Paul Thurrott on the next version of Windows and the future of the platform.
In some ways, the most interesting thing about Threshold is how it recasts Windows 8 as the next Vista. It’s an acknowledgment that what came before didn’t work, and didn’t resonate with customers. And though Microsoft will always be able to claim that Windows 9 wouldn’t have been possible without the important foundational work they had done first with Windows 8 – just as was the case with Windows 7 and Windows Vista – there’s no way to sugarcoat this. Windows 8 has set back Microsoft, and Windows, by years, and possibly for good.
With even Paul Thurrott claiming Windows is in trouble, it becomes virtually impossible to deny it is so.
Sally forth the “Windows 8 was fine*” crowd. Loose the gates, spread the table, make haste!
* If you built your own PC, installed the OS fresh, tweaked it, and installed a start menu replacement.
Ironically, I was getting on okay with Windows 8, it was 8.1 that sent me back to Windows 7; Win8.1 made the Start Screen an incomprehensible mess akin to a paint explosion in Ikea.
Edited 2014-01-13 10:11 UTC
In your opinion. I have no problem Windows 8 start screen and most of the day I use Windows 7 or an iPad. But then again I do “Press Start button” and start typing as a launcher, rather than manually scanning though the start menu items which is what you had to do in the XP and before.
Everyone claims that it is some massive mess but as Windows number version has increased, I’ve spent less time tweaking things and I have rarely spent time trying to find powertool extensions (like I did in the XP and 2000) days because most of it is already in the interface.
It doesn’t even matter what Microsoft do these days, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t anyways. I had people actually say “They’ve changed thing since customer feedback because nobody liked it” as it was some sort of bad thing they changed things based on customer feedback.
If you look at OSX (pre 10.6 since I stopped using it after 10.5) you had an application folder and Spotlight, which is basically how the modern start menu works.
Edited 2014-01-13 11:54 UTC
It never was just the start button.
I thought Windows 8 was ok; but I wasn’t really using it; I was just using a development environment.
Recently a family member needed a new laptop and she got a really nice Lenovo to replace her dying dell.
Sadly it was running Windows 8 and she hardly uses it.
It’s not the start button; its the infuriating and jarring way it always throws you into some completely useless full screen application whenever you try and do anything; it completely ruins the experience of trying to use a computer. The machine is hardly used because windows 8 is just so horrible. It took quite a while to figure out how to even turn the thing off.
Microsoft have shot themselves in the foot; Windows 7 was far better on a laptop.
That has been the main compliant.
The old “My mum/niece doesn’t like it … it must be shit for everyone argument.”
You are right; there may be people who love being randomly hurled between two completely different user interfaces; and get a lot of satisfaction from “discovering” where Microsoft have hidden everything in a new system. I like new operating systems myself.
Perhaps Windows 8 should not ship on laptops without touch screens because it is an unusable mess.
I haven’t actually met anyone in person that complains as much as people do on the internet.
I guess you WANT TO meet me and tell you and teach you where Windows 8 falls? It’s a downgrade from Windows 7, up to the DOS era.
I’ve meet a user who is satisfied with Windows 8, my co-worker, but it doesn’t mean, from my perspective, everyone should be OK with Windows 8.
No not really. The hardest thing is remember where the shutdown button is. The metro apps are a bit shit, but that the apps not the interface itself.
I a .NET dev, and I seen other than some .NET compatibility issues, other than that everything works and the only difference in the start screen is the presentation (it essentially works the same via keyboard).
Everything works fine with the odd exception (normally something dev related).
I never said that, I just never seen what the fuss was about because I don’t have a problem being primarily these days a Windows 7 and iPad user.
Is your business in procuring or building computers for people?
I’ve received dozens (if not a hundred, by now) calls from people who bought a new computer with Windows 8 and they think something is wrong with it because “This stupid program keeps coming up and covering my whole screen when I try to do something – my desktop disappears and I get this weird colored mess.” First time I heard it, I thought they were talking about video artifacts so I told them to take the computer back and get a replacement – which did the exact same thing. It was only after that when I realized it was Windows 8’s start menu confusing them.
Oh… and you DO NOT want to know how many people called me to figure out how to login to their computer… or to shut it down… Thankfully, I walk them through getting to a browser and downloading a program I setup on my server to take full control of their computer – then I install Start8 and a few other utilities to make it more like Windows 7.
I still get complaints about how flat everything looks – people are accustomed to being able to see ‘3d’ boundaries on buttons and controls… taking those way and making them flat makes people think they are broken. Stardock must be loving it!
No, I am a .NET developer
If you thought it was video artifacts you are a dumbass.
Utter bollox once again. People don’t have any problem with tablets and phones having full page applications so I doubt this is true. But suddenly because they are using a computer they totally lose their shit and say “I have never seen a full screen app ever, except all the other time I have maximised a window or use a application on my phone or tablet”.
GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK. YOU ARE TALKING BULLSHIT
You are lying.
More bollox again. You type the password as per usual, nothing has changed since Windows 7.
Well that is aesthetics and isn’t to everyone’s taste.
Things may have changed in 8.1, but the first time I tried Windows 8 it booted to a lockscreen *WITH NO INDICATION OF HOW TO REMOVE THE LOCKSCREEN*.
On a phone or a tablet, there’s a “slide to unlock” indicator somewhere that tells you how to get passed the lockscreen.
I stared at the Windows 8 lockscreen for 5-10 minutes, waiting for the login screen to appear. Kept thinking, “Wow, this is taking a long time to boot. Thought the selling point was super-fast boot times.”
Actually had to do a search online to figure out you have to click and drag the screen upward before you can login.
Supposedly, the retail version of Windows 8 includes a first-login tutorial that shows you the hotspots and corners and whatnot. However, the pre-releases didn’t. And, if you use a system that’s not yours, or that someone else setup for you, you don’t see that tutorial.
First several times I used Windows 8, I could not figure out how to logout or shut off the machine. Who’s brilliant idea was it to hide it under a hotspot and then under a charm?
But, my biggest gripe against Windows 8+ (and Windows Phone, and now iOS 7) is the complete removal of context around what is clickable and what is not. There are many many screens where there’s no difference between a title, a heading, a clickable link, a button, etc. It’s all just white text on a coloured background. Every screen, you have to randomly click around until you learn what’s clickable and what’s not.
You just start typing when presented with the screen, took me maybe less than 5 seconds to figure out, as for swiping the screen upwards:
http://modmyi.com/attachments/forums/skinning-themes-discussion/740…
http://mobileradar.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/htc_desire_hd_sense-…
It wasn’t exactly uncommon., yeah it wasn’t in the pre-release version because they are pre-releases, it like complaining about bugs in a beta release.
I can tell what is clickable and what isn’t in the interface.
Okay, I understand that other people’s posts can make you angry, but take it easy right there. I’ve also had people complain about similar things with new laptops, and then once I’ve explained that that’s just the way it is, had to “fix” them either by adding various things to make it more like Windows 7, or actually putting Windows 7 on it.
the things is, people don’t always have your insight into technology, and most non-techy people still hold a distinction between phones, tablets and PCs. They expect a PC to have a desktop where they have their files and applications all visible, dragable and overlappable, and they expect their phone to do one thing at a time. They don’t see phones and tablets as little PCs, no matter how much you insist that they do.
Not everyone sees things the way you do, and being a .NET developer already puts you in a much more tech-savvy category than the average Joe. So you can’t possibly say that it doesn’t appear confusing or unfamiliar to others, just because you managed to work something out with your tens of thousands of hours of computing experience. And STOP SHOUTING!
Man, we share the same crazy experience on that. It is surreal.
What is that then?
This.
.
And they usually ask “How I do to ‘un/des-maximize’ this thing?”.
And one senior even told me “how the hell I am supposed to know where to click.”
You see, to many of us computer interfaces are just obvious, we are so used to them, but, sure, for some others any thing changed is just an impropriety they should not be exposed too and they ask “Why the hell they changed that thing?”.
No, I have no idea what the hell I am doing with my Phone UI (Android) but and iPad I am fine with because it is a better UI.
There is nothing in the Windows 8 UI that isn’t obvious, if you’ve Windows before … f–king hell clicking and moving the mouse randomly you can get a good idea what the hot corners do on a laptop.
I seriously think half of the comments on here are lies, they all start off “I have my mum/customers/etc” and if they are customers they are in the 100s customers. So either this guy is answering the phone all day and not selling anything or he lying.
The thing is that most of the people don’t have a good enough memory. There was a user on here that claimed to have migrated 2 million Windows Desktops to Linux and was a professional lawyer … I think only CSI Miami’s Horatio Cain has a character profile that is only slightly more ridiculous.
Edited 2014-01-16 19:55 UTC
So Compaq back in the day used to have a nice little knowledgebase article painstakingly explaining that when instructions said to “press any key”, this meant whatever key you wanted, like enter, spacebar, etc. and not THE “Any” key. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/25/compaq_faq_explains_the_any…)
When you have users who are that technologically challenged – and they are out there – then even the smallest of changes can wreak havoc in their confidence. Windows 8 is a bit like switching from an automatic car to a manual: yes the concepts are the same and the gear stick is in the same place, but the usage instructions are now a little different and some retraining will be needed.
Would you believe I have… 1 million customers, an entry in the Guinness World Records book, and proof that I was a secret co-founder of Google? No? Dammit!
Anyway, back on topic:
We all love telling stories from our personal experience, but what some people forget is that just because something is anecdotally observable to them that doesn’t mean it’s true in general.
For example, my now dearly departed grandfather was quite confident on his computer, and if I had put Windows 8 in front of him he would have been able to figure it out. BUT he was a defence engineer in his working life and would not have been a good representative of his class of people (older retirees). And it’s the “but” which most people leave out when citing their anecdotes.
Edited 2014-01-17 01:22 UTC
Without wishing to sound rude (but realising I probably do anyway), all this tells me is that generally speaking people are morons and are incapable of accepting change in any form, at least the people you’ve clearly had to deal with anyway. Most of the non-tech people Ive spoken to about Windows 8 found the experience jarring at first due to the change, but fairly quickly got used to it and in fact the majority began to prefer the experience.
Personally I still think the Win8 ‘modern’ UI has a way to go, especially with regards to the quality of the apps. It just isnt there yet and simply cant serve as an adequate replacement for the desktop, not unless all you do all day is browse web pages… and even then I’d argue its not good enough. That being said the modern UI does work very well with touch enabled devices, extremely well in fact. And even on my desktop machine (traditional keyboard/mouse) I find the Start Screen and apps complimentary to my primary way of working which is the desktop (with Start8).
