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Windows 9 in 2015: Desperation isn't pretty
- hkmurakami 13y agoAs it is, an alarming number are still hanging on to Windows XP or Windows 7 tooth and nail. When those folks do move, they seem more likely to move to smartphones, tablets or Chromebooks. I wonder how we can make the transition be towards Linux for the average user. We moved my retired parents from Win7 to Ubuntu, and they're doing just fine (other than printer drivers). For most people's uses, Linux is a perfectly reasonable and functionally complete alternative to Win7 or XP.
- CmonDev 13y ago"We moved my retired parents from Win7 to Ubuntu, and they're doing just fine (other than printer drivers)" They will be happy with anything you are enthusiastic about that is lawful and is not harmful to your health.
- jamesgeck0 13y agoI dunno, you should have heard my dad after I upgraded him from Office '97 to Office 2007. Until that point, I was convinced that the ribbon was the some of the best UI Microsoft ever did...
- andrewfong 13y ago> other than printer drivers That's surprisingly important to the average user.
- bryanlarsen 13y agoThere are also a good number of older printers out there that aren't supported by the latest versions of Windows but are supported in Linux. Some didn't make the jump to NT/XP, and some didn't make the jump to Vista/7/8.
- jamesgeck0 13y agoMy father seems to have the knack of buying printers and scanners that don't transition between Windows versions. I had no idea that printer drivers could break between Windows 7 and Windows 8, but they did. He began emailing documents to himself and printing from his Windows 7 laptop. About six months after Windows 8 was released, HP finally released a supposedly compatible driver for his printer. Upon installation of the driver, the system detected the same printer twice, and neither of the detected devices worked. Additionally, every application I tried printing from crashed as soon as the printer dialog appeared. The situation was resolved when we discovered that HP has a Windows 8 compatible generic postscript driver that works with just about everything.
- freehunter 13y agoThere's one machine in my house that I could run Linux on full time. Unfortunately, that's the machine my printer is hooked up to, and Lexmark refuses to make a printer driver for Linux for that model. I didn't go out and buy a new printer, I reinstalled Windows.
- ForHackernews 13y ago> For most people's uses, Linux is a perfectly reasonable and functionally complete alternative to Win7 or XP. As long as they don't watch Netflix. Or play games. Or have any unsupported peripherals. Or want to use any commercial consumer software.
- bane 13y agoIn other words, so long as the typical user doesn't need to do typical user things, it's perfectly fine.
- gnoway 13y agoNetflix doesn't work out of the box, but does work with Pipelight and a browser user-agent override. Ease of setup approaches trivial. In my experience it's stable. The rest of your complaints are valid right now. I expect the game situation is going to change because of what Valve's doing w/ SteamOS.
- freehunter 13y agoI just searched for Pipelight. I found boat and trailer lights, something called FDS Team, eBay results, and something from the Arch wiki about Silverlight. Nothing about Netflix. How is this trivial? On Windows, I can go to Netflix.com and it starts working. Even if it needs Silverlight, it installs it for your automatically. Users don't know what Silverlight is. They don't want to search through Arch's wiki. They certainly don't want to figure out what the hell a browser user-agent override is. In reality, Netflix doesn't work on Linux.
- simoncion 13y agoNetflix does work on Linux in the same way that a program written for a device that doesn't yet have a C compiler does work. To wit: Netflix is (currently) harder to use on every Linux distribution than it is on Windows and Mac. It's probably too much hassle to be worth it for non-tech folks, but it does work.
- venomsnake 13y agoI don't know how we can make it. Yesterday I had to give old laptop to a friend to use for a few days. She wanted one thing from the laptop - remote desktop client to connect to her main machine. I used mint. After 30 minutes of trying to find suitable gui for rdesktop that does not require touching console just threw XP.
- jagermo 13y ago"Worse then Vista"? Sorry, let me stop this guy right there - this is just utter populistic crap. Personally, I have no problems with Windows 8, I even prefer it to 7 (or Android) on touch enabled devices. This might be the "Windows Blue Hype" all over again.
- michas 13y agoProblem is that "touch enabled" laptops or PCs are abominations in the eyes of God :) The idea of touch screen is good in smartphones or tablets, but completely riddiculous for notebooks. And Metro is optimized for touch, but annoying to use with keyboard and mouse.
- sterwill 13y agoI think the author means the sales of Windows 8 have been worse than Vista's. I don't think it's a qualitative judgment of the product.
- vezycash 13y agoIf the author can not perform a basic task of getting out his thoughts clearly, he stop writing! Few people will see this clarification and become misinformed.
- nemothekid 13y agoHowso? Windows 8 is objectively worse than Vista. How is that not clear? On any measurable metric, the author is right.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Personally, I have no problems with Windows 8, I even prefer it to 7 (or Android) on touch enabled devices. Even on non-touch devices, the big problems I have with Win 8/8.1 are solved by readily available third party software that gives you back a Win 7 style task bar / Start Menu (and, actually, I prefer and use this on my touchscreen laptop, as well.) AFAICT, Win 8 is an all-around improvement except for basically one highly-visible but trivially correctable UI decision for keyboard-centric devices.
- sosuke 13y agoRelease too slow you get criticized, speed up releases you get criticized.
