Naturally Bill Gates thinks it’s greeat! I and thousands like me on the other hand am condemned to suffer through the weeks of ensuing bugs and glitches and associated unoredictable total clusterfucks it will have while we’re paid peanuts:
Cnet— Gates noted that people will be “amazed at the energy” Microsoft is putting behind its new products, and he said Windows 8 “is key to where personal computing is going.” “This is the big time for us,” Gates said.
He added that he has been using his Surface tablet nonstop, calling it “unbelievably great.” Gate also hinted that the PC/tablet version of Windows and the phone version will eventually merge over time.
Yay, phone versions. Thanks Bill, even more shit I have to learn and half ass support at the drop of a hat for the same pay. Less actually, as inflation and other bills have outpaced my paltry raises, and I’m sure this coming year will see further erosions in company benefits just like this year did.
Well, it can’t really be worse than Win7… or Vista, Win phone, Surface, Win Server, etc.
It never ceases to amaze me the amount of utter garbage that the Windows-using world is content to just put up with.
Good chance that Windows 8 will be a miss, but MS has weathered this before with Windows ME and Vista. Windows 7 works well for the vast majority of users, but Windows XP works well enough that most businesses don’t want to upgrade (every upgrade cycle costs bucket-loads of money for any significantly sized company). Many organizations are only now looking to upgrade to Windows 7 mostly just because the non-OS software they use are not being supported any longer on XP…and I would expect they’ll do the same to Windows 8 (skip it until Windows 9 comes out).
I does not matter what OS you have your screwed. I spent a number of hours this weekend doing the IT thing with my wifes MAC. Apple & Microsoft all lie about their operating system.
My personal fave in the world of Microsoft fail was BOB. Anyone remember that? An attempt to make computers more “friendly” by giving the OS a cute name.
Second fave was the annoying paper clip. Really enjoyed it when I put in the help query,”How do I kill the paper clip?” and got a useful response.
Third fave was and is Word. I’ve never forgiven the demon of Redmond for killing Word Perfect for that unusable mess!
JohnBrown, every time I ask someone about Microsoft “Bob” I get the same vacant stare. No one seems to remember but me. Perhaps he should just be left to rot in peace.
And…
CLIPPIE MUST DIE!
So many users hated Clippie with a passion.
When it comes to obnoxious characters, Microsoft wins hands-down every time…
It’s pretty well established that every other Windows version is trash. Win 7 is great (Literally haven’t had a crash since I started using it a few months after it came out), so obviously 8 is going to be buggy. All the utterly moronic “Let’s put a tablet OS on real computers! Because that makes sense!” nonsense doesn’t help a bit.
So, yeah. I’ll be skipping it.
Pretty much every other version of Windows is a failure.
ME – fail
XP – still going strong in a lot of places
Vista – failure
Win 7 – much better
Win 8 – the portents are not good!
I wonder if they’ve got two development teams which alternate putting out the next version of Windows?
Something a bit like that, Trebuchet. It’s not different teams, it’s an expand-consolidate cycle.
Basically, they go in a pattern of “Raw New Technology / Polished Upgrade.” 95 was new, 98 was an upgrade. 2000 was new (and so not-ready-for-consumer-primetime that they pushed out crappy stopgap ME that didn’t fit the pattern), XP was an upgrade. Vista was new, 7 was an upgrade. 8 will be new.
True enough. I still wonder whether Windows 8 is before its time. I definitely see where they’re going with the “we’ll have one operating system that can operate PC’s and touchscreen tablets and we’ll be ahead of the curve when the markets start merging, but even the few demonstrator’s I’ve played with told me that attempting to use “touchscreen” controls in a desktop type environment is really awkward.
There’s also the enterprise market to consider. That’s the part I think they’re screwing over here. There’s still hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of active XP licenses because a fully patched up and streamlined XP still works fine. Lots of companies, the one I work at included, are just now starting to feel comfortable switching to Windows 7.
Now I wonder if they’re not shooting themselves in the foot because now any IT people pitching a software upgrade have to answer why they should upgrade to Windows 7 now when there’s a new version presently being released.
At my former company, OS upgrades seemed to be driven more by hardware replacement than any desire to upgrade the software. They were getting ready for a mass hardware replacement a couple of years ago when I left. I expect Win7 came along with it. They never used Vista at all.
Works fine for me; I haven’t been hit with any glitchiness or compatibility problems. I miss the Aero window borders, though. Not sure why they went back to Windows 3.1 for that.
You’re going to have an interesting learning curve on the start screen, until you get it customized to match you. And if you don’t have a touch screen you’ll need to learn all the keyboard shortcuts that were in previous versions but you never needed before (and then you’ll kick yourself for not doing it earlier).
MS still hasn’t learned that you should use a computer, not an operating system. I don’t want to see the operating system, so please stop making everything shiny and flashy and animated. Hell, I still can’t bring myself to install win7 on my main machine (it’s on my little laptop, and it pisses me off every time I try to use it… so I usually don’t). Example: in winXP, you just right click on the Network tray icon, and go directly to your choice of status, settings, firewall, etc. In win7, you have to open the Network & Sharing Center (whatever the hell that is…), and then find a link over in the left pane that opens another window that finally has the link to the network settings. Same with the Start menu (at least in stock form, thankfully there’s a 3rd party hack to bring back a start menu that’s actually usable). And on and on. Stop showing off and just make shit work, ok guys?
