Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions

[JorgeA]

So it anticipates lawsuits and is therefore going to put a clause in the End User License Agreement of Windows 8's RTM build that if you accept the license agreement, you can't file a class action lawsuit against them. Read this article for more details: http://www.forbes.co...inst-microsoft/ One can still bring the dispute in small claims court but not a class action lawsuit.

Good, this gives me another cannonball to use next time I get into a discussion with a PC salesman over Windows 8. In addition to recounting all the annoyances of the new UI and all the things it's lacking, I can tell him that it's outrageous that I should give up my right to sue MS in conjunction with others even after I paid them money for their OS.

OTOH, this new EULA clause is quite the devilish ploy -- you can participate in a class-action lawsuit sue them only if you haven't used the software, which allows them to claim that you can't possibly have been harmed since you haven't even bought the merchandise. They can also dredge up the tired argument, "how can you say that the release version of Windows 8 is so bad, if you haven't even tried it?"

--JorgeA

[Fredledingue]

I don't think anyone will risk a lawsuit which is likely to be lost if such reasons are invoked by a physical person.

However I'm positive that companies will sue Microsoft over W8. (And fire the IT guy who made the mistake to install this unusable OS)

Because companies have other types of contracts, and Microsoft has other responsabilities.

It's almost assumed that businesses will never install W8, that they already have choosen not to do so, but some businesses will still have W8 installed on some machine for some reasons (incompetance, ingorance of the fact that Metro cannot be disabled {theoricaly}, computers coming with it preinstalled etc). While most of businesses will not sue Microsoft because they will not use W8 on any of their machines, there will always be a few hundreds (or thousands) who will have to cope with the Windows 8 nightmare and immediately sue Microsoft if they don't get W7 freely installed instead or a refund.

You can't run a business an have a Mickey Mouse start screen full of crap and commercials on your computer. Yet Microsoft will have to provide a professional OS one day or another, just to get up to date with the W8 core files improvements.

IMO Microsoft will be obliged to release a "pro" version of W8 which will run without Metro (or with Metro rendered optionable) at some point. Perhaps a few months or weeks after the "Kindergarten" release.

If they don't they will be flooded with lawsuits, refund requests, helpdesk complains and bad press.

The world is not going to stay iddle in the face of it. MS already shaked a big olive tree. There are already a phenomenal reaction to it. (first hacks to disable Metro went online within days)

Everybody from hardware manufacturers to individuals already feel unconfortable about it. No Metro will not be enforced on us that smoothly.

how can you say that the release version of Windows 8 is so bad, if you haven't even tried it?"

What??! A snapshot of Metro suffices!

Edited July 13, 2012 by Fredledingue

[jaclaz]

Hmmm.

From:

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-893.pdf

What rational lawyer would have signed on to represent the Concepcions in litigation for the possibility of fees stemming from a $30.22 claim? See, e.g., Carnegie v. Household Int’l, Inc., 376 F. 3d 656, 661 (CA7 2004) (“The realistic alternative to a class action is not 17 million individual suits, but zero individual suits, as only a luna­tic or a fanatic sues for $30”).

I would guess that IF some 17 million indivduals get really angry against MS, no matter if they will receive or not any indemnification and whether they will be allowed a class-action arbitration or litigation , MS will have it's share of issues....

jaclaz

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Things got much nicer for me when I discovered the "silver" theme for XP. Looks pretty snazzy. (And with any different desktop wallpaper.)

The only remaining Fisher-Price element is that bright red, square X button for closing windows.

I find myself most often using the MCE derived variations: Royale, Royale Noir, Royale Remixed which are available everywhere. They're kinda basic and simple.

(EDIT: referring to the msstyles from the themes naturally!) Of course the UxTheme.dll should be patched first.

Looks to me like we have here a classic case of GIGO. The "GO" part being Windows 8...

