to force a tablet paradigm on the desktop, hoping to leveraging a desktop monopoly into taking on Apple. From no perspective does it improve my experience on the desktop.
It is actually the first time I've seriously considered moving my primary development desktop to Ubuntu or OSX.
I don't think the best way to deal with disruptions is to force most of your current customers into the new paradigm. You need to convince them, one at a time, that they should use the new one. It should all be organic. Instead what Microsoft is doing feels a lot like Google+, where Google just tries to force a social network on everyone. Facebook and Twitter grew organically, not by getting AOL or whoever, to force them on their existing database of users.
Microsoft tries their best to force Metro on you in Windows 8, because that's the most convenient strategy for them, not the user.
Not sure why you say that. Wouldn't it be better if the same metro UI that I see on my tablet is also on my phone and my xbox thus making it more predictable how I use them?
Wouldn't me as a developer be happier that the app I write can run on both the phone and a laptop with minor or no modifications?
What if I as a customer doesn't have to pay twice for that app?
What if by combining platforms, improvements are delivered faster and are more consistent? Would I as a user be happier with it?
I have personally not formed any opinion if Unity and Gnome Shell are good or not. I have used them too little to say, I primarily use XFCE myself which was very easy to get started with.
My normal environment is OS X, and I've grown used to using Spotlight to start apps. Cmd-Space + a few keystrokes, hit Enter. The only time I use the Dock is to resurrect the occasional hidden window. I'm too lazy to bother configuring the Dock. Start menus, even gorgeous ones like the OS X Dock, are so 1999.
Similarly, when I browse the web, I rely on keystroke completion and search, not on bookmarks. I'm too lazy to maintain my bookmarks
That is great when you know what you are looking for... but when the image editor is called GIMP, or KRITA, the audio player is called rythmbox, the video player is called VLC, then you need to know those names in order to find what you are looking for.
IIRC common users went to Windows running from having to remember MSDOS commands.
I find this to be a nice feature. I am a developer but don't have the time to tinker with every little on my desktop. For me, and with the newest version of unity, it works well enough to let me get on with my work.
And when I just want to create a spreadsheet, I have to know the app is named Excel, or when I want to play a game I have to type steam.
How? I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop for my wife and she finds it as easy as ever to do email and Facebook because essentially the only app she ever runs is Chrome and it's locked in the Launcher. She doesn't even know that Unity exists so it's certainly not making life hard for her.
Microsoft miserably failed with a very second rate mobile operating system for over a decade. Their browser has been an also ran to a couple of small-teamed competitors. Their core operating system, despite being the linchpin of their business, has seen endless grand ambitions abandoned because of a gross inability to execute (do people forget how dramatic of a change Vista was supposed to be? They tossed all of that and re-branched XP, releasing essentially minor GUI changes to bring in the payday for another half decade).
Any argument that argues the technical ability of Microsoft starts on a flawed foundation. I have a lot of respect for certain parts of that company, but they have had some enormous failures, both from a vision and technical perspective. There is nothing that demonstrates that Windows 8 is the pinnacle of engineering.
EDIT: One of the most foreboding elements of Windows 8 is that an improved copy dialog gets play in ever commentary about the operating system. Seriously, just think about that for a while. Otherwise it's a thin veneer of a shell, inconsistent with the overwhelming majority of the operating system, that makes it a stellar operating system?
The problem is that other browsers keep defining what a browser should be, and then Microsoft has to play catch-up. Same with Windows Phone and Windows 8: other people defined what a mobile OS should do, and now MS is trying to catch up.
When you're not defining the market, you're an also-ran. Microsoft in the last 10 years failed abysmally at defining new markets, which is what they had done with Win95/Win2000 first and then Office and VisualStudio and IE5 later (yes, IE5 was commercially fantastic -- there's a reason all those shitty "web-apps" from 2001 were not written for Netscape or Mozilla).
