JorgeA

A good, brief overview of the challenges Microsoft and its Surface Pro are facing: Microsoft Surface Pro Tablet Prospects Iffy Replying to the post just above this one -- Great point! I hadn't thought of it that way, but now that you mention it, it makes total sense. --JorgeA

Another tepid review of the Surface Pro: Surface Pro: Even Microsofts own tablet cant solve Windows 8′s intrinsic flaws (emphasis added)--JorgeA

See my reply over in the "Deepr Impressions" thread... --JorgeA

@CharlotteTheHarlot: If I posted the following in the "Ways to get the Start Menu back" thread, I'd be violating my own rules, so I'm commenting on your latest post from there over here: It's dumbfounding (not to say disappointing, to borrow a word) how some folks seem to be incapable (to borrow another word) of understanding that "new" is not necessarily "better." Why should I "adapt" to something that I find worse? And what's this business about "adapting," anyway -- are we to be viewed as little more than machines (like the Roomba) with no particular preferences, and which mindlessly and unquestioningly "adapt" to whatever new circumstances are framed around us? --JorgeA

That's interesting. So, instead of creating something new or playing to his company's own strengths, Ballmer is lurching left and then right, trying to imitate other companies' successes. --JorgeA

"Happy" Windows 8 customers over at the H-P Support Forum: I discovered this while searching for indications that H-P might consent to UPgrading new Win8 systems to Win7 at the buyer's request. --JorgeA

I'm not sure if we've covered this topic on this thread already, but just in case, here goes -- another thing Windows 8 won't do that Windows 7 does: --JorgeA

Oh, that's weird. I wonder what the flaw is -- what the guy in the photo did to get the tablet to behave that way. Incidentally, I was back at my favorite electronics retailer again today, and once again (as usual since Windows 8 came out) the PC section was a ghost town. For the first time, I saw them displaying the Win8 Desktop on one computer, instead of that hideous Start Screen. It was the first laptop that customers would see as they approach the computer department. Maybe they're discovering that customers are NOT interested in Metro. I spent a few minutes exploring one laptop that interested me for a Windows 7 installation. In the barely five minutes that I stood there, a sales clerk and then the store manager came around to ask if they could be of assistance. (This was a new experience at that store, they must be very eager to make a PC sale.) I was tempted to suggest to the manager that, as an experiment, for one week they hide all those Metro start screens and show only the actual Desktops on their display models, and see what happens to their computer sales. But then I thought: why would I want to help sell Win8 systems?? --JorgeA

PC World reviews the Surface Pro: Microsoft Surface Pro hands-on impressions from CES After showering copious derision on the Surface RT (maybe predictions that ARM will take over the computing world are premature), the author reports that the 64GB Surface will sell for $900 and the 128GB version for $1000, which is in line with what we've heard before: Anybody care to hazard a guess? --JorgeA

@CharlotteTheHarlot @Formfiller Wow, that's quite a back-and-forth you've had today. My hat's off to you! Now I will go and read some of the links, and with any luck will have something substantial to add... --JorgeA

I saw that -- it's encouraging to learn that something like this is possible at all, even if this particular approach turns out to be limited and temporary as the reports suggest. You WILL use your PC as WE say!!! --JorgeA

The Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg tries installing Windows 8 on a pair of computers that meet Microsoft's stated hardware requirements. Here's what happened. The bottom line: --JorgeA

I don't view it as an "anti-capitalist" attitude as such, it's more like an "anti-serious user of any kind" attitude. The removal of scanning functionality would affect private capitalist businesses for sure, but also noncapitalistic charitable organizations and government agencies. Further, it would affect any private individual user who's motivated and advanced enough to make use of a scanner. So, personally I would count this as one more example of what looks like an ongoing campaign to cretinize Windows. (More polite verbs would be lobotomize, or cripple.) --JorgeA

@Formfiller has opened a new thread that provides what we may classify as another "Deeper Impression": Details: in Windows RT, that is. And yet, we've been told that RT (ARM) and the Metro interface are the wave of the Windows future. So, what gives? Is this yet another way in which Microsoft is sticking it to serious users? (I suggest you go back to that thread to comment.) We can't even say that it's "for the sake of Facebookers and other casual users," because having vs. not having scanner functionality makes no difference to them -- so why remove it? And even that would be less than true, because I know home users who do scan pictures and documents into their PCs for purposes of archiving and organizing. --JorgeA