Garbage In --> Garbage Out

questionable Telemetry In --> Metro Out

Edited July 13, 2012 by CharlotteTheHarlot

[JorgeA]

Another right-on-the-money commentary on Windows 8 and the Metro interface. Scroll down to the long paragraph replying to the moderator:

I think it looks like its an app written for Windows 1.0. There is so much white background that it makes it hard to navigate. A good ui uses color and textures to create a natural point of reference (i.e. immediately know where the menu bar, settings etc. are).

[emphasis added]

Aero was just becoming mature as a UI and looking really great and I don't understand why it was abandoned. My problem is probably not so much with the applications themselves as it is with the UI.

--JorgeA

[CoffeeFiend]

There is so much white background that it makes it hard to navigate

Someone should let the MS Office team know because it seems fairly obvious to everyone but them.

It's pretty darn amazing how MS went from great to complete and utter sh*t in one year. Win8 (Metro, forced tablet UI on desktops, etc). VS2012 (dropping backwards compatibility, being last in C++11 feature support, almost nothing new for .NET devs, etc). MS Office going white-on-white while failing to provide much of a reason to upgrade (and mostly failing on tablets, dropping support for Vista and XP, etc). It also looks like they'll have some legal trouble in the EU. The only product they haven't managed to mess up yet is SQL Server seemingly (2012 is very nice)

Meanwhile, the main WP8 OEM will have spent half of its current cash reserves by year end (they've lost €1.41 billion last quarter) because their phones don't sell. Some even think it's time for them to call it quits. Their shares went down 84% since they switched to Windows Phone and they're laying off 10 000 people now. And with the iPhone 5 coming out this fall...

Time for some new management already.

[JorgeA]

It's pretty darn amazing how MS went from great to complete and utter sh*t in one year. Win8 (Metro, forced tablet UI on desktops, etc). VS2012 (dropping backwards compatibility, being last in C++11 feature support, almost nothing new for .NET devs, etc). MS Office going white-on-white while failing to provide much of a reason to upgrade (and mostly failing on tablets, dropping support for Vista and XP, etc). It also looks like they'll have some legal trouble in the EU.

All good links! This caught my eye in the Office 2013 article:

Having the real Office applications and their perfect support for Office documents is valuable—but this needs to be married to simpler interfaces that are engineered around reading and light editing, and that remove entire features and user interfaces that are too complex for finger usage.

The writer says that Office 2013 is not adapted well enough for touch, and that's a fair point. Trouble is, adapting it better for touch would mean either hiding or removing visible onscreen features (commands/menus), if not also making the content elements (individual words in a Word document; cells in an Excel spreadsheet) bigger for easier selection by finger, thus leaving less information on the screen and requiring more scrolling. Any of these changes would of course make the software that much less useful for serious purposes. So Microsoft is stuck between a rock and a hard place... a predicament of their own creation.

It's pretty darn amazing how MS went from great to complete and utter sh*t in one year. Win8 (Metro, forced tablet UI on desktops, etc). VS2012 (dropping backwards compatibility, being last in C++11 feature support, almost nothing new for .NET devs, etc).

Incredible.

Some posts back we had talked about the dangers of relying increasingly on cloud services, such as those MS is pushing with Win8, to store files and data. Here's a cautionary tale.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

@xpclient

The discussion over at AVS Forum has turned decidedly against Windows 8, with basically one guy trying to fend off all the people objecting to various aspects of the new OS.

Here's the funniest recent comment:

If Microsoft made cars (god forbid) and introduced a new model that was sleek and new but was missing the steering wheel, you guys would say just clamp a pair of vice grips on the steering column and quit complaining.

--JorgeA

[CoffeeFiend]

Trouble is, adapting it better for touch would mean either hiding or removing visible onscreen features (commands/menus), if not also making the content elements (individual words in a Word document; cells in an Excel spreadsheet) bigger for easier selection by finger, thus leaving less information on the screen and requiring more scrolling. Any of these changes would of course make the software that much less useful for serious purposes.

i.e. it needs a different interface for touch/tablet usage than it does for desktop/laptop usage. Someone should let Ballmer and Sinosfky know...

Incredible.