In this sense, Windows 8 is more of the same: other people pointed the way, and MS is now scrambling to imitate them as best as they can. Not a recipe for success, if you ask me.
available mouse pointer.......... ummm..... more colors?
Meanwhile: mandatory revokable code signing. no side-loading. centralized apps. restrictive filesystem. fullscreen by default. centralized homepage. everything-is-an-app. sliding pane navigation. implied scrollbars. ARM SOC hardware. on and on and on and on, it's a direct clone of what's working in the marketplace.
They didn't change Windows because there was no serious competitor to it and they were in a position of "there's no reason to change we're not losing sales". Now that there's competition they're in a position of "If we don't change we will lose sales" which is a huge motivation.
Just look at their Xbox brand which they grew so well they surpassed Sony's PS3. Having competition has motivated Microsoft to innovate incredibly well. No one can deny that the Xbox brand, especially Xbox live, is a huge success in both sales and in innovation. Just look at how much they've changed the Xbox 360 alone. From the dashboard, the the UI, the target demographic, the addition of the Kinect controller, gamer tags, avatars, and the look and style of the console itself. Xbox live did so well it forced Sony & now Nintendo to finally innovate their own online services.
Same with the Zune. It was a commercial failure because they launched at a time when stand alone mp3 players where on their way out and smart phones were in. But everyone I know who had a Zune loved it. When it started it wasn't anything worth mentioning but MS evolved it into an elegant, sleek, beautifully creative device and (its few) users loved and praised it.
So Microsoft is definitely starting to change and evolve. They're surrounded by competition and have no choice but to get the creativity flowing AND shipping.
If Metro apps take off we'll likely see the need to switch to legacy mode dwindle over time, but with so many of our common day-to-day apps living in legacy mode at launch I'm afraid Metro will just fade away in most users minds ala the OSX Dashboard...
(disclaimer: another MS employee)
Given that I'm spending 80% of my time in Visual Studio I definitely spend more time in the Desktop than Metro (on the tablet it's pretty much the opposite), if you're living in Desktop and not launching any Metro apps than you can almost view the Start Screen as a launcher / dashboard. Tapping the windows key to quickly see alerts, tiles and notifications and then typing to find the app you want to launch.
I think Metro can succeed on the desktop but it'll certainly need the appropriate sort of apps to do so and building apps that work well as both a full screen mouse / keyboard app as well as a tablet app is going to be a real challenge.
Bleah. Here's a thought: "Newer" and "innovative" do not necessarily equal "better." As far as I'm concerned, the Ribbon UI sucks big hairy ones, and is just one more reason to run screaming away from Windows 8.
Then again, since Windows 8 isn't F/OSS, I have exactly zero interest in running it to begin with, so MS aren't losing a customer here.
But, I only use Windows at my dayjob where I have no choice, and I try to spend as little time as possible paying attention to the fact that it's Windows (hello, Cygwin). I'm probably not exactly the target market for MS on this to begin with. ;-)
But Office on the PC wasn't made for a tablet - they intended the ribbon to be used by PC users, and it's terrible. Removing the menus eliminates discover-ability. The common case now when using a recent ribbon-enabled Office application, for me at least, is vaguely recalling a function that I used in a previous version and then hunting around for 2 or 3 minutes through the UI and not finding it. Without doing google searches, I'd never be able to find these features. And each of these feature-hunts adds up to a lot of wasted time.
The ribbon is a massive, massive step up in usability, the difference is you already knew how to get to features in the old version, so there was a learning curve. Show two people who are brand new to office Office XP vs Office 2010, and I an completely certain that they'll have an easier time with 2010 (especially Excel, the usability difference there is incredible).
Sure, if you use the "more frequently used options" but try using something a bit more obscure and you are out of luck.
At least with the menu system you had those "breadcrumbs" to give you an idea of where it could be.