Like it or not the way consumers use devices is changing and Microsoft’s answer to that in the form of Win8’s modern UI and more importantly the principles it represents, is a good if not great move. For those of us who need more, the desktop is still there just as its always been and will remain so.
Lucas that reply was beneath you, it sounded totally fanboy. As for why it sucked? as someone who sells PCs for a living and refuses to carry it anymore I’ll be more than happy to elaborate.
1.- Anything that took 1 click? Takes 2 or 3. If it took 3 clicks? Good luck on even finding it. I mean WTF is shutdown doing under “settings”? Seriously? 2.- Spreading controls willy nilly between metro and desktop. I mean WTF were they thinking putting the traditional control panel under the desktop folder but not having an icon on the desktop…does that MAKES ANY SENSE? Its Chewbacca defense, it makes no sense how something could be in the desktop folder, which is supposed to be what is on the desktop, but its not on the desktop, argh! 3.- That *&^%&*&^% “Charms” bullshit. If you are unlucky enough (as is the majority) to have a new laptop without driver support for killing gestures and two finger support? YOU ARE FUCKED, the stupid Charms bar will spaz out and throw crap at random intervals, it doesn’t matter which start menu replacement you use either as without driver support you are boned. My dad has a really nice i3 laptop that sits in the case, it will probably never be used again as there is NO WAY to 100% kill the charms, the generic drivers will not work on that model.
I could keep going Lucas but I’d end up with War and peace when all I need to do is just say “look at the numbers Lucas”. the majority of PC users? they do NOT read pages like this, they don’t read trade mags, yet their opinion is nearly universal and its DO NOT WANT…why? Because its NOT intuitive, NOT discoverable, its in a way a lot like DOS in that you have to know the “metro way” of doing things before you ever start or you are screwed. I’ll just leave this here, he explains better than I do..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo“>Windows
I find a lot of the issues complained about to be pretty superficial, so I don’t get what the fuss is about. I don’t understand why that is difficult to grok (I don’t like the word myself, but it seems appropriate here).
Did you watch the video? See what he said about touchpads? Now realize that if and ONLY IF your laptop has driver support for disabling gestures can you stop the “charms spaz” and if you are like the majority and don’t have support the charms bar will constantly pop in and out taking focus and screwing things up!
Now imagine if when you were writing your response something kept taking focus away from your typing every few words, so one sentence out of three you had to do over because the focus was no longer on the text box but on the right corner of the page….you’d HATE that, right? How long do you think you’d put up with retyping sentences before you were ready to chunk the damned thing?
Lucas do you have any idea how long it took me to learn Android? About a half an hour. iOS and OSX? About the same. Linux? I was able to get around both KDE and Gnome comfortably in about an hour a pop. Lucas I spent two weeks in Metro and still couldn’t figure shit out because there is NO consistency in that OS, none at all! Some shit is in Metro, some in the desktop, some things are built for touch, some things are obviously built for the desktop. hell on this very site when I first pointed out how stupid it was to have shutdown under settings Werecat and several others who had been using Win 8 as their main OS said “Is THAT where it is?” because after weeks of use they hadn’t found the thing and were having to use workarounds like logging off or hitting the power switch!
Ultimately Lucas the numbers don’t lie, and they show that a LOT more people feel like me than feel like you do about Win 8. Personally it feels like a cellphone pretending to be desktop to me. there is a reason why Apple still has OSX, and Google has ChromeOS, its because what works on a small low res touch screen you hold in your hand like a book does NOT translate to a 27 inch non touch monitor or 17 inch non touch laptop held vertically. the touch UI will NEVER be the norm for desktops and laptops, because poking a vertical screen for any length of time is painful…kinda like using Win 8 is for most of us.
I’m actually sorry that you like it Lucas, because I had friends that liked Vista too and I have a feeling that like Vista Metro will become “that which we don’t talk about anymore” and something you won’t see except on WinPhone.
No, as an IT admin, the pain of having no Start button is the result of that infuriating experience of metro/full screen apps. I press ctrl-alt-del to find the task manager so that I can shutdown the system, to show an example.
Not everyone likes it, you do like it, but as far as I can see, Lenovo provides a Start Menu to Windows 8 users. It this not an evidence that others don’t like it?
No, as an IT admin, the pain of having no Start button is the result of that infuriating experience of metro/full screen apps. I press ctrl-alt-del to find the task manager so that I can shutdown the system, to show an example. [/q]
Agreed… it’s less about the start button itself, and more about the thing that the non-existent start button took you to to.
The Gnome Shell guys did a much better job of that – they still have that mode switch for opening programs and files vs actually using them, but it’s done in such a way that it’s visibly an overlay with your apps behind it. Not perfect, but it’s not like having two completely different desktop environments running simultaneously… the Windows 8 way just confuses everyone I know who’s touched it…
Have you actually read the article, or are you just going to desperately sit there hovering your keyboard squirming around denying what has now become inevitable?
The only surprise to me is that Paul Thurrott has now accepted how serious this is.
Edited 2014-01-14 08:55 UTC
Yeah there was no real content, Microsoft is planning a new build conference and they are doing some more work on Metro.
When will you get it, quite a lot of people like it. I haven’t heard any complaints by anyone that is using it that isn’t on the internet.
I used Windows 8 (and Windows 8.1) for several months on my non-touch-capable laptop. I had performance issues after upgrading from 8 to 8.1, so I had to make a clean install instead. I had a problem with working driver getting updated to broken one. I had a problem with trackpoint driver pretending that middle mouse button is not a mouse button but something akin to what scroll lock used to be. There were probably more issues, I don’t remember…
Now, all of the problems I described above aren’t really worth mention unless I really want to bash Windows 8 – all of them are pretty much the same issues I had with my Windows 7 attempt.
And I genuinly enjoyed Metro/Modern-style apps – clean and focused, rich on presentation, consistent throughout the system. I did even use IE not to download another browser – probably the first time in a dosen of years! The new launcher allows to find desired shortcut quicker and doesn’t require much pointing precision, which is IMO a huge improvement over classic and especially XP-style launchers. Mail app has a lot of room for improvement though, and some software is still missing in Metro/Modern department, albeit slowly getting there.
I had a funny power bug with this computer (it is a chipset problem).
I been using Win 8 on a laptop with a touch screen and I find myself alternating between the touch screen and the mouse.
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCte-aNFpQzDPf05s4Aeyn7w
A lot of the touch screen problems was me being heavy handed and I really need to get a proper camera on a stand instead of using an iPad.
What’s stopping you from using the 8.1 Start Screen as you did in 8.0? This really does highlight the trouble with changing anything. Some people like change, others hate change, others hate a change to appease people who hated the original change, etc.
This is why listening to user feedback only takes you so far, and the real end in interaction design is figuring out what people want for them.
Edited 2014-01-13 14:47 UTC
the 8.1 start screen looks EXACTLY the same. are you saying you are not able to un-check a box in the navigation settings to use the standard start screen rather than the apps view?
Another day, another Windows red meat article. Oh, but this one is from Paul Thurrot, a Windows blogger who’s pro Windows articles you never cite, but who’s anti Windows rants you gleefully post as some grand validation of your fantasy.
Microsoft has a perception problem, and if token improvements like Windows 7 are what they need, then so be it.
The only relation between Vista and 8/8.1 is only that they will be releases that had irrational hatred, followed by releases with irrational admiration (curiously by the same people).
If the Vista debacle (and by debacle I of course mean the tech blogosphere collectively losing its shit) is anything to go by, then its safe to assume that the “Windows is in trouble” crowd is akin to the boy who cried wolf.
To loosely borrow a line from Thom, I’m sure THIS release will spell Windows’ doom.
Edited 2014-01-13 11:04 UTC
http://www.osnews.com/search?q=thurrot
You live in your own little world.
I’m not sure that you’re proving anything, you have a bunch of flame bait, which PT gladly serves up because it’s in his interests, he sells a Windows book for those “confused” by Windows 8 after all.
The last article that spun anything in a positive light from him was posted when? Of course you don’t post it.
Nelson, Microsoft is still searching themselves for years while Apple find quite rapidly what users wants.
Microsoft wants to bend their users to adapt to their products, Apple adapt its products to the users.
Numbers tells the truth.
Kochise
Edited 2014-01-13 13:06 UTC
Users want choice
Users want USB and micro-SD and don’t want iTunes
Users want big-screen phones
Users want cheap devices
That is why Android is dominant and not iOS
I’m not sure it applies to the great majority.
And yet a great lot of devices were sold without either USB or an SD card. There are lots of tech-ignorant people that don’t know/don’t care.
Completely disagree. Some people (like me) don’t like too big screens. I hate the Samsung S3 for this very reason (and some more).
No argument here. But quality and performance is important. So you pay more if you want a smoother device.
Not entirely accurate. It has nothing to do with USB, SD card, iTunes or screen size. It’s all about 1. price, 2. telcos deals with manufacturers.
Let me try again so things are more clear:
Users want choice:
Some users want USB and micro-SD and don’t want iTunes
Some users want big-screen phones
Some users want cheap devices
That is why Android is dominant and not iOS.
It is clearly not only about price and carrier deals because there are lots of expensive Android phones that sell really well and it is clearly iPhone/iOS that has the best/most carrier deals.
I think that there is too much choice (mostly crap) on the Android side, but it also means that you will be able to find a phone that suits you. On the iOS side there is not enough choice so if that 1 phone doesn’t suite you it means no sale for Apple.
(I received a Nokia 1020 as a Christmas bonus and I am loving it both as a camera, a gaming platform, a Skype machine and sometimes as a phone)
No Nexus device will ever have MicroSD unless something changes a lot in the Google engineers principals. Why would anyone ever want to buy a non-Nexus device? Seriously, I have 4.4.1 on my Nexus 4 and the Samsung devices are only just getting 4.2. Also, neutered and altered Android is a real turn off.
Those are almost entirely mutually exclusive. If you want a cheap phone, buy a Nokia Lumis 620, that is far cheaper and better build quality than any cheap Android phone. The 520 is even cheaper.
It’s a really complicated and extremely region specific phenomenon. It’s not because of any formula one could write on a bit of paper.
Well, so far they pack too small displays and camera quality is lacking. I rather buy something with larger display and better camera and then root it and install some custom ROM on it.
Fair enough. But that is a fairly narrow path which isn’t going to be true of the majority. Nexus 4 has a far larger display than most entry level Android handsets, and the price was pretty similar when it was still in wide circulation. Nexus 5 is larger and has a far better Camera. Unless you specifically want a Galaxy Note size device, there’s really not a lot in it.
