Wondering about Windows 8 and new versions of Vegas

[Angelo Mike]

[Steve Rhoden] “”Windows 8.1 will reintroduce the Start menus and allow you to boot directly to the desktop…”
Why the hell didnt they just release Windows 8 like that?
It bogles me at what some experienced corporations do at times
and what goes through their line of thinking.”

I try not to think about it, or it’ll drive me insane.

[John Rofrano]

Microsoft has never been an innovative software developer. They usually just follow the crowd and now you know why… when they do try and stand out and do something different, they get it all wrong. All they needed to do was test Windows 8 with a few corporate customers and they would have gotten all the feedback they needed to get it right. Apparently, they are incapable of doing that.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Angelo Mike]

I happened to use the internet on a Windows 8 computer today. It was unbelievably bad.

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] “Windows 8.1 will reintroduce the Start menus and allow you to boot directly to the desktop avoid their “Hello Kitty” Metro screen. So it will be a lot more like Windows 7 and a lot less like the unpopular Windows Phone.”

A little more. The Start Button they’re delivering doesn’t have a Windows 7 style Start Menu attached, at least in the versions shown so far. It’s got a much simpler menu, and when you want to launch a program, it’s still going to fire up the Metro-style Start Screen for you. It doesn’t restore the full Windows 7 menus the way all those various third party start-menu-replacements do.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Steve Rhoden] “Why the hell didnt they just release Windows 8 like that?
It bogles me at what some experienced corporations do at times
and what goes through their line of thinking.”

This is Microsoft in Panic Mode. We saw this before, with Windows 98. Back then, Microsoft has missed the web. Entirely. So they had cranked out Internet Explorer during the Windows 95 days. And in Windows 98, they went “all in” to a stupid degree, making the whole Windows desktop look like badly designed web pages. By default.

So once again, Microsoft missed the whole phone/tablet thing. Sure, they’ve had both for over a decade, but they lost all of their phone business, and the tablets never sold beyond a niche. Apple’s did. And then Android, using the same consumer-focused market, became the first application-oriented OS to outsell Windows since, well, the days of MS-DOS being the only application-oriented OS to outsell Windows.

So once again, the “all-in” approach… Everything has to be Metro. Ironically, this is only UI, not application compatibility… you can’t run full Windows 8 programs on Windows RT, you can’t run RT apps on Windows Phone, you can’t run Windows Phone apps on X-Box, etc.

Microsoft could have done just as you suggest. Or even better, as I suggested back before Windows 8 was out, ship it with two graphical shells, the Windows 8 one we all know and despise (well, most professionals), and the Windows 7 shell.

Here’s the thing… Microsoft IS in panic mode. They have clearly decided that the desktop is failing, and as well, that desktop users aren’t going away entirely. So they’re not too worried about making us happy. Microsoft wants to be Apple, and so they’re thinking nothing but Metro, Tablet, Phone, TV. The Metro UI on the desktop is designed to get you and me and my cats all used to Metro UIs, so presumably we’ll be more inclined to use non-desktop Windows devices.

And I’m also guessing that this was just not well orchestrated, from the management level on down. There were people telling Microsoft everything we’ve heard and read and experienced for ourselves, how bad the UI was, even if evaluated on a tablet as a GUI independent of Windows. It’s simply not a proper GRAPHICAL User Interface… the UI doesn’t make things intuitive. You just have to learn its various quirks. Lots of what used to be done with clicks is far more efficient with keyboard commands… on a UI designed for a fingers-please tablet. Microsoft clearly had a pronouncement about the UI, and no one was hiring real GUI designers or running proper usability tests. But I digress….

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Angelo Mike] “So, when Vegas 13 comes out, is there some consensus on what OS to use?”

Windows 7.

With enough 3rd party hacks, you can make Windows 8 nearly as usable for desktop work as Windows 7. But I really don’t expect Sony or any other company making professional software to embrace the Metro UI anytime soon. Vegas would get horribly clumsy if forced into allowing every control to be operated with one’s fingers. It’s not necessary to support touch or Metro to work on Windows 8 tablets — they pretty much all come with Wacom-style digitizers in the screen, as well as the much less accurate capacitive fingery touch sensor.

Add that to the fact that Metro apps are always full screen, with a bit of a hack to allow very limited vertical tiles… nearly as advanced as the tiling in Windows 1.0 🙂 This is not an acceptable UI for professional work… I do audio, video, photography, programming, CAD, etc. and every one of these disciplines runs dozens of windows across my three screens. Whole-screen is often the right choice for media consumption… web surfing less so, but usually video, eBooks, etc. work well on just one screen. Not development of anything.

