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Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions


JorgeA

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MS now claims they had a tablet UI before the iPad:

We started planning Windows 8 in June of 2009, before we shipped Windows 7, and the iPad was only a rumor at that point. I only saw the iPad after we had this design ready to go.

So Metro is now 3 years old. WTF has MS done since then? All apps and the usability of metro is still crap.

Also Julie Larson-Green is as arrogant as Sinosfky:

I can’t imagine a computer without touch anymore. Once you’ve experienced it, it’s really hard to go back.

only because she likes touch, everyone else has to like and use it. I've tested touch with an iPad and hated it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508311/the-woman-charged-with-making-windows-8-succeed/

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@MagicAndre1981

Do check the mentioned Courier links.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WYWGKnVkEw

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20128013-75/the-inside-story-of-how-microsoft-killed-its-courier-tablet/

As I see it (and as said before) a pen interface makes much more sense than a "touch" one by itself, and still IMHO the "book-like" two sided thingy looks a lot more usable, besides being a "common gesture" to open a book.

At least it would have been "new".

jaclaz

Edited by jaclaz
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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

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So Metro is now 3 years old. WTF has MS done since then?

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

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We started planning Windows 8 in June of 2009,

before we shipped Windows 7, and the iPad was only a rumor at that point.

I only saw the iPad after we had this design ready to go. We were excited.

A lot of things they were doing about mobile and touch were similar to what we'd been thinking.

We [also] had differences.

We wanted not just static icons on the desktop but Live Tiles to be a dashboard for your life;

we wanted you to be able to do things in context and share across apps;

we believed that multitasking is important and that people can do two things at one time.

June 2009?

and just a month before Nemulator version 2.0b1 released ( release date: 2009-07-07 ) ?

Somehow I got this vibe that folk at MS reading CharlotteTheHarlot's post above (#1317) about Nemulator and informing her about it,

which prompts the Granny to 'moves' the date from 2010 into 2009 accordingly.

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June 2009?

and just a month before Nemulator version 2.0b1 released ( release date: 2009-07-07 ) ?

Somehow I got this vibe that folk at MS reading CharlotteTheHarlot's post above (#1317) about Nemulator and informing her about it,

which prompts the Granny to 'moves' the date from 2010 into 2009 accordingly.

No question that Nemulator has Metro beat by a mile. We have Jensen Harris admitting that it was early 2010 that they created mockups. IMHO the author of Nemulator could own Microsoft if he wants. That is, unless the Xbox dashboard is considered which makes things considerably more complicated. But I guess that would be for a jury to decide.

If there is a God, that trial would be televised and Steve Ballmer would be the first witness to be sworn in, followed by Sinofsky. With just the right amount of pushing, old fathead would melt-down and the nightmare would be conclusively over.

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The story that everyone mentioned above is this ...

The Woman Charged With Making Windows 8 Succeed ( MIT Technology Review 2012-12-13 )

... also discussed here ...

New Windows chief explains why Microsoft redesigned Windows ( TechSpot 2012-12-14 )

New Windows Division head discusses why Windows interface was overhauled, more ( NeoWin 2012-12-14 )

and there is a related referenced article here ...

Microsoft Has Been Watching, and It Says You’re Getting Used to Windows 8 ( MIT Technology Review 2012-12-14 )

Considering we are talking about Windows which has a legendary association with a rock

intimately tied to the Start Menu, well it is perfectly logical that another Stones song is associated with Windows 8. A pile of Lies! Leaving aside the astoundingly pathetic garbage about telemetry, itself a massive whopper of a lie ( there are countless other parts of Windows that receive less clicks than the Start Menu, no-one can argue this ), the worst part is that they simply cannot tell the truth, and that is that this was intentional manipulation of the customer, like a sheepdog corraling the herd along a path to the shearing factory. Or did she slip and really mention the truth after all? Here is an admission of intentional manipulation ( from the last link above ) ...

She adds that the lack of tutorials or detailed instructions on how to adjust to Windows 8—something that has attracted complaints—is a deliberate choice. Tests have shown that although people find tutorials “comforting,” they don’t retain much information from them, she says, making them a waste of time.

Whoa honey. You admit Windows users are now guinea pigs? Beta testers? I've often said they have nothing but contempt for the average Windows user, and this pretty much proves it. Nice. Back to the original article for some of her patented absurdity ...

Before Windows 8 the goal was to launch into a window, and then you put that window away and you got another one. But with Windows 8, all the different things that you might want to do are there at a glance with the Live Tiles. Instead of having to find many little rocks to look underneath, you see a kind of dashboard of everything that’s going on and everything you care about all at once. It puts you closer to what you’re trying to get done.