Which is out of scope for most average users.
Moto G is a quite nice and inexpensive phone, with near-stock Android, already getting KitKat, and a rather big screen …but also no microSD.
Android devices without custom ROMS will only have MicroSD through third party vendor ROMS. Google will never support it directly and so it completely depends on each vendor to customise their offering. Given the mess most make of the Android experience, good luck on that one.
Windows 8 users alone dwarf the OSX install base. Numbers indeed.
In related news, Ford drivers alone dwarf the Lexus car base.
Don’t respond to nonsense with more nonsense.
I don’t understand what your point is. Are you saying that Lexus=OSX and is a better product than Ford=Windows? Are you than saying that Ford is in trouble and Lexus is doing great?
I have no idea what you are even trying to say
No, I’m saying that Nelson’s response contrasting that Windows 8 has a larger install base than OSX is a nonsense argument. Systems running OSX are on average significantly more expensive than systems running Windows(*), so it’s no surprise there’s fewer of them around, in much the same fashion as it’s no surprise that you see fewer Lexuses (Lexee?) than Fords. Premium brands are called “premium” for a reason.
Don’t believe me? See http://gizmodo.com/5033865/study-average-mac-computer-price-more-th…
The original context of the assertion was that “Apple finds what users want”, it is entirely possible, and in fact self evident that Microsoft does too, especially given the sheer scale of Windows.
It was partly a tongue in cheek response to the nonsense (Kochise has never, ever made sense to me god love him, but his posts perplex me).
But honestly, Apple has nothing to do with this entire discussion. Here’s hoping for an actual response from someone to my actual points.
Understood. In that context you’re right.
Apple is more expensive, but it is not a premium brand.
A premium brand typically implies that the same parent company (in the case of Lexus, Toyota) has a brand that is not premium. Apple has no such thing. If Apple had another brand.. say the myPhone by Orange, that was underpowered, and lacked some nice features, then Apple would be a premium brand.
Simply being more expensive does not make you a premium brand.. at best, if you’re lucky and have great marketing (like Apple).. you can convince people you’re a luxury brand.. (I’m not convinced, but some people do seem to be).
I won’t consider iPhones a luxury until iPhones come with better lumbar support, keep my butt warm, and are a lot more fun to drive.. have an interface that’s just confusing in a different way doesn’t do it for me
Apple is Jaguar when they were independent, or, in spirit, Audi (ignoring the VW thing), at best.
[quote]A premium brand typically implies that the same parent company (in the case of Lexus, Toyota) has a brand that is not premium. [/quote]
This is really of topic, but I just wanted to let you know that this is a completely made up fact.
Limiting the existence of a lesser brand to only the parent company makes no sense
Something is not a premium brand because the parent company also has lesser brands. Something is a premium brand because the competition has lesser brands.
But most importantly, something is a premium brand because people think it is. It doesn’t even matter if it really is
In other words, you completely missed Nelson’s point – here, let me spell it out for you.
First, Kochise indulged in the favourite passtime of all Apple fanboys (thinly-veiled bragging about their proxy daddy-figure), ending with – and I quote – “Microsoft wants to bend their users to adapt to their products, Apple adapt its products to the users. Numbers tells the truth. [/q]”
(Emphasis added for the reading comprehension-impaired)
Then, Nelson pointed out the gigantic, glaringly-obvious flaw in that statement: the fact that “numbers” indicate the exact opposite of Kochise’s claim:
“Windows 8 users alone dwarf the OSX install base. Numbers indeed.”
In other words, Apple’s approach has been so “successful” that the userbase for the LEAST successful release of Windows still makes Apple’s ENTIRE userbase look like a statistical margin of error by comparison.
Come on now, it’s really not that hard to understand. The thread consisted of a grand total of 2 posts, at least TRY to keep up.
New stats — let’s include all the apple standalone devices, and you see how they have been whooping MS rear for the last couple of years:
http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/analyst-apples-overall-product-s…
comparing apple and MS is not a clean comparison as they are very different style companies.
but the days of microsoft being the elephant in the room, knocking everyone else around, are long gone IMO.
A Lexus is just a fancy Toyota.
High end Fords cost more than low end Lexus models.
Your point is?
If users were given the choice between Windows 7 and Windows 8, I bet that Windows 8, even 8.1 wouldn’t stand a chance.
So Microsoft is trying by any mean necessary to pour down user’s throat Windows 8 and their “vision of the future”.
Not because it is better and more usable, just because.
Kochise
“Token” upgrade? Token my big white southern behind! Windows 7 CURBSTOMPS the broken mess that was Windows “cancel/allow” Vista any day of the week! Let me enlighten you with a little poem..
Oh Vista how I hate thee, let me count the ways…Networking…what morons thought that having the network slow to a crawl when you do ANYTHING while downloading a file was okay? They built a single tasking OS in 2007, how retro…UI…Alright which fool gave Vista a case of the “senior moments” where for no reason at all it would just “freeze” for a few seconds at a time?…File I/o…WHAT IS THAT THRASHING? Stop it! I turned off indexing (which works great in 7 BTW) and used every tweak on the net and it STILL killed a brand new 400Gb HDD by thrashing!…UI…Cancel/allow…SHUT UP! For the love of Pete Linux got that right half a fricking decade before, yet with Vista the ONLY choices are no security or the most annoying little whining “cancel/allow” nanny BS? WTH?
I could go on all day but Windows 7 was NOT a “token improvement”, it was like the difference between XP and Windows 95, not even close. And before you blame the hardware? The same hardware worked brilliantly with WinXP X64 AND with Windows 7 (using the same drivers as Vista, so can’t blame the drivers) and last I heard its still working just fine for its new owner.
Face it dude, MSFT has a serious case of the “Star Trek Rule” since Ballmer took over, lets just hope that after the double fail of 8/8.1 that 9 is as good as 7.
I’m more concerned with the fact that OS News has become nothing but an aggregator and re-post site of articles from other websites. The immediately previous article to this is nothing but a re-post of a Verge piece, and this one is from the Win SuperSite by Paul Thurrott. There hasn’t been an original post on OS News in ages. I already read The Verge and Win Supersite every day and don’t need to rehash it all on here. OS News used to be a place to find interesting original articles about alternative OS’s, but it isn’t any more. Sad.
Seconded. I agree wholeheartedly with you.
NSA, Windows 8/Phone sucks, and Patents.
It’s because of people like you and me that don’t post any original or interesting articles.
Edited 2014-01-13 11:50 UTC
Then write an article and submit it. If you actually read Thom’s original articles, you’d know that he works full time, has a social and personal life, and still makes time to be the managing editor here. I mean seriously, on a site that covers all OSes but more importantly covers open source news, you would think an open source mindset like “if you don’t like it, fix it” would prevail. The site is extremely open to user-submitted articles, and if you don’t like what you see here, write!
I think part of the problem is that there’s not a whole lot of news in the alternative OS space. We’re deluged with Windows articles already, there are far better aggregators of news about Linux, and for every OS X release you can just head on over to Ars and read the Siracusa review. That basically leaves OSAlert as a weird mashup of groklaw, mobile operating systems, and a Haiku post every few months. I guess there’s pressure to have more constant story submissions on a site with “news” in the name and URL, but sometimes there’s just not a whole lot left to report on.
That, and the interesting things happen in mobile – which is a closed-off world where every operating system requires yet another device purchase. That’s not something I can just do.
Also, when I write a review – like the one I’m currently working on for Jolla/Sailfish – I’m not satisfied with six paragraphs and the usual conclusion that “it won’t replace your Android device but it may soon!” – I want a proper review. So proper, in fact, that its direct predecessor, the Nokia N9, will be part of the review too (finally getting one!).
That costs way more time, skill, and organisation than a dry list of features. No sane person can write several of these articles per week even IF he owned the devices for it.
I haven’t seen ANY interesting thing happening on the mobile platforms (or any platforms) for years. There’s hardly new stuff, just old ideas improved (which is ok). Mobile got all the hipe but it’s going to end as mobile computing inherently sucks. There’s not much else to put in a phone. We already got a gps, a text messenger and a gaming console.
I’ve had plenty of mobile toys to play with since about 15 years ago; they have advanced a lot in functionality, but usability is and has always been total crap (compared to a desktop computer/notebook).
I think we have already got more than enough computing power and easy of use in the desktops/laptops that probably don’t need much more advances in these areas. OS X is as perfect as you could ask for, Windows is always two steps forward, one/two step backwards and will always suck as long as it isn’t *unix inside, Linux got some interesting future for gaming and eventually desktop, if Valve’s Steam Boxes do well.
Maybe you should open your eyes. There’s been plenty of interesting stuff happening all around us, what with Oculus VR, wearable computing, NLS speech recognition, holographic interfaces and so on.
I’d say you just lack imagination. Mobile computing could be exceedingly powerful in the future with better speech recognition, visual object identification, mixed virtual/real-world interfaces, even neural input — it may not be suitable for the same things e.g. a desktop is, but then again neither is a hammer suited for the same job as a pickaxe, and yet they’re both useful. And who knows, maybe one day mobile devices can just be popped in a dock and have them transform into desktop computing platforms, blurring the distinction altogether?
You know what they say about opinions and assholes…
Holographic interfaces are interesting. Wearable computing is crap very little people will use. Speech recognition is nothing new; it has improved in the last 20 years but not that much that makes it useful. And even if it was useful, people won’t go by talking to their phone and hope it understands correctly all they say. It may work for english (a simplistic language) half the time.
About Oculus VR, you might think it’s some new idea, but is as old as more than 10 years and never took off. I’ve see reality glasses before (and even a FPS game), but if that’s what you think is interesting, you have very low standards.
I think you have too much imagination if you think all that augmented reality crap is going to make people use it and love it. 3D TVs are a flop, there you might have some interesting facts about what people like. We already have proper 3D in real life. We don’t need a replacement. Or you think most played games are all 3D with fancy graphics and hardware? Think again, Candy Crash and stupid farm games are what people like. People like simple, and 2D works fine for most of us. 3D gadgets are nothing new or interesting anymore.
This already happened. Nothing new and didn’t work. Maybe it is not time yet.
Yeah, tell me something I don’t know and surprise me. You write opinions too.
Edited 2014-01-13 14:52 UTC
Because of…what? Just simply because you don’t like the stuff that’s out now? You can see to the future and can tell that everyone has the same tastes as you and there will never be any new innovations in the area of wearable computing?
Tell that to all the people using Siri, Google Now, all the various speech recog – based assistants on Play Store and so on.
Yes, because it’s totally impossible for the tech to ever improve..
