8 ms·

Engadget's conclusion: "We really liked Windows 7 when it launched. It felt like a big step forward in the short time that had passed since Vista. Now, as we c

Engadget's conclusion: "We really liked Windows 7 when it launched. It felt like a big step forward in the short time that had passed since Vista. Now, as we creep closer to a likely release near the end of this year, we can't shake a sense of doubt. Windows 8 still feels like two very different operating systems trying to be one. The potential is hugely alluring -- a single OS to rule both the tablet and the desktop -- and with each subsequent version we keep hoping this will be the one that ties it all together. Sadly, as of the Consumer Preview, we're still seeing a lot of loose threads. As it stands, Windows 8 is a considerably better tablet operating system than any previous version has managed to be. However, it's still a clumsier desktop OS than Windows 7. That's a problem Microsoft must fix before release." I feel the same way. By trying to please everyone, Microsoft will please no one, and will frustrate 95% of the Windows users out there who will be very confused not just by the tile interface, who is much different than what they are used to, but also by the disconnect between these two interfaces. Microsoft is trying to win the few who want a tablet interface at the expense of the vast majority who want a PC, mouse-oriented interface for their...PC's and laptops.

untog 15y ago
Well I guess it all feeds into the "buy every other Windows version" joke. By Windows 9 they'll have this integration sorted, maybe.
- Karunamon 15y ago
  I kind of noticed this as an unwritten rule, instead of a joke. Every other release of windows seems to have its fair share of weirdness which is corrected with the release immediately superseding it. My path, which I'm sure matches a great deal of others is: 3.1 = buy 95 = skip 98 = buy ME = skip XP = buy Vista = skip 7 = buy Extrapoloating, 8 will be a "skip". I hope this will be the exception.. I kind of like what I've seen with 8 so far.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - inconditus 15y ago
    Off topic, but did you wait 8 years upgrading from ME to Vista?
    - dpark 15y ago
      His timeline was really confusing. HN probably stripped out the newlines he used. 3.1 = buy 95 = skip 98 = buy ME = skip XP = buy Vista = skip 7 = buy He skipped ME. The "every other version" rule left him on 3.1 while the rest of the world was on 95, though. Seems like a pretty broken rule...
      - Karunamon 15y ago
        Yeah, it ate the newlines and I kind of posted in a hurry... oopsy. Thing was I didn't have a computer capable of running Win95 at the time, and even then convincing my parents to drop $100 on that plus the requisite hardware upgrade was pretty tricky. Then this and that happened, we got the new computer with 95, and then upgraded it to 98. Ah, those were the days :)
    - Karunamon 15y ago
      No, I went to XP.
  - replax 15y ago
    It's a nitpick, but you left out WIN2k, which would break your pattern... It was actually a very solid OS from my experience.
    - Karunamon 15y ago
      So I've heard- but my thoughts at the time (as a mostly ignorant kid) were than Win2k was too business focused for gaming. Keep in mind, I didn't even have internet access until 1999! Went straight from 98 to XP, buying ME and then taking it back after finding out that it broke EVERYTHING.
      - yuhong 15y ago
        To be honest, MS did indeed intend to target Win2000 at businesses and WinMe at home users, though Win2000 actually have good DirectX support unlike NT4.
    - rsynnott 15y ago
      Well, he has also skipped NT 3.1, 3.5 and 4. The various versions branded as NT, plus Win2k, were generally considered non-consumer, though Win2k was a marginal case.
lvillani 15y ago
I think they should clearly separate tablet and desktop interfaces and switch between them based on context (like what Canonical is planning to do with their "Ubuntu for Android"). That is: you get only a classic desktop (+ windowed Metro apps) when your slate is attached to a docking station and you only get the tablet interface otherwise. And then provide a switch within Control Panel to get the hybrid experience, as it is now.
- fl3tch 15y ago
  > they should clearly separate tablet and desktop interfaces... like what Canonical is planning to do with their "Ubuntu for Android" What? The whole point of Unity is to have a single interface. Canonical is making the exact same mistake as Microsoft.
  - freehunter 15y ago
    The point of Ubuntu for Android is it's Android when its on your 3"-4" phone and it's Ubuntu when you dock it and move to a larger screen. You can't expect a desktop interface to easily switch between a smartphone and a 20" screen with a keyboard and mouse. Ubuntu for Android is not Ubuntu for tablets.
- wvenable 15y ago
  Right now ARM tablets only have the Metro interface period -- there is no desktop interface installed at all. Only PC's have both interfaces.
  - Valdemar 15y ago
    I have played with a Windows 8 tablet at that had a fully functional desktop interface, looked just like Win 7 desktop. ...and I'm pretty sure it was an ARM
    - wvenable 15y ago
      Holy crap, it's even more confusing than I thought: http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/windows-8-arm-desktop-no-third-party-apps-1062187 http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/win... "You will get the traditional desktop with Windows 8 on ARM - but you won't be able to put third-party apps on it. That's because all the third-party apps developed for ARM-based Windows 8 devices will be for the new Metro interface."
acabal 15y ago
Sounds like echoes of the Gnome Shell critisicm... trying to be both tablet and desktop at once leads to neither side being very good.
- trotsky 15y ago
  People mostly hate change, and metro gnome shell and unity all represent that. Why did people like Engadget go from hating Vista to loving Vista SP1 aka Win7? They had gotten used to it and microsoft gave them a good excuse to change their minds. While gnome shell was a bit rougher around the edges as most dot oh open source projects tend to be, you'll emd up seeing the same behavior in n years when people will be screaming bloody murder about giving up gnome 3... or win8/9.
  - Zirro 15y ago
    "Why did people like Engadget go from hating Vista to loving Vista SP1 aka Win7?" If I'm not mistaken, the main reason for the Vista-hate was the too frequent UAC-prompt, buggy drivers and extreme slowness. This was generally resolved by Windows 7, and that's why I think they started praising it. I don't think I heard many complaints about the "new" UI. Rather, if anything, people was saying it looked like XP with a new theme. That's not much to get used to over time as a previous XP-user.
