Windows 7 'back by popular demand', says HP as it targets wary consumers | Hacker News Reader

Windows 7 'back by popular demand', says HP as it targets wary consumers

theguardian.com

Here is a story that happened last week: I was at my dentist, and we are both immigrants from the same country - so she said she needed a help with her computer (while I needed very big help in the tooth department).

She bought this Windows 8 laptop, and man it felt weird for me to explain in simple words that there are in fact 2 internet explorers - and they should use the desktop one... Since she was not sure what's desktop, and what's the other thing (the metro... I said Metro, but I wanted to come up with some other word).

Their dentist webpage (seems like other dentists are using it too) - only worked with the desktop Internet explorer, and there was no easy way to run it right away from the "big icon menu" (how do you call it?).

I had to explain how I'm getting there (I've had to evaluate Windows 8 at some point), and all I remmember was - well press the Windows Key and hold "D". I might install Classic Shell for them later.

So it was frustrating - the explaining process at least for me.

Not sure why Microsoft expects people to get their duality?

I'm going to build a PC for someone and use Windows 8, but install Classic Shell. For others, I figure if Classic Shell isn't an option for a user, I'd just pin the desktop to the top left, tell them to click there upon logging in, and then have their most frequently used apps pinned to the taskbar, along with their usual mixture of icons on the desktop. It's not ideal but it makes the best of a bad situation.

In 8.1 there is a new setting that makes the Desktop the default window after login. I'd suggest turning that on.

Which is still downright boneheaded on MS's part.

The situation is that people are calling in their nerd friends to get help figuring out how to do basic things that they shouldn't need help with, because it's supposedly a platform they've been using for over a decade now.

Their supposed solution, a setting somewhere in the control panel, just makes the nerd friend's job slightly easier. It does absolutely nothing to fix the real problem: That the nerd friend is needed in the first place.

At least the nerd friend would do it for free... I've seen the GeekSquads (are they still active?)

> the "big icon menu" (how do you call it?)

I believe its official name is "the start screen".

(Windows 8.1 builds in the ability to start in desktop mode and skip the start screen entirely)

Thanks for the 8.1 idea everyone! Surely 9.0 would be fine again.

7 for example is feels good, and comfortable, and XP was my best friend, and still have good fond memories of NT4 (or was it NT5) along with Windows 2000.

If Microsoft simply skipped all other versions (okay they needed 95), then I would've not had much to complain about Windows really...

There's an option in Internet Options > Programs to always open IE in desktop mode, which might be simpler for your dentist.

Thanks for the tip. I'll configure it like this.

What's so infuriating about Win 8.x is where it improves over Win7 it's clear, however, MS went out of their way to positively screw it up in whole new ways, such as Metro. It should never be the responsibility of the end user to tweak things to decent defaults - defaults should be right out of the box.

Take Metro etc. out (or, better, have it as an app launched from the desktop, and completely uninstallable), sort out the start menu and a few UI tweaks and they would have had an easy win on their hands, but their efforts to do things no one wants are causing them to fail, even to the point of giving people like Google an in with the latest Chrome for Metro aping a full screen Chrome OS like experience which, ironically, is more Windows 7 like than Win 8 is.

MS really need someone that understands not only what they're good at but why people have stuck with MS software at their helm.

Yup. Imagine a world, where you are still getting all these cool linux kernel improvementds but you are stuck to say "Ubuntu Unity's" ui and nothing else.

MS really need someone that understands not only what they're good at but why people have stuck with MS software at their helm

Microsoft realizes the end of the PC-era is here. (Almost) nobody is buying PCs and OS-licenses anymore, so Microsoft can't gamble it's future on those petty things.

They realize that the future belongs to services spanning several devices and multiple platforms, among which Windows can be one player. That's why you can have Microsoft-software for iOS and Android these days.

But for Windows to be a player in the future, people must want to have it on their shiny, portable touch-devices with long battery-life due to apps running in a controlled environment.

Nothing from the desktop-era Windows fits into that picture. Nothing. For Microsoft to be on those devices that just needs to go.

You and I may hate it, but Microsoft is literally forced to make this "new" Windows-model if they want to remain relevant in the future. Microsoft is upping its service-game, and it will do so at the cost of everything the PC used to be.

348.7 million PCs were wold in 2012. Never make absolutes, except that you shouldn't make absolutes. They make your opinions look dumb.

But the sales in 2013 declined in 11% .