Nope. Doesn’t make it any less of an interesting one, nevertheless. For example electric cars were already invented back in 1884, but they’re only now becoming useful. The idea itself was always interesting and useful, it’s just that the technology wasn’t ready. It’s the same thing with VR.
And again the fallacy of “I don’t like it so no one can.” We have spreadsheets in real life, does that mean we don’t need them on our computers? We have brains capable of doing maths, does that mean we don’t need computers? We have real life, does that mean we don’t need movies? No, it does not work like that.
Speech recognition doesn’t work if you have an accent. I have a mile West Country accent and all the voice activated stuff falls on its arse. Scottish Accent it just doesn’t work.
Most not UK English speakers (that are native) have a hard time understanding unfamiliar foreign accents. My Boss who is from the US I have worked with for over 2 years says sometimes he still has problems with mine. I really don’t think the tech can improve enough if people have problems.
Edited 2014-01-13 16:19 UTC
Aye, but that’s, again, something that can improve as the tech moves forward. His argument, however, was that it isn’t and cannot be useful, which rather obviously isn’t true. There are plenty of people who find it useful even now, and if/when the tech improves enough to work even with accent it’ll be even more useful.
That’s like saying that computers cannot have better vision than humans just because human vision is the pinnacle of it all. Well, I could point you to the various satellites in the sky that can see much wider spectrum than humans and much more minute details…
That is to say that just because there are problems now does not mean that it’s impossible to overcome them in the future.
I think it will get better, but even the latest systems have problem with my accent and so do most people who aren’t from the UK.
Here is a sample of mine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbAqsXwhPPo
Dogs can here higher or lower pitched noises (I can’t remember which it is), so they must be better at understanding speech … right?
The key point is that it not about how good the hearing is it is understanding not only what the input says but also means.
Human Speech recognition being the key phrase here. If people that are fluent or native speakers in the same language as my native language are having problems, I really doubt that at the end of the day what is algorithm can be better than a person.
They for all I know could only be teaching the system certain dialects and don’t can about the few million people that don’t speak with that dialect. Even Apple admits with SIRI that it doesn’t work with accents from the UK.
I can see the other posters point, time you have mucked about with it with a lot of this stuff you could have just in-putted the information by typing.
So, did you use voice recognition or did you type your comments in this OSAlert discussion?
The sad part about this cool technology is that its all years away from going anywhere and very few prototype devices exist.
The walled garden stuff around mobile is fairly discouraging. Another big hit to OS development are that many of the soc blocks are totally proprietary and hidden so device drivers don’t exist except a few binary ones targeted a specific android kernels. The mess almost makes me want to cheer for intel but I wish we had another player out there.
It started as VMS inside.
Given that UNIX own creators already tried to create a better UNIX, being UNIX inside might not be that great.
Edited 2014-01-13 21:56 UTC
What is your point, please?
For all I know, the intent of plan9 was to go even deeper on the concept of “everything is a file” than unix did.
And about heritage, it should be clear to everybody that works on this field that there is a lot of cross-pollination between the current main systems and their ancestors, and I am not only talking about the direct ones. Useful concepts should, and are, “copied” outside their origins and as so we see unix concepts on Microsoft systems and conversely and it is actually a good thing. Why anyone wants to demand the reinvention of the wheel is something that really makes no sense at all (I am not talking about you specifically on this).
With the unixphiles at least, I think part of it is a feeling that outside ideas diminish the purity – “everything is a file” becomes “most things are files, some aren’t”; “use text streams, because those are a universal interface” becomes “…unless you really want it to go 2% faster, then go ahead and use binary file formats.”
My point is better said by Rob Pike itself on his Slashdot interview.
With all respect all have to Mr Rob Pike, that particular example is a bad one. For large data transfer, the argument list was never the indicated method, it is very inefficient to use it for that purpose, this is what pipes, mmap and structured (or even unstructured files) exist for.
And by the way, it is a problem on Windows too if you want to use huge argument lists to process. It just was not created with that intention and should not be abused.
Unix is not perfect, that is for sure, but I really fail to see a contender that aged so well.
If you want to pick a better example, pick interprocess communication next time. But be fast, kernel developers are addressing it now with kdbus.
My main point was
it had nothing to do with argument’s list example.
And, using that old, shallow and infamous analogy, we are still using steering wheels and brakes on our cars. But know they have a lot of improvements, like ABS, hydraulic assistance and so on and so forth.
Similarly, the unix descendants incorporated a lot of advances themselves. Also, there is no way to deny that the core concepts of unix created a very flexible and modular beast that can be molded to accomplish almost all our needs (from a base system POV).
Fact is, unless something proves to be really better (in the sense that it makes possible something that can not be achieved without a great effort) or cheaper, we should expect to see that evolutionary steps that have been serving us well. On the absence of a clear advantage, practicality will trump them all.
Microkernels GNU Mach and Hurd, distributed OS Plan9 and Inferno and other attempts failed to deliver something with enough push factor. Granted, many of their concepts were assimilated.
Other things, like modern languages, have carved their space but expect them to eclipse the old methods was unreal.
Things will be adapted until they became too cumbersome, at which point they will be substituted as a wholly or on its subparts, what, conversely, is way more common. It is happening on Linux, it is happening on Windows.
What about trying out Firefox OS? Perhaps you already have one of suitable Samsung phones? ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Firefox_OS_build_prer… ) And the hardware shipping with Firefox OS (ZTE Open, Alcatel OneTouch Fire) is rather inexpensive, and IMHO you should really include this OS in your musings.
Edited 2014-01-16 05:42 UTC
tidux,
I agree that part of the problem is that the lack of interesting OS news is the lack of interesting OS developments. I really believe this is caused by modern consumer mobile devices being much harder to hack on than PC counterparts used to be. As a child I was fascinated by how things worked, especially computers. I would read about things like interrupts and bootloaders, and the open state of commodity PCs (both hardware and software) would actually give me the opportunity to get my hands “dirty”, I absolutely loved that. The software restrictions imposed on today’s commodity devices precludes the same kind of education. Finding/using an exploit to get machine code to run is much tougher today than what we had, and riskier to the device as well since it implies breaking the lockdown mechanisms just to get our own code to run.
Folks are always being accused of seeing the past in rose colored glasses, but for indy OS-development and diy computer hacking we really did have it MUCH better in the past!
Edited 2014-01-13 16:07 UTC
The problem is that computers are sold by businesses, and once they started selling to people who weren’t geeks or hackers, openness stopped being a value added feature to the majority of their customer base, and removing it allowed for much more extortion via device restrictions. This is why I’m so excited about bunnie’s Novena laptop – it’s a computer of the hackers, by the hackers, for the hackers, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln. It’s silent, fanless, has a good keyboard, amazing screen, a freaking FPGA onboard, uses stock batteries so you can add nearly as much as you want, and not an NDA in sight.
Then you’d be reading stuff you yourself wrote, if it gets accepted.
I submit news, but on average, I guess, 1 in every 4 or 5 submissions gets accepted.
Finding news and submitting doesn’t take a lot of effort, so if I find a great article, submit me and it doesn’t get accepted it isn’t a great loss. But what if I spend hours or even days on an article and it gets rejected?
Maybe a better plan would be to attract people who want to become writers and journalists and give them a podium here. Or an idea I gave earlier is to link articles, as is done now, and add comments from a number of fixed staff members. Thom, or the one who accepted the post, can add a long comment and the others can give a small take on it. A bit like was done with game reviews in Zzap!64 where one person did a full review and a few others just gave an opinion in a few lines.
The idea is to give a number of insights and provide material for the commenters like us.
BTW wasn’t there a remake of the site planned?
Just did a check. You’ve made a total of 129 submissions – 50 of which were accepted and turned into a story. I also know a number of those 129 were ‘popular’ submissions that were submitted by several people (so someone else may have been first), and also quite a few I already had on my own list of articles to post (so which weren’t attributed to you). So, I’d take a guess about half of them were accepted.
We rarely reject an original article. Can’t recall the last time we did that.
Well, my stats say 50, but each time an article gets accepted it stays at 50.
The stats on your profile only cover *accepted* submissions – not rejected ones. If they max out at 50, it might mean older ones are cut off from that list. This would mean you have even more accepted submissions.
The 129 figure is 100% accurate. It comes straight from the submission system.
129? That must make me one of your favorite submitters!
What if I would finally do that long overdue RISC OS review?
(but I would do it on an emulator) How horrible the used English can be and still get accepted? ;p
Yes, but it might also spur others to start submitting original content. That is a great thing, as far as I’m concerned.
As Thom said, that is unlikely to happen, and even if it’s not published because of writing or grammar issues, I’m sure an editor would work with you to get it into shape.
A couple of years back, the site approached a few members to become regular contributors. I was approached, and I declined because of my situation at the time (two jobs, one full time and the other may as well have been, and I was trying to break into writing fiction which was also put on hold due to work). I’ve since gotten married, and while I’m down to one full time job, I still haven’t made time to start writing again.
I plan on being a more active contributor to the site soon; this is one of the few websites I’d say I actually care about and would be sad if it went away (not that I think it’s in danger of that). I think if those of us who feel that way would get off our butts and write, we’d see a lot of great original content to complement what Thom works so hard on already.
Well, I’d be interested in your writings.
This comment: http://www.osnews.com/permalink?580530 is at least as comprehensive as the original article.
Can we submit someone else’s comment as an article?
Morgan,
Well, to be fair, we work too. What we’d really need is part time or even full time staff producing original content, however obviously it becomes a financial problem. OSAlert may not be willing/able to hire full time staff. I know that I couldn’t afford to if it were me.
Sorry, I didn’t meant to imply otherwise. As I said above, it’s work commitments that keep me from writing as much as I want to, I imagine it’s the same for many.
Once again, I don’t see why it can’t be more of a community effort. Just look at any open source project; while you may have a few, or even one, paid main contributor, the project really benefits from volunteers in the community who want to see it grow and flourish. Their only pay is the joy they get from creating something useful, entertaining or just awesome to behold. Just judging by the comments on various articles, I can see dozens of highly literate, intelligent members who could contribute if they chose to.
And as I’ve said, I’m guilty as charged too: I have a lot I’d like to say, but I limit myself to commenting on my lunch break or before bed because my day is so busy. It’s a cop-out, I’ll admit it. But that doesn’t mean others can’t step up, just as I hope to do once I have a few things sorted.
Edited 2014-01-13 18:34 UTC
Morgan,
Well, I’ve brought this up in the past. Thom seems discouraged with the community approach because we don’t contribute much to the site. I concede that we mostly bicker about things and that’s it. However personally I’m not particularly fond of the format, to me it’s not much more than a “letters to the editor”. Some people do it, but there’s not much motivation for people like us to contribute articles.
