JorgeA

And in a separate article, Thurrott makes the intriguing argument that, in one important respect, Microsoft did not copy Apple enough: --JorgeA

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Paul Thurrott critiques the Windows 8 UI and proposes giving users the choice to boot directly to the desktop!!!

Consider it done (mentioning this tracking in the Start Menu Replacements thread). I visited Pokki's blog after seeing the graphic in Neowin reporting "30 Start Menu replacements 30 days after launch of Windows 8." I was hoping to find either more choices to add to the MSFN list, or maybe a mention of our list there. The most interesting datapoint was the graph showing a threefold increase in Google searches for "Windows 8 Start Menu" in the weeks after Win8's launch. --JorgeA

CharlotteTheHarlot links us to the following story (thanks!): Would be interesting to know how some of the other Start Menu replacements are doing in terms of downloads/sales. Clearly, there is significant demand out there for this sort of thing. However, the content of the article strongly suggests that Pokki is tracking how people use their program (and not simply the number of times it's downloaded), so you may want to keep that in mind when considering this particular Start Menu replacement. --JorgeA

Your French is excused, thanks to the substance of the message! --JorgeA

Great analysis, jaclaz -- you picked apart the report very well. I rushed through reading it and, although I knew there was something about it that bothered me, I couldn't put my finger on it. You identified the problem areas. Meanwhile, more bad news for the Surface RT: Microsoft Surface Demand Weak Vs. Apple iPad, Others --JorgeA

In-app Advertising To Hit $10 Billion By 2016: Informa Gosh, do you guys think that enthusiasts of the Metro UI will be getting bombarded by advertising right on their monitors as they're trying to get serious things done? Oh, wait -- the Metro interface isn't for getting serious things done, it's designed to facilitate trivial pursuits. Sorry about that, never mind... --JorgeA

I was going to download this report to read on my Vista PC, but then I saw this -- -- and realized that my PC didn't meet Microsoft's requirements for the download, so I didn't go any further. --JorgeA

Wow, the "desire" to have a Surface dropped from 45 percent to 21 percent after customers learned the device's price and specs. A good comment posted on that page, that clearly explains the how and why of the drop in interest in the Surface RT: And the next commenter writes of the Surface Pro: Bingo. Possibly the most insightful comment: --JorgeA

The commenter "pforbes" said the following: Does anybody know what he's talking about? --JorgeA

Here's a nice writeup about one of the leading choices on the list, created by an MSFNer. --JorgeA P.S. I just noticed that CharlotteTheHarlot linked to the article above over in the "Windows 7 explorer for Windows 8" thread.

Wow, thanks for the info. Linux fans like to boast of their favorite OS's stability, but I wonder how many of them can match this performance. --JorgeA

Bummer! Consider it done. But, thanks for reporting it, and indeed for continuing to review the list info. No doubt there are many visitors and lurkers out there who also appreciate it! --JorgeA

That is not about BSOD's (which could be an actual measure of the stability of the OS) they are about application crashes that are very likely to be associated to the actual application (and NOT to the OS in which they run). jaclaz jaclaz, Check out the last row of items above the one labeled "Most Popular PC Models." That's the one I was referring to. Yes, the Soluto webpage (as well as the article that originally linked to it) mentions application crashes, but Soluto also mentions bluescreens, and that's the item I commented on because the numbers don't jibe with my experience, so it got me wondering just how accurate/valid any of their stats might be. But that's a good point, that application crashes don't necessarily have anything to do with the OS. It's another reason to wonder about the value of Soluto's figures. The Dan Castellaneta quote reminds me, for no good reason , of the old joke about the public-opinion pollster who comes to the next house. He knocks on the door, and when the owner opens it... "Hello, we are conducting an opinion survey. What do you think about the level of ignorance and apathy among the public today?" "I don't know, and I don't care!!" --JorgeA

While reading the ZDNet post discussed above, I came across another ZDNet item about Windows 8 which led to this Web page. I'm not sure about the significance of these statistics. My Vista, which is supposed to be such a bad and unstable OS and isn't even listed on Soluto's page, doesn't BSOD 0.33 or even 0.28 times a month. More like 0.08 times/month (once a year, if that). And I have a ton of stuff loaded on my PC. --JorgeA

That's pretty funny!! --JorgeA

Here's the original blog posting. The guy sure can turn a phrase: In terms of Windows 8, the following is an important point he makes that we haven't paid a lot of attention to: He brings up the usage case where you want to get information about how a Metro app works, so you launch the browser -- but as a result the app disappears and you can't view it at the same time as the information/instructions that you found via the browser, so that you can follow what they're talking about. I found a convoluted way to accomplish this, although it's far from ideal: Go into Metro, open the app, then limit it to the one-third size. Then bring up the Start Screen, open IE, and do your search. This if far from ideal because either the minimized app will show up in type so tiny that you can't read it, or everything will be so scrunched together in the one-third view as to render it unusable. (I tried this with the music app beta signup and then IE in the Consumer Preview, which is what I have loaded on that PC at the moment. With the beta signup minimized (or whatever they call that action), the text appeared in a narrow strip and the buttons to Accept or Cancel were nowhere to be seen. Don't know if this has improved in the RP and RTM, but to judge from the Harvard prof's writing, I would guess that it hasn't.) You would have to keep resizing each of the respective apps in turn as you proceed through the instructions. PITA. Of course, in that tired old legacy Desktop mode, it's not a problem keeping two windows of whatever size you need, open and in view and at a readable size at the same time. --JorgeA