Still higher sales than tablets.

Edit: Also, 2013 figures shouldn't be out until March (if I remember right)... where are you getting these numbers from? Is that a quarter decline?

Just some rough internet search. Others talk about 10% , and mid year predictions we're similar.

> nobody is buying PCs and OS-licenses anymore

Yet, almost everybody is still using PCs and regular desktops, either at home, or at work. Even with the explosive growth of mobile devices, the PC market is still bigger - and I suspect that the reasons for why people aren't buying so many PCs anymore is due to (a) lack of innovation and (b) PCs have a long life and a 4-year old PC or laptop is working just fine for most people. What's really over is the upgrade treadmill. Either way, I'm glad that all kinds of wankers think the PC-era is over, maybe we'll finally have some real innovation in this space.

> They realize that the future belongs to services spanning several devices and multiple platforms ... Microsoft is literally forced to make this "new" Windows-model if they want to remain relevant in the future

Actually there is only one platform that is slowly but surely cannibalizing every other platform, the open web, making the concept of an operating-system irrelevant for the purposes of achieving lock-in the good-old fashioned way. In fact, I bet that Microsoft wants a future dominated by app stores, because that's a future they know how to control.

Nothing from the desktop-era Windows fits into that picture. Nothing. For Microsoft to be on those devices that just needs to go.

One word: Surface

Microsoft's strategy is not based on the idea that nothing from desktop OSes belongs on tablets. To get an ecosystem that is built from that idea, you need to look to Apple's offerings. Microsoft's approach has been to attempt to meld the tablet and PC experiences. Which seems to have failed miserably, because as you observe they really don't fit together very well. The end result has been an offering that's received a lukewarm-at-best reception in both the desktop and the tablet spaces.

> nobody is buying PCs and OS-licenses anymore

Is this because nobody is using PCs anymore or because consumer grade PCs currently have an expected life of 5+ years?

To a large extent, yes. A decade ago you needed to significant upgrade every couple of years to stay current but now a machine can stay useful for the basics and beyond[1] for considerably longer.

There is also competition from the consoles, cheap media players and portable devices: instead of upgrading their PCs many home users buy those devices instead and leave the old PC for when they need to crank open a MS Office document. And having not spent money on new hardware, they resent paying for an upgrade to Windows (which traditionally the cost of was hidden in amongst the cost of that new PC).

[1] even games if you don't mind not playing the latest graphics fests, especially with the growing indy circuit[2] and the growth of mobile devices[3].

[2] which is supporting older hardware better than the big players

[3] because once you are optimised to the point where the game works on cheap tablets, that old PC will probably play a port of it quite well too

Sales have been plummeting across the PC business for a couple of years now, and Windows has reached a point of "good enough" leaving people little incentive to upgrade outside of HW replacement cycles.

And to paint a even bleaker picture you still have 30%+ of the worldwide Windows user-base still running XP, i.e. while PC-users on the Windows platform, they haven't actually paid for a OS license in over a decade.

The business of selling a licensed OS either shrink-wrapped or to OEMs is seemingly much less profitable than it used to be, and clearly not an area where future growth can be expected.

You can't blame Microsoft for trying to find something else to base future growth on.

The interesting part is that both PCs aren't going away, and there is a huge market at the backend. MS is simply throwing those markets away, trying to get into the shiny new thing.

At the same time, the shiny new mobile market is getting more and more similar to the desktop interface MS is trying to throw away. (Android alread has multiuser support, file navigators are getting more Windows(7)-like, status bars are getting more complete, tablets are gettng keyboards...) And mobile devices will get good enough quite soon, then their sales will also go down.

By the way, I'm behond hate here, I'm not participating in any way. I'm just watching the train wreak.

Call me cynical but I don't really think unifying the desktop/laptop/mobile OSes was the point here.

I think the (unspoken) point of their whole "app" idea is to make people transition into a subscription model instead of a single-payment model; the unification reason was just an excuse.

Could anybody please explain that ?

I mean think about it: people at Microsoft aren't idiots. There's no way in hell that they didn't realize people hated Metro. So why would they still force it upon people even though it means they know people would hate Windows that way?

The only reason is if there is an overriding goal worth the short-term loss of money, and this is the most plausible explanation I could come up with: even if you make people hate your product, if you can force them to move onto a subscription model, they probably won't be able to go back.

But where's the subscription ? isn't 8.1 a regular purchase?