I’ve always felt that osnews could extend beyond just covering news. I had suggested a sister site, one where we actually get involved in more hands on projects, technical challenges, contests. I know I have more impulse to participate in those than in writing articles! Have a “sandbox” to showcase our work in a way that it doesn’t disappear after a week but encourages ongoing involvement. Some projects purely for fun, others could have technological merit. The community could vote on projects. Osnews could even apply for some crowd funding if it wanted to get serious.
It’s way too easy to get back into the pessimistic mindset that people won’t do anything. But if anything is going to happen, then we need to attract & motivate the right kind of people who will cause others to become interested as well. We’d just need enough interest & funding to get it rolling. Personally I don’t have money, but I could contribute lots of ideas and a strong technical know-how. In past discussions, Thom expressed doubt and disinterest, so he’d be the first one who needs motivating
I am not a writer. I am a user, an alternative OS fan for 15 years or so, a reader of several websites each day on subjects that I am interested in. It is not a matter of “if you don’t like it, write your own articles and fix the problem yourself, it’s a matter of going to a website where there are articles of original content on the subject of that particular website, written usually by the owners and people hired by the website owners, not simply re-posts or articles already posted on other websites. It’s quite a simple process. Joshua Topolsky does not run The Verge where there is nothing but re-posts of articles from Cnet, Engadget, Gizmodo, etc, they have writers that do their own content. I guess it’s too much to ask that this little website OS News do the same.
From the FAQ at the top it’s rather clear that “OS” stands for “operating systems”…
Because every time Thom posts an opinion piece, or an original article, the crowd bitches and moans about how OS News has become Thom Holwerda’s blog.
… Windows is in trouble !
Wait : how much market share has Windows got, overall ? More than 90%? Hmm… they’re in trouble then !
Because they will soon be replaced by OSX (7.someting%)… no wait, they will soon be replaced by Linux (1.7%). No, wait, those desktop PCs will soon be replaced by a single Samsung phone running Android 5.x (codenamed “WindowsIsDoomedKat”). Wait ! We have Jolla phones now and those can replace Windows desktops !
THIS TIME Windows is doomed… sigh
Don’t forget Chromebooks. Those are sure taking the market by storm. /s
They are in trouble, because they are 90% of desktop computers and desktop computers are in trouble.
As the news article right below this one showed, this is a very debatable subject.
PC sales have been down (negative growth) pretty much across the board for basically a year and a half. So as far as growth is concerned, that market segment is pretty much taped out it seems.
It’s not the end of the world as that segment, albeit stagnant, is still huge. So Microsoft is probably not going anywhere. But there are questions, however, regarding whether they (MS) can keep meeting growth expectations or if they may have to contract at some point in the future. That is not a position MS has ever found itself in, but it was bound to eventually happen.
I noticed you stopped quoting numbers when we got to android phones. You do know that Android outsells windows by a wide margin already. Devices that often have enough computing power to replace a lot of desktop machines. You don’t think that’ll do something to shift the balance in the long run?
Already it is entirely possible (thanks to apple and Android) to live a Microsoft-free life. If you tried that 10 years ago, you’d be fighting an uphill battle all the way.
You don’t think that losing it’s consumer computing dominance will affect windows long term?
Stating that those devices are as powerful as desktop machines seems exaggerated to me. I agree that mobile devices are redesigning computing in general. I’d rather say that many people found out that they don’t need machines as powerful as PCs. If you need to browse the Web, check your e-mails, get on Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and so on, definitely you don’t need a PC. So while personal computing was happening through PCs in until a few years ago, now that’s happening through many different devices. So it makes perfect sense that number of PCs might stay stable while PC share of all connected devices might drop. In that sense, I agree.
I think when people talk about demise of PCs they underestimate the fact that most connected devices users are in facts new users, not old users converted to mobile devices. In most cases, if I have a PC (desktop, notebook etc.), I will just add a new device, not replace it.
Living in a Microsoft-free world to be a prey of Apple or Google doesn’t seem an improvement to me. However, as I said I agree that a whole category of general computing can now happen outside PCs. And this is good. And it also good that people can choose their preferred experience, be either Google, Apple, Microsoft and even less common ones.
Microsoft needs to consider that and I think they’re doing that. The impact of such changes needs to be understood in a better way because what computing will be restricted to PCs and which one will be addressed by mobile devices is not clear enough yet.
However, people chanting that Windows is doomed actually miss the target. Windows already morphed into something running on multiple devices and Windows brand will not go anywhere soon.
Evolution of PCs is strictly connected to evolution of technology and, in many cases, to the evolution of UIs. touch-enabled UIs are by far the easiest to use so in that sense one might think that users will be switching out of “windows”. However, touch-enabled UIs didn’t prove yet that they reproduce the complexity of pointANDclick UIs so one might argue that there’s still a long road to walk to replace “windows”.
Either way, Windows will not go anywhere and it will be what will power your next generation devices.
There is a vast amount of (very expensive) critical software for architecture, engineering, mathematics, science and business use that only runs on Windows. It is unlikely to ever be ported to any other platform. MS could charge $5000 per licence and customers would still pay.
Only those few customers who had such a specialist application. The vast majority of users are very well catered for with a modern Linux desktop. A number of organisations have now moved to desktop Linux, it is entirely possible to do these days.
If a larger percentage of non-specialist desktop users started running the Linux desktop, as some organisations have already done, then the vendors of specialist applications would start releasing Linux versions.
Indeed, some have already done so:
http://www.bricsys.com/en_INTL/bricscad/features/
http://www.bricsys.com/common/news.jsp?item=502
Virtually all small businesses run specialist Windows-only software for accounting, payroll, databases, practice management etc. [eg my hairdresser has a salon management system which automatically sends and receives SMS messages for confirming bookings.] This software must be fully customised for local (Australian) business conditions. In the vast majority of cases there are no high quality Linux or Mac alternatives.
The vast majority of modern scientific instruments have Windows interfaces.
If you’re paying $10k per licence for AutoCAD you’re not going to worry about saving a few bucks runnning Linux. [/q]
Bricad is not considered a replacement for AutoCAD. It is far cheaper to buy a licence than it is to fully retrain someone on a new piece of software.
My recent experiences with consumer products indicate otherwise:
Software included with Nikon cameras is Windows or Mac only.
The CD that comes with Canon cameras does not include Linux software either. Funny thing about Canon, when browsing their software online Linux is one of the OS choices in the drop down menu. But if you click it, “There is no software for the OS Version you selected.” But at least they acknowledge there is such a thing.
Software for Texas Instruments calculators is Windows or Mac only.
Celestron telescope software is Windows-only.
Fuse software for Fender guitar amps, Windows or Mac.
Those are a few of my recent encounters. Admittedly, Celestron telescopes aren’t in every home, and neither are Fender amps. But Canon and Nikon? As mainstream as it gets.
Linux has come a long way with PC component manufacturers (motherboards, video cards, modems, etc.), but when it comes to getting Linux CDs distributed alongside Windows and Mac software with everyday consumer products, it may as well still be 1998.
Sure, sure, you can sometimes find replacement software titles, run a virtual Windows OS, or seek out Linux-friendly products. Just like in 1998…
Unclefester’s comment:
I get a kick out of the engineers and their beautiful expensive iMacs… running Windows XP.
One of the other electronic items I purchased recently is a Galaxy Player running the Android operating system. And even the desktop software included with that is Windows-only. Ditto the sync software for a Galaxy Tab bought last year. The irony of Linux-based appliances being sold with Windows-only software…
Only other thing I can think of that I’ve purchased recently, a new Garmin GPS. Garmin has recently begun creating Mac versions of all new GPS-desktop and mapping software. But still nothing for Linux users.
Edited 2014-01-16 00:57 UTC
Maybe Windows is doomed; OR they could confine METRO2 to tablets; release Windows 7.1 call it “Windows for Laptops” and everything could be good again.
What we are witnessing is a painfully slow transition process, and attempting to judge the overall execution mid-stride does everyone a disservice.
From a technical standpoint, Microsoft has been here before, and I imagine that the Windows 8/Threshold story will be very similar to Windows Vista/Windows 7.
In 2006, when Windows Vista was released, it was a disaster. I remember setting up a new machine very shortly after Vista was released, and the problems were obvious: the extra security features were so onerous that they interfered with normal usage, a lot of software was incompatible, and many peripherals were as well (in fact, Canon entered the Hall of Shame for me that year when they simply refused to release Vista drivers for some of their devices).
Fast forward to Windows 7’s release in 2009. By now most vendors had caught up, and Microsoft had gone away and ironed out the worst issues in Vista. With a fresh coat of paint, better support for middling hardware configurations, and the addition of XP Mode for really troublesome software, Windows 7 was critically acclaimed and sold like hotcakes. Vista was forgotten and consigned to its grave.
Windows 8 has different problems to Vista. Its architectural problems are more about shoe-horning the tablet-oriented Modern/”Metro” environment onto desktop and laptops without touch screens. Instead of being incompatible with older software, it faces a dearth of touch/Modern apps. But it is basically the same underlying issue: an attempted paradigm shift which hasn’t yet been completed.
There are two things going on here. Firstly, Microsoft are attempting to broaden their install base beyond traditional desktop/laptop devices. Secondly, they are attempting to create a unified code base so that one Modern app can run on any Windows-related device. On the latter front, this is already getting closer: Windows Phone apps are now being ported over to Windows 8/RT more and more frequently, even by low-level independent developers. In terms of the unified install base, this is really the thrust of Threshold I suspect. And when that happens it will suddenly make much more sense for developers to target Modern Windows – although Windows 8, Windows RT, Xbox, and Windows Phone don’t necessarily have great numbers individually, as a group they represent a pretty decent install base. So the Windows 9 wave, if handled well, has the potential to create a virtuous circle for Microsoft: a unified codebase means more apps more quickly, more apps means more users, and more users means still more apps.
This leads us into the business side of things. Does this all mean that Microsoft will go back to dominating the operating system market overall? I doubt it, but I still think they will be a very important player. The plan appears to be to subsidise this next-gen platform (Modern apps, in-house devices, Bing & other online services) using revenue from legacy businesses (Windows 7, server software, etc.), and await the point where the new businesses are profitable in their own right. For a lesser company, this pivot might be unachievable, but Microsoft has huge cash reserves and is still very profitable, so they have the financial muscle to be able to pull it off.
