What the Heck is Happening to Windows?
winsupersite.com
winsupersite.com
The Mac was apparently designed by a person I can't freakin' stand. I recently spent a year with an OSX laptop, and it was a merciful relief when I was finally able to get the hell out of iLand. My first love is KDE because it bows to my will like nothing else, as a good window-manager/OS should. Win8 is also pretty malleable, even though it's not so good for those lacking the chops to bend it to their will. OSX, by comparison, is a constant freakin' PITA if you don't happen to be the "single person" it was designed by and for.
This might be a bit of a rant but I'm sick of people ragging on Windows for its default settings. Windows is eminently customizable. If you aren't a complete n00b you can bend Windows to suit yourself far more easily than OSX. KDE absolutely spanks them both, but still... I would wholeheartedly recommend OSX or iOS to my grandmother, because she's not so good at customizing things. This blog is aimed at people who probably aren't running their OS on 99% default settings. Customizability matters, and Windows fucking owns OSX in that respect.
Beyond the UI stuff, some MS software is just not meant to be uninstalled. I wanted to test an app without the VC++ 2008 redistributable installed, to see which dlls a user would need. Easy, right? Just go to control panel -> add or remove programs -> click on VC++ 2008 redistributable, and it's gone... except that all of the dlls are still there, in a huge folder with hundreds of other dlls. Which ones are for the VC++ 2008 redistributable? I have no idea. On some platforms I could just rm -rf VC++2008.framework, but not here. I guess MS thinks it would be better for usability if people had to reinstall the OS and wait through hours of updates just to remove some shared libraries.
I would probably just use a snapshot in a VM in that case. After all, testing "package not installed" is different than "package installed, then removed" unfortunately (which is your point).
Then it ceased to matter. Now I use Gnome shell or Unity. I install software using package managers. The most radical thing I do it to customize the launcher and change stock Ubuntu background to a bluish one. Sometimes I even power up my AIX machine and work from CDE. The way it looks doesn't matter. I spend my days between browser, text editor and terminal. From the desktop, the feature I use the most is task switching followed closely by virtual desktops.
Making the OS look a certain way is doubly risky. It's a waste of time and, if you develop desktop apps, you risk making them consistent with your taste rather than usual conventions your users rely on.
There was a time I would spend hours trying every available window managers and see how far I could customize them.
Nowadays I just use what is available by default.
Why degrade people like that? You sound like those hard-core Android fanbois that never misses a chance to tell you they think iPhone users are sheep. :-(
No, they want the software and options to be thought through before released.
Why have 20 options for 100% of the users, when 16 good defaults and 4 options is the better way for 90+% of the users? In OS X, I bet most of those 16 options can be changed using a terminal command.
Live patching if not the best thing in the world, but it works.
When you accept the UI defaults, someone has chosen your meal or movie for you - no choice needs to be made.
About 6.8bn out of the 7bn people on this planet are complete "n00bs".
Slate - https://github.com/jigish/slate
Both will do what you want. Also, you can add a 5th modifier key to avoid conflicts: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/
When I use linux, I use a tiling window manager, when I use OSX, I use tabbed terminals and fullscreen mode and workspaces.
Also, I should note that the Command-~ functionality which doesn't exist on Windows and spotlight is enough to make me prefer the OSX desktop to the Windows one.
There's only a handful of people I've spoken to that like Windows 8 and hardly anyone seems to share Microsoft's belief (above).
Meanwhile, Canonical has came along and pretty much came to the same conclusion as Microsoft -- that a common experience across all of one's devices is the way forward. And, just like Microsoft, they apparently fail to realize that nobody wants this but them.