WTF! Did she just describe the traditional Windows user as running some program, then closing it, running the next, closing it, etc? That's what she thinks we have quad-cores and a gazillion programs for? Holy crap! She is saying that we are the single-taskers! She believes we are the ones that operate serially like an Instruction Pointer, not the Metro tablet Angry Bird fanboys who bounce from Facebook to Twitter! That is so **** insulting I'm mad enough to chew Neutronium :realmad: ( that's for real old-timers ).

You’ll use the mouse and keyboard, but even on the regular desktop you’ll find yourself reaching up doing the things that are faster than moving the mouse and moving the mouse around. It’s not like using the mouse, which is more like puppeteering than direct manipulation.

Uh huh. What about ergonomics again? Nevermind, that is beyond her pay grade. But how about her assumption that the slight abstraction of pushing a mouse is "in-direct" and that we are so stupid we need to remove that abstraction and "directly" push pixels directly on the screen ( which is also an abstraction, DOH! ).

For cost considerations there might always be some computers without touch, but I believe that the vast majority will. We’re seeing that the computers with touch are the fastest-selling right now. I can’t imagine a computer without touch anymore. Once you’ve experienced it, it’s really hard to go back.

An admission that she herself is no more than a simple content consumer. Angry Birds or Flying Pigs is her actual skill set. And her plan is to convert the Windows user base into a vast world of numbskulls like herself. The future of MicroApple exposed.

We started planning Windows 8 in June of 2009, before we shipped Windows 7, and the iPad was only a rumor at that point. I only saw the iPad after we had this design ready to go. We were excited. A lot of things they were doing about mobile and touch were similar to what we’d been thinking. We [also] had differences. We wanted not just static icons on the desktop but Live Tiles to be a dashboard for your life; we wanted you to be able to do things in context and share across apps; we believed that multitasking is important and that people can do two things at one time.

Who believes that? What a load of crap. See above. There were only Windows 8 mockups in "early 2010" and the iPad came out in March 2010. There is no way that she and Sinofsky did not see an iPad before "we had this design ready to go." Those were mockups. No code. Mockups. Disclaimer: I couldn't care less about the iPad. Don't have one, never will. I care about lies.

It was a very definite choice to have both environments. A finger’s never going to replace the precision of a mouse. It’s always going to be easier to type on a keyboard than it is on glass. We didn’t want you to have to make a choice. Some people have said that it’s jarring, but over time we don’t hear that. It’s just getting used to something that’s different. Nothing was homogenous to start with, when you were in the browser it looked different than when you were in Excel.

She actually meant to say: "We didn’t want you to have to make a choice. ". There s that patented Microsoft arrogance once again.

When you sign into your Windows PC, one of the things you get asked is whether you’ll be part of our customer experience improvement program, and if you will, then you’re sending some data to us. Everyone gets asked that. We get terabytes and terabytes of data every day, and we can’t possibly use it all.

That is an accidental slip of the truth. What they don't use is the data that contradicts their arrogant contemptuous opinion of their herds of mSheep. Anything that shows the usage of the traditional NON-Apple power-user goes to the bit-bucket. The mSheep that stick to the program gets cited as confirmation bias in their quest to morph themselves into MicroApple.

There's more to this interview but that is about as much as I can personally stomach without gouging my eyes out with a spork. I can see exactly why the softies and ex-softies cannot stand this "executive". I pity those folks stuck with her.

Keeping with the Stones theme, I think there is another Stones

for this lady which from I read could be her theme song up in Redmond.

EDIT: typos, fixed links

Edited by CharlotteTheHarlot
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Some faint praise highlighted at NeoWin ...

Business app developer: "We are doing great on Windows 8" ( NeoWin 2012-12-14 )

Since the launch of our title, we have had over 2,500 downloads. That is not too bad for an Enterprise business application. And I can share this, we made WAY MORE than $83 bucks on it ... We have seen an extra 15 to 20 new business leads a week because of Windows 8. We are seeing tremendous business traffic with Windows 8 that is for sure.

Hmmmm. Okay. I like this next line from the NeoWin author :lol: ...

In fact, an earlier blog post showed how the PUSHBI app can work in "snap view" so users can check on their business work while also playing Angry Birds Star Wars at the same time.