The OS is, the apps aren't necessarily.

The most plausible explanation is the explanation MS gave for creating Metro:

They want to unify destops and mobile, so that they can extend their desktop dominance at the mobile market.

They could've done that without Metro, though, so your hypothesis doesn't really fit the evidence any better than the alternative.

The users are going to learn to like it or stay with Windows 7 for the next 6 years. Microsoft doesn't mind leaving them behind because what is the worst they can do, buy a Mac?

A significant amount of Windows PC users stick with Windows because they're gamers. However, the number of recent and current games for the Mac is steadily increasing (for example, just under half of my Steam library is Mac compatible). Also, the "Mac tax" (ie extra amount paid for a Mac over the cost of the hardware) has greatly diminished.[1]

If Microsoft doesn't release a worthwhile successor to Windows 7 within the next few years, then yes, some consumers will buy a Mac.

[1] http://bgr.com/2013/12/26/mac-pro-windows-diy-cost/

As a matter of fact, yes. I've been using Windows since version 3.1. I've used every version except Vista. I'm building a hackintosh and am moving to Mac OS X. I could have bought a Mac Pro had they been like the previous Mac Pros (e.g., internally expandable and reasonably priced). I'd be using Linux if Adobe Lightroom worked on Linux.

In fairness, for the spec, they are pretty reasonably priced. Compare them to the equivalents from say HP, the Z420 and they are in fact cheaper.

Obviously if you're building your own then you'll save a hell of a lot, but if you're looking for a prebuilt machine you could do worse.

The HP you reference is a lot cheaper:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?gclid=CIvD7qzOnLw...

$1,629. It would need a nice video card, I think, but let's call it $2,000. Now, it still better than the Mac Pro, because if you have a bunch of disks, you need to spend, for the Mac Pro, between $1,500 and $2,500 to hold the disks. That makes the Mac Pro a LOT more expensive.

I'm nearly a power user of Windows 8.1 (using it both coding, designing, using VirtualBox, Photoshop, AfterFX, Office etc), and when you just minimize the icons in the Start screen to the smallest possible tile size, it is not different from Windows 7 at all. The thing I miss most is feeling of depth, which is lost in this flat area. But other than that, I don't understand the hype. Every single application in Windows 7 is available in Windows 8. You don't ever have to use Metro apps. I just remove them from my start menu, since I don't use my laptop as a tablet. I didn't like it first, but I get used to it and I use it faster than my previous Windows 7 installation.

> I don't understand the hype.

I use a Windows 7 machine for gaming at home, and I have briefly used a Windows 8.1 machine for a personal laptop. I dislike Windows 8 pretty viscerally. The laptop has a split personality, with some applications behaving one way, and others behaving a completely different way. I can guess how it will behave by the presence or absence of a window around my application, but that's extra cognitive overhead which I don't feel I should have to spend on figuring out how to manipulate an application.

I could certainly drop everything Metro, and get a closer to Windows 7 experience, but what is the advantage of that over just using Windows 7 in the first place?

That's kind of the point though. You can go through a lot of work to undo the changes so that it's just the same as 7. Or you can avoid the upgrade at all.

There's other things that 8 does that's annoying, there's some changes to it so that some drivers no longer work, so there's devices that are left unsupported. There's stupid decisions like how if you want to shut down you have to hover in the top right corner with your mouse, then slide down the right side of the window to go to settings to shut off.

The problem is that they wanted to make a consistent tablet interface, but it's not easy to use a tablet interface with a mouse. Many many people still use mice, and still have many reasons to still use mice, but they didn't design a system that is comfortable with a mouse. Using windows 8 on a tablet is actually not too bad, but I only use a tablet casually.

If you're using the mouse and interacting with windows 8 features you probably aren't having a good time. However, you have no reason to. As of 8.1 you can boot straight into the desktop, if you're a power user (or aren't on a touch device) you aren't using metro apps anyway so their interface doesn't mean much to you, and all other functionality (shutdown, search, settings, etc) is accessible with simple keyboard shortcuts (far faster than using the mouse regardless of what OS you use). The only reason a user without a touch interface should see the start menu in Win8 is for brief moments when they are using the search functionality to quickly open programs. The poster you were responding to is completely correct: they hype against win8 is completely overblown. In my opinion, slight visual changes are worth the back-end changes to things like boot time, multi-core performance, and security.

