Microsoft backs off on Metro
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
My immediate reaction was "Why are you killing Windows, Microsoft?". From that moment I installed the beta I could see the destruction of PC gaming and everything that came along with it following in it's wake as clear as day.
A lot of people misinterpreted Gabe Newell's dislike of Windows 8. People seemed to think that he disliked it simply because of the windows app store. Just because it might compete with Steam. The problem is much more fundamental than being competed with. He disliked it because it's a terrible release of Windows that destroys the very platform Steam is on.
It's no wonder Gabe decided to go all in on Linux. It may be a slim hope getting that to stick, but at least it's a chance. If the platform you rely on is going to self destruct out from under you, you need to jump to whatever has a chance of keeping you afloat.
When I did talk to them next, it was more along the lines of expressing condolences. I thought since it was objectively bad, it goes without saying that they also think it is bad, and some internal politics led to what was released, ruining their hard work. To my surprise, they defended it and claimed to really like it. I found this so baffling that I've since been struggling with several theories; "either they are crazy or I am crazy, I'm not sure which anymore", some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, or something contaminating the water around Redmond.
I ruled out the possibility that it's me who is crazy after a few rounds of a game where I hand my laptop to a coworker, who uses windows exclusively (and one even develops drivers for it), and told them to try and close Internet Explorer and shut down the computer. Invariably the result was trying for 5 or 10 minutes before walking away in frustration, sometimes with colorful language.
I've found Windows 8 actually works quite well if you use the keyboard exclusively for navigation.
- The Metro "start menu" (that's really all it is) works great if you use it mostly by searching (press Windows key, type, arrow keys, enter to launch.)
- The Win+X accelerator menu has made me faster maintenance tasks than I ever was in W7.
- Your puzzle: focus the Desktop; press Alt+F4. (This has always worked, if you're curious.)
I think this might be why people within Microsoft don't "feel the pain" of Windows 8: it works great with a tablet, or with a keyboard... just not with a mouse.
I just got Windows 8 last week. I found the vast majority of functionality I needed without any help, in just a few minutes of playing around with it. My brother (who had Windows 8 for a few months) showed me just a couple more things, but none of them were necessary, only more convenient ways of doing the same things I'd already figured out how to do.
And there's no way you figured out how to close a metro app without looking it up.
Was it my dual monitor setup? Was it a bug?
No, I didn't have enough screen resolution and the os wouldn't mention this fact and it took a ton of googling to find out that was the case.
Yeah, the OS was being obtuse.
They were proudly showing off how your could multitask TWO whole programs and I wondered what they were smoking.
On my Android phone I can't really chat on Skype and surf the web at the same time, I need to switch from one to another every time. On my Windows tablet (the Asus Transformer Book T100) I can do that easily.
Their big mistake was to market it as a desktop OS. They made a tablet OS, that's all.
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effectBy destroying the platform entirely, the long term result will be no development for that platform.
All users of the PC are running as fast as they can. Windows 8 has destroyed it for everyone, all of my friends and family have become so frustrated with the PC. Microsoft is really going to destroy the entire platform, they have no idea what they are doing.
EDIT: http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for-windows/dow...
Basically the concept is to include both the Metro + desktop UIs and let the user explicitly choose. When you're in tablet mode, all desktop apps run full-screen (or using the Metro-style split screen) and when you're in desktop mode, Metro apps run windowed like Desktop apps.
The whole point of the Modern design language is to provide a unified experience for all of the Windows ecosystem. Honestly, it's really good - except on their most used product, Windows. I think when they allow Modern apps to run inside the desktop, allow desktop apps to work with the charms bar, and build their own laptop you'll see customers flock in droves to the Windows ecosystem.
Seems to me the whole win8 ui fiasco is something Microsoft does a lot.. Have a good idea, go way overboard with it, and end up having to pull back and find a more refined middle ground in a future release. If only they'd find a way to internalize this process instead of making us all into a usability study...
Fortunately they didn't manage to really screw up Visual Studio in any significant way, and the dark interface skin looks great.
It's nerve wracking when they announce a new release :-).
I'm pretty handy with VS but given its sheer size I don't need any extra impediments. RANDOM ALL CAPS MAKES THIS SENTENCE DISTRACTING. I HAVE TO LOOK AT MENUS A LOT.