I’m with the “every other version is good” crowd. XP is legendary; 7 is really very solid. I’m still regretting that we installed Vista on our home machine (at least I didn’t pay for it, cough cough). Unless the reviews on 8 are rave, I’ll take a pass and wait for them to fix it in the next version :D
So far my Windows 8 experience has been fine. It’s wicked fast (especially in bootup) with a lot of nice OS features. With the initial upgrade pricing, there is little to no reason to not upgrade to it from XP, which may make Windows 8 the XP-killer.
The Metro interface has been over-hyped by both Microsoft as well as the Microsoft haters. You can use it as little or much as you like. From an enterprise perspective, the tighter integration between desktop, tablet, phone and server/cloud is a definite advantage over Windows 7.
Being faster, the hard-core gaming crowd should embrace it no matter what other features or bugs it comes with.
From a application development point of view, there are some interesting changes, but Microsoft is still, of course, fully supporting the legacy win32 environment for minimal impact to legacy applications.
Ars did a good article about the development environment as well as the history behind it:
http://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt-everything-old-is-new-again/
Power users will, of course, have to overcome the Someone Moved My Cheese inertia. A good place to start is by checking out the shortcuts to the administrative features which are now in a different part of the maze. A good article covering many of these changes is here:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Windows8ProductivityWhoMovedMyCheeseOhThereItIs.aspx
Remember, Vista wasn’t bad because it was so different from XP, it was bad because it was half Longhorn, with elements of XP patched over it in an effort to bring a new OS to market after Longhorn was cancelled.
The IT world has changed with the wide-scale acceptance of tablets and phones, and we really do need an OS that properly handles the new environment. Microsoft is actually taking a conservative approach with Windows 8, with more walls between the RT and classical win32 world than they could have gone with.
From that perspective Windows 8 must be viewed as a bit of an experiment, but it’s being implemented in the least possible restrictive way. I suggest you approach it with an open mind and try it. Most of the bad things I’ve heard about it simply aren’t true. Most of the positive hype, I’m sure, will also not be true. In my opinion it’s actually a nice evolution of the OS.
If you don’t want to read the tips and tricks, you at least should know about Right-Click when the mouse is in the lower-left corner of the screen to call up a lot of the tools you will be looking for. This works when in the desktop or Metro interface…
There’s alway Linux :)
It is an even version number (Windows 2, Windows 95, Windows ME, Vista.) What more needs to be said?
@15, Tsu Dho Nimh
Unfortunately, some of the biggest players in Linux are doing the same tablet/phone-on-a-pc schtick. Ubuntu, probably the single largest and well-known distro, ditched the traditional desktop for a home-grown touch-scree-friendly desktop, and Gnome (popular desktop gui software) followed suit shortly after (if I remember the timeline correctly).
It’s unfortunate because Ubuntu’s primary version used to use Gnome for it’s desktop environment, and it made some not-insignificant inroads with casual PC users.
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I think Windows 8 is going to be terrible for the PC in general because of the UEFI requirements Microsoft is making of hardware manufacturers.
Quite looking forward to it myself, I’m elligible for the $15 upgrade & hope to get it Thursday.
8 looked like trash from inception. It isn’t a new thing to me, I’ve been aware of it since it was announced, so its RTM means little to me.
For those of the even/odd Windows release persuasion: 98 sucked, too, untile the Second Edition was released. 95 was pretty decent (for Windows) after rev B/C. XP was a pile of shit until SP2. I personally stay years out of date with MS OSes, and I like it that way.
8 is supposed to cut down on support (or at least begin to do so) because eventually only the “Metro app” will be the only supported development method, and loaded only through the Windows Store (sound familiar? “user friendliness” imposed via walled gardens). What MS really wants you to do is buy the current incarnation of the Surface. This is far from the only issue, but others have already been mentioned.
MS BOB: Heh, lol, I have it installed on the computer I’m using right now. It isn’t an OS, it’s one of those “desktop navigator” sort of overlays on top of the GUI (which, at the time of release, was an overlay on the real OS, DOS).
But I also have a copy of the Bob-mockery Bubba by Osasoft.
As always, Microsloth is guilty of producing bloatware. It expands the OS to fill all the available memory and hard drive space, and it forces users to buy new PCs because old ones can’t run it. It’s wasteful and stupid.
I would rather see less window dressing (pun definitely not intended) and a more streamlined version with less clutter and a LOT more options when installing. Do we really need a program to look as if a piece of paper was turning in a book? Or be forced to install crapware that will never be used (e.g. Internet Exploder, LookOut! It’s Going To Crash!)? I want fast, small and stable, not beautiful.
The only positive I have to say about Microsloth is that (for the most part) they’ve maintained backward compatibility, that older software will still run. You could run a DOS program written in 1980 if you really had to.
That’s not something you can say about Apple where you’re screwed if you go back more than one OS generation. Some Linux apps won’t work if they’re not compiled on the same distribution (e.g. Ubuntu, Gentoo, et al). That’s why I gave up on Linux, I could never tell in advance programs worked, and some were only compiled on one distribution.
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Regarding others’ disdain for Microsloth (e.g. F @ 19), I agree that many versions were crap until service packs and second editions solved problems. 95, 2000, XP and 7 were tolerable – sort of like Star Trek movies, the odd numbered versions suck, the even numbers are good. But I absolutely hate Windows Explorer in XP, with its bouncing folders. It opens (or closes) whether folders you want it to or not, and things close without being touched. I am forever grateful to developers of freeware file explorers.
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Humour from 2001, by an unknown author:
Attributed to Art Bahrs of Hewlett-Packard, August 1997: