Posted on 07/28/2014 4:25:25 PM PDT by markomalley
Microsoft attempted something different and daring with Windows 8. It introduced a whole new interface and means of interaction with your PC that was identical to a smartphone or tablet. It threw out the “Start” menu and mouse-driven interface people had used for decades in favor of a touch-driven interface with tiles, some of which received active information updates.
And people hated it.
“They tried to get their entire audience to jump from a UI [user interface] they were comfortable with to a brand new one with a serious learning curve,” California-based Creative Strategies tech analyst and president Tim Bajarin said. “Had they done a more transitionary product, especially keeping the Start button, I don’t think the impact and perception would have been as bad.”
By removing the Start button, which had been a Windows fixture since Windows 95, Microsoft wasn’t just introducing a new way of using the operating system — it was trying to force people away from the only one they had known for two decades.
The result was that Windows 8 was slaughtered in the court of public opinion, often compared to the much-maligned Windows Vista released in 2006. It was an incorrect comparison; Vista was a technological hairball, a truly awful piece of software that often failed when people tried to install it on their PCs.
Windows 8 was technically sound. No one complained of crashing, slow performance or old apps not working on it. People noted it was actually a tad faster than Windows 7, they just hated how it looked. The result was slow sales for Windows 8, but Windows 7, the OS it was supposed to replace, kept selling like hotcakes.
“Its distinguishing feature was support for touchscreens but also legacy applications,” Endpoint Technologies President Roger Kay said. Endpoint is a Boston-based market research firm. “It ended up being a Frankenstein. So the good parts, like being a little faster and more reliable and more secure were almost totally invisible to the end user. So you could tell people it was faster and more reliable and they said ‘I don’t know how to use it.’”
Kay said the beating Windows 8 took in the tech press hurt, but users also hated it. Microsoft released a public beta for anyone to download and use on February 29, 2012, and released the product in October, 2012. During that time, in all the public Windows forums, “consumers were gnashing their teeth and stomping their feet about it. It was vilified in public forums,” Kay said.
The old guard who came up with Windows 8 and refused to listen to beta testers are gone and Microsoft has more or less given up trying to rescue its slandered OS. There will be another significant update to Windows 8.1 (called Update 2) later this year. After that, the new management are focusing their efforts on Windows 9.
Windows 9, which Microsoft internally calls “Threshold,” should ship around the second quarter of 2015. It will put the Windows 8 interface on the back burner but not throw it out, since applications written for Windows 8 would be broken. The familiar desktop with the Start button will be back.
Bajarin expects Windows 9 will return all of the familiar elements of Windows 7 and prior operating systems, with the new UI relegated to the back burner while new features are added to bring people forward.
“I don’t think it will be radical at all,” Bajarin said. ”I think they will make it easier to work with user interfaces of the past and provide better transition for those with older operating systems to come into this era.”
That could include tighter cloud services integration. One feature widely rumored but not confirmed by Microsoft is that it will offer seamless, tight cloud integration into the OS. Your OneDrive storage will be as easy to access as the “C: drive,” so all of your documents, personal files, photos, etc. will go right to the cloud without having to think about it.
Apps might also be potentially stored in the cloud as well. Say you log on to another Windows 9 PC using your login and password –not only will your data files be accessible from your cloud storage, but also the apps you use.
Kay expects more cloud-oriented features as well.
“It would be good to move to a cloud-oriented OS to do updates more frequently and keep the OS alive,” Kay said. “That way you would check in to the cloud at login but run locally, so you could work anywhere.”
He also doesn’t expect Windows 9 to be a major departure from the operating systems of old.
“You’d expect them to do more in order to justify all of the effort of creating a new OS other than fixing the old one. There will be a lot of it will be bells and whistles, but a lot of that stuff tends to fall into Who-Cares? territory,” Kay said.
Another rumored addition to Windows 9 is Cortana — the digital voice assistant currently being rolled out to Windows Phone users. Cortana is like the iPhone’s Siri: ask it a question and it fetches the proper contextual answer. Microsoft has made comments in recent weeks about bringing Cortana to Windows PCs, and Windows 9 would be the most logical candidate to get its own answer to J.A.R.V.I.S.
At this point, it’s all speculation, but one thing is for certain: Microsoft needs to get Windows 9 right. Kay noted that Microsoft has had only one good operating system in its last three releases over the last eight years. Windows 7 (2009) was good, while Vista (2006) and Windows 8 (2012) were bad.
“Those are not good odds for software. Maybe for blackjack, but not operating systems. I would love for [Windows 9] to work great and do the right thing, but they are one for three in recent releases. So I’m a bit cynical,” Kay said.
cloud-based apps == s/w rental service == never-ending revenue stream
difference is an xp machine may still work just fine for what someone needs to do. ‘79 set won’t be useful as no tv signals are being broadcast for them to pick up.
whynget on someone for being upset a company destroys a product people liked, and ignored their pleas’not to change it. msquish has dropped a number of crap os’s in their hstory so it’s a chronic issue with them. it also affects shareholders’ bottom lines by being massively pig-headed and stupid.
you don’t expect chevy to provide free updates..
>>XP officially went out of support last April (or thereabouts).
>>>It still works better than windows 8<<<
<<
That is like being the best yodeler in Harlem...
I find few XP progs that do not work on W/8.1, while with the Classic Shell it is like XP.
But i also ignore the MS defaults as in not using Libraries, My Documents, and hot key much using AutoHotKey (not in Linux), including remapping CapsLock to crtrl+c, Esc to ctrl+v, and NumLok to Esc. and the middle mouse to ctrl+x, among other things. Thank God.
THANK GOD that 8.1 Update 1 included a application kill button.
That question could spark a lot of wars... ;-) I'll tell you what I did a bit later. First thing though, to save yourself the hassle of learning a new OP SYS, have you looked into whether your old XP box would run Win7? Get yourself a download of Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. Install and run it and it will give you a really good idea of whether you can run Win7 on your old box or not. If you opt to try out Win7 I would recommend picking up a new hard drive, install as primary and install Win7 on it. Then hook up your old XP drive as secondary and you can migrate your files from it. When you get all your stuff off of the old drive, reformat it and use as a data drive...
If the above was Greek to you you may not want to go playing around with anything else. But if you are comfortable playing around with OpSys installs and don't want to try Win7 I would suggest one of the many fine Linux distros. What I did when faced with the death of XP follows.
Three machines were affected by XP endoflife, an old (vintage 2002 or 3) single-core cpu laptop, a newer vintage dual core cpu laptop business model that came with XP back when no businesses would buy Win Vista but was capable of running Vista (note: if the machine would run Vista, chances are like 99% that it will run Win7) and an old desktop that once was my Daughters that I used as a guinea pig... ;-)
I had purchased some hardware (MoBo and dual core cpu) to upgrade the guts of Daughters old box, but instead got her an all-new quad core setup, so I tossed the new stuff into her old XP box and started experimenting with Linux distros. Finally settled on Mint with the Cinnamon desktop, and have been happy with that result. It has two hard drives in it so every new release gets loaded as a clean install on 'secondary' drive, the old primary becomes secondary, and the new install becomes the boot drive (so I could easily go back just by swapping drive cables should I want.) (Like I said, this box is the 'test bed.')
The dual core laptop got a 250G SSD and Win7 installed on it with the old WinXP hard drive stuck into an external USB enclosure until files were scavenged, at which point it was reformatted (as I said, the machine was designed to run Vista and there were no problems going to Win7.)
The old single core laptop was the biggest challenge. I was pretty sure that I could get Win7 to run on it but the performance hit would render the machine useless for more than a paperweight with pretty graphics, so I opted for Linux on that machine. That took some doing. The machine itself was maxed out at 1gig of memory of which 256k was 'shared' with the video. I copied all my Windows files off the hard drive and departitioned it so I could do a clean install of Linux. And started having issues. Apparently when you install from a DVD, the install routine loads, or tries to load, all the necessary stuff into RAM. It seems to require at least a half gig of ram to get all the stuff in, and then some left over for 'wiggle room' - operating space during install. Here's where I ran into issues with the available ram on the machine, most often after it had run the install to the point that it was trying to make the jump to running off the hard drive (following letting the install partition and format the drive and try to copy files to it.) Somewhere in that sequence I would develop a memory overflow thing and was dead. Had to play around with different versions and desktops to find one that could get through the install without seizing up. A fault of the hardware limitations on the laptop, not Linux itself - Ubuntu, Mint, and Debian all had issues at roughly the same point.
End result of all this verbage - if you can get Win7 to run on your machine, I would recommend that. If not, go Linux. Download one or more distros with whatever variations of desktops they have. All the ones I looked at had the ability to run from the DVD so you could get an idea of what you were looking at. Then pick one and install - and then start playing with it.. ;-)
I see you have a PET... ;-)
How long did it take you to find it?
I think the Start Button was around before Windows 95 wasn’t it?
It’s already being reported that Windows 9 will require a login account on THE STORE in order to activate its license.
Having to use THE STORE for any purpose whatsoever is all the reason I need to keep myself and all of my business and consumer clients on W7 indefinitely. No doubt the enterprise and SMB will stay away from W9 in droves for the same reason if they’re forced to use THE STORE for any purpose whatsoever.
You’d think Microsoft would have learned many lessons from Windows 8, but my gut says no, that Microsoft will commit an equal number of serious blunders with W9 as they did with W8. If so, W7 may be the last Windows OS that has any clout anywhere, and Microsoft’s OS monopoly will disintegrate.
Once the enterprise, SMB, and savvy consumer customers convert to Windows 7, they’re gonna sit tight until their hardware fries. Windows 8 has taught us that Microsoft no longer cares what we think, and no longer cares to make products that are of benefit to anyone except themselves.
We’re all going to be looking at Windows 9 with an incredibly jaded eye, and quite frankly I suspect that Microsoft has yet to learn their lesson with Windows 8, and will be deliberately making a whole new set of really bad decisions resulting in a number of serious blunders equal to what they did with the Windows 8 ecosystem.
Microsoft is no longer interested in making our lives simpler or even making products that benefit our lives and our businesses. The sole focus of that corporation is to now make products that benefit only Microsoft.
Microsoft is in the process of shifting their OS from a PC OS to nothing more than a set of deeply integrated clients that exclusively marry one’s hardware to a set of Microsoft servers. Microsoft’s vision of the future is not a vision of the Personal Computer anymore, but a vision of client terminals tightly and solely tied to Microsoft servers of various sorts. Any vestigial local functionality will be merely window dressing to make people think they are still buying hardware and software that make up a personal computer.
Windows 9 will simply be the next step in the not-a-personal-computer-any-longer evolution started by the execrable Windows 8.x. Rather than being the Phoenix rising from the smoking pile of Windows 8 ashes, Windows 9
is likely just going to be another pile of ashes heaped upon the old Windows 8 ones.
PC’s do not have “apps” they have programs.
Windows 8 was OK. It just wasn’t made for desktop or laptop computers. I have a touchscreen PC with Widnows 8, but I just don’t use the touchscreen feature. I’m very good with a mouse and a button and I have no need to move my hands away from the keyboard every time I need to execute a command.
““New Coke.””
Uh, I believe that Windows 9 would be “New New Coke”.
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How much was that low, low price?
Nope.
Big ad campaign featuring the new seature...
Well, considering it’s MS, it might HAVE been a seature. But I think they called it a feature...
Well actually if car companies used policies MS does your Chevy would be ready for the scrap yard in about 5 years. Why? Because they would not allow any company license to make replacement parts. Can you imagine a Microsoft concept economy? Did your heat pump crap out at seven years and needs a $50 relay? Gee too bad no company can make one but we can sell you a brand new $5000 heat pump.
I'm driving a 95 Ford truck because Ford allows the market to support it. It's only got about 110,000 miles on it and I expect to put 100K more with parts still readily available. Parts will likely be around 20 years from now.
I have a 22 year old fridge. When it needs parts I can go buy them. Why? Because the company allows others to make parts. Sears for a long time tried the MS policy of only having their specific parts fit major items they sold and they controlled how long they would be available. Sears lost their butts eventually doing so because GE & others etc. allowed you to buy parts for their products elsewhere. My dad stayed away with any equipment with the Craftsman name or appliances with Sears name due to this.
MS needs some affordable stiff competition to keep them honest so that other program developers can sell their product license too instead of MS exclusive rights. Right now it's like being in a town 75 miles from no where and being at the mercy of the person who owns the store, garage, gas station, hardware store and same person is also sheriff and mayor.
W8 stinks. Their CLOUD they keep pushing even more so. I don't want my files stored in their CLOUD and I don't want my bandwidth ate up uploading to them either. W8 has already had more so called patches and updates file size wise than W/XP in all it's years yet they still refuse to admit the OS is a dog. The W/8 updates never really seem to quite fix anything nor for that matter show any real notable differences. You'd think with a near 1GB update they could do that. Two screens I am real tired of seeing on W8 is "This Page can not be Displayed" & the "Internet Explorer has had to shut down" press here to restore.
MS needs to start listening to customers. Not doing so is what generates the animosity toward the corp.
Customer satisfaction and input/feedback from customers is not on their agenda. Their attitude is we are Microsoft take our system and you'll like it. If not Oh well wait two more years. XP proved they can build a basic reliable stable system. Windows ME, Vista, and 8 however proves that is not the agenda. I've bought my last Winders OS unless they show substantial improvements in all areas.
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