    - nolok 15y ago
      There was a lot of small and discrete but very effective ui changes in windows seven. The kind that transformed "why is it asking me to add tags and rating to my dll" into "what i need is right there under my mouse already". And as you said the completely broken uac in vista didn't help, they had managed to make limited accounts worse to use than in xp somehow.
      - dpark 15y ago
        How were limited accounts worse? Previously, a limited user couldn't perform action X at all. After UAC, they could perform it if they had an administrative account (or could get an administrator to approve).
recoiledsnake 15y ago
>Microsoft is trying to win the few who want a tablet interface at the expense of the vast majority who want a PC, mouse-oriented interface for their...PC's and laptops. Interesting, I thought the wisdom here was that the post-PC era is upon us and PC are going to die? In that case MS is definitely going the right way.
- roadnottaken 15y ago
  Perhaps for consumers, but enterprise/office-workers will never switch to tablets. Keyboard/mouse is just too damned efficient for data entry and manipulation. And, I always thought that office-work/enterprise was MSFT's bread-and-butter.
  - Splines 15y ago
    I think MSFT is worried about a future where IT workers bring in their personal tablets for consumption work - at some point they're going to become "good enough" for their creation work and replace the desktop PC (similar words were probably said about the mainframe). If they play a reactive role it may be too late.
  - Symmetry 15y ago
    I think the idea is that you carry your tablet with you, then plug it into a dock with a keyboard/mouse when you are at a desk.
    - oakgrove 15y ago
      Yeah thanks. You just took me from having two devices before, e.g., a tablet and a desktop, and gave me one devices that does neither of the previous unit's respective job as well. Yay future.
    - huggyface 15y ago
      This notion gets a lot of play but I'm not buying it -- at least until several years down the road. Of course there are people for whom tablets are perfect -- inventory, front-line customer service, sales, etc -- however there are many where it is of questionable value. A major issue at many corporations is asset management, with laptop theft or loss being a massive problem. Now take all of those desktops and replace them with roaming, fragile tablets?
notatoad 15y ago
i feel like microsoft shouldn't have tried to include the classic/desktop mode. Metro is cool, commit to it. re-work office to exist solely in the metro interface, add a launcher to make AAA PC gaming titles compatible with metro. then, refuse to continue selling windows 7 to laptop OEMs. enterprise is going to hate metro anyways, keep selling win7 to them, but commit to metro as the way forward for consumers.
- Lewisham 15y ago
  Microsoft's shareholders would have had a fit if they marginialized the enterprise in this way. Let's face it, right now all of Microsoft's current future revenue is coming from there. The shareholders wouldn't allow them to go all-in against Apple in the consumer space right now. I expect what you're looking for will be Windows 10, once enterprises have had time to get used to Metro.
- watty 15y ago
  This would be a great way to kill windows. Microsoft Office, IDEs, Photoshop, etc. simply wouldn't work as well in metro. Having separate windows allows drag and drop between applications and is a huge boost to productivity. Not to mention you can have several windows open and tiled appropriately so you aren't stuck in fullscreen mode all the time.
tjoff 15y ago
I'm sorry, I don't get what everyone is on about. The first thing a power user will do is to go to the old-desktop and stay there, basically not interacting with metro at all. There is no point, it's about as useful as the winkey+tab is on Vista/W7. "Cool" but useless for real work. And there seems to have been numerous improvements to the windows experience (outside metro), the ability to pause file-copying etc. proves that they still have some focus for the enthusiast. For everyone but the average Joe the new "metro-UI" is nothing but a bundled application that you will only use when you want to demo something or for some very light use (on a tablet for instance). Just as Media Center is today! How does a bundled application make the whole windows experience clumsier? If it is clumsy, close it! Sure, the start menu is different but who uses the start meny on windows today? All apps that you actually use are pinned to the task bar... And that is how everyone that does real work will use their windows 8 machine, just as they do today in windows 7. And no. MS will not phase out the "regular windows", that's just moronic. Contrary to popular belief but people will actually do work in the near future as well, not floating around in a fluffy cloud with touch devices. You read it here first. The mouse and keyboard are not dead. Curious to see how broken the metro is on a multi-monitor setup is though. Any UI that doesn't scale well to multiple monitors has failed miserably in my eyes (hello OS X + Unity + Metro(?)). And that's not an edge case (at least it shouldn't be for anyone favoring productivity).
- Lewisham 15y ago
  The first thing a power user will do is to go to the old-desktop and stay there, basically not interacting with metro at all. There is no point, it's about as useful as the winkey+tab is on Vista/W7. I don't know if you're trying to troll or you're just incredibly short-sighted, but I'll bite. Windows 8 is clearly designed as a hybrid OS, in the same vein that Ubuntu on Android is, even if Microsoft's marketing team don't outright say it. It's fills the use case of "I love my iPad, and I love my Mac, but I really hate that I have these two devices." Within a year, you're going to see probably about 30% of the new machines being manufactured as tablets, with docking stations. Run the machine in tablet mode, and you get Metro, perfect for reading web pages and flinging Angry Birds around in bed. When it's time to go to work, you pop your tablet into the docking station, and up pops the Desktop for productivity apps. Metro is not going to disappear like Media Center did. It's integral to the whole thing. The iPad is not a machine to do large amounts of work on, but you'd be surprised how many people are trying to. Have you been on a plane recently? A good half of the iPads I see are actually jammed into some horrible looking keyboard dock. Consumers seem to really want a machine that will do this. That's what Windows 8 is.

