...because Windows is intolerably awful now, presumably getting worse every day.
Seriously. It's been downhill since Vista. Every upgrade since XP has been disruptive, and destroyed time-saving behaviors.
Seriously. It's been downhill since Vista. Every upgrade since XP has been disruptive, and destroyed time-saving behaviors.
I can't imagine the mind of the person at MS who decided that making Solitaire pay-to-play was a good idea.
It's fascinating how decisions like this get made, how products like Win 8 and 10 get out the door, and how MS seems to think it can fix the terrible design by downvoting critics on public forums and getting PR companies to write booster posts that are so ham-handed they have no persuasive power.
As a company, MS has a lot of really smart individuals doing really dumb things collectively. I'd be incredibly interested if MS could find its own Rodney Brooks to explain the business processes that make that happen.
Not a hater, btw. Office 365 and Azure both have their good points. But Windows and mobile seem like industry-changing disasters now, and from the outside it seems like the icebergs shouldn't have been that hard to miss.
It categorically is not.
All of the functionality in classic solitaire (the version since Windows 95) is all free. There are also additional game modes which are also free.
But they've added "daily challenges" which you can pay to play. It is an optional additional part of the game.
> how products like Win 8 and 10 get out the door
You mean products people dislike because Microsoft has actually tried to push forward their platform? Seems like they cannot win. If they push out a product exactly like XP over and over people will complain that Microsoft is being lazy/playing it safe/not innovating, but if they push out a product like 8/10 then people complain that they are changing too much.
Reminds me a lot of Ubuntu Unity. Everyone complained that they wanted innovation in the Linux desktop space, and when Ubuntu tries to provide that everyone freaks out because "they changed classic Linux!!!" Well which is it? Do you want to see progress or don't you?
> MS seems to think it can fix the terrible design by downvoting critics on public forums and getting PR companies to write booster posts
Now we're moving into the realm of conspiracy theory. Did it ever occur to you that other people have a different opinion to you and that that is ok? Not everyone is a Microsoft shill, and your opinion isn't the only legitimate one.
Canonical didn't make Unity to innovate for the user as much as they did to have a unified interface that could run more easily on phones and tablets operating on the same concept as Windows 10. Whether people want that, time will tell though it was innovative thinking even though Unity is still a bad experience for experienced users, we can't even right click a Launcher icon and edit its properties. That's pretty stupid.
Sorry, but simplifying and clarifying the interface for users absolutely is a goal for unity: "innovation for the user". All the user-testing showed that general users (ie non-developers-or-techies) found many aspects of the Linux user-experience too complex. So a lot of time was spent simplifying all sorts of aspects of Ubuntu so that it could be used by more general users. I know because I saw user-interface report after report. Furthermore, having a single user-experience across your different classes is trying to be user-centric. It's true that since there were three code-bases 'unifying' to one base was a key goal at an engineering level.
That doesn't deny your point that Unity is less suited to users who prefer the traditional Linux window manager experience e.g focus-follow-mouse.
To me, this goes far deeper than the surface of "charging for solitaire". There has to be some systemic dysfunction within the windows team.
Or to have to suffer through ads in a program that was once free and continues to be free online, because the OS was given away?
Neither of those seem fair to me.
People are mainly noticing now because its one of the default apps again.