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Comment by bornhuetter | Hacker News Reader

What a ridiculously over the top hack article. In Windows 8, Microsoft did a lot right, and a couple of things wrong. In 8.1 they are trying to fix those couple of things.

If they put the start button back and default to the desktop, that would address 90% of people's concerns. The only other major issue is that Metro apps are so far pretty useless, but they are very easy to avoid until they get better (or just ignore them permanently).

As to it being "widely panned", I saw a lot of positive reviews of it when it came out. Even the Verge, who usually hate anything and everything Microsoft gave it a good review.

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The absolute number of things done "right" or "wrong" doesn't matter so much.

Many small "right things" will not balance out even a single, massive "wrong thing".

Keep in mind that the single "wrong thing" can in turn spawn new problems of its own, like a tarnished reputation and uncertainty among consumers.

It should be quite clear now, although it was pretty clear during the preview releases, that the UI changes were overwhelmingly bad. Even if such problems are fixed with a subsequent update, there are enough people who still just won't trust it, based on the poor initial experiences.

But there aren't any massive "wrong things".

Missing start button and not booting to the desktop are by far the two biggest complaints I hear about Windows 8. These are, in the scheme of things, not exactly massive issues. There are numerous programs out there that fix this issue, and Microsoft can fix them with a minor tweak.

Metro apps have a load of problems, but since they are completely avoidable (and I think most people are just completely avoiding them) it's not a major issue. It's like widgets in Vista.

That workspace all the way to the left on OS X with widgets, whatever it's called. I've literally never seen anyone use that feature, but I wouldn't consider it a major problem that it's there.

For the power user those might be minor issues, but not for the average user. The start menu and the initial boot screen are about the most important things to get right to be user friendly to the mass market.

Booting by default into an inferior environment and not having the chance to change that default sounds like a massive issue to me.

Maybe not massive from the developers' point of view (they can probably revert it just from tweaking a flag somewhere in the code), but definitely massive for the user which will see a completely different desktop environment.

The problem is with Metro apps, not the start screen.

The full screen start menu is, in my opinion and the opinion of everyone I've spoken with, better than the old start menu. For the beginner user, they have a nice big visual screen with the name and icon of all the programs they use. For the advanced user, they are going to type the name of the program or setting they want - and this works better in Win 8 than Win 7.

The big problems only start when you click into a Metro app, like News, but I don't think many people are doing that anyway - they are just clicking either "Desktop", "Chrome" or "Word/Excel/Outlook".

> These are, in the scheme of things, not exactly massive issues.

The perception can be very different though. There are those that really don't like it, and it is rubbed in their face every time they login to their machine. They are small matters, I agree: Metro apps can be completely ignored and most of what I used the start menu for is just as it was (ctrl+esc, start typing, pick from list) and is in some ways better, but it is still a change in look and feel that for a novice user adds friction.

Worse for a marketing/sales point of view: there are people who have not really formed an opinion and have decided to avoid Windows 8 (not upgrading, buying a machine with 7 instead, or getting the option and downgrading to 7 like many did from Vista to XP) because there is a lot of press questioning the UI changes. These people might not know that the change is minor when you consider their entire day, but it is being talked about it loudly enough that MS don't want to take the risk.

Another problem for Windows 8 is of course that many people simply have no real need to upgrade and no end of additional UI options is going to change that. If people have no problem with Win7 then MS can make Win8 look exactly like Win7 and it'll make no difference to that class of user (a very large class of user) unless they offer the upgrade for free.

The only reason I have 8 is that I was rebuilding my main home PC, it was a very cheap upgrade a the time, and I might have need to do Windows Phone 8 development in the not-too-distant future (the SDK for that will not install on older Windows).

So I think we agree that there are only fairly minor issues, but many people feel that they are major.

I really think that a lot of this reaction is just because it's popular to hate Microsoft - so any small perceived missteps are blown massively out of proportion (particularly by the media).

Microsoft could have gone down the path of keeping everything exactly the same, and providing no innovation; that probably would have worked great in the short term - but they are trying to do something new and there are growing pains associated with it.

> So I think we agree that there are only fairly minor issues, but many people feel that they are major.

Essentially, yes.

> Microsoft could have gone down the path of keeping everything exactly the same ... that probably would have worked in the short term

I'm not sure it would, as people would have even less reason to upgrade. The man on the street is not going to be impressed by under-the-hood improvements to the point of spending upgrade cash so while they'd have saved some hassle on new sales they would have lost revenue on upgrades. Admittedly the reception has made that upgrade income smaller than they hoped for anyway, but that is hindsight talking.

> but they are trying to do something new and there are growing pains* associated with it*

This is a bit part of the perception problem I think. A proportion of the of the people who have upgraded (ignoring those who have opinions despite not having tried it) feel that Windows 8 is using them as guinea pigs for the new tablet stuff that they don't feel fits with their desktop use well. If MS had made the new UI changes more easily turn-off-and-on-able initially they might have avoided some of this friction.

I think that the major issue with the desktop is that it really isnt a desktop in the old sense (where you can access "everything") and more like a desktop simulation for no-metro software

Windows 8 completely broke the wifi management screen. It's nigh impossible to connect my Surface RT to anything other than a simple home router in my experience, and often times even that will fail.

Heaven forbid you try and connect it to a corporate wifi with certificates et. al. I've tried - it's not pretty and I was not able to get it working. You have to use a crazy number of backdoors to features that aren't exposed anywhere in the GUI.

I have a Surface Pro and have had no such problems. The Wifi interface is not different between these two devices.

Do you think it's the user interface causing the connection problems or something else?

> If they put the start button back and default to the desktop, that would address 90% of people's concerns.

And that would erase 90% of Windows 8. Hard to call Windows 8 a success if Win8.1 or whatever reverts back to the good ol' start-button-driven desktop by default. Windows 8 will be what, an obscure alternate desktop hidden in a user setting that no one will use?

The whole measure of success for Windows 8 is exactly the new UI and whether the users, you know, use it. The old desktop is barely an evolution of Windows 7 for the common user.

To imply that the only difference between Windows 7 and Windows 8 is a lack of start button is incredibly ignorant.

Were you so happy to bash someone that you missed the "default back to the desktop" part? From the average end user point a view, bring back the "default desktop" and the start button and yes, you're effectively back to Win7. I accept your apologies.

If Metro apps are "pretty useless," and thus easy to avoid/ignore permanently, doesn't that largely undercut the need for Win8 entirely?

Wasn't this supposed to be a "no compromises" OS? I seem to recall hearing that a lot from MS.

> As to it being "widely panned", I saw a lot of positive reviews of it when it came out.

The press does good reviews because otherwise they would be banned from doing any reviews at all by MS. Or they get nice new shiny hardware for the reviews. You should take all press reviews with a pinch of salt.

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