untog 15y ago

Well I guess it all feeds into the "buy every other Windows version" joke. By Windows 9 they'll have this integration sorted, maybe.

Karunamon 15y ago
I kind of noticed this as an unwritten rule, instead of a joke. Every other release of windows seems to have its fair share of weirdness which is corrected with the release immediately superseding it. My path, which I'm sure matches a great deal of others is: 3.1 = buy 95 = skip 98 = buy ME = skip XP = buy Vista = skip 7 = buy Extrapoloating, 8 will be a "skip". I hope this will be the exception.. I kind of like what I've seen with 8 so far.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- inconditus 15y ago
  Off topic, but did you wait 8 years upgrading from ME to Vista?
  - dpark 15y ago
    His timeline was really confusing. HN probably stripped out the newlines he used. 3.1 = buy 95 = skip 98 = buy ME = skip XP = buy Vista = skip 7 = buy He skipped ME. The "every other version" rule left him on 3.1 while the rest of the world was on 95, though. Seems like a pretty broken rule...
    - Karunamon 15y ago
      Yeah, it ate the newlines and I kind of posted in a hurry... oopsy. Thing was I didn't have a computer capable of running Win95 at the time, and even then convincing my parents to drop $100 on that plus the requisite hardware upgrade was pretty tricky. Then this and that happened, we got the new computer with 95, and then upgraded it to 98. Ah, those were the days :)
  - Karunamon 15y ago
    No, I went to XP.
- replax 15y ago
  It's a nitpick, but you left out WIN2k, which would break your pattern... It was actually a very solid OS from my experience.
  - Karunamon 15y ago
    So I've heard- but my thoughts at the time (as a mostly ignorant kid) were than Win2k was too business focused for gaming. Keep in mind, I didn't even have internet access until 1999! Went straight from 98 to XP, buying ME and then taking it back after finding out that it broke EVERYTHING.
    - yuhong 15y ago
      To be honest, MS did indeed intend to target Win2000 at businesses and WinMe at home users, though Win2000 actually have good DirectX support unlike NT4.
  - rsynnott 15y ago
    Well, he has also skipped NT 3.1, 3.5 and 4. The various versions branded as NT, plus Win2k, were generally considered non-consumer, though Win2k was a marginal case.