Contrast with the Outlook ribbon's "Home" tab which puts 95% of what I need to do right there always visible by default. I don't have to hunt around at the top of my SCREEN WHICH IS IN DISTRACTING ALL CAPS nearly as much.
The first thing I do after installing VS2012/VS2013 is to edit the registry to return the correct casing to the top level menus.
The icon scheme for SSDT in VS2012 was the worst. No colour, just symbols. Want to add a primary key? Look for the key icon. Sounds good in practice but there's lots of monochromatic key symbols overlaid onto other monochromatic symbols (primary key on table, symmetric key, foreign key). At least with the colour I can more easily distinguish the primary key is gold and the blue square it's in front of is a table.
FWIW I don't think I was significantly less productive in VS2012 than 2010 but it's a moot point now since VS2013 put colour back in.
[1] Best I could do: http://i.msdn.microsoft.com/dynimg/IC653694.png
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communit...
The fact that the betas had wildly different casing seems to point to some designers holding the product to their whims, instead of based on any sort of intelligent thought.
APIs are unifying. Too bad they are un-unified in Windows. A security model is unifying. But <sad-tombone/> not in Windows.
So WP and XBOX will be the touch vanguard? Damn but that TV is far away. Makes touch laptop look reasonable.
If iconography can be seen as a form of barebones language, what else can we fit in the concept? Perhaps colour? Red for STOP, or urgency. Green for go. If shapes and colours, why not relative sizes? Big for important things, small for detailed things.
These are the kinds of concerns that pertain to the construction of design languages. You can see how they can be unifying.
I decided they had left behind anyone who wanted to get actual work done, and bought a System76.
Booting direct to desktop seems as pointless as adding a start button that launches the full-screen thing. No one was asking for that. So either MS is incredibly obtuse, or they think they're going to fool people by pretending to have changed something.
On my new Win8 machine the first program I installed was Classic Shell [1]. Now I have a (functioning) start button and it boots straight to the desktop so I never have to see the touch interface.
Deleted comment
But I agree, on a tablet, Metro is great.
The problem is that full, complete, design orientation doesn't give you enough clues to accomplish tasks. Maybe no one ever cares to accomplish anything on a tablet but if they do, it doesn't seem like Metro will be helpful.
I mean, the problem with the Metro start button isn't that it's touch oriented - you can click the tiles with a mouse just as easily. The problem is you look at the start button and say "beautiful - WTF is it?" If you just feel like experiencing an endless beautiful demo, it's great but if you have a goal, it's opaque how you'd achieve it.
Design is a specification of an object, manifested by an agent, intended to accomplish goals, in a particular environment, using a set of primitive components, satisfying a set of requirements, subject to constraints;
For my usage it would be been quite fine if the old desktop apps could run as Metro apps. I really liked how the splitting of the screen between multiple Metro apps worked in Windows 8.1. It was easier to use the screen efficiently than with traditional desktop windows.
Did you never take advantage of Aero Snap in Windows 7? It's far more useful and versatile than the limit multitasking of Metro in Windows 8.
While paging from the side or a slide in is cool they decided to go with an infinite side scrolling paper thing. Real bitch to read like that. The newsapp is a perfect example of that annoying hard to track with your eyes side scrolling that would be a 1000 times better if it either scrolled vertically or just paged.
They really had something going on with Windows 7 and they blew it. Maybe metro is ok for light usage like checking emails, browsing, multimedia, which is certainly what a lot of people do, but for a developer like me it just feels handicapped.
This is what Microsoft should do, offer different versions of Windows, one with metro the other with the desktop. I really don't think they are that stupid to just mess with the momentum Windows 7 had.
If they don't then they are finished in the desktop front, at least for people who make things with their OS and not just consume media.
I run Windows 8 exclusively and I use a Start Menu replacement called Start Is Back, and it's great. It was only $3. I never use Metro on my 27" screen.
HOWEVER, I'm really keen to get something like the Lenovo Helix [1], as I think that's where things are going to go (like an iPad that has an i5 and runs both iOS and OS X). Sensible friends of mine who have the original Surface say metro is great as a tablet UI, the only annoyance being that the Store is lacking in many apps.