The fact is, it really didn't work for Apple. Short of a few common design choices, iOS and OSX are very different, and for a good reason. I am not sure why it's not obvious to people. Mouse or keyboard driven UI can be much smaller and tighter, with a lot less chrome, to allow more room for data. Touch UI has to be chunkier by default. The simple truth is Metro UI works amazing on a touch device, I love it. Windows 7 works just fine on PC. What Microsoft really needed is 2 separate operating systems, just like apple. The Windows line could have been updated with a fresh skin, more stability improvements, and some core new features here and there. The Metro OS could have been a separate OS for the Phone, Tablet, and TV markets. Instead Microsoft now has 4 incompatible OS lines which all function very different, but look identical, only adding to the confusion:
1. Windows 8 - For PCs, Tablets, and God knows what else,
2. Windows RT - For Tablets which are not as nice as the Windows 8 tablets but can run some of the same software, but not all of it, and some apps which work on the RT actually do not run on Windows 8 tablets, and, so ..... yeah.
3. Windows Phone 8 - Exclusively for phones. For convenience, incompatible with Windows Phone 7 and 7.5.
4. XBox OS - Runs only on XBox, looks like Windows 8, but works very different.
So, instead of 2 visually distinct operating systems, Microsoft now has 4 visually similar operating systems. I can see their logic, they wanted to leverage their huge PC instal base to drag some users to their Tablet and Phone products. Much like Apple is using iPods to sell people on iPhones and iPads, and perhaps later, Macs. But the problem is, they are not really achieving that goal, while pissing of their core PC customers.
When Apple added touch-sized icons to the Application menu in dock and eventually Launchpad, Microsoft and Canonical saw it and just completely jumped the shark on device/OS convergence. Meanwhile, Apple has tip-toed with the changes, to the point that they're not really moving forward with touch UI on OSX because it seems the value-add is not really clear for the end-user.
Remember that Operating System != GUI.
Actually I think their key argument was that people should be able to develop apps across all these devices using the same APIs and technologies. Same look and feel is just a (unfortunate?) consequence of that.
The idea was that having a unified technology-platform, if people made an "app" for Windows, it would also work on Windows-based tablets and phones. This was Microsoft's attempt at trying to leverage their desktop-dominance into working for their mobile strategy.
If that worked out OK or not can clearly be argued, but the basic premise wasn't all bad. If they had made that work, developers would probably want to create apps for Windows first, instead of iOS or Android.
It's actually a consequence of a strong coupling of GUI and the programs and the unwillingness of developers to refrain from pixel-perfect control. In order to make a program consistent with different interfaces, you need to write them against a "generic" layer. You should declare your screens, menus and visual elements in a GUI-neutral environment and let the specific device use the GUI consistent with it.
In order to make a multi-GUI app you either code for each and every GUI or you give up fine-grained control.
They've taken the worst of WPF (XML) without offering any of the goods (data-binding, rapid application development). You feel like you're back in the stone-age of computing, only this time with XML instead of objects.
This often means you have to do lots of UI-wiring in code indirectly, based on handles, and due to Java's lack of functional constructs, even wiring up a simple event-handler becomes 6 lines of tedious, annoymous class instantiation nonsense. It's horrible.
Had anything like WPF been available in any stable or unstable form, I would have jumped at it in an instant.
Then I got to do some work in WPF and was quite impressed how far the XAML stack has become.
Now if Xamarin cared to support it, it would be great.
If they ran a restaurant they'd be trying to make a plate/bowl hybrid with a spork holder. So unified!
Imagine if they built cars; the brake pedal would be next to the brake lights.
Sounds like classic architecture astronaut thinking (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html)
I don't think the concept is flawed. I actually think Metro is the "right answer" for your typical user, with a hidden file system and tiled window management, even on the desktop. However for this to be plausible, you need to be able to ship without the desktop, which means Office needs to be Metro-friendly. The stop-gap of shipping with both Metro and the traditional desktop is a fatal execution flaw in what's otherwise a reasonably sound design.
A better, technically possible, solution would be to open Win32 apps as full screen apps within Metro, and allow the usual tiling and app switching. This is basically how OS X works, and it's very effective and also quite efficient if using a touchpad that allows gestures.
The only group at MS I see right now making products for real people is Azure. They're actually developing features to remove friction and make its customer more productive and happier—even if it means supporting Linux, Git and Ruby.
