3 responses to “Where we stand – and where we’re heading – with Windows 8”

1. 

   Sethness July 1st, 2012 at 00:24

   Near the end of the article, you wrote “But the most important fact is we don’t know its price.”

   I couldn’t agree less. The price (i.e. what we pay to Microsoft) is trivial compared to the learning-curve burden Microsoft has placed on experienced Windows users. Just how many times does MS expect us to drop all we’ve learned to embrace a set of pointlessly rearranged menus?

   It looks like the learning curve to get IT-level competent (or even user-level competent) with Win8 will be just as onerous as with Win7, if not more so.

   Who gives a “rodent’s fuzzy posterior” about the $50 or $100 we pay Microscoffed. That’s peanuts (or just nuts). Count the cost of hours and hours of lost time spent learning (And, no offense, the cost of the new books). Really, I’d love to see a class-action suit against Microscoffed for not designing a backward compatibility in menus, and not permitting 3rd party packages that’d provide backward compatibility. The way I figure it, when they stop selling the older O/S and rearrange the menus, they’re callously wasting thousands upon thousands of our IT man-hours.

   AFAIK, Win7 doesn’t have an add-on that will untwist its obtuse, useless rearrangement of every (@*#&ing menu so it looks “right” and easy to navigate for an XP power user / IT guy. Win8 doesn’t even have the “start” button, and it’s pushing the worse-than-useless Metro desktop at us…with the added bonus of requiring programmers to rewrite their apps for the Metro desktop. If my employee did that to my company, he’d be fired before 5pm, and his “up”grade would be recalled.

   MS is trying to woo tablet customers, but alienating its current users in the process. I’d rather gargle broken glass than lose time learning Win8.

2. 

   rc primak July 1st, 2012 at 12:56

   As a veteran of all kinds of freeware and thosde programs’ UI antics, I cannot say the Windows 7 or Windows 8 “learning curve” was all that excessive for me. I’ve seen far worse in Secunia PSI, Acronis True Image Home and countless other titles, some free and some paid, over the years since Windows XP first hit my household.

   I suppose some Power Users have very efficient but very UI specific ways of getting things done in Windows and application programs. I’m a more flexible sort of person when it comes to anything visual — as long as I can (eventually) find and bookmark or shortcut the useful stuff, I don’t care much about the visual presentation. As long as nothing’s totally unreadable or unviewable.

   I use Windows 8 mostly without Metro, although getting news and weather reports is OK in Metro Apps. But for anything productive, I use the Legacy Desktop. And that Desktop and its Win-32 Applications aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

   I got rid of Acronis True Image 2012 not because of its UI changes, but because of recent developments in their Sync Agent which crashed my Windows XP laptop and slowed my Windows 7 laptop intolerably. I’m not saying there’s an element of spyware in there, but I’m not saying there isn’t. Same with Metro and the Windows Live ID used to log in for the Live Tiles and to use the Apps. Maybe it spies, maybe it doesn’t.

   If you’re worried, just revert to traditional password login and don’t use the Live ID unless you’re seriously in need of a fix of the Metro Koolaid.

3. 

   EP July 14th, 2012 at 00:11

   Windows 8 becomes RTM or final sometime in the first week of August. read here:
   http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2012/07/09/upcoming-windows-milestones-shared-with-partners-at-wpc.aspx
   and Windows 8 will be publicly available sometime in October.