It is technically possible to allow a Windows 8 program to use either UI. It wasn’t originally going to be that way, but Microsoft caved on allowing this, WinRT and Win32 in the same program or some means of getting there. Of course, that means the program is Windows 8 only, no RT or easy ports to Phone or X-Box. So I wouldn’t be shocked to see some pro-class programs run this way, offering a reduced-function fingers-on mode. However, I doubt they’ll have many requests for such things.

And this kind of defeats the purpose on other ways. WinRT does two things for Microsoft: it gives them power management control over programs, like iOS and Android have, but which can’t be done in regular Windows. WinRT is always or nearly always managed code (the politically correct term for “it runs in a virtual machine”, as do all of the .NET common runtime programs, even in Windows 7, as well as Java, Dalvik, etc). And it gives Microsoft absolute control over an Apple-like walled garden. Sony couldn’t sell you a Metro/RT version of Vegas, you’d have to buy it in the Windows Store. And MS will take their 30% off the top, just as Apple does.

-Dave

[John Rofrano]

[Dave Haynie] “It doesn’t restore the full Windows 7 menus the way all those various third party start-menu-replacements do.”

So they couldn’t even get that right. Typical Microsoft! I’m glad I don’t use Windows anymore on a daily bases.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

[Dave Haynie] “This is Microsoft in Panic Mode. We saw this before, with Windows 98. Back then, Microsoft has missed the web. Entirely. So they had cranked out Internet Explorer during the Windows 95 days. And in Windows 98, they went “all in” to a stupid degree, making the whole Windows desktop look like badly designed web pages. By default.”

Oh man I remember that now. I had almost forgotten. You are dead on. They thought the Internet was a passing fad and totally ignored it and they’ve done it again with tablets and phones. Don’t forget Windows 1, 2, and finally 3.1 which was their way of playing catch-up to the Mac but even then it was a half-hearted attempt where you had to drop out into DOS mode run certain programs. The desktop is slowly dieing and they are holding on for dear life.

[Dave Haynie] “The Metro UI on the desktop is designed to get you and me and my cats all used to Metro UIs, so presumably we’ll be more inclined to use non-desktop Windows devices.”

Yea I think this is where their logic broke down. I actually had an Apple device (iPad then iPhone) before an Apple computer (MacBook Pro) so it was Apple’s intuitive device interface that drove me to buy more of their products and switch from Windows to Mac. Microsoft has no market share in the device market so they have no way to pull customers in and then they totally forgot the fact that placing a touch interface on a non-touch desktop makes it extremely hard to use.

[Dave Haynie] “Microsoft clearly had a pronouncement about the UI, and no one was hiring real GUI designers or running proper usability tests. But I digress….”

Microsoft has never been, and never will be, a great UI company nor a company that drives innovation. They seem to like always being in “catch-up” mode and they can’t even get that right.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] “Yea I think this is where their logic broke down. I actually had an Apple device (iPad then iPhone) before an Apple computer (MacBook Pro) so it was Apple’s intuitive device interface that drove me to buy more of their products and switch from Windows to Mac. Microsoft has no market share in the device market so they have no way to pull customers in and then they totally forgot the fact that placing a touch interface on a non-touch desktop makes it extremely hard to use”

Yup… in fact, the overall growth of the Apple market, particularly in the USA, is “iPhone coattails” to a large extent. My sister did the same thing: she got an iPhone, that lured her into the Mac world, so two iMacs (one for her daughter), and even the iPad that six month before “I’ll never need one of those”.

Apple’s still doing it correctly. They have actual UI designers, and they recently did a study of touch-on-the-desktop, and found that touchscreens are the wrong answer. That’s happened before, back in the 1980s. For a little while, pretty much every CAD workstation had some kind of screen-interface mechanism, sometimes touch, sometimes lightpens or other things. It didn’t take long for professional users to start suffering from “Gorilla Arm” and drop those for horizontal devices: graphics tablets and mice. Apple seems to be experimenting with the UI, moving some ideas from iOS to MacOS, but in a smart and controlled way (I don’t use a Mac, but my daughter, in the “Broadcasting and Digital Arts” program at Montclair University, was strongly advised to get one… so I have some familiarity with their latest stuff).

Microsoft always seems to react rather than act. That’s a fundamental flaw… if you didn’t see the need for a thing, and you’re just aping what someone else found to be successful, it’s hard to develop the sense of what made that original work as successful as it was. I think they also still have this odd sense of entitlement — that users are going anywhere Microsoft goes, and it doesn’t matter what it actually is, as long as it’s called Windows (even WinRT, which ironically doesn’t support “windows”), users will flock to it. I hope they’re wrong.

-Dave