What Microsoft does is "dog fooding at gunpoint" even if the result is poisoning oneself. Microsofties carry Windows phones around... and hate it. Openly. This isn't good.
Switched from my Android to WP, loving 95% of it, have a few gripes, but far less than on Android.
For one thing, my phone no longer leaks memory. My start screen doesn't randomly take 10+ seconds to load up. My dialer doesn't occasionally decide to just screw it and not appear.
(I had those same problems across 2 different android handsets, a 2.3 model from Motorola, and a 4.2 model from Samsung)
Couple features are annoying. Too many steps to turn off GPS is one, I liked having a quick pull down drawer. But that is a minor nitpick. Compared to swearing at my phone every single day for being a bloody POS like I was doing with Android? WP is a great experience!
> What Microsoft does is "dog fooding at gunpoint" even if the result is poisoning oneself.
I also disagree with this, my group uses a variety of handsets, WP, iOS and Android.
If only there were a third mobile OS for you to try, one that's actually well-designed, one that even many Google employees use ...
Have you tried Windows Phone? I'm a bit biased, I spent 3 years working on it, but I'll say that of the current crop of mobile OSs out there, it is by far the best designed.
From the underlying infrastructure used by the development team (one of the few teams at Microsoft I've ever been on that really believes every daily build should be stable and reliable, and has the test infrastructure to ensure it[0]) to the lovely UI to the outstanding performance requirements the team places on themselves.
Back when I was on the WP team, a list of user frustration levels with wait times was widely disseminated. It was something like " 50ms unnoticeable to user, 100ms+, somewhat noticeable pause or skip, 250ms, interface begins to feel slow, 500ms+, user satisfaction begins to drop, 5s+, users become overly irritated" with a lot more detail and gradations of course.
The team's internal requirements was that all UI elements in the OS respond in less than 1 second, and even then, you'd better have a damn good excuse as to why what you were doing took a whole second!
The UI flies. Animations are smooth and beautiful. Anything that does not please or delight the user does not get into the code base.
The bar in Windows Phone is not "do we have this feature", the bar is "does this feature make the user happy?"
All of this is of course not spoken as an MS employee. I'm just a lowly dev, albeit one now in charge of a UI dev team, and I can tell you that our product will sure as hell meet the same bar of smooth beautiful performance that Windows Phone does. It is damn well going to be a matter of pride if nothing else, and the entire management chain here is behind me on that!
[0] The Windows Phone division has over 4000 people in it, although I am not sure how many of them are devs. Let's say 500 or so devs total (likely an underestimate!) checking in code to what is a huge code base. Now imagine every single day, you can take the code that is committed and, without worry, put it on your phone and expect it to work. Daily's aren't always 100% stable, but they are dog-foodable and usable. One thing I miss about working there is coming in every morning and flashing the latest code to my phone and seeing the incremental progress that the team made on a daily basis.
Of course this ignores that many teams work off of branches which are then tested and integrated. The overall engineering effort to keep that platform moving is huge.
I miss Symbian so much :( Oh well.
When Nokia killed Symbian, they had 60% of the phone market here in Brazil, and their sales were RISING (not declining, as they were in many other countries).
Now Brazil is the dream land for chinese knock-offs, and OS fragmentation, my startup make iOS and Android apps, and I found it bizarrely hard to sell those here, when I ask a random person on the street what phone they use, they don't know, and when I take a look I see:
If the person is very rich, or very dumb, a iPhone (very dumb because we had instances of people without money to eat taking crazy debts to buy iPhones... Apple Reality distortion field is crazy).
If the person is part of the shrinking real middle class (real because the government says that if you earn 500 USD month you are middle class, obviously this is absurd), a Samsung Android.
But those are 5% of the population at most... The rest of the population I see:
S40, Symbian (specially on... SONY phones O.o Sony had once a great Symbian line, and they were really popular here, and those phones are hell sturdy, lots of people still have them), Android customized to look like Symbian (Sony phones frequently do that too, I own a Xperia Play, and my mom a Symbian Sony Phone, and for any tasks the two are almost the same), HiPhone (a popular clone of iPhone that use some weird OS), Symbian clones (that usually have Facebook and Youtube but you cannot install anything else and is incompatible with actual Symbian), S40 phones, some blackberry and old windows phone (I never saw a WP8 phone! and I see more old windows phone than WP7 phone!)