The other thing to note in all of this is that I think the doom and gloom for Microsoft is driven by a misunderstanding of the sales figures. Firstly, there was a boom in PC sales after Windows 7 was released in late 2009. The vast majority of those PCs are still in use, and are not yet in need of replacement; however this time is now arriving and Gartner has predicted that the fall in U.S. PC sales is now over (http://winsupersite.com/mobile-devices/2013-pc-sales-down-not-out). Secondly, tablet sales are highest in households where PCs are very likely to already exist. Pew Research reports that tablets are more common in households which are wealthier, better educated, and have children present (http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2013/PIP_Tablet~*…). This is exactly the sort of demographic which is likely to own a tablet as a companion device: they can afford two devices, they are more likely to be technologically capable (better education levels), and they are more likely to have a use case (children who want to browse the web, use social networking, and play games).
What does this mean in terms of the current ‘malaise’ and the future for Windows? I think that in terms of understanding what happened to Windows 8 it is important to realise that it simply arrived at the wrong time and had an ecosystem that was too immature to be commercially viable. When the next wave of primary device purchases hits, there will be a brand new opportunity for Microsoft: the Modern environment will have matured and probably have a critical mass of apps available, and the release will likely arrive on or around the five year anniversary of Windows 7’s availability, which is almost exactly when many PCs (especially desktops) will be nearing their expiry date. As with Vista/7 before it, undoubtedly a narrative will emerge that Windows 9 is comparatively “good” where Windows 8 was “bad”, overlooking the catch-up in the supporting ecosystem but also unleashing pent-up demand from people who hung on to their old machines for as long as possible to avoid having to deal with Win8.
After that, the theory goes, people who obtain and like the “new” Windows on their more traditional devices will discover that they can get the same experience on a tablet and a phone, so when it comes time to replace their Android or iDevice, the successor to Windows Phone and Windows RT may well get a renaissance of its own. That’s a decent plan if Microsoft can pull it off.
All that said, there’s considerable potential for Microsoft to stuff this whole thing up. The release of Windows 8.1 was handled poorly, particularly the inability to download an offline installer for use on multiple machines (think about that when you see the stats on why there are still so many 8.0 users who haven’t upgraded yet!), and the lack of a Modern version of Office – even a stripped down one ported over from Windows Phone – is just mind boggling. Meanwhile, Windows Phone development has been glacial, and on the app front developers rightly wonder whether the Modern environment will stick as Microsoft has a history of killing off once-heralded development platforms without warning.
However, as I mentioned above, the company has titanic resources at its disposal. Vista alone would have killed lesser players, as it cost $6 billion to develop. It was released not because it was ready but simply because, even in Microsoft land, it simply had to be in order to start getting money in the door again. By comparison, I suspect Windows 8 cost a lot less to develop, given that it basically took the pre-existing Windows 7 core (virtually unchanged in Win8) and bolted the pre-existing Windows Phone 7 UI and Metro design language on top. (In addition, Windows NT’s code base was always designed with multiple architectures in mind – Windows NT 4.0 ran on four – so developing an ARM port, while ambitious, is not something which would have needed a complete rewrite.) So in terms of overall funding, Microsoft has (compared to Vista) plenty of money left over to subsidise the emerging ecosystem where required: paying for app development, potentially giving the Windows Phone/Windows RT successor away to OEMs for free, and obviously funding the underlying architectural changes needed for the Threshold wave.
The bottom line here is that it’s way too early to count Microsoft out, and I think that doing so overlooks the fact that we are in the middle of a transition period. Only when Microsoft has fully executed its new strategy will we finally start to get a sense of where things will stand going forward.
Edited 2014-01-13 12:45 UTC
Thing is, I went from XP to 7, and didn’t think 7 was all that impressive, given that it took them 8-9 years to get there. I realize there were a lot of changes under the hood, but most of the UI stuff felt like it could’ve been a minor point upgrade to XP. And some stuff I turned off almost immediately, like the OSX-style dock and the Aero snap feature, which kept interfering when I tried to move apps across multiple monitors. In the end, it just didn’t feel a whole lot different than XP, except the extra 14gb of bloat with the default installation.
On the other hand, Windows 8 had native USB 3 support, native ISO mounting, taskbars on multiple monitors, a new task manager, a new startup manager (which I’d heard they ripped out of Vista), etc. Although not a HUGE step forward, I thought 8 was a better update than 7.
If you ever saw Vista it was, UI-wise, also fairly similar to XP. While the 5.0 series (Windows 2000 and XP) was all about porting the UI & consumer features of Windows 98 across onto the NT codebase, the 6.0 series really has been, at least until Windows 8, all about the internals. A lot of what was bolted on to XP as they went along (Desktop Search, data execution prevention, .NET) was integrated properly into the OS, and added to this was a brand new security model, much better troubleshooting tools (automated start-up error repairs, automatic rollback of failed Windows Updates [which used to hose the entire system], ability to recover from a graphics driver crash without BSOD’ing etc.) and a far friendlier installer/recovery environment.
For all that Windows 8 went and “broke everything again”, the fact that Microsoft felt able to focus almost entirely on the UI for NT 6.2 is a testament to the stable foundation of 6.1. That stability has not been a given in Windows history. People forget how bad XP GA was, and to an extent XP SP1 as well; it was really only when SP2 came along that XP became the gold standard. By comparison, Windows 7 GA was feature-complete and very stable; its SP1 was the most boring service pack of all time (a good thing really).
Regarding your personal experience of the Windows 8 desktop, if you ignore the tablet mode (and especially if you buy Start8) Win8 does indeed have some nice improvements over Windows 7. The problem is that most users are not power users; they generally find the whole split personality thing very difficult to handle and benefit from the advances you mentioned. Win7, as you pointed out, did a nice job of staying out of the way for people who comfortable using XP; Win8, not so much.
I personally never had any stability or security issues with XP, so all the updates in that regard that went into Win7 was meaningless to me. As I said before, 7 was just thoroughly underwhelming to me. Just because Vista sucked ass for a lot of people doesn’t suddenly make 7 a gem by default. It was also a little confusing for my parents when I updated their machine, having to get used to the way the new taskbar worked. And I also point out a lot that the reason Classic Shell was invented in the first place is because people hated the start menu in 7. I have never installed a start menu replacement on 8… didn’t take me long to get accustomed to the start screen.
To be honest though, I’ve had more problems with Win8.1 than I did with 2000, XP, 7, or 8. Mainly because of video card driver issues (GeForce 460) that seem to have finally gotten sorted out recently. I went from running flawlessly on Win8 for a year to my machine freezing at least once a day on 8.1.
True story: I met a fellow the other day who is still using Windows 98 as his primary OS and doesn’t see any reason to get rid of it. He is an outlier, and chances are you are too – although for different reasons.
In the case of the ’98 guy, he rote-learned his computer skills and thus finds it difficult to contemplate upgrading. He’s an extreme case, but there are lots of people who use XP, don’t have great proficiency, and have no desire to learn a new OS every few years. Classic Shell exists for people like that, and we should all be thankful it exists – especially now because most people will be forced off XP when it goes EOL in April.
In your case, you clearly know what you are doing, know what you want out of your PC, and aren’t going to be stung by most ‘average’ problems. But trust me on this, Microsoft didn’t spend billions of dollars rewriting Windows’ internals just for the fun of it. They were responding to flaws in NT 5.x – particularly security issues and problems with the driver model.
By way of an anecdote, I know a lady who rote-learned Windows XP and Outlook Express, but somehow managed to miss the lesson about not opening attachments from strangers. So literally every few months her poor brother has to disinfect the machine and sometimes wipe it entirely. While it’s not impossible to infect Windows 7 in a similar manner, it’s definitely harder in general and specifically *much* more difficult for malware to hijack the underlying OS without some kind of payload being voluntarily installed by the user. If and when she upgrades to 7, my friend’s relative will notice this difference and likely appreciate it enormously – as will my friend!
Another anecdote, this time about the UI: when Microsoft released Desktop Search 4.0 for XP, most people never installed it (it was opt-in) and because the widget lay outside the Start Menu, where users are trained to look, many people who had it installed for them didn’t understand how to use it. In Windows Vista this was moved into the Start Menu proper. I personally don’t use it all that much, because I know where my files are, but your average user generally has crap all over and can’t find things easily. So having “Search” right there in the Start Menu makes a huge difference, because now with a tiny bit of training (essentially being told, “if you’ve lost something, type the subject here and it will magically appear”) they can be much more comfortable using their PC.
IMHO it’s all too common stories like these that help to explain just why Windows 7 is so highly regarded. For a lot of people it genuinely is a much better experience than XP.
Of course I can understand why tech tards are into it, but even geeks praise it like it was the second coming. Maybe because they don’t have to clean off their relatives’ XP systems anymore
And I’m not saying it wasn’t an improvement; I just don’t think it was worthy of all the accolades it received from those who actually know how to use computers. Although there were some nice additions like winkey+P, I didn’t like most of the UI changes they made.
And I still think 8 is better, despite Metro. (I must admit though that I LOVE getting Facebook notifications via their metro app.) If you have to, just install Classic Shell or Start8 and be done with it
As for me, I’m trying to steer my less computer-savvy friends and family towards tablets where possible, esp iPads. It’s really hard to break those
lol
Edited 2014-01-14 00:44 UTC
Haha, true!
Also, I think the fanboys were really let down by how bad Vista was, and when 7 came along they were just incredibly relieved that it was more than half way decent.
Was Vista really that bad, if you used it on a machine with up to date drivers and apps? And would 7 had fared any better had they released it when Vista originally came out? In other words, was 7 just fortunate enough to have been released after Vista?
I don’t think it was ever actually as bad as people make it out to be, it just was all the issues with drivers not being updated for Vista and PC-manufacturers selling Vista on machines that very, very clearly were not suited for running it that created this image that Vista itself was somehow a horrible creature. The transitional period from XP – driver model to the newer one was really confusing for the layman and many a manufacturer didn’t bother to upgrade their drivers at all just so they could push people to buy new peripherals, so is it any wonder that the layman then started blaming Vista?
Had there been no Vista in-between I really doubt the situation would’ve been any different.
Yes it was still pretty bad, even with just the plain OS, the basic Internet apps (Flash, Adobe Reader etc.) and Office 2007. The security model was awful (UAC had only one setting – on for everything), I/O performance in Windows Explorer was atrocious, a lot of simple stuff was broken (e.g. I had to create a registry patch to fix handling of MSP files, Microsoft’s own patch medium of choice) and it was soooo sloooooow even on top end hardware. I bought what was then a top of the line Quad Core Q6600 in late 2007, and it crawled along with Vista; when Windows 7 was released two years later – remember, 7 has the same core as Vista and was 99.99% compatible with Vista drivers and applications – it flew along nicely for the rest of its lifespan.
