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Comment by el_cuadrado | Hacker News Reader

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el_cuadrado

I have.

The interface is freaking unusable.

It is like Microsoft decided to exit the desktop market with a bang.

"We are failing, and we are taking Windows with us".

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To each his own I guess, the only time I ever use the Metro UI is when I'm searching for something, which usually consists of hitting the start button, searching "Chrome" (for google chrome) and then hitting enter. Any other time that I've used the interface it was just for development or testing. How often do you see yourself using it?

Windows XP - success

Windows Vista - failure

Windows 7 - success

Windows 8 - potential failure

Just following a pattern.

That pattern only holds if you think that the world started at Windows XP. Going back another few years:

Windows 3.1 - Success

Windows 95 - Success

Windows 98 - Success (moderate, whatever)

Windows NT 4 - Success

Windows Me - Failure

Windows 2000 - Success

We're talking about Microsoft here! What about DOS?

I was talking about Windows, actually. I do remember some versions of MS-DOS being marginally better than others, but I don't think it had any predictable cadence.

If you switch that metric from good/bad instead of success/failure, it makes more sense. Something doesn't have to have been objectively good to be sucessful.

Here's how I remember it:

3.1 was the first windows GUI for mass consumption, and was successful, and pretty decent for it's time.

95 was also succesful, but I remember it being very, terribly unstable. Moreso than 3.1.. i put it in the bad column based on that.

98 improved on this and added a lot. Good.

ME was utter dogshit.

Kernels changed from ME to XP, so I make the link there. Microsoft did provide a direct upgrade path from ME to XP.

XP was awesome

Vista was horrid.

7 was awesome

Now 8. If they continue the pattern, 8 will suck.

It seems like there's a micro pattern like "new UI paradigm" >> "polish and improve new UI". 98 improved on 95, 7 improved on vista, XP improved on 2K.

I see Vista characterized as a failure over and over again, and Win 7 as a success. Win 7 is somewhat better than Vista, but the distance between them isn't that great. Besides the fact that UAC prompts were more frequent in Vista, was there some particular problem with Vista?

For a year or two there I was running workstations with both, and didn't see much difference.

I think Vista took the heat for imposing security where none existed.

Do you feel like Vista ran slower than 7? That was my issue with Vista, the new design was fine, but it just seemed to run poorly compared to the speed of 7.

It's the little things that add up, Vista is like Win7 with an itchy wool sweater over top. Win7 refined UAC, the quicklaunch/taskbar is amazing and the running task previews actually work, the start menu app search is better, the system tray notifications can be more finely tuned, and it runs significantly better on mid/lower end hardware.

I hardly notice a difference between Vista post SP1 and Win 7.

Vista had teething problems early on which burnt a lot of people. Unfortunately, that's what seems to be stuck in everyone's minds.

I ran both Vista and Windows 7. As far as I was concerned, in terms of usability they are both pretty much the same as long as you turned indexing off on you Vista drives.

The simple pattern is a popular myth. For ex, you didn't list Longhorn (after XP) that was such a fiasco that after 3 years of development it was completely scrapped. This was an overly ambitious release with a new relational db filesystem (winfs), new graphics stack (avalon), and new networking stack (indigo). It didn't converge. The team forked Windows Server 2003 and rushed out Vista with as much of the intention (but not code) as it could from previous development. I was on the windows team from 98-11.

failing? MS has been holding 70% to 85% of the desktop market for decades, even by conservative estimates.

They also used to focus on the desktop market. Now they focus on the tablet market, to the point of sacrificing the desktop user experience to gain entrance to that market. That might prove to be a big mistake.

The interface is freaking unusable.

It's funny that I keep hearing people say this, yet hundreds of thousands of people are using it just fine before it's even released. A large number of them even using it as their daily OS. This indicates to me that it is usable. Perhaps by "unusable", some people really just mean "different than I'm used to"? Because to me, unusable means impossible to use, which we know isn't true.

There is no way out of the "metro" interface?

Clarification:

I assumed el_cuadrado was refering to metro being "unusable".

Is that true?

To run desktop apps, you can go to the desktop. I've been using it as my primary OS for several months now

Disclosure: MSFT Employee

I recently bought a laptop and it's the first time I've had windows on my home machine since 2004. Since it's only $15 to upgrade: Is it possible/easy to upgrade and go back to Windows 7 if I find it detestable?

Going back means using the restore disks or partitions that came with your computer, or installing fresh from a retail DVD of a previous OS. There's no "downgrade" process.

Of course, 1% of your time is spent in Metro if you use it on a desktop, and that's generally when you're searching for something.

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