Comment by jpxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpxxx | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Microsoft is not composed of morons, their engineering is world-class, and they're not out to ruin their business or their product line. And the problem isn't Windows 8.

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.

This is the most accurate comment on Windows8 that I've seen so far.

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 so I had no problem playing around with Windows8 DevPreview and ConsumerPreview.

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.

One advantage for Microsoft is that the Linux desktop environments currently also mess around with their UIs. Maybe in the long run it may turn out well but currently Gnome Shell and Unity make life hard for people who just want to use Facebook.

How does Unity make your life hard? I'm on osx myself but I love the unity interface and everyone that I've seen using it seems to easily find their way.

Change in general is bad for non-power users short term. Especially now that the interfaces grew less similar to the old windows paradigm it will get harder to steal the theoretical people escaping the Metro UI.

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.

Even (or especially) power users can resent gratuitous and/or negative change.

> Gnome Shell and Unity make life hard for people who just want to use Facebook

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.

Isn't this the perfect use case for Windows 8, though? Your wife would have no trouble finding the Internet Explorer (or even Chrome) tile prominently featured on the Metro UI launch screen.

I love Unity. I love that you can start things by typing just a little of what you are looking for.

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

> I love that you can start things by typing just a little of what you are looking for.

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 don't have that problem. I just type the word "music" and I get all the players. Typing "video" will also get me my video players.

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.

Ah, this old argument again.

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.

So 70%-80% (taking a guess) of their user base will not like the new Windows or want to bother with learning it. That doesn't sound like great news for Microsoft.

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.

This 70--80% you're talking about are the email/facebook segment who do not choose for themselves what OS to run?

That figure is probably higher - computing has become more ubiquitous than it was in 2006 with Vista.

>> 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?

Microsoft is not composed of morons, their engineering is world-class, and they're not out to ruin their business or their product line.

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?

Yeah but look at Windows Phone, Xbox, and Zune. I think they're very capable of evolving and innovating when their product has competition. Balmer and his management style still needs to go but the main reason they didn't innovate with Windows is because they had no reason to.

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.

When it comes to mobile and browser, Microsoft probably did not prioritize properly and I think they acknowledged it too. Using that as an argument to question their technical ability is not right. IE10 can take any browser head on and so can the new mobile OS.

They said the same for IE7. And IE8. And IE9.

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.

I thoroughly agree with this. If they know what they have to replicate, they can do it in style. I can't find three significant points of conceptual difference between Windows 8 Metro and iOS....

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com