HalloweenDocument12

How dare you call me a douche? That was uncalled for! In any case, I do not accept that statistics equates to "educated guessing", at least not by the colloquial understanding of the colloquial expression, and I feel the field of study can and does demonstrates truth values to the degrees of confidence which the discipline ascribes. Being unique has its price. I appreciate your taking the time to explain your viewpoint.

Making a statement whose truth value cannot be evaluated to any reasonable degree is an invalid statement on the grounds of lack of basis. I feel that you changed your argument when you switched word usage to "fallible" at the end which isn't the same thing as "futile, impossible". Fallible implies a degree of confidence while your earlier arguments implied zero degree of confidence. You even said "more fallible" which means there are less fallible and, therefore, inherently more reliable, but you said that demonstration (to any degree) was impossible, which would seem to be a contradiction. Basically, you seem to be simultaneously advancing two contradicting arguments. 1. "Demonstrating is impossible." This would imply that there are no available tools to gauge popularity. 2. "Popularity exists, the way it is measured is fallible" This would imply there are tools to gauge popularity but with the caveat of suspect reliability.

So, in conclusion, demonstrating popularity is impossible, and no attempts should be made? Does that make a statement of popularity automatically invalid? Does this mean that popularity effectively doesn't exist, at least from an argumentation standpoint?

JorgeA's request was fair but was dismissed offhandedly: what is a better method of demonstrating popularity than Google results?

The Elop interview reminds me of a 60 Minutes interview with Howard Stringer, former Sony CEO. Looking it up, it looks like the interview was done in 2006, so before the iPhone. During the interview, Leslie Stahl whips out an iPod. Stringer doesn't throw it, but he looks like he wants to. After Leslie presses him a bit, Howard says "You can take iPod and beat us over the head with it, but it's only one product. And we have a thousand products. Apple has two or three." Sorry, can't find a clip of this. There is a 2 minute recap but it edits out all the Apple talk.

False dichotomy and too often repeated by 8tards. The point of having a huge number of apps is to increase the likelihood that one exists for whatever specific purpose. Attempting to "focus" on creating a smaller number of higher quality apps fails because a single entity doesn't have control over these disparate resources (separate companies) and consolidation reduces specialization and competition. I have "only" 117 installed at the moment according to the Programs dialog, but this doesn't count the stuff without installers and i'm reasonably good about pruning the list. One of my favorite features of Windows 7 is the "iconization" of the taskbar. The reason is that, with 16 GB RAM, I don't bother shutting things off. There are constantly 15-20 things running and probably 25-50 browser tabs going. In previous versions of Windows the Taskbar became practically unusable after about 7 open windows. Not applications: windows.

Yeah, who knew associating an email address with a local account would be an issue? How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking Well, I guess he would. Ouch.

This is always where I get stuck. What problem does Windows 8 solve? Sure I can get used to it, but why would I? What's in it for me? If I really wanted an app store experience, why wouldn't I use an iOS and/or Android device which I already own? In light of the bolded statement, Microsoft's market doesn't even make sense: they're targeting a segment who wants "apps" but hasn't bought into either of the mature ecosystems. And they charge more for a less developed experience. Even 80 year olds have iPads. The first time I heard the argument that we need to put up with this stuff because of how Microsoft wants things to be I was literally stunned. It's like my brain melted. Who the hell cares what Microsoft wants? Who are these people who do care? I know some are on payroll but some seem to be pro bono sycophants. My brain is melting again.