If you're trying to do anything other than the obvious stuff, then yes. I struggle to find anything in Office w/ Ribbon, whereas I could almost always find what I was looking for in a few seconds worth of menu hunting before. Personally, I find discoverability to be absolute shyte with the Ribbon interface.
Secondly, because there aren't adequate F/OSS replacements available. I can use Fedora Linux with KDE and get an experience that's better than Windows. I don't know of a Quora like service that makes their code available, that gives a better experience than Quora. That said, if such a thing were available, I would prefer it.
But I like my own freedoms and I'll avoid buying software that prevents me from exercising them.
Even if LinkedIn or Twitter were open source, I would still not be able to control them--I don't have a spare server lying around and I certainly don't have a way to get everybody else on my own system! So if I took LinkedIn's source and improved it, it would be useless: I would first have to get a server to run it and then I would have to get everybody I know to switch to it. This means that, even if LinkedIn was open source, I would still have to use their implementation on their servers; it would not have much of a practical effect.
Put another way, Reddit and HN are open source. But this does not mean I can meaningfully modify or control the code; this control is naturally left to the people with the servers. There is very little practical difference for me as a user between an open source Reddit and a closed source Reddit.
Now, this is not to say that web apps should not be open sourced--quite the contrary! Open sourcing is great for reasons besides freedom: you contribute to the common good, give more people insight into the development process and help other people with similar projects. But it is less critical than having open source programs that run on my own computer.
But they also tend to be the people most invested in the software itself, so if you're a company that sells software you should probably torment them at your peril. Drive them away without successfully luring any new users, and you may not end up with very many at the end of the transaction.
The caveat, of course, is that, just because something is better for most people doesn't mean it will be better for all. And, of course, there is a large group of people who just refuse to accept change.
(I've used the Office ribbon exactly once and couldn't figure out what I needed to do. I don't consider myself well versed enough to say whether it is innovative or not.)
I am not adverse to change, and had a very open mind about the ribbon in office, but it still hinders me far more than it ever helped. From observations of others there are perilously few who actually appreciate that interface tactic.
They could be onto something here, but it will only pan out if Microsoft can execute it properly.
Instead of thinking of it as "serving two masters," think of it as treating all HID paradigms as first class. You have one device that can hold all of your data and can adapt to either a tablet or a workstation input mode.
Basically, it's the OQO with an iPad form factor.
This could be just as "Post PC" as anything else claiming the moniker. Instead of all computing being embodied in a PC, the PC/workstation just becomes one of many input form factors. Whether or not this will fly will depend on how well Microsoft and partners can achieve the same sort of vertical integration that Apple has. (It will also depend on how well Google can develop the same and how well Apple can maintain theirs.)
>No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.
If you'd like to hear Tim Cook's take on what Apple think, see his interview from D10, where he talks specifically about this, and why Apple thinks keeping iOS and OS X separate makes more sense than combining them.
TLDR: A legacy OS (OS X) has to much "Old stuff" that would hold back an iOS device (iPad) because it would be too clunky.
http://www-bgr-com.vimg.net/wp-content/uploads/Image/oqo_mod...
Oh, this was a satire piece.
The question remains as to whether OEMs will start to make similar devices and try and compete with Microsoft (who will have an inherent advantage). For the corporate desktop , there is still probably a lot of mileage left in Windows 7.
I can't imagine buying a touch device for work. I wouldn't object to getting one to watch movies or read books on.
People with high disposable incomes don't seem to have any problem owning a PC/Mac desktop , a laptop , a tablet , a smartphone as well as several games consoles and other gadgets. Assuming you already have an iPad I don't see any huge benefit to having a Windows 8 laptop over a Windows 7 one.
I know people who bought touchscreen monitors to run Windows 7, in combination to keyboard and mice. They found these a novelty for the first few days but they never really use the touch functionality.
That's a very mistaken assumption for Windows 8 devices. There are going to be a lot of form factors with touch which are not small.
