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Paul Thurrott: Windows 8 is a disaster in every sense of the word
- Thread starter Rogifan
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Yeah no kidding. Thurrott is one of the biggest Microsoft proponents out there. If he thinks it's a mess that's saying something.
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I think A. Hebrew was being sarcastic.
But yes, Thurott is the John Gruber of the Windows world.
Windows 8.1 seems like a hodgepodge of desktop and metro mashed together. But I don't see anything changing until Microsoft gets away from this Windows everywhere nonsense.
I hope we don't see something similar with iOS. Yes there are UI improvements that need to be made but Apple needs to make the iOS design language more unified and consistent, not less.
After my brief experience with Windows 8 I concluded that it is full of good ideas, but badly executed. Lots of glitches, inconsistencies, and compromises.
For example - Internet Explorer can be accessed from the desktop, or from a Metro tile. But the two experiences are different. "Very similar, but different" is a dangerous thing in the computer world, it confuses and frustrates your users.
And browsing looks terrible in portrait mode on a 1366x768 display such as that on the Lenovo Yoga 11S. That's not Windows' fault, but the hardware partners need to work harder on optimizing the hardware to make the software experience really good. That is one of Apple's key strengths.
The two ideologies (desktop vs Metro) clash and there is no easy solution. For example, I just mentioned that the Metro IE and the Desktop IE are similar, but different. But when you open a JPEG file in Desktop it opens the Metro photo viewer to look at it (and dumps you back in Metro land). So which should it be? Separate Desktop and Metro apps or one links to the other? It's inconsistent right now.
My personal experience with a Lenovo Yoga 11S was also filled with app crashes, laughably poor speech recognition from a Dragon dictation app (not Windows' fault), a huge list of "critical" security patches, none of which would actually download or install... it was enough to drive me running back to the store to buy a new Mac instead.
I will give Windows 8.1 (not 8) another try. Just not as my primary machine.
For example - Internet Explorer can be accessed from the desktop, or from a Metro tile. But the two experiences are different. "Very similar, but different" is a dangerous thing in the computer world, it confuses and frustrates your users.
And browsing looks terrible in portrait mode on a 1366x768 display such as that on the Lenovo Yoga 11S. That's not Windows' fault, but the hardware partners need to work harder on optimizing the hardware to make the software experience really good. That is one of Apple's key strengths.
The two ideologies (desktop vs Metro) clash and there is no easy solution. For example, I just mentioned that the Metro IE and the Desktop IE are similar, but different. But when you open a JPEG file in Desktop it opens the Metro photo viewer to look at it (and dumps you back in Metro land). So which should it be? Separate Desktop and Metro apps or one links to the other? It's inconsistent right now.
My personal experience with a Lenovo Yoga 11S was also filled with app crashes, laughably poor speech recognition from a Dragon dictation app (not Windows' fault), a huge list of "critical" security patches, none of which would actually download or install... it was enough to drive me running back to the store to buy a new Mac instead.
I will give Windows 8.1 (not 8) another try. Just not as my primary machine.
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I played with Windows 8 when it was preview in a virtual machine on my Mac. I have used Windows for many years and was frustrated trying to do things I was used to doing.
I concluded that it was because I had a desktop and not a touch enabled device. But, I've come to understand that that's not the issue, it's just poorly executed software.
I concluded that it was because I had a desktop and not a touch enabled device. But, I've come to understand that that's not the issue, it's just poorly executed software.
Metro & Classic are inconsistent and incompatible ideologies. They should have been kept separate from the start, much the same way that OS X and iOS are separate.
MetroUI is really cool and works great for touch-capable devices. Classic UI is great for traditional computing devices that are navigated by keyboard and mouse. Windows Phone (while unsuccessful in the market) is really good. Windows 7 is a really good operating system.
Microsoft's mistake isn't the idea of "Windows Everywhere". That's just marketing. Their mistake is thinking "No Compromises". Only having one OS for both tablets & desktop is a bad idea that is, quite frankly, full of compromises.
Windows 8 is a disaster. As a Windows user going back as far as the 3.1 days, this is the first version of Windows I've ever used that is just completely unintuitive. They've made missteps before and come out with operating systems that had their faults (looking at you, Vista), but 8 is just a trainwreck. Its interface is confusing, tablet or no, and I hope the new guy can turn it around.
That's when the /s tag is immensely useful. Sarcasm doesn't translate well in text people.
They've had all the way from 2011 to now to figure out how to fix this mess, and that's what really worries me. All the way back to developer previews, people haven't been happy with Windows 8.
Compare that to the Mac - We were just going from Snow Leopard to Lion, and have had Mountain Lion and Mavericks since then.
I don't think it was one person's fault, it's the entire vision of the company as a whole. They're still clinging onto that idea that people want a Tablet PC and that if they make it as fun as the other guys, it'll sell. The Tablet PC was dead on arrival and the Surface is the one that looks like a toy in comparison to Android and iOS.
Compare that to the Mac - We were just going from Snow Leopard to Lion, and have had Mountain Lion and Mavericks since then.
I don't think it was one person's fault, it's the entire vision of the company as a whole. They're still clinging onto that idea that people want a Tablet PC and that if they make it as fun as the other guys, it'll sell. The Tablet PC was dead on arrival and the Surface is the one that looks like a toy in comparison to Android and iOS.
Hopefully the new CEO might change that inconstant approach since he is an old Microsoft kind of person.