- jfoutz 13y agoI never understood the decision to stop shipping an os every 2 years between xp and 7. hindsight is 20/20 and all, but i was critical back then as well. Service pack 1 should have been a (cheap) paid release with whatever features they could scrape together. The net effect seems to be, a big fraction of customers are just completely entrenched in XP and have lost the ability to upgrade. If they can't pay to get up to date, what would they be willing to pay for? Are those customers MS wants? There's a market there, but it's a tight fisted one. Not releasing often enough seems like healthy for business criticism. At least some of those upgrades can be paid. It keeps customers in the upgrade habit. It keeps infrastructure nimble. Releasing to slow means fossilization. That might be good for some aspects of business, it's cheaper. But again, less money to be had there.
- epochwolf 13y agoThey are shipping approximately every 3 years since Vista if they hold to the release schedule for 9.
- venomsnake 13y agoThere was never such decision. Just MS could not ship anything for 4 years. Then after vista reboot in 2005, Sinofski put Windows back on track.
- randlet 13y agoIf current experience with XP is any indicator; " companies want desktop operating systems they can rely on for three to five years" should probably be changed to "companies want desktop operating systems they can rely on for thirteen to fifteen years"
- DanTheManPR 13y agoTime between the release of Vista and 7: 996 days Time between the release of 7 and 8: 1100 days Time between the release of 8 and 9 (assuming a July 1st, 2015 release): 978 days
- CmonDev 13y agoThis is a valid argument. I think he was talking about XP to Win7 bypassing Vista which is incorrect. The situation is very similar now Win7 to Win9 skipping Win8.
- GhotiFish 13y agoThis is perhaps the most apt criticism of this article.
- psbp 13y agoIt's the Star Trek movie curse in reverse.
- GhotiFish 13y agoI'd wager this perception is partially self fulfilling. Frankly, So is the Star Trek movie curse.
- dkuntz2 13y agoCome now. The Star Trek movie curse is somewhat true, at least for movies two through eight. Each odd numbered movie (in the set) has a worse all time domestic ranking than the following even numbered movie (in the set). There is at lease some true. It kinda breaks with nine, because it did so much better than ten, and all of them did a lot worse than eleven and twelve (but we don't count those, they're different...)
- GhotiFish 13y agoso except all those exceptions, there's definitely a pattern! By the time 5 came, most people were already speculating, and you ought to know as well as I do about how nasty an effect framing can have on nebulous judgements of "good" and "bad". I'm surprised I got a downvote for the parent post, frankly. You'd think the majority of the demographic here would be against insane pigeon logic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner#Superstitious_pigeons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner#Superstitious_pi...
- blueicelt2004 13y agoAbout 6 months ago I built a really sweet computer, put Windows 8 on it, and I barely touch it. Since I do iOS dev I also have a mac, and I find myself always using that even when I am not developing. I am even doing my Android dev on it. I liked Windows 7, but 8 I have not liked.
- CmonDev 13y agoDevelopers tend to like OS-s they are developing for.
- michaelwww 13y agoThe desktop market may be shrinking but it is still huge, but Microsoft keeps throwing it's loyal Windows desktop users under the bus. Case in point: The Windows 8.1 fix to the start button is no more than an icon that takes you to the tablet view. Right clicking the icon brings you a plain menu with a few system type options on it. I hope someone tells me I'm doing it wrong, because I've lost patience with it. I use it, but I don't feel Microsoft cares about me. I'll jump ship in a heartbeat if I see something that meets my needs even a little better.
- CmonDev 13y agoIt's easy to make a mistake when you are being so radical. I hope innovation (consistent modern cross-product GUI experience in this case) will pay off for Microsoft eventually.
- nycticorax 13y agoI'd argue that the central mistake was the decision to radically change the desktop experience to conform with the touch experience. I.e. the radicalism was itself the mistake. My feeling is that Apple made the right call here: Desktop and touch interfaces are different enough that you just have to write different code for each.
- kisstheblade 13y agoIt's "funny" when I was looking for a laptop and read user's reviews of them, nearly every single one contained the line "No problems with the laptop, but Windows 8 was bad" Why the hell does a desktop need the metro crap? Nowadays you use a desktop for getting work done, not looking at "live tiles" with useless info in them poking around the screen when trying to get something done. When you are "consuming content" you have better alternatives (tablets etc.) Win 8 would be excellent if you could just set the default start screen (metro / "normal") and the normal screen would function basically like win 7.
- nycticorax 13y agoThe central claim of this article, that releasing Windows 9 too soon will alienate customers, seems very weak. The author acknowledges that Windows 8 uptake has been slow, so there just aren't that many people out there that are running Windows 8. And it's not like enterprise customers feel strongly obligated to switch to a new version just because one is available.
- avenger123 13y agoAnother alarmist article. There are threats to Windows dominance but Microsoft has always been fighting against their own market share with older releases when it comes to OS releases.
- circa 13y agoMy biggest gripe with 8.1 or 2012 R2 is using the corners or charms on a VM or a smaller sized RDP session. Its awful. The right-click on the start menu is also a much needed improvement in 8.1 and especially for Server 2012 R2!
- b0rsuk 13y agoDie-hard windows users will stay with Windows. Not because they like Windows so much, but because they believe in crap "every second Windows version is good", "I can just wait for another version", "what I have just works".