Windows 8: how did so much suck happen?

[Wowbagger]

I'm not particularly bright, yet I seemed to manage this in a remarkably short time.

It's just a sign of bad design that you needed to do that, at all.


Also, it seems some people don't like icons pinned to the Taskbar. (My own mother happens to be one.) It makes them think the applications are open all the time. And, others don't like the space being wasted, especially if they enable captions on running apps.

So, pinning things is not always such a great solution for a few segments of the Windows-using world. (I imagine those who have used MacOS would feel right at home, though.)

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

I spent quite a bit of time tweaking XP when I first started using it. I continued to tweak it over the years.

I have never started it with a stock installation of any OS that didn't require tweaking to bring it in line with my preferences. When I got my first XT clone with DOS 2.11 I had to go in with debug and patch the environment space to expand it because it was hard-coded to 256 bytes. This was plenty for most people but not enough to handle the batch files you needed to work with Fidonet well.

I never expected Win 8 to be entirely perfect for my tastes out of the box. I really don't understand anyone thinking it should be..

Perhaps your experiences are not the same as mine, but I certainly had no problem aligning Win 8 with my preferences. Less so than XP was initially if I recall correctly.

It's always a challenge to dial in a new OS. But for years, I didn't mind because I was getting support for larger disks, more memory, USB, etc. I saw steady progress in desktop capabilities. But that has petered out. The desktop environment is still important, but it doesn't need to change much any more. That is the crux of the griping you see here. The message to MS is, leave the desktop as it is and pursue tablets and phones as a separate project.

I made my peace with W8 very quickly, as soon as I figured out how to bypass the phone/tablet interface and keep it from intruding at odd moments. I can use W8 or W7 or XP with equal comfort. Windows is Windows. Somehow I doubt that cranking out new versions is going to be a winning strategy for much longer.

 

[Meed]

Windows 8 was NOT made for YOU!! It was made for kindergarten students, who will grow up getting used to that sort of thing. Why would you assume a giant corporation, building an interface for EVERYONE, would care about YOUR needs?!!

You realize Travis' problem with Windows 8 was that he accidentally downloaded the wrong version of skype and that he hadn't changed his default music player, right...? Those problems can be fixed within a couple minutes and they aren't interface problems.

And, one additional problem with the Start Screen being full-screen is that it leads to more cases of situational amnesia. This is the sort of thing that happens when you go into the kitchen, and forget what you were supposed to be getting from there. The act of transforming the environment actually makes you sometimes forget stuff from the previous environment. And, now, it's a built-in part of the Windows Operating system!
We see more people clicking Start, momentarily forgetting why they did that, going back to their application, remembering, then clicking Start again. That didn't happen nearly as much with the partial-screen compact Start Menu.

It's also a dreadful nuisance when you are trying to video chat with people: "Hold on a sec! Don't show anything interesting on the screen, for a few seconds, while I open up this other application."

Hmm not for me. Most of the time I use the start screen it's: hit windows key -> type in first few letters of whatever program I want to run -> press enter (and start screen gone). Which takes about 1 second. I also have the classic windows start menu and could change the hotkey to correspond to that instead, but I rarely feel the need to use it. Classic is nice if you don't remember exactly what programs you have (or their names) and want to browse through them.

 

[John Jones]

Windows 8.x has sold even fewer copies than Windows Vista over a similar period of time.

MS admits that Vista was a mistake.

 

[John Jones]

If you mean 'some people', then yes, but that doesn't really change what I said, considering what I was responding to.

Some people being the buying public -- but hey, let us let the public decide.

 

[Rat]

Some people being the buying public -- but hey, let us let the public decide.

So a lot of people apparently don't like 8. Still doesn't change what I was responding to in that post.

 

[Wowbagger]

Some people being the buying public -- but hey, let us let the public decide.

It's not even merely a matter of public opinion.

Even if Windows 8 had wildly successful sales, it would still be an objectively bad design. Just one that a lot of people would tolerate for one reason or another.

Skyrim was one of the most popular games on the planet. That doesn't mean it's built-in user interface doesn't objectively suck, especially in the inventory management department. (SkyUI, which fixes those issues, is the only 3rd party add-in I consistently use in the game.)

