4 ms·

History repeats itself. MS really screwed up with vista and hardware, now they will do the same damn thing with software, which will piss people off IMMENSELY

by ixacto 14y ago

History repeats itself. MS really screwed up with vista and hardware, now they will do the same damn thing with software, which will piss people off IMMENSELY and cause people to stay with win 7 or xp. There are still quite a few small businesses who are running XP and office 2003 or 7 and office 2007. What is Joe in accounting going to do when he is confronted with metro and its shocking minimalism, office is undoubtedly re-designed AGAIN, there isn't any start menu, and when he is used to old style MS office and XP or in the first place... There are many, many people out there who stare at excel/word/outlook/powerpoint all day as the main function of their job. Not having to re-learn any of the interface is a damn good thing, and OSX is not too widely used in most places outside the usa/1st world. If MS keeps at it we might actually see a worthwhile migration to LibreOffice. IMO Office and enterprise-consulting and possibly gaming are the pillars holding MS up these days. With Metro they are doing a good job of trying to royally piss off business customers/it. Remember that most users are too lazy or stupid to go to addons in firefox or chrome and type in "adblock plus" or similar to completely remove ads, which would destroy the vast majority of web companies including Google/FB/Yahoo. The only other avenue is college students and younger getting hooked on new MS Metro offerings and deciding that MS cloud office of MS metro office will be the new standard that the expect when they get jobs. This isn't going to happen tho, because appple already has the non-ms market and actually has MS office on the Mac already. _______ If MS rolls out Metro in its full swiss design-language glory it will actually be more different and more difficult to use than OS X or kde/xfce. It doesn't just warp the desktop metaphor like gnome and unity are trying to do, it throws it in the trash and replaces it with a smarthphones home screen. This is unbelievably stupid and we may still see the year of the linux desktop xD. Or more likely is that they will realize that their largest customers including the government/military/accounting firms/everything that actually builds things (coders included) want the desktop metaphor to remain for another ten years, and pull a "downgrade" option. _______

bztzt 14y ago
Windows 8 was planned as a consumer-focused release from the start of the project, due to the expectation that businesses wouldn't be ready for a new version after just moving to 7 anyway. They really aren't counting on widespread enterprise uptake, and never were.
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  The thing is, consumers live in the browser these days. In all the discussions and debates about Metro, the most important factor of all is being left out: what value does Windows 8 add to applications? How will it reverse the trend that's currently leading toward browser-centric usage patterns? Even if someone actually wants to run iOS-style weather and stock-price apps on their PC for some reason, they don't need a new OS to do it. Upgrading to Windows 8 would be like trading your car for a minivan because you want a new radio.
seanmcdirmid 14y ago
If you define China as 1st world... Apple is doing very well here (in China), even with its computers. It used to be Macbooks were rare, then they became fashionable but buyers would still put pirated XP on them. Today, most of those buyers are actually running OSX, they just got used to it through their iPhones/iPads. Other non-1st world countries I frequent seem very similar. This only applies to the middle class, of course, and most people in China are not middle class. At least the kids here aren't getting hooked on google docs like back in the states; the GFW takes care of that!

by ixacto 14y ago

bztzt 14y ago

Windows 8 was planned as a consumer-focused release from the start of the project, due to the expectation that businesses wouldn't be ready for a new version after just moving to 7 anyway. They really aren't counting on widespread enterprise uptake, and never were.

CamperBob2 14y ago
The thing is, consumers live in the browser these days. In all the discussions and debates about Metro, the most important factor of all is being left out: what value does Windows 8 add to applications? How will it reverse the trend that's currently leading toward browser-centric usage patterns? Even if someone actually wants to run iOS-style weather and stock-price apps on their PC for some reason, they don't need a new OS to do it. Upgrading to Windows 8 would be like trading your car for a minivan because you want a new radio.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago

If you define China as 1st world... Apple is doing very well here (in China), even with its computers. It used to be Macbooks were rare, then they became fashionable but buyers would still put pirated XP on them. Today, most of those buyers are actually running OSX, they just got used to it through their iPhones/iPads. Other non-1st world countries I frequent seem very similar. This only applies to the middle class, of course, and most people in China are not middle class. At least the kids here aren't getting hooked on google docs like back in the states; the GFW takes care of that!