This proved to be a nightmare to my startup, I cannot nab a random person in the street and convince them to install my app, because most likely they have some crazy phone OS that is not iOS, not Android, not WP8, not Blackberry.
And if someone launched a good sturdy phone with Symbian, hardware buttons (god how I hate touch-screen, specially when you need to dial in the rain in a very rainy country) but with a good API, I would GLADLY pay iPhone levels of money to have it. And I guess most brazillians would buy it too (although to them it must be old Symbian levels of price, iPhone level is reserved to the top 5% richest)
Is the management aware that they hate it ? Do they care?
So it's death by a thousand paper cuts.
Dog fooding at ms is eating a substandard product to provide feedback. You grudgingly use it to help the company. See internal drives to get people to use bing.
How about making a product you don't need to cajole employees into? Think Google has ads to get people to use google search, or apple forces employees to use iPhones? (Or do they call it caviar-ing?)
If dog fooding is the reason employees use your product you should not release it.
And then, you are expected to work on the feedback, so the product is not substandard anymore. I guess Microsoft is lagging on that part.
Anyway, I fully agree that if your employees are only using your product because you require it, you shouldn't release that, and that you shouldn't eat your own dogfood all the time.
Google probably has "google search rocks" internal ads. They probably don't have "hey guys could you stop using bing for a bit and try our search engine?".
See: Almost all of Coca-Cola's advertising, for example.
Although reinforcing a brand is still a big part of attracting and keeping customers. If Coca-Cola stopped advertising, they'd definitely lose sales.
Ultimately, this means no accountability because you are not developing products you yourself would use by choice. You use IE because you're supposed to, not because you prefer it over Chrome or Firefox.
Trying to please too many people = personas. Anyone who has worked at MS knows what personas are.
I've never been asked to dog food anything before RC, so I haven't really felt that.
> Trying to please too many people = personas. Anyone who has worked at MS knows what personas are.
Something they left out of our MSR training I guess?
I think it is no coincidence this is where Mark Russinovich etc. works in now.
Paul Thurrott's been covering Microsoft, almost always positively, for most of (if not more than) two decades. He's been labeled one of the "notorious Microsoft shills" by Daniel Eran Dilger (http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/01/18/dan-lyons-paul-thur...) -- and that's not far from my own impressions of Thurrott based on some of his earlier Linux commentary.
So -- yeah, the rats are, if not fleeing the ship, talking loudly about its soundness.
Thurrott seems to look at the computing world through a magnifying glass pointed squarely at MS, overreacting to every little shift and bump there, while never being able to see what's going on elsewhere particularly clearly.
The advice in the final paragraphs is just plain wrong as well. It should be "Don't use one OS GUI for two different user paradigms", not "abandon an entire market segment". Windows needs to go back to a traditional desktop, and Windows Mobile should continue on as is.
Following the Google/Apple model of having cloud profiles maintain/inform/manage (depending on home/gaming/work platforms) all the Microsoft devices seems the best approach.
It's also what people want - they want unified logins (note: plural, Google!) so that they can get on with their work/personal/gaming needs and ensure that new devices that are platform compliant "just work" with minimal/no config.
But eventually they'll get it kinda-sorta right. And when they do, they'll crush the competition. Especially when tablets and convertibles start to supplant traditional laptops as daily driver devices. Apple probably hasn't much to fear. The real loser here is Android. A light, cheap, powerful device that can run full Windows like the Dell Venue 8 Pro has insane added value above the equivalent Android device.
But, "computers" has become a big industry. It seems strange to say something so obvious, but the number of "computers" in use, the importance of those computers and the amount of money businesses and individuals spend on them is still growing and growing. I don't think MS can keep ahold of "market share" when the market gets to that size. Market share has always been MS' biggest weapon. The difference between 95% and 80% is 3X as much competition, even if it is nothing in total sales.
Imagine an incumbent (say Amazon, Samsung, Google or whatever) company launching a new product that runs something inspired by Chrome OS & iOS on $250 hardware that can replace windows laptops for 10%-20% home users. That sounds a lot more plausible today than it did 10 years ago.
6-7 years ago Vista came out. It had issues and didn't run well on the low end hardware retailers were selling. They probably lost a percent or two of market share to Apple/OSX. Apple never really went after the low margin low-middle end. 6-7 years from now that could be 10%-20% to an unexpected incumbent.
The markets important to MS are still growing and expanding so I don't think they are in trouble. They could lose market share and still grow absolute sales.
tablets and convertibles starting to supplant traditional laptops as daily driver devices is an opening for new players.
Then why prefer many programmers to work using the command line for many tasks? ;-)
Take a look at who the CEO is now. The hub is the cloud. Apple and Google got it right, and Microsoft realizes this (I hope). If they have indeed learned this lesson, they will be competitive in the coming years, and perhaps come to dominate. Ignoring this lesson means Windows is going to be torn apart by Android, iOS and Steam.
Touch, Desktop, Search and Console should all be spokes on the hub - different ways to consume the same services.
It will be a challenge meeting this vision, but Microsoft can and will meet it. Question is, will it be in time to fight off Google/Apple?
Anyway, this time it quite different. GUIs are quite compatible with CLIs, but you can't have a touch-based small-screen hight input throughput big-screen GUI desktop, even the name is a contradiction.
I'm primarily a Windows user (but I run Linux on some of my devices as well). I'm also tend to be quite particular about my UIs getting things right. Saying all that, I've felt next to zero impact in moving from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 feels a bit snappier. Some options have been moved around a bit. That's about it.
I just don't understand all the polemicising. Especially with statements like: "The specifics of what's wrong in Windows 8 don't really matter". They matter to me, because after reading all these articles about how terrible Windows 8 is, I still can't figure out what those specifics are! I would love to be enlightened about what I've been missing (or how I've been using Windows 8 wrong).
You said yourself you are fickle about your UI of choice. And yet you can't see how many people would be just like you but unlike you they can't stand Win8 UI? It's just like a car, the design matters about as much as the performance of the vehicle. Sure, some people look at cars as tools and don't care what they look like as long as they have 4 wheels and can get them from a to b.
But for many people, the car they buy has to have a great design. It is about as much about lifestyle as function. And the same goes for a desktop OS.
And I for one find the Metro Tile fest that is Windows 8 to be just that. Fuck Ugly. No other way to sugar coat it. And that isn't just the Metro side. Nope, also the desktop with its sharp 90 degree corners and flat 8 Bit color pallet window blinds looks horrible. Like a complete step backwards looking at how the desktop used to look under Win7. And on Win7 you could even change the themes if you wanted to something more to your liking. Good luck trying to do that on Win8.
So, add that to the fact that Win7 filled a need the consumers had and Win8 just filled a need that Microsoft had and you have ample reasons why Win8 is where it is today. Even if there are people like you who apparently can't imagine other people might have a different take on what a great UI should look like.
"The problem is that Microsoft is like a broken record. No matter what the question is their answer is always the same. Windows.
Need a phone OS? - Windows Need a Tablet OS? - Windows Need a Desktop OS? - Windows Need a Server OS? - Windows
Windows, Windows, Windows. It's supposed to be all things to all people. And it just doesn't work anymore. You're right, on the desktop nothing beats Windows. Even on the Server Windows is fine. But when they try to force Windows on to phones and tablets everything starts to fall apart. It isn't suited for mobile devices. It's too big, to bloated for mobile. And it's interface is terrible for mobile, but great for the desktop. So they come out with a new interface that's fine for phones but sucks on a desktop.
JUST STOP THE INSANITY.