Either way, I think Metro is OK, they just screwed up the roll out. As we see more devices like the Surface 2 Pro, the Dell Venue 11 and the Lenovo Thinkpad Helix, it'll start to make more sense.
[1] http://shopap.lenovo.com/au/en/tablets/thinkpad/thinkpad-hel...
FWIW Windows 8.1 fixed that
Do something better and there'll be less complaints.
If, at Lion's launch, Apple had said 'we think launchpad is so good we're going to take away all the other ways of launching apps', there would have been a full-scale riot.
The problem with the start menu is that millions of people, people who don't really know much about computers, or want to know much but have to use one anyway, grew up thinking a start menu is what a computer has. It's been there and worked in a similar way since 95 and it's disconcerting to find it's suddenly disappeared.
It's not special hate, I love the design language and it's great to see Microsoft taking the lead in design values - it's just that it is not good enough yet.
The start menu from Windows 98, when they introduced the ability to move and reorder items by drag and drop, is great – assuming you do a bit of manual reorganization of the mess of a structure that application installers create by default. The one-dimensional layout is easier to scan (visually) and easier to aim at with the mouse (since you only have to aim carefully in one dimension), I find, than the two-dimensional designs in XP, Vista and 7.
Windows 7 removed the option for the "classic start menu", so the need for these third-party replacements is nothing new for those of us who preferred it.
Microsoft can adapt or be eaten. I think they have decided the later.
Now regarding "completely separate OS", impossible to maintain. And "at least their own shell", goes back to desktops/laptops having touch and the old shell not being good for that.
I don't see a problem with their hybrid approach. I enjoy the touch stuff where it fits. I don't see how a SAP or heavy data entry (where a keyboard will make all the difference) will benefit from Metro, so why no keep the desktop there as usual (like they did)?
Having touch sized buttons on the screen makes the mouse and keyboard experience worse - everything has to be bigger, with giant borders and separation because your finger is ~100px or more across, and my mouse pointer has a single-pixel click area.
Te problem with the hybrid approach is simply that I, or any anyone like me, can't or won't use touch for our desktop use, so why should a touch oriented UI forcibly impinge upon our experience? They didn't keep the desktop as it was - they removed the start button and a bunch of context menus and hid them in those ridiculous 'charms' pop-outs. The start screen is an enormous waste of time. If they were optional, or the defaults changed based on whether a touch screen was present it might be different, but they are not optional, or even configurable without third party software.
I'm not saying they can't or shouldn't change things. I think the start menu could have been re-drawn as something visually like a charm menu, fading in from the left edge of the screen, so long as it doesn't take you away from what you are doing it would have been fine.
I am extremely skeptical of your "impossible to maintain" argument against separate OSes. Again, Apple seems to do it just fine. I realize I must sound like a total Apple fanboy, but while I'll concede that their innovation has worn thin, the overall usability and design of their core products has remained inoffensive at the very least. The same could not be said for Microsoft's current offerings.
Apple doesn't have touch on its laptops and desktops and a their products can be counted with the fingers we have. Microsoft has always worked with OEMs and has a much more chaotic environment... these partners/OEMs/etc will use, and are using touch,... imagine telling your dad, who owns a laptop with touch, that he should install Windows "Touch" and your grandma with a new ultrabook w/o touch has to use Windows "Original".... it would be a nightmare. Microsoft has, and is trying to, devise a bridge in a single OS.
They screwed up the Start button thing. Have they left it there in the desktop and provided the option to boot directly to it, they would have received much less criticism. They got greedy with the Metro stuff... it should have been a nice "add-on" for traditional desktops/laptops.. not major shell.
They will never drop the Metro interface now. My bet is that they will slowly add things back to the traditional desktop, hoping by this time nobody but the hardcore users will notice... while the masses will swallow the Metro interface.
If, on the other hand, you have a device where touch is the only input that makes sense, then your shell needs to be designed around it. Every aspect of user interaction needs to be reconsidered, because you can't expect your users to run regedit with a touchscreen.