lvillani 15y ago

I think they should clearly separate tablet and desktop interfaces and switch between them based on context (like what Canonical is planning to do with their "Ubuntu for Android"). That is: you get only a classic desktop (+ windowed Metro apps) when your slate is attached to a docking station and you only get the tablet interface otherwise. And then provide a switch within Control Panel to get the hybrid experience, as it is now.

fl3tch 15y ago
> they should clearly separate tablet and desktop interfaces... like what Canonical is planning to do with their "Ubuntu for Android" What? The whole point of Unity is to have a single interface. Canonical is making the exact same mistake as Microsoft.
- freehunter 15y ago
  The point of Ubuntu for Android is it's Android when its on your 3"-4" phone and it's Ubuntu when you dock it and move to a larger screen. You can't expect a desktop interface to easily switch between a smartphone and a 20" screen with a keyboard and mouse. Ubuntu for Android is not Ubuntu for tablets.
wvenable 15y ago
Right now ARM tablets only have the Metro interface period -- there is no desktop interface installed at all. Only PC's have both interfaces.
- Valdemar 15y ago
  I have played with a Windows 8 tablet at that had a fully functional desktop interface, looked just like Win 7 desktop. ...and I'm pretty sure it was an ARM
  - wvenable 15y ago
    Holy crap, it's even more confusing than I thought: http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/windows-8-arm-desktop-no-third-party-apps-1062187 http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/win... "You will get the traditional desktop with Windows 8 on ARM - but you won't be able to put third-party apps on it. That's because all the third-party apps developed for ARM-based Windows 8 devices will be for the new Metro interface."

acabal 15y ago

Sounds like echoes of the Gnome Shell critisicm... trying to be both tablet and desktop at once leads to neither side being very good.

trotsky 15y ago
People mostly hate change, and metro gnome shell and unity all represent that. Why did people like Engadget go from hating Vista to loving Vista SP1 aka Win7? They had gotten used to it and microsoft gave them a good excuse to change their minds. While gnome shell was a bit rougher around the edges as most dot oh open source projects tend to be, you'll emd up seeing the same behavior in n years when people will be screaming bloody murder about giving up gnome 3... or win8/9.
- Zirro 15y ago
  "Why did people like Engadget go from hating Vista to loving Vista SP1 aka Win7?" If I'm not mistaken, the main reason for the Vista-hate was the too frequent UAC-prompt, buggy drivers and extreme slowness. This was generally resolved by Windows 7, and that's why I think they started praising it. I don't think I heard many complaints about the "new" UI. Rather, if anything, people was saying it looked like XP with a new theme. That's not much to get used to over time as a previous XP-user.
  - nolok 15y ago
    There was a lot of small and discrete but very effective ui changes in windows seven. The kind that transformed "why is it asking me to add tags and rating to my dll" into "what i need is right there under my mouse already". And as you said the completely broken uac in vista didn't help, they had managed to make limited accounts worse to use than in xp somehow.
    - dpark 15y ago
      How were limited accounts worse? Previously, a limited user couldn't perform action X at all. After UAC, they could perform it if they had an administrative account (or could get an administrator to approve).

recoiledsnake 15y ago

>Microsoft is trying to win the few who want a tablet interface at the expense of the vast majority who want a PC, mouse-oriented interface for their...PC's and laptops. Interesting, I thought the wisdom here was that the post-PC era is upon us and PC are going to die? In that case MS is definitely going the right way.