You are exactly right. Focus Windows on productivity and the corporate market. If Microsoft feels that they have to get into mobile fine, come out with a mobile OS. But don't throw out the baby with the bath water. Leave the damn desktop alone."
In short, Windows 8 solved no real pressing problems for users - it solved - or was supposed to solve problems for Microsoft - which is to say a lack of penetration in what all the kids these days (and pundits) say is the environment of the future - mobile.
Microsoft has, and will have the enterprise and most of the desktop market locked up for the near future - for all the apps out there for whichever mobile platform, they pale in software for PC and the overall power and usability of the traditional desktop/laptop computer paradigm - and likely will for the foreseeable future.
Most of the naysayers are simply unwilling to accept change, the same naysayers that whine about modern Linux DEs.
It is unfortunate, how it seems that so many people resist to UI advances. Even more so, on a place like HN. This kind of stubborn rejection seems pulled from something like a geeksquad forum. Another example is Ubuntu, which has collected massive hate, on considerable less groundbreaking UI changes.
Its the technicals of Win8 Metro that I can't stand however (sideloading licenses, the locked-down nature, etc. etc.)
For Microsoft to abandon the consumer market and solely focus on a sub-section of 'doers' would be to set in motion an unstoppable slide into obscurity, as it did with Blackberry. Increasingly people only have one device and they're not going to choose a product which is only good for 50% of what they want. This mythical group of people who only care about using products for business just doesn't exist.
What they need to do is to make the product better so that people in general like using it again. It's that simple.
The question for MS is will they be OK with selling trucks in a car world? Will they be satisfied with how much money they would make selling only trucks to farmers and construction companies?
I say MS needs to make cars and trucks. They need to make the best trucks out there without compromises. The best cars without compromises. Not this weird car/truck hybrid.
Microsoft need to have a vision about what products they want to create and go about making them with a singular focus on producing something which customers will love. It's not about abandoning consumer software or business software, it's about making something great, regardless of it's purpose.
Problem is that it's not so simple. They need to decide from which direction to make it "better", then drive that as a distinguishing factor. This can't be done if there isn't leadership from the top driving that priority incessantly (and demanding good reasons for exceptions).
E.g.: make an SSH built-in client so I don't have to install f*ing putty on every Win install to get decent work done. The cloud is here, and SSH is a core part of it's workings. Embrace and extend if you have to, but make it a native experience.
I've always felt that if they would have kept polishing XP or W7, diligently building on each version, they would've had a strong OS with a strong following. Maybe they should stop trying to do a "revolutionary redesign" every new release and just stick with one approach for a couple of years?
http://mmminimal.com/windows-ui-concept-what-windows-8-shoul...
This is how they should've added Metro to Windows 7. I WOULD BUY THIS! Instead we got Windows 8 with its awful colors and squares.
Maybe they should stop trying to do a "revolutionary redesign" every new release and just stick with one approach for a couple of years?
It's every second major release, not every release - 3.1 was alright; 95 big redesign, sucked; 98 serviceable; 2000 wasn't ready for primetime, but the redesign was adopting NT into the desktop OS; XP built on that to became the world's default OS; vista sucked; win7 was solid; win8 sucks; win9... ?
I used to run Win7 in a form that looked very much like XP. The newer OS had many small improvements and refinements, not just the 'in-your-face' big ticket items. Windows 8 actually sounds the same - Microsoft published some interesting articles during development about lots of kernel-level changes, systems tweaks and so on (e.g. look at the windows process manager)
The problem has always been the massive forced-down-your-throat changes that MS insist upon, and Windows 8 took that even further.
Problem #2: Having basically 2 operating systems in one, and forcing the user to switch from one to the other, by nagging him with all sorts of bad UX elements (charms on the desktop has always been a terrible idea to me, for example, and the UI looks completely out of place, too).
Problem #3: Price. I don't know if they're "feeling" this yet or not, but I think they are. If Windows for tablets cost $90 to license, then Windows tablets are simply not competitive from the get go. Yes, you may see some $300 Windows tablet, but it usually has much worse specs and quality than a $300 Android tablet. As I said, not competitive. This may be the reason why Microsoft may exist the consumer market eventually (3-5 years from now), and focus on enterprise, where they have much more lock-in and it's a lot more profitable/unit.