I think you're right that Microsoft won't drop Metro now, but I don't think it's a given that customers will ever adopt it. Windows 7 works fine for everything I use it for, and without architecture-imposed RAM limits, I honestly can't see a time within the next decade that it will stop doing that. I still know people who use Windows XP, 11 years after it was released. The fact is, they all run Firefox and Chrome equally well. Your desktop OS has never mattered less than it does right now.
Three years ago I bought a Macbook Pro, ostensibly for iPhone development. I went in with the assumption that I would still primarily use my Windows desktop, what with the power and the keyboard and the mouse. Within thirty minutes I was signed into my GMail account, browsing my RSS feed, and realized that I had completely migrated my life over to the new machine. In this environment, where switching to Ubuntu requires less of a lifestyle change than Windows 8, why would anyone ever upgrade Windows?
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/laptop-computers/macbooks/pcmcat...
Traditional PCs are coming with touchscreens because Microsoft insisted on shoehorning touch into their desktop interface.
This is not a case of Microsoft being in danger of being left behind, but a repeat of the disaster of XP tablet edition - Microsoft completely failing to understand where touch is and is not appropriate in UI design.
It's funny if you stay a bit in these areas and notice people immediately touching the screens. I've seen it quite a few times and the comments are all "hmm, no touch".
The whole PC industry is creating this demand for touch out of users' familiarity with them in their mobile phones. I have no use for touch on my laptop but a lot of people I know think it's cool...
Um, duh.
> I fail to see your point. Does your local Best Buy store have a non-Mac area? I think you'll have a hard time finding a late generation laptop there that doesn't include touch..
The point is that you're conflating supply of Windows-based touch desktops and laptops for actual demand for those systems.
> I have no use for touch on my laptop but a lot of people I know think it's cool...
And as somebody that deals with end users, I've yet to talk to anyone that didn't ultimately find touch in a laptop/desktop either pointless or outright counterproductive.
It's one of those things that people think is a cool idea until they actually use one for an extended period of time.
On HN you can't just say 'this is no better than that' without providing some reason, even if the lamest anecdotal evidence.
But the idea that you should use one and only one control scheme / UI in every use case is just dumb. There's not going to be one universal way for humans to interact with a computer, period. Sometimes touch will be used, sometimes keyboards & mice, sometimes voice, sometimes other methods of control. It's vastly more valuable to figure out how to seamlessly transition between different modes of use/control and to maximize the utility of each mode than to try to engineer some grand compromise design that can be used in all modes but takes advantage of none of them very well.
Moreover, Microsoft needs to learn a very hard lesson here. If you want to change things you need to transition. UI reboots are like system rewrites, they carry a lot of the same risks, if you commit to the new system before it's mature without giving people the option of using the old system you'll often times end up with rejection instead of acceptance. Microsoft has developed a bad habit lately of ramming new ways of doing things down users throats without any time to get used to the changes. The only people who can get away with bullshit like that are Apple, and Microsoft is very definitely not Apple.
I.e. basically the first SP for 8.1.
Yes.
> It seems like this article is a little bit behind the times.
No.
Anyway, there's a huge potential for having one device that can be used with different UI concept based on the peripherals: A tablet docked into a docking station should be operated by mouse and keyboard (desktop mode), otherwise it should be operated by touch (metro mode). Windows 8 should recognize what default to use.
While Metro as default for a PC doesn't make sense, it's not really a big problem. The issue is mainly amplified by our emotions. It took me much longer to get used to OS X, but as I liked the device to much, it didn't bother me at all. I kind of enjoyed exploring how to use it.
What I do need however is a UI that lets me run my legacy apps side by side with new ones, in any configuration and number. I don't mind the look of metro and I never liked the start menu. If my start menu is a start screen, fine.
The biggest problems are a) the divide between old and new. The mistake was making a completely separate UI rather than making a single UI that could adapt to both touch and mouse interaction. b) the API debacle: what IS microsofts strategy for the future of heavy desktop apps? What happened to wpf/xaml? Developers don't like constant surprises.
Because they aren't actually dumping metro? The problem with metro wasn't that it was the default UI, but that it replaced the start menu. I really hate all these disingenuous tech reporters who lauded the "return of the start button", when they knew true well that the problem wasn't that the button disappeared, but that the menu was gone. Now we have another shill reporter claiming victory because of a default change, when metro is still just a click away.
The problem with metro is that it exists at all (on non touch screen devices).
Apps come packaged with both a mobile and desktop UI, and depending on which input devices are available it shows the relevant one. For example, a Surface by itself would show the metro UI, but connect a type cover or a keyboard and mouse and it'd flip to the desktop interface. Same apps, same data.
Obviously it would take a lot of work to ensure consistency and maintain spacial awareness between modes, but they do still employ some bright people, right?
What made it different from what Ubuntu is doing (as I understand it) is a couple of additional problems they were trying to solve:
First, you're probably thinking about "hybrid" devices in terms of having a tablet that you use with touch exclusively for X hours, and then attaching a mouse and keyboard, having it become a "PC" and using it with those inputs exclusively for X hours. In this usage model it's OK to have pretty stark changes between modes because you don't mode switch very often.
However, they really wanted to enable a usage model where "touch plus mouse plus keyboard" became more like "mouse plus keyboard" in that you can constantly switch between inputs without really thinking about it, or even use them simultaneously. For this model to work whatever optimizations are done for different inputs need to be less intrusive and more localized - generally more about hiding/showing certain controls than completely changing the layout.
Second, there was a feeling that even for large displays and mouse/keyboard the desktop windowing model felt too heavy and required too much manual window management, at least for some (more casual) use cases. So they were hoping the model developed for tablets could double as a solution to the "Windows feels like too much work" problem on the desktop, especially for home PCs used for entertainment and communication.
To me the recent rumors sound like they're continuing the same general philosophy (of having a common UI with optimizations for each input method), but maybe deprioritizing the above two goals somewhat, which would leave them freer to make more drastic per-input-method optimizations.
I too am missing the start menu, I think it's one of those things that just worked so well they shouldn't have changed it. The extra few seconds added to go in and find something on the metro desktop and pin it to my desktop or taskbar is a waste.
I see what they tried to do, but it's didn't really work out.
The main things I dislike about 8/8.1 are hot corners and the Metro apps being default on desktops. (Seriously Microsoft, I'm glad you finally implemented a native PDF reader but come on.) I don't understand complaints about the start screen.
That being said, Windows 8 did one really great thing for the desktop: multi-monitor support finally works the way it should have all along. The upgrade is worth it just for that, for someone like me with three montors.
Yeah I never got why people complained about this. We're running Windows 8 and now 8.1 at work on our development machines (not for "now I can develop Metro apps!"). It's good because we get the latest RDS protocol improvements so remote access works just that little bit better and Windows 8 comes with other technical improvements.
My workflow for launching applications never changed: if it's not pinned to my taskbar then it's WinKey + Type "Fi" (say for Firefox) + Enter.
All that said, I did install ClassicShell a fortnight ago just to try it out (after using the Start Screen since Windows 8 RC) and not having to leave my desktop for the Metro interface just works that leeeeeeeeetle bit better in unquantifiable ways. Now it's on my home + work PCs.
Kazimir Malevich 100 years ago tried to tell the world about it but the world is slow.
I feel really sorry for all the graphics design people whose work I loved and who now have to use pastel crayons with large blunt tips which of course anyone can do so puts the designers pretty much out of work. I hope this too shall pass and eye pleasing detail shall return. I just hope all the designers weren't pushed into becoming higher paid programmers never to return to esthetics.
Yes, it's different. But is it really news when an average user has a negative bias against change and unfamiliarity?
About 5 years ago, when Mac OS X 10.4 was the latest, I started considering switching from Windows (Vista at the time) to Mac. But all my friends and colleagues were telling me about how awful Macs were.
They were remembering the Macs from the 90s, and that image stuck with them long after those Macs died. They had no idea what innovation and improvements Apple had done with Mac OS X and the iMac. They were just blindly biased and either okay with it or unaware of it.
I wonder if that's the same thing happening today with Windows 8. I bet people here are so biased against it because previous versions of Windows or previous Microsoft products or practices left a bad taste.
To be fair, I don't know any modern news about Microsoft. So maybe they still are shady business people. But I don't expect to be able to find any unbiased sources who can confirm or deny this credibly.