The hype is simply that the historically go-to OS for ease of use is now difficult for so many of its most dedicated users. I used most versions of Windows going back to the early 90s, and have generally been on Mac OS X since 2006 (except at some jobs). I'm still very familiar with Windows up to Windows 7, but I remember being horrified when trying to help my parents figure out their new laptop running Windows 8. It was so hard to show them how to use it for even their most basic needs. Last week I was trying to help a friend locate Wordpad on Windows 8. I thought about cheating and seeing if the search worked as well as Spotlight, but I was determined to figure out the usual path to open it, and the steps seem so much slower than most versions of Windows. I understand that people can simply learn the new ways, but Microsoft's claim to fame was that their OS was good for all the people who aren't good at computers. It's not like the new look and feel is going to convert people from Mac and Linux, so what competitive edge does Windows have now if their own users are struggling so much?

> The hype is simply that the historically go-to OS for ease of use is now difficult for so many of its most dedicated users.

The historically go-to OS for ease of use is Mac OS, not Windows.

Windows is historically the go-to OS for appeal to corporate IT because Microsoft fairly directly inherited the "No one gets fired for buying X" mantle from IBM as hardware became commoditized and the remaining concern was over core software.

At no point post Windows 95 did any other company has a claim to go-to OS for ease or otherwise than Microsoft. It is fact, does not matter what your likes or dislikes are.

> At no point post Windows 95 did any other company has a claim to go-to OS for ease or otherwise than Microsoft. It is fact, does not matter what your likes or dislikes are.

Personally, I prefer Windows to Mac OS X, so if I was stating my OS preference rather than my perception of the perception common in the market, I wouldn't have said what I did. But I don't think what you say is a fact at all -- its a claim that I've, in the course of using almost every Microsoft DOS/Windows version since MS-DOS 2.11, and most versions of Mac OS, and interacting with plenty of other users over that time, never even heard outside of this thread.

"Ease of use" and "familiarity to people who have been using it for a long time" are two very different things. Every OS has the latter, and Windows has by far the largest base of familiar people -- which, as long as nothing significant changes, is a strength (and MS occasionally gets bashed for breaking familiarity -- this happened with Windows 8, sure, but also with Vista and XP -- and even more often with applications and opposed to OS's.)

I'm wondering if this will stay the same. Prior to 8, I've found that Windows has been easier to work with than Mac OS.

The first example, (not the best example, but illustrative) that comes to mind is I was asked the other day to set up an AirPort Time Capsule. It was unboxed, and so I looked at it, and at first I had no idea what it was. It had no identifying marks, no product name even on the underside. I had to go to the mac store online and browse through images until I could see what it was.

I found the box, and there were no instructions or disks in it. I went online, and found that you had to use a program to configure it. The page to download the program only had a link to the iTunes store, so I had to set up an iTunes account on this computer to download it. Once all of the iTunes linkage was done, I found out that despite the fact the page said it was an iPad, iPhone or iOS app, it wouldn't run for iOS, or at least not in any trivial way that I could find. I then had to hunt around for an alternative download source through google, for the actual iOS application to configure it.

Now the nice part of it is, once it was configured, it was trivial to set up the time machine portion.

And that's always been sort of illustrative of my dealing with Mac. As long as you're doing exactly what is expected, the experience is simple. As soon as you want to do something a little bit differently, it's not simple to accommodate.

Windows is able to accommodate, but sometimes the simplest things become more complicated as a result.

(Contrasted to Linux, which can accommodate anything you want, as long as you don't mind writing it yourself, but has a more limited set of options for pre-compiled software.)

I think 8's real failing is that it wanted to have the rigidity of a tablet while keeping the flexibility that a desktop has historically held. And whenever the question of which to use by default would come up, they erred on the side of the tablet interface, which is frustrating for anyone who would prefer the desktop.

> Prior to 8, I've found that Windows has been easier to work with than Mac OS.

I agree, for much the same reason that you state:

> And that's always been sort of illustrative of my dealing with Mac. As long as you're doing exactly what is expected, the experience is simple.

Right. That's long been Apple's strength: simple as long as you're doing exactly what's expected, and having the strength of design to "expect" things that hit a pretty large segment of the market.