roadnottaken 15y ago
Perhaps for consumers, but enterprise/office-workers will never switch to tablets. Keyboard/mouse is just too damned efficient for data entry and manipulation. And, I always thought that office-work/enterprise was MSFT's bread-and-butter.
- Splines 15y ago
  I think MSFT is worried about a future where IT workers bring in their personal tablets for consumption work - at some point they're going to become "good enough" for their creation work and replace the desktop PC (similar words were probably said about the mainframe). If they play a reactive role it may be too late.
- Symmetry 15y ago
  I think the idea is that you carry your tablet with you, then plug it into a dock with a keyboard/mouse when you are at a desk.
  - oakgrove 15y ago
    Yeah thanks. You just took me from having two devices before, e.g., a tablet and a desktop, and gave me one devices that does neither of the previous unit's respective job as well. Yay future.
  - huggyface 15y ago
    This notion gets a lot of play but I'm not buying it -- at least until several years down the road. Of course there are people for whom tablets are perfect -- inventory, front-line customer service, sales, etc -- however there are many where it is of questionable value. A major issue at many corporations is asset management, with laptop theft or loss being a massive problem. Now take all of those desktops and replace them with roaming, fragile tablets?

notatoad 15y ago

i feel like microsoft shouldn't have tried to include the classic/desktop mode. Metro is cool, commit to it. re-work office to exist solely in the metro interface, add a launcher to make AAA PC gaming titles compatible with metro. then, refuse to continue selling windows 7 to laptop OEMs. enterprise is going to hate metro anyways, keep selling win7 to them, but commit to metro as the way forward for consumers.

Lewisham 15y ago
Microsoft's shareholders would have had a fit if they marginialized the enterprise in this way. Let's face it, right now all of Microsoft's current future revenue is coming from there. The shareholders wouldn't allow them to go all-in against Apple in the consumer space right now. I expect what you're looking for will be Windows 10, once enterprises have had time to get used to Metro.
watty 15y ago
This would be a great way to kill windows. Microsoft Office, IDEs, Photoshop, etc. simply wouldn't work as well in metro. Having separate windows allows drag and drop between applications and is a huge boost to productivity. Not to mention you can have several windows open and tiled appropriately so you aren't stuck in fullscreen mode all the time.

tjoff 15y ago

I'm sorry, I don't get what everyone is on about. The first thing a power user will do is to go to the old-desktop and stay there, basically not interacting with metro at all. There is no point, it's about as useful as the winkey+tab is on Vista/W7. "Cool" but useless for real work. And there seems to have been numerous improvements to the windows experience (outside metro), the ability to pause file-copying etc. proves that they still have some focus for the enthusiast. For everyone but the average Joe the new "metro-UI" is nothing but a bundled application that you will only use when you want to demo something or for some very light use (on a tablet for instance). Just as Media Center is today! How does a bundled application make the whole windows experience clumsier? If it is clumsy, close it! Sure, the start menu is different but who uses the start meny on windows today? All apps that you actually use are pinned to the task bar... And that is how everyone that does real work will use their windows 8 machine, just as they do today in windows 7. And no. MS will not phase out the "regular windows", that's just moronic. Contrary to popular belief but people will actually do work in the near future as well, not floating around in a fluffy cloud with touch devices. You read it here first. The mouse and keyboard are not dead. Curious to see how broken the metro is on a multi-monitor setup is though. Any UI that doesn't scale well to multiple monitors has failed miserably in my eyes (hello OS X + Unity + Metro(?)). And that's not an edge case (at least it shouldn't be for anyone favoring productivity).

Lewisham 15y ago
The first thing a power user will do is to go to the old-desktop and stay there, basically not interacting with metro at all. There is no point, it's about as useful as the winkey+tab is on Vista/W7. I don't know if you're trying to troll or you're just incredibly short-sighted, but I'll bite. Windows 8 is clearly designed as a hybrid OS, in the same vein that Ubuntu on Android is, even if Microsoft's marketing team don't outright say it. It's fills the use case of "I love my iPad, and I love my Mac, but I really hate that I have these two devices." Within a year, you're going to see probably about 30% of the new machines being manufactured as tablets, with docking stations. Run the machine in tablet mode, and you get Metro, perfect for reading web pages and flinging Angry Birds around in bed. When it's time to go to work, you pop your tablet into the docking station, and up pops the Desktop for productivity apps. Metro is not going to disappear like Media Center did. It's integral to the whole thing. The iPad is not a machine to do large amounts of work on, but you'd be surprised how many people are trying to. Have you been on a plane recently? A good half of the iPads I see are actually jammed into some horrible looking keyboard dock. Consumers seem to really want a machine that will do this. That's what Windows 8 is.