I think if Vista had come out in a polished Win7-like state, with the speed of 7 and the application compatibility of 7 [especially the built in XP Mode], while it would certainly have had teething troubles due to driver issues and so forth, there wouldn’t have been the continuing furore that accompanied the actual Vista product. A big part of the ongoing hatred for Vista was due to the lack of a response from Microsoft. The major problems with Vista (speed, poor application compatibility) are still present today if you happen across some poor bastard running it on their PC – Microsoft bundled all of the improvements into Win7 instead of actually fixing Vista.
Someone mentioned the netbook wave that erupted around the time Vista came out. If Win7 had been around instead of Vista, then XP wouldn’t have been needed for netbooks. (XP is pretty horrible on netbooks FWIW while 7 is more tolerable.) That alone would have changed quite a bit of the narrative.
Edited 2014-01-14 06:46 UTC
Maybe because they don’t have to clean off their relatives’ XP systems anymore
My sister used to download a lot of free games. She always ended up with 3-4 extra toolbars on her browser and a load of crapware. Last year I just completely wiped her XP desktop and installed Xubuntu 12.04. No more problems.
Given your experience, windows 8.1 isn’t Vista – it’s Linux!
(Sorry, just spent some time upgrading Ubuntu from LTS to the latest normal release because docker (crapper) wanted me to bring in a backported kernel to LTS without mentioning this upgrade will break my ati driver, and therefore my X setup, and… yeah, if you upgrade and it breaks video, you got Linux
)
I am a Linux fanboy, but even I know it has it’s issues (but has gotten a lot better!!)
You are doing it wrong IMO. Get a live USB of the new version and boot it, then test that it works (while running from the USB) before you commit to it.
Assuming you have kept user’s home directories on a separate partition (as is the recommendation for Linux), having tested the new version then you can simply re-format the root partition and install the new version to the hard disk in place of the previous version, safe in the knowledge that it works.
By all means update an existing installation, but I recommend don’t upgrade an existing installation but rather just install the newer versions (after first testing it).
How is is acceptable for an OS update to complete bork what was working?
Windows doesn’t do it, unless there is something fundamental (lack of 16bit support, requires a driver model that doesn’t exist, or uses undocumented APIs). Windows program work … hell even drivers work well between versions.
I recommend the same. I even have two versions of Kubuntu in every computer: the current and the old one, each one in their own partition.
This way if the current Linux installation would fail, I would still have the prior one. The former Linux installation is also available with its configuration files, and so they can be consulted later, etc.
How is it acceptable that someone needs to know this much to have something that is reliable?
I think it is ridiculous.
It’s better to be safe than sorry and ridiculous. And Windows installations can fail, too. So if someone values his work he’ll have his measures. Some of them are not very costly, like the one I talked about: installing the new operating system in another partition (instead of overwriting the old one). But a lot of people knew that.
Edited 2014-01-14 23:03 UTC
Can fail, but it is a rarity rather than “well this is a well known fact”.
It’s an important thing to notice that malfunctions (even in the performance) are possible. Rarities are not impossibilities, so some methods that are not costly at all, like “installing the new operating system in another partition (instead of overwriting the old one)”, can be applied. But all of this is also well known.
I dunno why people think it is acceptable for even technical for myself to have to go through these steps.
It is a waste of my time. I dunno where the attitude comes from that we should have to tinker (and that is a slur from where I come from) with things that are developed by “professionals” to become usable past anything that can be done trivially.
I’m talking all the time about
– Malfunctions (even in the performance) that can happen to Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. and to some of their software.
– Methods that are not costly at all, like “installing the new operating system in another partition (instead of overwriting the old one)”.
Given that disk space is not an issue these days, I also adopt that exact same practice of having two Linux OS installations at any one time, one of which I use only as a fallback. When I upgrade to a new version I over-write the fallback, I begin using the new version, and the version that I was formerly using becomes the new fallback. It would appear that we have both come up with the same solutions.
I normally leave out this detail in online discussions, however, because although it is simple to do it is complex to describe, and I fear that recommending it would only confuse people.
I do note however that doing something similar for Windows systems (i.e. having a fallback installation) would be extremely rare.
Edited 2014-01-15 00:29 UTC
Ubuntu had always been like that for me – every upgrade, something would break.
Ironically, since swapping to Arch, I’ve had no such problems.
The only admining I’ve had to do has been:
Follow the installation guide.
Install Yaourt
yaourt -Syua (~once per week)
0 issues, and I’ve been running it for as long as I had Ubuntu. I don’t know if it’s a result of their extended kernel review time, the switch to systemd, or the stabilising of the vanilla linux stack, but it’s been without flaw.
For a “bleeding edge”, rolling release distro to be doing so much better than Canonical speaks volumes about them.
However, as I mentioned above, the company has titanic resources at its disposal
And sales will be going up like the Hindenburg.
Windows 8 isn’t that bad if you put some time in it. The problem is that it’s a bit messy, trying to to be a tablet like OS and serving “classic” apps at the same time. To make it less messy they’ll just add stuff making it more messy.
Smart people can figure out how to live and work with Windows 8, but the masses will have more trouble with this. They are used to the way Windows has been since 1995.
But for them there’s still Windows 7. Maybe Microsoft should admit defeat and go back to classic with Windows 9 or figure out a way to be both Metro and Classic in the same OS.
I don’t think Windows will go away soon. Almost everybody uses Microsoft Windows, almost everybody uses Microsoft Office. People need to stop both for both to go away and I don’t think that will happen, because they won’t leave Windows/Office in large numbers and if they do so in small numbers they’ll come back sooner or later as the rest is still on Windows/Office.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft Office sales is in decline for the home. Just like Microsoft Windows sales for the home is probably in decline for some time now.
And also, even Microsoft is trying to get people to use Office 365. Which isn’t tied to Windows.
If only there was something else like Steam OS to get people from Windows to Linux for gaming.
Edited 2014-01-13 13:34 UTC
I don’t know anybody who ever bought Windows or Office.
It either came with the computer, provided by the employer or it was a “free” edition from some nephew.
Businesses buy Windows/Office, people buy PCs (but doing less and less).
I did.
I think you’ll find that outside of the tech-crowd, most people generally want to do the right thing and do voluntarily buy Office for their home computers, even if only at the prompting of a salesperson when they’re buying their PC. Often it will be the very inexpensive Home and Student, but still, they do buy a real copy.
As an aside, Microsoft have really stepped up their antipiracy efforts over the years. It’s now harder to give copies to all of your friends, as activation is now required even for many corporate SKUs. In addition, users who unwittingly had pirated software installed (by the proverbial nephew) get notified as soon as the key is blacklisted – and from memory the save functionality goes away as well – which prompts them to go out and buy a genuine copy.
I did, Office 2000. Still using it too.
I did it too. Windows XP professional, 7 and Office 2003 and 2007, even though I run most of the time on Linux and really like LibreOffice.
Office 365 is mostly just “the latest office” (currently 2013) + some SkyDrive and Skype and office mobile/webapps (that you can get differently anyway). The whole point of Office 365 is that it is a cheap purchase that you have to keep buying year after year.
I have noticed around me that several people that never bought Office before now start buying it in Office 365. So I would say that Office 365 is making Office at home more popular than before.
I also see that people are starting to buy new laptops/ultrabooks/convertibles with Windows 8.1 on it. For the last year none of my friends asked me for advice, but in the last 2 months 5 of them did. All of them bought a machine that is roughly 1000 Euro and 4 of them have touch. None of them bought the same hardware! Anecdotal? sure, but I don’t think pc’s are in as much trouble as people hear they are. Most people that bought a tablet like it and use it a lot, but all of them still have a pc/laptop as well and now want a new machine with an SSD, touch and “apps” on it
Microsoft very cleverly made the iOS and Android Office apps subscription-only (Windows Phone has Office Mobile included in the base product). I think that this is a major driver of Office 365 sales.
That’s my experience as well, and the numbers (cited in my mammoth post above) suggest that tablets are largely companion rather than primary devices. The more interesting question is whether there will still be a lot of demand for Windows 7 on new hardware, or whether 8.1 will start to bring over the waverers. My guess here is that the outcome will differ depending on the generation: younger people with smartphone and tablet experience will start gravitating towards 8.1, while older people with less technical proficiency and/or who being forcibly kicked off XP (which is going EOL in April) will probably stick to Windows 7.
Truth be told I use Windows machines on much rarer occasions today and it’s a steady trend as the version number rises. I’m still inherently tied to Windows world data formats, but that’s my archive. My new data plays fine across platforms.
What happened? Paul Allen and Bill Gates perpetuated a myth that Windows can never be replaced. It wasn’t true. It’s no longer even accepted as mainstream. And with Win8 pushing the average Joe away, it’s dangerous close to being a lie.
Paul Allen? Whaaa?
Sadly it doesn’t change the fact that certain business software such as Sage Accounts only runs on Windows, and with virtually every accountant in the UK recommending or insisting on Sage being used, it’s probably enough to keep them going for a very long time as it won’t be the only case!
As a side note, it did amuse me when I visited a Mac dealer recently, who admitted they used Sage via Parallels because there is no native version for Mac!
That’s the entire reason the company I work for hasn’t switched to Macs yet, though our irreplaceable app is Quickbooks Enterprise. All of the big wigs in the company are Apple devotees; they all use Macs, iPads, and iPhones at home. One long-time, influential employee is extremely vocal in her desire to use a Mac at work. As the only IT staff, I’d certainly be up for it; it would greatly simplify my job.
Unfortunately, there is no Quickbooks Enterprise for OS X, and likely never will be. I’ve brought up Parallels to the bosses, but the added cost of that software, the Windows licenses, and the price of Apple hardware combined keeps us on Windows machines for the foreseeable future. Interestingly, on the server side Quickbooks is compatible with Linux, though it’s Intuit’s devotion to Windows for the client (likely due to the stagnant and bloated code base, but that’s just a guess based on the poor performance of the client) that will keep it off of Macs. Rewriting/porting such a behemoth would be a massive undertaking, and most companies using Quickbooks are likely already Windows-only anyway.
Does QB Enterprise work on CrossOver Mac? According to WineHQ QBEv14 crashes on launch but it’s worth keeping your eye on IMHO.