I basically agree with you, but even though it was "later" that Windows became the go-to easy OS, its reign in that category lasted long enough to be a big part of consumer computing history. I do remember many friends and teachers loving Macintosh before I used it much, and I can imagine all the reasons they felt it made more sense or was simply more pleasing. However, even though I now prefer OS X to Windows, I know that people have generally found Windows easier, and even if the only reason was because the average user learned it first (at home or at the office), that still gave Microsoft an advantage in holding onto a huge number of users who stuck with it because it was what they were used to (found to be easiest).

I too use windows 8.1 daily. I didn't mind windows 8 at all. It was only different when I turned the computer on, the rest of the time it was just slightly different windows 7. With 8.1 I only see the metro screen when I accidentally press the windows key.

Windows 8.1 vs Windows 7 is not so interesting to me. But Microsoft 2014 vs Microsoft 1994 is very interesting to me.

There was a time when they had enough weight that they could force their vendors to toe the party line on OS versions. Enterprises might drag their feet on upgrading, but consumers were force-fed the new release even if they hated it.

They had failures, but even so their vendors were reluctant to push back like this. Or at least, that's how I remember it. Not any more.

Let's remember the versions history for Windows targeted at consumers ... Windows 3.0 (1990) => 3.1 (1992) => 3.11 (1993) => 95 (1995) => 98 (1998) => 98 SE (1999) => Me (2000) => XP (2001)

Besides Windows Millennium, which was a total clusterfuck (and I happen to have used it), all other versions were better than the ones prior to it.

Also worth considering - 3.11 was released one year after 3.1, however it was the same Windows, but with improved networking. And Win 98 SE was like a service pack for Win 98. The only time Microsoft hurried to release a major version of Windows within only one year of the previous one was after Win Me happened. And I was in high-school then, but I don't remember many Windows Me PCs being on display in computer shops.

> And I was in high-school then, but I don't remember many Windows Me PCs being on display in computer shops.

I was as well. I can confidently say that there were enough WinME PCs being sold, but it didn't last as long as Windows 98 had. What I can't remember was whether Windows 2000 was sold in stores in between WinME and XP.

(you've omitted Vista from your timeline)

I remember a different version history, nt4 to 2000 to xp, each version adding a ton of bloat without expanding the functionality (2000 added usb, but xp added nothing to 2000 except bloat and a dumber ui).

Many consider WfWG 3.11 a massive beta test for some of the improvements (in the networking mainly, but in I/O handling chunks too) planned for Win95.

IIRC Windows ME, or Windows Yuppy Flu as is got unofficially renamed[!] was never supposed to happen: the cunsumer transition from lagacy Windows to the NT line was originally supposed to happen with Win2K but for various reasons (MS were not ready for it, and neither were the app/game vendors) this didn't happen, so they botched together an upgrade to Win98SE so they had something new to sell to that market until XP happened (by which time everyone (MS, the users, and the 3rd parties) was more ready to transition).

[!] after the nick name for the debilitating-when-real illness misunderstood by many and that had a reputation for being faked by certain classes of people who thought they worked too hard (most of the yuppie types who were genuinely ill probably had hypertension/stresss related disorders due to lifestyle, but those did't sound as "cool" to have) which has bouts of chronic fatigue as its main identifying symptom

My desktop and laptop have Windows 7 installed on them and my wife's laptop has Windows 8 on it. As someone who spends 8-10 hours a day on their computer programming/debugging/everything users on this site do, I'm not sure I could handle working in Windows 8 all that time. I feel like Windows 7 got so much right for power users of Windows, and that Windows 8 is for casual users of their computer.

As a power user and after discovering "win+x" on windows 8, I can't come back to windows 7 but it is a matter of taste I guess

I looked that up; what does it offer that the Windows 7 (and 8) control panel doesn't?

Hitting the Windows key, and typing in any of those names will get you the same content.

Less effort. Key-strokes + click on 8/8.1, as opposed to opening the Control Panel, finding the most likely group for the thing you forgot the name of, and then clicking on the thing you need. The control panel is bloated, and it's organisation is not entirely logical (to me, at any rate).

Or Win-X + letter on 8/8.1. For example opening the Disk Manager is Win-X + k, Event Viewer is Win-X + v etc.

Effort reduction is a fair point. However, most of the shortcuts presented are for tasks I do so rarely that having a quick shortcut to them adds relatively little value.

The few that I do use frequently from that list already have their own key bindings, or I can find them with 2-3 keystrokes after pulling up the windows start menu (something you can't do with Windows 8 if they aren't regular applications; you have to type and then select a different application category to search in).