And it runs full Windows.
Hell, I put VS on it and started writing C# apps with it. It's pretty nice. The two different GUIS are pretty jarring if you're running a desktop PC, but they make perfect sense with a touchscreen laptop or tablet.
The tablet game is about to change. Android may find itself crowded out of the mobile computer space.
Followed by
It has a 1280x800 high-quality IPS screen.
So spec-wise, it has more storage, but apart from that, it has the same amount of RAM, and a display completely inferior to the 2013 Nexus 7.
I don't know about you, but I would trade storage for display anytime. You can always download/stream content from the cloud, but it's hard to stream a better display.
Most 'regular' users I know care a great deal more about a great display than storage. My mom would pay a premium for the former (although perhaps she specifically would actually not care and just want an intuitive interface so she can get to her games and email).
Not to mention virtual machines. Backing up and transferring around virtual machine images of vista and beyond really sucks hard. I know one ops guy who is keeping his XP install simply because it's base install size is about 3% the size of Vista an onward; much better for VMs.
You want to use Skype on someone else's PC?
No problem, just create a new Windows user (and watch Windows crash twice in the process while the person you're supposed to call is waiting).
I'll install it.
Metro and explorer are completely different worlds. There are even two configurations systems and I've yet to find how to reach the standard control panel without using search.
or open Explorer at "Computer". There is a big "Open Control Panel" button in the ribbon (reachable via Alt+C, C).
That being said, search brings me exactly where I want, while the control panel is not my end goal, so I didn't have to open it in quite a while (both on Win 8 and Win 7).
(Man, it feels weird leaving this comment as a Linux user and reformed Mac zealot)
Thurrott is full of shit. I call for him to step down and shut down winsupersite and to generally shut up. He's not a windows user -- merely a critic. This is about spinning hits than a valid critique of windows. All he is doing is damaging the company and the industry by recycling this shit over and over again.
There are those of us who use windows both for our own personal use and business use. It suits us well simply because there is nothing else with the broad scope that Microsoft offer. Windows 8, whilst not a great success, is exactly what people asked for. The tech news sites spewed how the future was tablets and closed ecosystems powered by app models ao they dived into the consumer market with exactly what people expected. Unfortunately they discovered that the consumer market (which didn't really exist) is just a bunch of fashionista journos' wet dreams and fanboys.
Now I'm a Unix guy who saw exactly the same thing happen in the 1990s when Microsoft kicked in the Unix vendors. However they did it through actually providing products people wanted and providing long support lifecycles rater than disposable trinkets and rapid change.
Give them a break and look at your 2 year life throwaway trinket phone and tell me that's what you want for the future? That's what you asked for, that's what you got.
That's the problem with fanboys and people obsessed with these things, they tend to obsess with other things as well.
I usually read them with my filters set on maximum level.
Won't that imply support for legacy applications (which Windows is good at) going back some years? Hence maintenance of features required by those applications?
Cram thousands of users into a hall using all sorts of versions and customizations of Windows along with A/B testing, heat maps etc. to figure out the fastest and easiest way to get a thing done. This way users won't have to spend hours trying to customize their Windows (read: disable all the new stuff).
Also maybe throw a world-wide design contest to find the best suited man / woman to be responsible for a new Windows2 design.
Like they say, "perfection is achieved, not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away".
"Maybe Windows needs to be more like GMC, the part of GM that only makes trucks (and truck-based SUVs). After all, while many people choose to use a truck for basic transportation, they're really designed and optimized for work. You know, as should be Windows."
Windows 7 is a great OS and they could refine it to be even better.
On the Tablet side they should just pick the good pieces of Windows 8 and go from there.
Do one thing at a time and do it well Microsoft!
Don't know what they are thinking!
That's not entirely true. Some things fixed, while others are not.
(CAPSY MENUS, I'm looking at you)