Eg. IdeaPad Yoga.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SHKFYngqOM
Acer All in One http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/03/acer-announces-windows-8-...
Even an 80 inch computer. http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/05/25/microsoft-sell-80-in...
Eventually you forget that your PC has a touchscreen. Even when you do remember that you can just jab something with your finger, your internal context-switching brain-lobe-thing tells you to not bother because the next few micro-tasks will involve the keyboard and mouse anyway.
Touch is for media consumption, not when you need to get something done.
To be fair, the iPad (and Android tablets) with a keyboard provides similar flexibility, but I think the desktop paradigm is what is missing.
My wife needs a new laptop, but only because she requires access to these legacy apps. Going into "legacy" mode for this, but providing the mobile consumption experience and productivity of a convienent keyboard is a killer combo.
I'm actually fairly impressed with the promise of the Surface. I might go as far to say this will be what people will be carrying in 5 years or less.
I carried a blackberry for 5 years (and sent dozens of emails a day from it) but I've never particularly found that switching to a glass screen on iPhone and now on Android impacts my ability to compose messages. Most of the folks I hear complaining about screen keyboards are still using hardware keyboards and haven't used both methods for any extended period of time.
Metro looks bitchin. I can't wait for others to copy it.
But I can't imagine Microsoft sustaining their commitment. Nor can I imagine them not trashing whatever investment I've made in their platform(s), either as a user or as a dev.
In fact, the PDC'03 Longhorn is still light-years ahead of Windows 8.
I know Jeff is looking at this more on the design side than the technical, but I'd argue that Windows XP was a much bigger deal than Windows 95, being the first consumer release based on the NT kernel and thus the first "home" version of Windows with reasonable memory protection between processes. How quickly we forget how terrible Windows was in the bad old days of daily BSODs.
Now, despite the lingering snarkiness from the *nix-hipsters, Windows is incredibly robust... even more so today since in Vista and on even the graphics driver can crash without an OS restart in most cases.
I hung on to 98 until 2001 for gaming, but at that point most stuff worked perfectly on 2k. While it wasn't intended for "home" users, 2k was the preferred OS among my group of friends until XPsp2 or so.
I really don't get why the NT kernel wasn't introduced to the "home" market until XP.
There was also a companion "Windows 2000 Home" edition announced, however it was rolled into XP while Windows ME was released as largely unwanted stopgap.
I mean, seriously? The copy dialog? The thing whose job it is to say "OK, you've got plenty of time, go take a shower" and "OK, we're almost there!"
I'm sorry, this is not a key piece of infrastructure. If that's one of the most exciting things you can point to on Windows 8, that says to me there's not much exciting to point to.
I don't understand why people assume that just because CLIs are older and less popular they are also necessarily worse: they really aren't.
And second, probably because they didn't want to be the ones that actually push the knife deep into their decades long partner, Intel, and they wanted to drag them along in the "post-PC" era.
If this is confusing people on HN, think what it will be like for consumers since the two devices look very similar. Imagine trying to explain to someone that their laptop can't run software X that someone else's otherwise identical (or near enough) laptop can because "it has an ARM chip not an intel one".
Instead of saying " Supports Windows 8 " , non metro software will now have to say " Supports Windows8* "
I wonder how many developers will bother with metro since we already have a bewilderingly huge choices of platforms to support with our software, including "Just give up and do a web app".
Will anyone develop software? I'm sure they will for one definite reason - hope. Lots of folks in the ecosystem with skills in ms tool chain etc. who will prospectively develop stuff. But key developers will only ship stuff if the platform is successful.
Windows 8 is certainly a sign that MS is steering in the right direction. Its income base isn't disappearing immediately, so it may have the time to do its usual thing of getting it good enough in version 3. Windows 8 seems close enough that MS might even have it right by version 2.
Here is where I think Microsoft may have screwed the pooch:
* Orphaning WP7.
* Possibly orphaning/pissing off its third party partners. (When will they give up their abusive relationship?)
There are too many hardware constraints. Current ARM chips have less than 1/10 the memory bandwidth of current Intel notebook CPUs and in real-world benchmarks are MUCH slower. Ditto tablet vs notebook GPUs. At best, Microsoft is making a tablet with a keyboard, not a notebook/tablet hybrid.
I love my iPad. But Surface isn't going to save me from buying a laptop. There are lots of things that I've found that I just couldn't move over to my iPad, and none of those are going to move over to a Surface either.
So at the very, very most, Surface saves you from buying one of these:
http://www.zagg.com/accessories/logitech-ipad-2-keyboard-cas...
If you want an iOS clone, there's always Android. Why should Windows too play a me-too copycat and reduce choice to the user? What benefit is there to that?
I believe both companies see increased convergence for 90% of use cases down the line, and Microsoft's just making a more dramatic transition. I can see the argument that it's premature to make the big jump at this point, before there's a Metro app ecosystem or anything (and I'd be very antagonistic towards any dramatic changes to the non-Metro interface, since for the things I use my PC for, I don't want Metro), but I can also see an argument that it's better to make the painful transition early.
And I'm gradually just resigning myself to the fact that the things I want a computer for aren't the same as most people's... so whoever provides the least-painful way to still get power-user stuff done in a "Post PC" world will get my money. I'm very intrigued about running Lightroom on a Surface Pro and tossing it in my bag with my camera...
Do you want a 2 pound tablet though? That's the big problem with the Surface Pro. The original iPad at 1.5 pounds was generally considered to be too heavy by a lot of people. I can't imagine adding an additional half pound to it and being able to actually use it as a tablet anymore.
If you unplug your keyboard and mouse, you get a UI that is designed for touch.
Makes sense to me.
It seems like Microsofts end game is that you will have one device and the interface for interacting with that device will depend on where you are. If docked at home with external monitor, keyboard, and mouse you get more of the desktop feel. Unplug the device and take it with you and you have more of the touch based interface.
Now , thank god almighty, I have choices. They will have to do a lot better than Windows 8 to rope me back into the corral.
Metro and Windows 8 might be good enough if introduced by any other company. Microsoft is not any other company.
I am not a ludite nor a nutjob. I have real work to do and am forced to use Microsoft products. But I will roast in hell before I give them any benefit of the doubt. Ever.
I hate Microsoft.
Why they don't afford the user choice like Linux I don't know.
Forcing users to make a limited choice of one is going to upset many, change can be bad as well as good.
Come SP1/2 of windows8 they will offer alternative user interfaces - can smell the outcome in the air. Failing that they will have a active market in alternatives that will become more mainstream aware than the alternatives currently.
You can choose to have the standard desktop be the default, is that what you mean?
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for_...
There is also a very active windows theme customization community who use tools like windows blinds to tweak the current windows theme into something you probably wouldn't recognize.
Does this sound like marketing to anyone else?
Personally, I find Daring Fireball significantly more smug and annoying--unlike this post, Daring Fireball also likes to constantly rag on Android and implicitly assumes almost everything Apple does is perfect.
The new meto programs have no depth or maturity. I had the same problem trying to do serious work on android.
It wasn't worth jumping though the extra hoops to get the same stuff done.
That being said... a tablet is the best bathroom computer.
We seem to be heading towards a point where booting Windows is going to take longer than copying a single file.
Your mileage is entirely welcome to vary, and perhaps the performance of this new dialog is such that I won't notice it as much as its Vista and Windows 7 counterparts. To be honest I couldn't work out the Windows 8 preview to the point where I could even find a file, let alone copy it somewhere.
As for the recycle dialog, I'm pretty sure that's gone in Windows 8.
Metro is nice for tablets but it's clearly inefficient as a desktop OS. Efficiency and features are more important than original and pretty UI.