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They're not rolling back the interface.

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Yeah, I realized most / everyone probably wouldn't have time to watch but hoped someone might be interested. I guess my basic point is that the animations and gestures are deliberately designed to feel more precise and clarify the discrete actions you're taking (which is to put a more positive spin on what he describes negatively as "feeling like a computer" - not that either spin is right or wrong). It's a purposeful contrast to Apple's bubblier approach, it's not that they tried to make their animations like Apple's but Didn't Get It.

well, he correctly noticed that the gestures and animations take a different approach than Apple's but that apparently just makes them "wrong" to him - Apple's is the only valid approach.

fwiw, here's a good presentation of the design rationale behind the use of animations in Windows 8: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/BUILD2011/APP-206T

Gestures: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechDays/Techdays-2012-the-N...

OK, but I'm not sure what you can point to that they're currently doing that's a reaction to that. The products you're seeing now (Windows 8, WP8, etc.) were all put into motion before WP7 was released.

I'm actually not sure what you mean by Windows Phone being a wakeup call ... ?

(note: I work for Microsoft. but I certainly don't represent them and in fact I think they'd probably rather I didn't run my mouth here :) Also just because I work for Microsoft doesn't mean I know what I'm talking about when I talk about Microsoft either, it's hard enough to even keep track of what the specific team I'm on is really doing sometimes let alone the whole company so keep that in mind :) also I'm drunk :) )

The frustrating thing about reading Daniel Dilger's articles is that he's actually a good deal more knowledgeable than most tech pundits and occasionally even insightful, but his worldview is so Apple-centric that he's blind to having any idea what his blind spots are. This article is a case in point, almost everything factual in it about Microsoft is wrong, to wit:

* Zune wasn't a low-budget project (it was actually funded fairly lavishly, in part because it was meant partly as a kind of pilot project for developing new Microsoft design aesthetics / patterns / practices)

* Zune wasn't based on web technologies (it used Yet Another Internal UI Framework). Neither is Windows 8 really (there is a web-based UI framework, along with a native one, but they both sit on top of native APIs)

Windows 8 has nothing in common with Zune codebase-wise, and UI/design-wise though there's a family lineage between them it was developed independently from the Zune->Windows Phone line (which itself has changed a lot over the years) and diverged quite a bit

* he still apparently thinks the new Windows UI is a "thin layer" on top of old Windows, which I think he still imagines as Windows XP or whatever. in previous posts he was having fun comparing it to Bob. I think that's fundamentally wrong - while the new environment isn't really separate from existing Windows it's imo misleading to think of it as a "thin upper layer", because developing it involved making deeper changes & refactorings to every layer of the system (ARM support, window hardening, MoCOM, PLM, app model, async, etc.)

* see, not only does his ignorance lead taking jabs at MSFT that don't make sense, it leads to him missing out on potential avenues of attack that WOULD make sense - he could make fun of the ridiculous UI framework fragmentation problem Microsoft has, which is an area where Apple actually has its shit together and has for some time.

Ever since Windows 8 was first shown to the public back in June 2011 people have speculated about / been confused about what relation the "new system" has to the existing Windows, technically - is "Metro" a thin layer over "Desktop" Windows, like Media Center or Bob? Or is it the reverse, the desktop some virtual-machine environment on top of the "new system", like Mac OS "classic mode"? Or are they two systems running side-by-side?

In fact it's none of those things - the new environment/UI isn't a new shell running on top of, underneath, or alongside the existing shell. Rather, it's a set of new features added and refactorings made to every layer of the existing system, together with a set of policies designed to create the effect of a fresh new environment by encouraging/enforcing a path through only the "new" parts of each layer.

So, for example, the app permissions / sandbox that new-style apps run in is actually a new general low-level system feature that desktop apps can use too - IE10 desktop uses it for "Enhanced Protected Mode". But this isn't really being publicized or promoted because why would desktop app developers rewrite their code to work with it? Similarly the windows that new-style apps run in aren't being controlled by some separate window manager, they are just regular windows (HWND) in the existing window manager - but that window manager has new features for smoother composition/animation and touch manipulation of windows, and new security features to enforce Z-order rules so apps can't pop up windows on top of new-style apps or steal focus or whatever. Most of the new WinRT APIs aren't available to desktop apps but there is no fundamental purely technical reason they can't be. And so on.

I don't know how this failure happened, but I'm certain it wasn't intentional. IE market research has been tracking the effect of the browser ballot closely and found it to be almost completely negligible - the people who don't pick IE from familiarity / brand recognition are the same people who would have downloaded another browser anyway. They wouldn't have risked another legal/PR/financial fiasco over that. I'd really hate to be whoever's responsible for whatever snafu was the immediate cause ...

The Zune desktop app is actually (still!) pretty popular with employees.

nobody will care about this stuff when the phone launches. which isn't to say it will (or won't) be successful, but whether it is will have nothing to do with the launch event or what they did or didn't have ready then. the press and pundits put way too much stock in this sort of thing.

It's not particularly a touch paradigm either. It's simply a "new" convention introduced by Windows 8. FWIW, moving to the mouse to the corners or edges to trigger "invisible" actions isn't unprecedented, for example that's how you show an auto-hidden taskbar (ok, so there's like a 1-pixel edge visible) or show tabs in a fullscreen IE in Windows, and Mac OS X has a "hot corner" feature that has you set actions for the corners.

Windows RT is Windows 8 with the desktop, but without the ability to install new desktop software. The built-in desktop utilities such as Explorer, Control Panel, etc. are still there and work the same.

Windows RT is no better or worse for touch than Windows 8, they are identical interface-wise. The only differences are that you can't install new desktop software on Windows RT (but you can use the preinstalled desktop software) and it comes with (desktop) Office bundled/preinstalled.

Yeah, I think setting the default file associations to Metro apps is something that really damages people's first experiences with Windows 8 on non-tablets. I find it hard to believe that many people, even "casual" PC users, would prefer this setting, at least with the apps in their current state (which I doubt will change that dramatically by launch). It is easy enough to change (there's even a popup that appears the first time you open a file of some type, asking if you'd rather use a different app) but a standard rule of UI design is that most people don't and defaults do matter.

Is using the edges and corners of the screen not a mouse paradigm? Isn't the Fitts's Law value of the edges and corners one of the classic tricks of mouse UI design?

I haven't tried it on a multimonitor system yet, but my understanding is that the start screen and apps will appear on whatever monitor they're launched from and can then be moved around ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/21/enhancing-wind... ) - is that not your experience?

It doesn't prevent them of course, but the higher price floor and the lower cut incentive for >$25k seem to both be designed to encourage devs to focus on high-quality apps rather than flood the store with a lot of crappy ones. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there will be tons of crappy apps anyway, but hopefully a slightly better signal-to-noise ratio overall.

This doesn't negate your point, but Yahoo Japan is a different company from Yahoo (which owns about a 30% stake in it).

They are a database company :)

They are doing this because they know that today's consumer market = tomorrow's enterprise market.

If that's the problem, what's the better approach to solving it: cleaning up the file system organization, or making it so that those things don't happen and make people mess around with the file system in the first place (e.g. by introducing a declarative isolated application model such as AppX in Windows 8)?

? For me all 8 sizes are visible with no need to expand or scroll.

edit: I guess it depends on your window size - if you shrink it horizontally it does only show 6 items. Though I'm not quite sure why there need to be so many layout options anyway - what exactly are Tiles and Content view for?

I didn't realize Chrome was being preloaded by OEMs. It's nice to see that OEMs are actually using their freedom to customize Windows installs to do something socially valuable for a change.

People won't switch because sites are hectoring them with lectures about how something they might be fine with is actually awful. All it would take for them to switch are compelling apps (whatever definition of "compelling" applies to each person) which exploit the capabilities of, and therefore require, the newer browsers, and whose existence is advertised to them. Not "your browser is bad and you should feel bad", but "this site is awesome and will make you feel awesome, there's just one thing - you need to install this awesome browser to get your ticket to awesomeville". Same as any other platform.

I always thought the "one foot on the ground" was what it meant. You figure out a way to keep about half of your current strategy or assets or whatever fixed but applied in a new way to a new context, and change/recreate the other half. This is sort of what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows 8, they are keeping about half of their OS the same while radically changing the other half.

Compare with music theory for example - "pivot tones" are a way of making a smooth connection between chords in a harmonic progression, by keeping one or more notes the same while changing the others. Through a sequence of chord changes you can end up somewhere harmonically radically different from where you started, yet still keep each individual step smoothly connected to what came before.

To make it clear:

Groove -> Office Groove -> SharePoint Workspace (not SharePoint in general)

Office Communicator -> Lync (unrelated to Groove, internally developed from the start I think)

Gates and Allen thought there were too many other established companies in the microcomputer software market?

Compiled from bytecode

Although they didn't come out and say this, the impression I get is they are bringing over the WinRT APIs for lower-level stuff like networking, etc., while the XAML UI stuff is an extension of the Silverlight in WP7x rather than a port or adaptation of Windows.UI.Xaml from Windows 8.

If that's what they're doing, I think it's the right decision - the UI conventions themselves are different between the phone and Windows 8 (more than people realize, despite having a similar visual aesthetic), so you'd have to rewrite much of the UI anyway - so why break compatibility with WP7.x.