What a magnificent, eloquent post -- all of it. I only quote the above so that readers know which one I'm talking about. Just to make it worthwhile for folks to return to this webpage because of my post, here's more bad news for Windows 8. And ponder the irony of this picture: --JorgeA

Excellent point! No doubt there are people who only want to do those sorts of things, and need only a simple machine. But IMO their number has been vastly overestimated. Or, more accurately, the proportion of people who actually use their computers for more complex tasks has been greatly UNDERestimated. And then there are those who only want to do simple tasks, but who don't want to shell out $499 for a simple machine (the Surface RT) when they can pay $329 for a full-fledged PC, or a similar amount for a non-Microsoft tablet that will do much the same stuff (for that much less money). --JorgeA

Finally, the real reasons for poor Windows 8 sales are starting to appear in analysts' reports: [emphasis added]--JorgeA

That is amazing. I feel like placing an order, just to verify that it's really running DOS. --JorgeA

That was fascinating reading, thanks very much for linking to it. It shows that Windows designers used to know how to conduct market research: by sitting down with users and interviewing them, not by gathering petabytes of meaningless, context-free "telemetry data." I was especially struck by two items regarding Windows 3.x: Which is why Windows 8 with its "Charms" and "hot corners" and "chrome-free interface" is such a ridiculous concept. There is a point to showing menus, folks! Count me as one of those users. Because I always maximized my programs in order to make full use of the real estate on my 15" CRT, I couldn't tell what other programs (if any) were open at the same time. I can't remember the number of times I ended up opening multiple instances of the same program. Which is why I welcomed the Taskbar when I first came across it in Windows 98: it was an unquestionable improvement in usability. And which shows that us Win8 "haters" are not opposed to change, as such -- we are opposed only to change that makes things worse. "New" might be "better," but new is not necessarily better. The folks at Microsoft used to understand that distinction: --JorgeA

December reports are in, and Windows 8 share is at 1.72% or 1.80% (take your pick). Complaints from vendors about slow sales are spreading (we saw the remarkable graph a few posts upthread): [emphasis added]Initial estimates for those Surface RT sales came in shortly after that article, and buyers aren't exactly stampeding into the stores -- just 500-600K units in the last quarter. Even sales performance hopes for the Surface Pro (qualified by a lot of ifs and coulds) are hardly likely to get Steve Jobs turning in his grave. --JorgeA

Huh, very interesting. Maybe there IS a way after all! Thanks very much. --JorgeA

If there is a way, I haven't found it in my Web searches. I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and re-enter the account settings by hand. I'll wait for the next long weekend. --JorgeA P.S. to answer your question, no -- I don't have anything special. Just an e-mail address from my ISP and then Outlook to download and store the e-mails. I'm not too keen on leaving e-mail indefinitely on a server somewhere, it could go POOF in the blink of an eye.

Fantastic commentary Charlotte, pulling together items from a variety of sources over time. If this guy really did work on Longhorn, and he's correct that even back then the idea was to make the UI recede into the background, then the folks in Redmond have been even more clueless for far longer than I had imagined. It tells me that they simply don't get it. "Doing work" and "Metro" cannot appear in the same sentence, except as contrasting/contrary concepts. A chrome-free UI is preferable if you want to watch TV. But if you are trying to get work done, then you must interact with your software in order to process the information that you're working with. In this case it's better to have menus and commands immediately visible so that you can use them, instead of poking around trying to remember where they hide because some fool thought you'd be better off without seeing them. Having to start discovering commands in the midst of intense work on a file constitutes a much more serious interruption of the workflow than having them quietly sitting ready around the margins of our consciousness. --JorgeA

Great point! You're right, he did avoid showing any decent images of the Vista/Win7 desktop which would have made the contrast immediately obvious. Sneaky. --JorgeA

Thanks, Andre. It looks pretty nice, too bad they didn't go with that look. --JorgeA