Of course, Microsoft would care about sales. And, the fact that the sales are poor is bad for them. But, I generally don't use that as an indicator of the quality of a product.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

You realize Travis' problem with Windows 8 was that he accidentally downloaded the wrong version of skype and that he hadn't changed his default music player, right...? Those problems can be fixed within a couple minutes and they aren't interface problems.

And why did he download the "wrong version"?

 

[John Jones]

I do wonder how the release of Windows 95 (which of course introduced the start menu as well as lots of others standard bits of Windows) would have looked if 3.11 had the numbers of people using it at home that XP did, and the web widely available and used for them to vent on.

Wonder is a wonderful thing.

What nobody has been willing to answer is if WIN 8 is backwards-compatible with previous software like Oracle 10/11, etc.

 

[elbe]

Wonder is a wonderful thing.

What nobody has been willing to answer is if WIN 8 is backwards-compatible with previous software like Oracle 10/11, etc.

For the most part it should be compatible with anything 7 could run, but there are always going to be exceptions so you'd have to check with the developers or, if you're feeling adventurous, install it and find out.

 

[Rat]

Wonder is a wonderful thing.

What nobody has been willing to answer is if WIN 8 is backwards-compatible with previous software like Oracle 10/11, etc.

I honestly have no idea at all. Is there any reason to expect (rather than hope) that a new OS is entirely compatible with all software that was written for the previous version? MS have not yet stopped support for 7, so if that's what you're currently running on, you can keep on using it for at least a couple of years. If you're currently running on XP, then you've known for a long time what the expiry date on that was. If your Oracle stuff is not compatible with 8, then don't go to 8. If it is, then do. If you don't know, then test.

 

[Wowbagger]

I do wonder how the release of Windows 95 (which of course introduced the start menu as well as lots of others standard bits of Windows) would have looked if 3.11 had the numbers of people using it at home that XP did, and the web widely available and used for them to vent on.

Adding the Start Button and Taskbar are, objectively, improvements to the UI. The taskbar makes it EASIER to see which applications are open, and to switch between them. And, it leaves room for a system tray of important status icons (and some not-so-important ones, unfortunately), and a clock.

Granted, the Start Menu, in its earliest form, was a mess of nested folders. But, at least you could get to it at any time, without hopping over to a Program Manager. And, the Start Menu's usefulness did improve over time.

And, on top of that, MOST behaviors people were used to on Win 3.1 did NOT have to change. The Control Panel was still the Control Panel. (You didn't have different setting in different places, ala Win8.), etc. So, there was little to complain about, regarding how things "changed", even for those used to the 3.1 way of doing things.

Hell, Win95 even kept a copy of the Program Manager executable as an option (though it wasn't advertised), just in case someone was going to go into a tirade over it, anyway.

 

[Meed]

And why did he download the "wrong version"?

The same reason that full screen apps were set as default for media files. Because someone (or multiple someones) at Microsoft is very stupid. I made the exact same mistake Travis did with Skype. It was a little annoying, but it was an easy problem to fix.

Travis' troubles with his new computer are the result of very dumb mistakes by MS, but they aren't problems with the OS itself.

 

[smartcooky]

Copy protection dongles have always been problematic as far as the smooth operation of a PC is concerned.

The fact that the particular one you are talking about survived a couple of iterations of Windows before it finally started screwing up is not an indictment Win 8. Maybe a testimony to whoever coded it in the first place, but backward compatibility can only ever be expected to go so far.

Somewhere back in the mid-eighties I came to the conclusion that any program which required me to use a hardware copy protection dongle (or a key disk, or carved reserved sectors into my hard disk, or ... ) needed to be avoided.

I agree, but unfortunately, they are hard to avoid in my trade. Pretty much you have Fuji, & Noritsu who are tied up with Whitech, and Kodak (for how much longer, I can't say), and all have dongles to protect their software.

 

[kirstenholme]

Take Skype for instance. It used to be that I could just run it in the background and if something happened I would get an exclamation icon in the notification area that would stay there until I finally checked it. Now there is no icon.....anywhere and if I want to see if someone has left a message I actually have to go to the damned tile interface and click on it. If I don't do this periodically I might miss out on an entire series of posts without knowing it.

Another complaint is with Skype itself, though that is a third party issue, where in the Windows 8 version I have no ability to even view my profile settings let alone change them. I guess I'd better hope I was happy with all the info I inputted back with the old version!

