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.
“My dad stayed away with any equipment with the Craftsman name or appliances with Sears name due to this.”
Well nothing against your dad, I’m sure he was a fine man, but I do question his knowledge in this area.
Kenmore and Craftsman have never been manufactured by Sears, it is a brand that sears created, but it does not manufacture any of it. They are made by companies like whirlpool, Maytag, GE etc under license. You can always get a part for a kenmore or craftsman product from the original manufacturer even if sears will no longer directly sell you one (assuming of course the original manufacturer still has parts for your model) all you need to know is the original manufacturers version of that model and cross reference the part.
Here’s a useful link showing what I am saying:
http://www.appliance411.com/purchase/sears.shtml
and another for Craftsman:
http://vintagemachinery.org/craftsman/manufacturers.aspx
W8 UI is confusing to users of pre-8 WinOS.
that’s a given.
My servers (running Win Server 2008) at work are easier to navigate than my Win8 devbox. So, I use classic shell.
With Win 8.1 I’m assured that all bleeding edge .Net assemblies are supported and all available bugfix/workarounds installed..
the thing to understand about software is that is evolves quite independently from how customers react, or can be predicted to react, by marketeers.