That’s the version we use, and nothing short of a VM running Windows would suffice, as far as I’m concerned. As buggy, bloated and slow as Quickbooks is in its native environment, I shudder at the thought of supporting it on Wine. Not to mention our support contract with Intuit wouldn’t cover it (I administer the machines but I lean on Intuit when their bugs pop up). We could probably get away with VMs, but if they ever got wind we weren’t running actual Windows in some fashion they likely wouldn’t even talk to us.
The other option is something like 2X, where the app literally runs on a Windows Server, and is piped to clients over the network. If you can believe this the folks at Canonical appear to use this method to run Microsoft Office on Ubuntu (I noticed it in their Edge promos).
Why is it I feel like taking a nap every time I read about Windows news?
-Hack
It might be Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. You should see a doctor.
I mean seriously.
Unless you’re playing games, why would you use Windows?
Even if you are in the computer industry, why would you not work on LINUX when the challenges are so much more grandeous and much more satisfying knowing your are contributing to technology on such a basic level?
So much less frustration because everything is open and can be identified as either a problem or a solution and you can intervene personally to either improve your technology for your users and business.
Windows prevents any of that from happening.
Why the hell would you use Windows and compete in the industry with those sorts of restrictions that your competitors using LINUX do not have?
-Hack
Edited 2014-01-13 21:04 UTC
Because time and time again Linux on the desktop tends to be a buggy, incomplete mess and not all the most important stuff are available for it or the alternatives are not up to the scratch?
It’s a great OS and all, especially on servers, but it’s not a fucking magic bullet and doesn’t work for everyone.
Please, do not spread falsehoods.
I said on this thread, that there is a need for Windows, and using Windows only makes perfect sense, not because Linux desktop is an incomplete mess.
I also install Ubuntu and use wine to run MS Office.
No, its also great on desktop.
How can my personal experience be a falsehood?
Well, that is your opinion. My own opinion is that it isn’t all that great on the desktop. Suppose we’ll just have to agree to disagree here.
You must be joking…as a server it gets it done, but Linux is fragmented garbage on the desktop. Bugs and missing basic features in practically every window manager out there…and X LOLOL That is why no one uses it on the desktop even after years development. I tried Linux Mint again last month, I must be a glutton for punishment…what a waste of time. Every time I think that there might be a chance for Linux on the desktop, I try it again and what a complete let down. After trying tens of distributions, all lame. I just don’t get it I guess. Great if you want to run FireFox and just OK for running LibreOffice, other than that what is the point? Libre runs better on Windows. What applications are worth running on a Linux desktop besides that? Nothing that is not available on other platforms:
https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/537692-what-are-the-best-10-li…
And Yes, it was drivers in Vista that gave average users headaches. Vista turned into 7 and all of the sudden 7 is the new XP.
Edited 2014-01-14 06:13 UTC
LOL. How history keeps repeating, now its the turn of the windows zealots to pretend their preferred OS is somehow flawless.
Desktop Linux is a very hit and miss proposition I think. If you have supported hardware, and you are OK with LibreOffice and Thunderbird (e.g. you don’t need VB macros) then it can work fairly well. If you have the misfortune to be using poorly supported hardware – especially in terms of the corporate/enterprise/LTS releases, which usually have older drivers than the bleeding edge distros – or can’t cope with LibreOffice (e.g. because of poor OOXML compatibility) then things become much more complicated.
LibreOffice has very good OOXML compatibility.
http://www.libreoffice.org/home/Discover#interoperability
The compatibility area that is lacking is that MS Office has exceptionally poor OpenDocument capabilities. This is a shortcoming of MS Office, not of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice does have some issues with VBA compatibility … it is not non-existant but it isn’t as good as other areas which have great compatibility.
PCWorld Review: LibreOffice 4 liberates you from Microsoft Office
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2042552/review-libreoffice-4-liberat…
Edited 2014-01-14 08:31 UTC
Both office suites have comparatively poor compatibility for the primary formats of the other. I always advise users of LibreOffice to use the 97-2003 filters instead of OOXML because compatibility for them is outstanding by comparison.
The thing about being the undisputed market leader [Office] is that, however much everyone else might complain about it, the onus is on those others to support your formats, not the reverse.
I strongly disagree. LibreOffice has excellent compatibility for MSOffice formats whereas MSOffice has abysmal compatibility for the OpenDocument formats.
I submit as evidence this snapshot from my Linux Mint Petra KDE desktop:
http://i.imgur.com/8wIPVLY.png
On the left is Okular (PDF viewer) showing a PDF of MSOffice output of a .docx test document.
On the right is LibreOffice Writer Version: 4.1.3.2 with the actual .docx test document loaded.
Note that this is a Linux desktop which does not have proprietary MS fonts (such as Cambria) installed, but rather the Calibri/Cambria replacements Carlito/Caladea (metric equivalent fonts) are displayed instead.
OK, so here are the details for my sweeping generalisation from before.
LibreOffice has two distinct OOXML filters: load and save. The load filter has been extensively tested (like you just did there) and works pretty well, except for PPTX which I’ll get to in a moment. But saving is another matter, particularly in Writer. If you load a complex document, especially one with fancy tables, and then make some changes and save it, LO will not infrequently bugger up the formatting; close the doc down and open it up again and you’ll see the problems.
In terms of PowerPoint files (binary and OOXML) Microsoft has added boatloads of features into PowerPoint since the 2003 version, and LibreOffice doesn’t handle many of them well yet – particularly animations and multimedia.
My advice to clients looking to evaluate LibreOffice is that if they regularly collaborate on documents with external parties who are using Microsoft Office, particularly PowerPoint presentations, they should think very carefully before ditching MS Office.
Edited 2014-01-15 15:02 UTC
That makes sense for someone whose company uses GNU/Linux regularly, like Google, but most companies (especially older ones) run Windows, and there’s no getting around it. As I said above, we can’t move to Macs because of proprietary software. I do use GNU/Linux at my test bench, in fact there are some tasks I can’t complete easily without it. But the corporate world at large is Windows, for the foreseeable future.
Also, I play as many games on GNU/Linux as I do on Windows, thank you very much!
A person can easily rebuttal with `why would you use Linux unless you’re only running a server`?
You already describe Linux challenges are being more grandiose. People tend to want their computer experience to be simple & painless, not frustrating & difficult.
I don’t know why you view using Linux as “contributing to technology”, or why using Linux is somehow more satisfying in general. If I had to take a tally, I see more complaining from Linux desktop users than their Windows counterparts. That suggests the more satisfying of the two is generally Windows, not Linux.
[/q]So much less frustration because everything is open and can be identified as either a problem or a solution and you can intervene personally to either improve your technology for your users and business. [/q]
Huge mistake on your part thinking that open source software causes less frustration. Linux experiences plenty of breakage & regression on a regular basis. So much in fact that I often see old versions being recommended to users if they’re looking for stability & a less problematic system.
Further you point out that the user can be part of the solution to the mess. That’s terrific, real simple to do in theory, but the truth is reality tells a much different story. Linux devs are in constant disagreement over coding style, design, implication, etc etc etc. These are the people who are supposed to be at the forefront of Linux advancement and they have difficulty amongst themselves. Do you think Joe Blow from nowhere is going to pop up, submit his patches, and they’re just merged by default? Often times I see those guys asked to make tons of changes or take a completely different approach. Or their stuff is rejected flat out. So much for fun in Linux dev.
Oh any btw, are you under the impression tons of Linux users are 1) coders, who 2) have the necessary knowledge & experience to contribute worth-while code? Nope. And Linux is not where everyone is welcome and holding hands. If anything the open source nature of Linux causes just as much, if not more, arguing than if it were closed.
Windows doesn’t prevent people from writing their own drivers, applications, games, etc. Aside of altering the kernel, what do you think Windows prevents?
I always get a kick when people try to sell Linux as the os of rainbows & unicorns. This magical os where everything is great and everybody welcomes you with open arms. The truth is Linux has many of the people problems that Windows does. Its’ open source nature can be as much of a drawback as it can be freeing. Linux and Windows have far more in common than the fanboys of either are typically willing to admit.
So “why the hell would you use Windows”? Because generally speaking it’s solid and fulfills users needs & wants. Maybe you’ll respond by saying the exact same thing about Linux. People who aren’t shackled by their own bias & ignorance realize both have a lot to offer, and neither hands-down shits all over the other.
For the record, I use both on a daily basis and in a capacity that each is good at. I don’t “love” one more than the other. To me they’re just tools that I use for different purposes, that’s all. I don’t get emotionally attached to software, or companies, or distros, or any of that.
I too use and maintain both.
Linux is far less frustrating than Windows, and far easier to use, and easier and much quicker to maintain, install new apps, update, and upgrade.
Edited 2014-01-14 02:20 UTC
Debatable at best. I use both and think it is the other way around. Your personal experience isn’t the same as everyone else.
On the upgrade front, apart from download time (which happens in the background), Windows takes 20 minute to update. The fedup tool on fedora took 35 minutes. Most applications take care of themselves, and I don’t even notice Windows update happening these days, unless it is an OS update.
But hey you never listen to anyone but yourself.
Only a handful of few people among millions of businesses worldwide would care to improve the OS in which their application was running.
We use Windows because there is a need of Microsoft Office, and inhouse/legacy software written for Windows and will run only on Windows.
To be fair, for core use cases [basic productivity and web/email tasks & no Windows-specific software] going to a Mac is feasible, or even to some sort of Linux with LibreOffice if your starting point is Office 97-2003. Google rolls their own Ubuntu desktop for exactly this sort of user, in addition to developer types. Only people who actually need Windows software get Windows workstations if I recall correctly.
The problem for desktop Linux adoption, as distinct from Apple, is not so much feature parity (compared with an XP/Office 2003 era starting point), but rather that companies with limited internal support resources – that’s all small and medium businesses, and many larger ones too – struggle to make the switch because there’s very little training available for end users or the internal I.T. staff who have to support them. It’s not like you can send your less savvy workers away for a few days to do a refresher course like you can with Microsoft Office, and pretty much any new employee who walks through the door will have to be retrained as they will undoubtedly have come from a Microsoft background. Unless you’re the size of Google and can afford to create your own training, using some of the savings made on licensing costs, that’s pretty much the end of the discussion in most instances.
Having said that, if an SME has stable access to I.T. personnel who know desktop Linux, and particularly LibreOffice, well, and is also are blessed with staff who have good experience with non-Microsoft platforms like Android or iDevices, the idea of evaluating desktop Linux can still make sense. You’ve got users who are already comfortable with non-MS platforms and apps, and you’ve got support people to help get them used to LibreOffice & Thunderbird etc. In cases like that it’s worth crunching the numbers, running a pilot, and seeing what comes out the other end.