JorgeA

And elsewhere ... Study suggests majority of Windows 8 users ignore Metro apps ( TechSpot 2013-05-22 ) More than half of Windows 8 users just treat it like Windows 7. Almost nobody using Windows Store apps, survey finds ( UK Register 2013-05-22 ) Quite a beating the MetroTards are taking in the comments, even at NeoWin. Probably a bit surprising to them. Looks like I'm not the only one who took Soluto's report and ran with it. Nice quote at the end of the article in the second link above: --JorgeA

Paul Thurrott looks into his crystal ball: Azure Is the Future of Microsoft Anybody who hasn't slept through the last couple of years will be aware of the widespread and growing problem of enterprise online security. And in particular Microsoft's record on privacy is, shall we say, as solid as a block of Swiss cheese. Not to mention their admitted active cooperation with official snoops. If I were a CEO, I'd fire any IT manager who suggested moving the company's data to a server controlled by anybody other than us, much less Microsoft. In a related post, Paul did offer the following insight about Windows 8 sales: --JorgeA

Latest from Neowin: Study: 60% of Windows 8 desktop users launch a Modern app less than once a day Note that surprisingly (and perhaps tellingly) the percentage of touch-enabled laptop users launching a Metro app less than once a day is virtually the same as the percentage of non-touch laptop users who launch Metro apps less than once a day. In other words, having "touch" hasn't made a great deal of difference in the proportion of customers using Metro apps. There's just not much point to touch, or to Metro. (Touch-enabled users launch 2.22 Metro apps per day on average, compared to 1.51 Metro apps/day for non-touch laptop users.) Here's the link to the original report (the report you see may change over time), and a quote from it: The dilemma is only apparent, of course. The solution is to offer the user a choice of UI, either upon installation or at will, instead of trying to foist Metro on everyone willy-nilly. If it's as wonderful, easy, and appealing as its fans claim, then there should be no problem building an audience for it. If not, then -- well, the market will have spoken. Let it speak for itself. --JorgeA

+1

Doubtless it has to do with their DRM/copy protection scheme. Sounds like it's impossible to reinstall the system on a replacement HDD, which means that if the original drive fails, then you're SOL. Right? Lovely system they're coming up with. Imagine if Hasbro, Milton -Bradley or whoever had been able to prevent buyers of their games and toys from lending them to friends and family. That's what MSFT is trying to move people to. Sheez. --JorgeA P.S. I like these bits in the comments section: I see that somebody asked my obvious question:

Definitely: http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/21/4352596/the-xbox-one-is-always-listening For a firm established since 1975, i.e. 38 (thirty-eight) years ago, it is good to know that they had privacy as a top priority for more than ten years, the issue is whether they are last ten years or so or from 1975 to 1985.... jaclaz Given that they snoop into customers' SkyDrive contents and that they're helping New York City to set up a city-wide network of surveillance cameras, those "ten years of experience" in privacy must've been 1975 to 1985. Certainly not anytime recently! :angrym: Then again, maybe to them "privacy" actually means being constantly watched and monitored, just as in '1984' the slogan was that "Freeedom is Slavery." --JorgeA

Great catch, about Minitrue being in a pyramid-shaped building! I don't know which possibility is more disturbing: that the Microsoft folks are clueless and oblivious to all these parallels to '1984'... or that they're well aware of them. --JorgeA

Surprisingly only one MetroTurd in the comments section... Reminds me of the TV commercial about 12-14 years ago, where the webmaster at the office was showing off how to make a little globe spin on the company's site, and the boss asked something like if he could link up the sales orders with the inventory database, and the web whiz shook his head and answered, "I don't know how to do that..." As @Formfiller says, this cyclist's blog is a good example of a "normal" user's perspective on Win8. --JorgeA

That was a good follow-up to last week's devastating analysis of the true state of Win8 sales. Here's a good set of observations: One wonders if and when Microsoft will relent on Windows 8, as they did with Vista. Another really good excerpt -- Browsing around The Register's site I found this article suggesting that Microsoft kill Metro in Win8 and focus instead on developing their phone OS for tablets: The Metro experiment is dead: Time to unleash Windows Phone+ --JorgeA

Less than a month ago, we reported that Hewlett-Packard had introduced a Chromebook, suggesting a crack in their formerly solid comitment to Windows machines. The crack seems to be widening: H-P has now come out with an Android tablet. I guess they're hedging their bets. --JorgeA

What should really worry them is that WP8 has been out for over six months and they either still can't / just barely pass Blackberry which just got released at the end of Q1 ( and in the USA later still ). That is the big story IMHO. I think there is gonna be a back and forth this year for 3rd place but it won't matter in the long run because they both will eventually have Linux nipping at their heels within a year. China is going into it and I suspect this is the end-of-the-line for WP. Just a hunch. If WP8 goes down, it knocks out one of the legs of the strategy -- to ultimately standardize the device interfaces -- that supposedly motivated the big Metro push in Win8 (the other two legs being tablets and PCs). With one less type of device to sell apps for, from a developer's viewpoint it arguably makes writing Windows apps that much less attractive. --JorgeA