Even the Xbox360 is turning into a product I'm not sure I want of. They're metro-izing the interface (I prefer the other console's menus), they've added ads to the dashboard (yep, you bought an ad delivery system), and you also need to pay $10/month for the privilege of online gaming or even just to be able to use Netflix's services (while their competitor's consoles don't charge anything for any of that) . There's really only a couple Xbox exclusive games that could possibly attract me (Halo and Gears of War) whereas every other console has so much more. The PS3 has Killzone, Metal Gear Solid, God of War, Uncharted, InFamous, Gran Turismo, LittleBigPlanet, Resistance, etc (and it plays BluRay discs too) and the Wii has all the fun Mario/Zelda/Kirby/Donkey Kong/Metroid/etc games. Microsoft was also the one company that had the least exciting stuff revealed during E3.

Some posts back we had talked about the dangers of relying increasingly on cloud services, such as those MS is pushing with Win8, to store files and data. Here's a cautionary tale.

MS is basically the last company I'd trust my data with. Their online services have always been crappy too.

[xpclient]

@xpclient

The discussion over at AVS Forum has turned decidedly against Windows 8, with basically one guy trying to fend off all the people objecting to various aspects of the new OS.

Here's the funniest recent comment:

If Microsoft made cars (god forbid) and introduced a new model that was sleek and new but was missing the steering wheel, you guys would say just clamp a pair of vice grips on the steering column and quit complaining.

--JorgeA

Good that more and more people are realizing that MS is cheating them with Windows 8 by dumping features and replacing them with half-baked "improved" ones. What a coincidence I made a similar car analogy on TechNet. Thank god that MS doesn't make cars, or they would remove, dumb down or "simplify" core components because of telemetry or whatever and decisions lacking common sense and by the time the driver discovers his car is missing components, he would meet with an accident.

Edited July 21, 2012 by xpclient

[jaclaz]

Personally I would NOT take the car market as very good example of either "intelligent" or "customer driven" or "good" (in the sense of "good for the customer" or "giving freedom to the customer") "marketing strategies".

I will cite myself

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=20983&st=37

It's just like some cars, you cannot get electric external mirrors by themselves, you need to buy also electrically heated seats because some smart guy in the marketing thought making a "package" of the two items to be a clever idea , which probably is, in Sweden or Norway, but, I assure you, scarcely so in southern Italy or Spain.

The only BIG difference is that on the example car, after you have unneededly payed money for a feature that you will never use, you get for your wasted money AT LEAST a §@ç#ing switch, so that you can keep the "feature" TURNED OFF!

jaclaz

[dencorso]

BTW, did any of you all notice the deja vu in the new logo?

>===>

[JorgeA]

The only BIG difference is that on the example car, after you have unneededly payed money for a feature that you will never use, you get for your wasted money AT LEAST a §@ç#ing switch, so that you can keep the "feature" TURNED OFF!

LOL

The automotive analogy to Windows goes back a long way. I remember back in, what, 1995/96, during the antitrust litigation over IE vs. Netscape, Bill Gates testified that the browser was an integral part of the OS, and that splitting it from the OS was like taking the engine out of the car. I thought at the time (and would be surprised if somebody didn't say), that the browser was actually more like the car radio -- something to receive information from the rest of the world while the machine (the car, the OS) is going. So, to me, Bill was saying that he had designed a car that wouldn't run if you took out the radio...

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

BTW, did any of you all notice the deja vu in the new logo?

Hey dencorso,

Great find! As several of us have pointed out in the Win8 threads, the Windows 8 UI is in some important ways a throwback to primitive versions of Windows with the tiles, the lack of multiple-window functionality, and the flat 2D look.

The logo selection seems to lend official weight to that view -- far from constituting an advancement, Windows 8 is a regression!

--JorgeA

[MagicAndre1981]

MS Office going white-on-white while failing to provide much of a reason to upgrade (and mostly failing on tablets, dropping support for Vista and XP, etc).

1 note becasue I read Office 2013 here. MS also censors here. I tried to get a key for the 2013 Pro from Technet Eval page and my email accounts where blocked. I had to use a new email. So MS now blocks users who have different opinions to test the preview builds