Back in the spring, I'd intended to buy some MSFT stock over the summer, but my terminal procrastination meant that I never did get around to buying it. Now I'm glad. I'd intended to buy MSFT because I'd noticed that the last two (maybe three) times that they introduced a new OS, the price spiked up a few weeks before launch, and even though I disliked Win8 the greedy part of me wanted to get in on the action. I was going to buy no less than two months before, in late August. (May as well try to get something out of this abomination, was how I rationalized it.) As it turned out, when the time came for the spike to occur, it never did and so I hesitated, hoping to see some sign of life in the price -- which has yet to manifest. (We do have a little MSFT indirectly as one bit part of a technology index fund. But we don't have a share in the company as such.) And if I'd actually gotten around to buying, I'd be among the shareholders pushing to replace the current management. I sure hope that there's a strong owner revolt in the works to do just that. --JorgeA

Yesterday I went back into the Windows 8 Developer Preview to try (for the first time in months) some of the "live tiles" available in that early version, and the experience prompted an insight. None of the three tiles that I tried -- weather, stocks, and Picstream -- worked any longer. You might say they were "dead" tiles. They were stuck at whatever information they happened to have the last time they worked. That got me to thinking again about this Cloud thing: it strongly enhances the user's status as a dependent with respect to providers, and it decreases the user's control over his/her content. As things still stand today, we have complete control over our content, and as much security of possession over our files as the number of backups we care to make of them. If CyberLink goes out of business, for example, I can still access and play my videos and MP3s on its PowerDVD player right on my PC or on any other electronic machine that I can convert and copy to. I might not get updates to the software, but the software still works and I don't need to start looking for an alternative to play these files. But let's say that one day the Cloud visionaries' dreams are realized and all our stuff comes to be stored online. No more personal storage; external HDDs and locally installed software are things of the past, viewed with derision as hopelessly passé by the hip and Modern. Three-letter agencies might even view with suspicion the desire to keep one's documents out of their benevolent reach. The Windows 8 model has won out and we are all on 32GB tablets as the bottom dropped out of desktop PC sales and they're no longer being made, except perhaps for $10,000 limited-edition systems for government offices and large companies. At that point, if (say) Microsoft goes rogue and starts charging extortionate prices to use its Office 365 service, or demanding onerous conditions for me to access my Office files, I am SOL. If the website that kept all my songs and movies and photos suddenly goes 404, I am SOL. Today, no matter what happens with the people who made the software we use, we can still create and edit documents in (say) Office 2003/2007/2010 and store them on our own PCs, thank you. And we can still play videos and music files on locally installed software. But once we start needing online accounts to get at our stuff, then we are no longer in control of our own possessions -- indeed, it's an open question as to whether we actually even physically "possess" them anymore. One ray of hope: that stock market live tile, it's frozen on a day and an hour last spring when the price of a share of MSFT stock was $31.44. Now, six weeks after the introduction of Windows 8 and the Surface RT, It closed Friday at $26.81. --JorgeA

Yeah, it does look pretty neat. I'll dig a little deeper. Another excuse to spend a couple more hours on the computer. --JorgeA

This: Great -- live bubbles instead of live tiles. Why do people keep trying to fix what's not broken? Or maybe the motivation is, "Keep fixing it till it breaks." --JorgeA

As I was watching the video, I was thinking to myself, "what would I ever use this for??" While the technology looks pretty neat, the range of uses for this device seems awfully limited. Ultimately, technology has to be used for something, and there isn't enough "something" there. I did read the CNET article, and when it mentioned writers drafting documents and writing down ideas on this thingy, my reaction was -- umm, that's what I have MS Word (and OneNote) for. Microsoft made the right call in killing this thing, IMHO. If only they'd opted to give Windows 8 users the choice of interface depending on their needs and the specific device they're on, instead of herding everybody into Metro, the conversation in this thread (as in so many other places) would have gone very differently. --JorgeA

Great find, dencorso. I can hardly wait to read this, but it's getting late even for me. The interview looks really promising, elaborating on the article that Nielsen wrote recently and which (I think) was linked to in this thread a few days ago. This is the first thing I'll look at in the morning! --JorgeA

Thanks, Andre. First I had to get a handle on what Rainmeter is, but now I can put this one on the list. --JorgeA

sounds to me as being condescending and/or presumptuous. You read the sentence correctly. It's like one of those hybrid automobiles that has the big electric battery in the rear taking up most of the trunk space, and the auto manufacturer telling you that "you'll still have space for your groceries, handyman projects, or Christmas presents." Basically, this is how they're pitching the situation: You'll still have storage space!* (*) Just not as much space as you might expect. An excellent analogy, IMHO. --JorgeA