Another complaint would be with music. I can only play one song at a time now because there is no "play all" button and I can't pick a new song without completely leaving the desktop.

Everything becomes more user friendly when you hook software onto your task bar. Then you never have to leave the desktop. As for music, just open Win Media Player and drag your songs onto the list. (Am I missing something?)

 

[Brian-M]

You forgot the caveat there: Many programs don't work on these systems.

I suppose the suitability depends on the individual user.

If you're a gamer or have special software you want to run, then it's probably not a good choice because many software companies don't bother creating ports for Linux and BSD. Other than a dual-boot system, you'd just have to hope that they work under WINE, DosBOX, ect, and end up frustrated and annoyed when they don't.

But if you're just using it for general-purpose things where open-source equivalents and Linux ports are readily available (like word-processing, internet, ect), then this isn't really a problem.

I never expected Win 8 to be entirely perfect for my tastes out of the box. I really don't understand anyone thinking it should be..

No operating system can be expected to be entirely perfect for everyone's tastes straight out of the box, and I doubt that most people expect that that it would be. But I suspect that most people are hoping for a generally positive experience with a new OS right out of the box, especially when it's supposed to be an upgrade to their current OS.

This might be why people are upset with Windows 8. They're expecting something similar to what they're already familiar with, only slightly better, but end up with something annoyingly unfamiliar which they can't use effectively right out the box without an uncomfortably steep learning curve.

 

[quadraginta]

I suppose the suitability depends on the individual user.

If you're a gamer or have special software you want to run, then it's probably not a good choice because many software companies don't bother creating ports for Linux and BSD. Other than a dual-boot system, you'd just have to hope that they work under WINE, DosBOX, ect, and end up frustrated and annoyed when they don't.

But if you're just using it for general-purpose things where open-source equivalents and Linux ports are readily available (like word-processing, internet, ect), then this isn't really a problem.



No operating system can be expected to be entirely perfect for everyone's tastes straight out of the box, and I doubt that most people expect that that it would be. But I suspect that most people are hoping for a generally positive experience with a new OS right out of the box, especially when it's supposed to be an upgrade to their current OS.

This might be why people are upset with Windows 8. They're expecting something similar to what they're already familiar with, only slightly better, but end up with something annoyingly unfamiliar which they can't use effectively right out the box without an uncomfortably steep learning curve.

I guess that's why I'm not upset with it, because the learning curve I experienced was trivial to the point of inconsequential.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

It is interesting that the Windows taskbar has essentially become the OS X dock, when the dock was always referred to as Apple's needless and inferior reinvention of the taskbar (at least in the circles I was in). Personally, I don't like it because I often have multiple windows of the same program running. But going back to XP I would hate it when it would group windows when the bar gets "too full". You can set it back to the old school way, but then you get pinned icon shortcuts mixed in all over and it is weird.

 

[quadraginta]

<snip>

Also, it seems some people don't like icons pinned to the Taskbar. (My own mother happens to be one.) It makes them think the applications are open all the time. And, others don't like the space being wasted, especially if they enable captions on running apps.

<snip>

What space is being wasted?

And why can't you explain to your mother that the applications aren't really open all the time?

 

[Wowbagger]

They're expecting something similar to what they're already familiar with, only slightly better, but end up with something annoyingly unfamiliar which they can't use effectively right out the box without an uncomfortably steep learning curve.

It's NOT merely a matter of learning curve. The UI design is objectively bad.

The Microsoft Office Ribbon was also a steep learning curve for some people. But, it was widely accepted relatively rapidly because it was an objective improvement over the previous menu/toolbar design.

Windows 8, on the other hand, is NOT an improvement. It's just plain worse. Even AFTER you learn it, going back to Win7 feels refreshing to most folks.

What space is being wasted?

The pinned icons of non-running apps waste space on the taskbar that could better be used by icons of apps that are open.

This is especially true when labels are set to be visible on open apps.

And why can't you explain to your mother that the applications aren't really open all the time?

It's not just my mother. There are probably thousands of other "mothers" out there. And, this might be more of a personal preference thing, for some folks.


Then there are also freaks, like me, who regularly use TONS of applications. I do keep a few icons pinned to the taskbar. But, if I pinned all the apps I use, there wouldn't be any room left for unpinned items.

I also have to keep a few pinned to the Start Menu (which does not come with Win8), and even there, I set up a couple of sub-folders of groups of icons.