Stop the presses! They have cracked the dual-tasking barrier! And what a cracked barrier that is. Angry Birds can stay on screen while I glance at my business app. :lol: ( "The Human Race is Doomed" --Jaclaz )

Favorite comment so far: "The beatings will continue until moral improves..." :yes:

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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508311/the-woman-charged-with-making-windows-8-succeed/

Now that Windows 8 has been released, what are you and your team doing now?

We didn’t really slow down. There are always new technologies to think about that can be helpful to people.

Missing end of the sentence/interview:

.... we are going to carefully avoid them and invent something else that will further slow down or harass people, continuing the tradition I instated with the Office ribbon.

As an example, with the current release of the Surface, based on Windows RT, I insisted on finally removing support for macros, that noone - according to our telemetry - actually used in Office. They are, or I should say were, a big issue because people often needed to think to write one of those, or even to simply use it, and we all know how thinking is something that is really really tiring. When I stopped thinking (this happened around 2001, but I was planning this since 2000) I found much more time to do useful things, you know like resizing (crappy) pictures of my sons on the screen, adding to them witty text to use them as Christmas cards, the kind of stuff that everyone should actually do and that is obviously much easier to do with fingers on a touch screen that with a mouse, let alone with a pen and graphic tablet.

Sometimes I am amazed that still exist people in the word that use computer to work, this is evidently a cognitive error, a computer, as the other named after a vegetable company that I won't directly name has proved, is all about doing the seven good things in life:

  1. modifying (crappy) images of your sons and relatives and sending them to everyone
  2. mailing (senseless) one liners to everyone in the company every five to ten minutes
  3. twitting at least ten times a day
  4. browsing funny sites on the internet and send the jokes or funny images found there to everyone you know, possibly by mass-mailing them so that everyone gets the full list of your contacts
  5. playing games such as angry birds
  6. posting your wisdom on Facebook
  7. chatting with people through VOIP or texting them

At least this is what I do all day long, and if you are done with the interview, I have to tweet about how witty I was in answering the pre-made questions you asked with what my ghostwriter came up with, once reviewed by the PCRT (Politically correct review team), please write also how I was completely sincere in my answers, specifically these words come from the bottom of my heart:

Your predecessor, Steven Sinofsky, was widely credited with driving Microsoft to create Windows 8 through sheer force of will. Is that true?

Steven is an amazing leader and an amazing brain and an amazing person, but one person can’t do everything. It’s really about the team that we created and the culture that we created for innovation.

Too bad that the space on that page wasn't enough to contain these last statements... :(

jaclaz

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As an example, with the current release of the Surface, based on Windows RT, I insisted on finally removing support for macros, that noone - according to our telemetry - actually used in Office. They are, or I should say were, a big issue because people often needed to think to write one of those, or even to simply use it, and we all know how thinking is something that is really really tiring. When I stopped thinking (this happened around 2001, but I was planning this since 2000) I found much more time to do useful things, you know like resizing (crappy) pictures of my sons on the screen, adding to them witty text to use them as Christmas cards, the kind of stuff that everyone should actually do and that is obviously much easier to do with fingers on a touch screen that with a mouse, let alone with a pen and graphic tablet.

You completely had me until that! rotflmao.gif Well played!

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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

Edited by JorgeA
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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. :)

Flashback upthread to Sinofsky's Black Tuesday ( Post #1292 ) ...

Final Note: the New York Stock Exchange just closed. NO crash, but markets all slightly down. MSFT closed at $27.09, down -0.90 which is off -3.22%.

Hehe. They're now below that. :lol:

P.S. I'm not laughing at anyone that may be in MSFT ( I think you said you had some yourself Jorge ), I'm just laughing at the company itself because I can only imagine the heat that the Board is getting behind the scenes because of the huge amount of funds and trusts holding MSFT in their portfolios. Certainly it has a lot of growth potential at this very low price. However, that is offset by the potential problem that there are probably a lot of people planning to jump out of MSFT only waiting their sell price which itself creates an impedance so it truly may never rise. When you look at other mis-managed companies like HP, it moved from $30 to $15 in just the last year so this is a real tough nut to crack. On the bright side, it has been this way ever since Ballmer was promoted and even though the big hit ( Post #731 ) was the fault of the DoJ and not his, perception is reality, so when he gets removed it might just skyrocket, rightly or wrongly.

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P.S. I'm not laughing at anyone that may be in MSFT ( I think you said you had some yourself Jorge )

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. :yes:

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.)

I can only imagine the heat that the Board is getting behind the scenes because of the huge amount of funds and trusts holding MSFT in their portfolios.

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

Edited by JorgeA
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