Ctrl-Shift-Escape == Task manager

Win-D == Desktop

Win-R == Run

Alt-F4 (from Desktop) == Shutdown

The net result is that this is not enough of a value add to elevate Windows 8 above Windows 7.

What advanced features from Windows 7 would you miss on Windows 8.1? Because they are most likely still there.

I use both and in terms of desktop i don't have any productivity issues. The only issue i have with Windows 8 is with USB 3 driver support but i'm not sure if it's microsoft or intel's fault.

For me, Windows 8.1 'made sense' after I installed a third-party utility called ModernMix (https://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/). It allows you to run all or some metro apps on the desktop in normal windows.

This was the turning point, as I could use apps from the Windows Store (mostly media consuming apps) when I wanted to, as I wanted to. I didn't have to leave my desktop or have a SoundCloud app take up all 27" of my monitor, and the Store apps are much nicer to use and look at when you're in the mood for consuming media. On the opposite sense, I still had Putty/Office/etc right next to them.

This really fixed Windows 8.1 for me, and I think Microsoft should consider having it as an option in 9.

(disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Stardock, just a huge fan of ModernMix)

I find 8 awkward to work with. 7 felt like a breath of fresh air after Vista. It cleaned up the interface, it improved (incrementally) the same user experience and flows that MS originally deployed with Win 95 and NT 4.

Win 8 felt like they looked at how I use a computer and decided to try to hide everything I use. Everything. And when I can find it I get weird fullscreen fisher-price versions.

I'm sure you can relearn the interface just fine. That's not really how I want to spend my time though. Even after two months of using it in parallels, all the windows features I want to use are pinned to my MacOS dock.

I'm mostly a linux guy these days anyway, but after 20 years of PC use Win 8 is the release that drove my dad to Apple as well.

The core trouble I've seen with non-technical people on Windows 8 isn't Metro, its confusion/paralysis with a mobile-like interface suddenly on a desktop.

People had 5-6 years experience with touch computing on mobile devices. Pull here, touch here, gesture here to make X, Y, Z happen. 1 app at a time and its full screen. An app store is the only way to get software. Instant power-on, single user, very simple shell/OS/application launcher. People know what to expect and do with this interface.

Windows 8 force dumps new users into a mobile interface going against 20+ years of how they have used a desktop PC. It's jarring, its weird, it "feels wrong." I've seen this time and time again. My mom is a wiz on her iPhone, and she is just fine with Windows XP/Vista/7. I put her in front of Windows 8 and she had no clue what to do. All her reference points are gone.

It feels more and more that Microsoft should have focused on making phones/tablets running Metro, and a Desktop OS that iterated on Windows 7. They crossed the streams [1] and that's bad

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_pack#Crossing_the_Stream...

It makes me minority - I started using Windows 8 from Day One, and actually like it. I completely understand why people who are computer semi-literate bash it. I just exposes their inability with computers, but I am also aghast why people who make it to a site like this one - hate it passionately. I have to reconsider my assumptions about a Hacker News visitor.

I've noticed over the years that every other Windows release is good. The next version should be good.

Win 8 - Crappy

Win 7 - Good

Vista - Crappy

XP - Good

etc.

I agree. At work, we have a limited number of Windows PC's. They have never run Vista (stuck w/ XP), and hopefully never run 8 (running 7 now).

and here I am trying to figure how to migrate my parents off of XP to newer machines. The hold back to buying them newer machines is that both like the look and feel of Office from that generation.

Give then OpenOffice, it comes from the classic menus instead of that abomination called the ribbon. That's the very reason why I use it, even though MS Office is still better in terms of functionality.

LibreOffice retains the 'classic' menu structure and is an excellent transition to a *nix distro that looks like XP.

Jesus! How many times are we going to be played with this non-story on the HN front page?

Previously:

> HP brings Windows 7 back 'due to popular demand' as buyers shun Windows 8 (theinquirer.net) > 54 points by chakalakasp 16 hours ago | flag | 82 comments > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7092164

> HP promotes Windows 7 PCs (smh.com.au) > 27 points by hiharryhere 12 hours ago | flag | 43 comments > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7093073

Maybe, but this is the first time I notice this story on HN.

I can't believe HP was the first major vendor to see Windows 8 as the goat is really is. Usually HP is well behind everyone else.

While I agree that HP selling Seven isn't news, the shift in marketing focus from Eight to Seven __is__ very much news.

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