When I read this I thought of all the "Flash websites" that sprung up circa 1998-2000. The text was very small, not scalable, and not indexed by search engines. The layout was fixed and always shoved to the upper-left corner of the browser window. Sometimes sound would be unexpectedly loud, mouseovers over every element would generate sound, and the sounds would stack and combine into a crackling, distorted, speaker blowing mess. Still, despite all this, Flash websites were "the future" and HTML was all but dead. The more sane at the time proclaimed Flash as a companion or replacement for Java, to be used for games, novelties, and, later on, ads. I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the number of people who understand this motivation of Microsoft but fail to realize that by pulling the rug from their customers' feet Microsoft is risking exodus to competing products. Change is not inevitable when your product is a less developed version of what the competition offers. I think Microsoft of the 90s was scared that despite all their work that Windows 95 still might not be convincing over Macintosh and/or the previous interfaces (DOS and/or Windows 3), which while loathed by many was still profitable. This Microsoft is pretending competition doesn't exist, even though it is far more established in the target market. The story about people willingly using DOS for years is disingenuous. Almost everybody converted instantly because Windows 95 was such an upgrade. They had to because the Internet didn't really work with DOS, and even if the Internet wasn't of interest, Windows 95's ad-hoc networking was still superior to the unaffordable Netware on DOS. The problem was that it took years for new industry-specific software to be written so people were forced to stick with DOS for a keystone program, which ran in a real-mode window within Windows 95-98. People hated this at worst and tolerated it at best. Though Progman.exe and Fileman.exe were still around, no one used them and accepted Explorer as an upgrade over Windows 3.

What Microsoft has forgotten is that the kind of grassroots support seen during the NT 3.x-2000 days is basically required to move tech products at a large scale. The underground proliferation of NT helped immensely to legitimize XP. The release was botched both by OEMs, for underspeccing PCs, and Microsoft, for making XP take significantly more (at the time) resources than Windows 2000, which itself required significantly more resources than Windows 98. Still, nearly everyone in the tech sphere recognized NT as the future as far back as 1996 when NT 4 workstation was released. It was acknowledged that consumer hardware wasn't there yet and that NT lacked the hardware diversity of 9x but that in a few years 9x would be scrapped. Windows 2000 was supposed to be the unifying release but the 9x software compatibility guts weren't finished in time. In retrospect, this compatibility was rarely used. The end result was pushing back the 9x -> NT transition by about two years but it still happened because tech people "believed" in the product and recommended its use. The only people disagreeing were ABMers (anything but Microsoft) who were willfully ignorant about what NT offered. These people, to this day, insist that Windows is an application shell on top of a 16-bit DOS kernel.

The problem with services like Google Docs is it doesn't matter how "fast" your internet connection is when "fast" almost always means throughput. We need a revolution in latency improvement to resolve the issues, and, at a macro level, seeking and expecting improvements of this type isn't logical. It's almost like expending resources on rock climbing gear as a method of travel when there already exists a road through or around the mountain. No matter how efficient you make the rock climbing, it's not going to beat driving through or around the mountain in a car. In the case of latency, we're dealing with the speed of light (electrons) and it's simply a shorter trip to the local CPU and RAM than it is to Google's datacenter(s). Furthermore, the work involving CPU and memory still must be done and at both sides, so even if end-to-end travel time was instantaneous, it's still effectively double the workload. This will not change. Ever. The "cloud 100% everywhere" advocates are banking on technology improvements that reduce latency to below the threshold of being noticeable, but the paradigm will never be more efficient from an interactivity point of view.

You'll get a nice preview of this starting next year when XP falls out of support. Prediction: it won't be nearly as bad as some people think. The good news is you won't need to make such a decision. If things are so bad that people feel their only option is to stick with an unsupported Windows 7, by 2020 someone else will have captured Microsoft's market. Windows would still be around but it would be run in VMs like how older versions are today. Security concerns will be almost irrelevant as professionals will know not to web browse from inside the VM--just to run that one or two applications that the VM is for. I might have to do this anyway just to deal with the support requests that come my way. Hopefully all the 8-tweaks still work and/or Blue is an objective improvement and not yet another interface that's different for the sake of being different. I don't know if I have it in me to master at least 4 sets of interfaces across two operating systems released over a period of about 9 months. Microsoft is making it very difficult on its grassroots tech support that they've depended on since the DOS era. My moments: 0:47, she talks about the silver potatoes representing the Desktop. 0:55, "Budapest?!" 1:00, mail fail. Really the whole section, but particularly, "It's just this big, vast sheet of white." 2:19, oh my god I exited a program! 3:07, when she finds the dog photo. To me, the multiple transitions are so jarring that I have no idea what happened. Meanwhile she's quite excited at her success and was stoic during the transition process.

While looking at the Windows 8 usability videos I came across one from Chicago, the Windows 95 development project: The user had uploaded this to demonstrate that users get over UI roadblocks but he overlooked two important things: 1. The final Windows 95 product differed drastically from the one used in this study, and such was driven by testing feedback. 2. People still have problems double-clicking. In fact, the tester said exactly what the problem was in 1993: "Oh. It's too sensitive then." It's also a problem knowing when to double click as opposed to single-clickng, also demonstrated in the video. Microsoft acknowledges this because they've spent significant effort changing clicking behavior over the years.

The right-click program launcher predated the Start Menu with NeXTSTEP. I couldn't find a screenshot demonstrating this but did for AfterStep, which is a clone: http://systhread.net/texts/2009xvishist-img/afmenu.png Not only were the menus available everywhere, they were objects that could be stickied if desired, so if you needed quick access to, say, the "open" command, you could sticky the menu column it was in until you didn't need ready access to it anymore.

I did some work for someone on a Windows 8 laptop yesterday, which I think was the first time. This means that my tasks were goal-oriented and that I would be configuring options that are not necessarily within my general usage range. Being that I was in a goal oriented mindset rather than exploratory (such as one is when writing technology reviews), I found Windows 8 drawbacks to be even more noticeable. For starters, I kept wanting to touch the screen even though it wasn't a touch screen. The interface looking as it does had that effect. It's as if iOS had 'X' buttons on the applications but they were strictly cosmetic. Even if you knew this you'd still want to press the 'X' to close applications. But more importantly, I knew that if it were a touch screen it would operate more intuitively and that mouse navigation was a second class citizen. Second, regardless of human interface, getting to where I needed to be took objectively longer due to the context changes, mechanical travel (either hand or mouse pointer), and number of clicks to arrive at the desired destination. Having the Charms Bar change context based on location is not something I am mentally prepared for as in my mind it's a floating omni-bar, not the equivalent of a right-click context menu. It looking native to the Metro interface and not Desktop does not help, either. Something else I did, even though I knew what was going to happen, was to move the cursor down to the lower left, clicking in vain for the start menu. It's part of me being used to it, but, I think more importantly, I'm doing this because the interface is not giving me enough clues as to where else to go. Something missing from most tech reviews is this notion of being exploratory rather than goal oriented. When you're exploring, you're going to be more patient and have more mental resources dedicated to solving interface problems because you simply have nothing better to do. When there's a goal involved you will be much more conscious about how the interface is slowing you down and how you can't spare the mental capacity when you're trying to keep the goal in mind. The reviewers who do understand this distinction were universally negative. Perhaps the best reviews are the ones where test subjects are used with minor goals provided by the host. People will behave differently with even minor pressure to perform. I feel a bit stupid for saying this because I'm describing scientific UI testing, which should be a given, but...well... And then there's this classic, which for sure has been posted in here (doesn't embed for some reason and doesn't link unless it's youtu.be):

Mainstream UIs like KDE and GNOME are familiar to Windows users. The exception is Unity, which is far closer to Windows 8 in methodology and drew a similar level of controversy. Past these you're into the second tier of window managers, which aren't as well supported. Of the stuff that's not too old, IceWM is probably as close as you get to a design that is intentionally like Windows rather than "inspired by". EDIT: adding screenshots

Linux has its own tiling window managers reminiscent of Windows 1 or 8: xmonad ion dwm I think this is why some Linux users seem to like Windows 8 more than previous versions. Linux has been attempting to gain users by imitating the Windows interface since the 90s: fvwm95 Before this there was CDE, a commercial product of Sun, HP, IBM, and USL (Bell Labs), which, due to IBM's influence, imitated the Windows 2.x / OS/2 Workplace Shell interface: CDE 1.x KDE licensing politics aside, GNOME basically originated as a replacement for fvwm95 and imitated Windows down to the blue background: GNOME 1.0 Edit: image embedding isn't exactly graceful. I suggest right-clicking and selecting "view image in new tab/window" or a similarly labeled option in your browser.

It is, but my terminology is old. Same with MSN Messenger. It's been Live Messenger for years but I still call it MSN messenger. I had to look it up. Apparently it's called "Microsoft account" (lowercase 'a'), which is new to me, and previously "Windows Live ID" which I do recall. The infrastructure is still used for XBox Live and I think the Windows Phone store and was used for Zune, which I think uses the same basic store structure.

There's also the shutting down of MSN Messenger and rolling everything into Skype. Why bother? Why not just let MSN die a slow death like ICQ did? The way they're doing it is probably more expensive than the slow death method, and the remaining users, estimated to be about 30% of MSN's peak, are likely the lowest value assuming Microsoft is looking for people who are tech hip and have disposable income. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure most of those remaining users are in China because Microsoft is keeping the service active there. I really don't think people are going to start buying Skype credits just because they were forced over from MSN. It's really confusing, too, since they're doing this at the same time as the Outlook.com move. You can sign into Skype with your MSN ID, but it's going to be @outlook.com now or soon instead of @hotmail.com (or @msn.com or @passport.com assuming those still work). Edit: I forgot until after this posting that AOL had more or less rolled ICQ into AIM after its acquisition so the comparison isn't so great. However, IM was still very much "in" when this was done and was probably at its peak, so the landscape was much different.

Maybe some new material is needed. How about a little discussed venture: the retiring of Hotmail and rolling the assets into Outlook.com? Even if it is objectively better, why destroy the legendary Hotmail branding? It's amazing how strong Hotmail continued to be given how each of the last half dozen interface revisions was worse than what proceeded it. Microsoft's "hide the buttons" flat look seen in Office 2013 started here. Hotmail Outlook.com Outlook.com looks like yet another Hotmail interface revision, so why the rename? It's not like Outlook is well known outside of business, especially since the killing of Outlook Express in 2006, and both Outlook and OE, where known, are strongly associated with local software. Outlook.com looks like neither but bears a striking resemblance to what Hotmail has become the past few years. Maybe at least they'll fix it so that the delete button doesn't move around depending on which folder you're in. It's been years and I still can't find it without effort. In fact, pretty much all the buttons rearrange with each different view. I think this may surprise some, but if Gmail ever caught up to Hotmail and Yahoo! it happened in the past few months: Email and webmail statistics As the article mentions, it's likely that Gmail was able to catch up by forcing Gmail registration on Android devices. Gmail is also a popular authentication mechanism. It's probably more prevalent in this area than Passport and OpenID. Facebook is an even bigger authenticator, though.

RyanVM was one of the major Windows XP deployment products associated with MSFN, along with nLite and HFSLIP. Until this thread, I didn't associate MSFN with anything else.

Wishful thinking can make one think that old problems have gone away even though nothing was done to solve them. After all, there's so much more technology now so maybe people won't care anymore! The real red flag is when Apple performed the same user studies and came to the same conclusions. Not making any progress at all on a 30 year old problem is a sign that bets should be hedged. Edit: adding reference: Why ‘Gorilla Arm Syndrome’ Rules Out Multitouch Notebook Displays Note the publication date. This information shouldn't have been a surprise to Microsoft. Edit 2: if anyone is confused by the line, "And touchscreen computing is already well-implemented in non-mobile horizontal interfaces, like Microsoft’s Surface." it's because Surface originated as a "drafting table" concept. Here are conceptual demos from early in development:

LOL, Sinofsky with his derp expression totally makes the picture.

I like the Microsoft feedback thread where somebody said they tried reinstalling Office 2013 several times because they thought there was something wrong with loading the theme. I think it was in here somewhere.