( image source ) Ergonomics. Humanity is doomed. More examples at the article too. "Ergonomics" is right! Can you imagine sitting hunched over that screen for more than ten minutes at a time? Or if not hunched over, then hyperextending the back of your neck to look down at the screen. Maybe the idea for this furniture was thought up by a chiropractor... No matter how you cut it, "touch" doesn't work well on anything that's not held in your hand and not more than a bent arm's length from your nose. --JorgeA

So, it's yet another retread in Win8, like the tiles and the flat interface. *sigh* --JorgeA

Shocker: Thurrott uses Start Menu replacement, calls for Microsoft breakup In a discussion of how to fix Microsoft and Windows 8 (starting at about 24:50), Paul Thurrott acknowledges that using the new OS on a desktop is "not necessarily optimal." A few minutes later (31:00) he describes the annoyances of the Windows 8 pop-ups interrupting his work flow: At that point Mary Jo Foley brings up Stardock's ModernMix, which enables the user to run Metro apps on the desktop, to pin them to the Taskbar, and to actually close them. After pointing out the absurdities of using the touch-oriented interface on a 27" screen, Thurrott and Leo Laporte have the following exchange (33:51): [emphasis added]Later on in the program (55:24), Thurrott endorses the idea (eloquently expressed by @Charlotte many times in this thread) of breaking Microsoft up into more specialized entities: Had this been the case all along, one doubts that "enterprise Microsoft" would have been so keen on wrecking the Windows UI with the Metro interface oriented toward casual users. If it were broken up tomorrow, would it root out Metro to salvage its core market? --JorgeA

Odd. Lenovo's page for Windows 8 support still lists the QuickLaunch button, but when you click on the link, the result says that "the document is not available." A search on the Toshiba site for Desktop Assist yields nothing (literally a blank page for me). We'll remove both of these. Too bad. --JorgeA

Wow Laurence, thank you -- you saved me a ton of work!! I wish there were an official way to give you Kudos, as in some forums. Yes, we sensibly hope that an updated product will mean improvements. We shall see. The drum's rolling... Great to hear from you again! All the best to you too. --JorgeA

I looked at the screenshots for Porteus and I have to say that it looks very attractive. Even the LXDE that they show sports a convex taskbar, which is one of my favorite Vista features. Will give this a whirl off a Live CD. I notice that they say that if you want to install the OS on a hard drive, they recommend installing full-blown Slackware instead. But like you said, this should be good enough to get a feel for the OS. Got a chance to try Porteus (x64 with KDE), and the desktop is a thing of beauty. Dare I say that "Porteus is gorgeous"...? (Sorry, couldn't resist that one.) If and when I make the switch to Linux, I'll definitely go for a flavor with KDE. --JorgeA

There is one even worse called Starter Edition. See the table here. The post-XP releases really were the penultimate example of MicroMarketing! Just unbelievable. Yeah, it's just that it hit me that what MSFT is trying to sell everyone on these days, is in many ways equivalent to the plain-Jane, feature-limited edition of their previous Windows version. --JorgeA

... Microsoft is far above such practices and mismanagements however. (Also a comment on the Google cloud angle) I wonder if the people who put together this "whymicrosoft" website even realize that the pot is calling the kettle black? Or maybe they did, and don't care because it's all part of a "perception" campaign. Just make the other guys look bad, and let them worry about trying to make you look bad in return. If I were in charge at Google, I'd be having such a ball blasting Microsoft out of the water for their hypocritical campaigns. --JorgeA

Shhh, quiet -- you don't want to be making too much sense! --JorgeA

Windows 8 in action! That was a great description of a real-life use scenario, in contrast to the general, ivory-tower claims that Win8 apologists will throw at you without thinking how it actually works in practice. --JorgeA

Nice find! With "Blue" coming up, I didn't think anybody else would take a chance on creating a Start Menu that may turn out not to work in just a few months' time. I'll add it to the list. Next on tap will be to review all the existing links and fix or clean them up. --JorgeA

While looking for something else, I came across the following paragraph in the book Windows 7 Inside Out (Microsoft Press, 2010, p. 7): [color added for emphasis]A fuller discussion of this edition on p. 950 says, among other things, that Help me out here. Where have I heard about a version of Windows that doesn't support Aero, can't play DVDs natively, and is lacking WMC? So one may not be far wrong to say that Win8 is little more than Win7 HB with a few behind-the-scenes functional innovations and a tablet interface tacked on. --JorgeA

On the other hand I can understand why the irony detector of lots of people is malfunctioning. Metrotards write this stuff (Dvorak letter) for real. When people start piling up the irony and sarcasm, as in the comments to Dvorak's post, it can get pretty hard to figure out what their actual views are. But if I'm reading them right, then while the writer of the first line you quoted above seems to be a Metrotard, the writer of the second one (who elsewhere was suggesting improvements to Win8) seems to have outsmarted himself in the attempt to be witty. Or maybe I'm the one who's not properly following the tangled thread... Myself, I prefer simple straight sarcasm, as in the following: --JorgeA

If Microsoft has to reach this deep to find somebody to defend them, then they really must be in trouble. An unrelated observation: Sounds like our Author could take up working for the government... --JorgeA