News - Microsoft confirms “key aspects” of Windows 8 will change

[Willzzz]

Win 8 fine, but it needs one of three things (and a user who can be bothered to learn gestures):

Win8 has gestures?

[Saracen]

Win8 has gestures?

It has at least one, because I gave it a gesture.

[Noxvayl]

I wish news writers would stop reporting useless numbers that Microsoft throw at them. If they aren't willing to give you a breakdown of where those 100 million sales came from then the number is worthless. How many of those sales are for phones? or perhaps tablets? What percentage is representing sales that are not bundled with hardware?

I'm sure they do this specifically because they don't want people to be able to get the figures for desktop alone and figure out that Windows 8 is selling worse than Vista did. If only they'd be honest they could perhaps fix the OS so desktop users are more happy.

[phil4]

I used win8 for about 3 months. As some have said it didn't really add anything to my life, and wasn't appreciably quicker either. I replace the start button with start8, because I found leaping back and forth between metro and the desktop to start something was too cumbersome.

If I didn't have start8 I'd have ditched it very quickly indeed.

Will be moving back to Win8 in Sept, and neither look forward to, nor dread it. To me with start8 it offers nothing over win7 nor really loses anything. So a bit "meh" really.

[OilSheikh]

Where have all these Win8 fanboys come from ?

All veteran Hexus member like Windows 7!

[this_is_gav]

The other big sticking point, the Start button. Can't say I miss it now. I use Launchy for opening applications etc anyway and I'd do the same even with Win7. If a fully fledged start button came back I don't think I'd even use it as it's far slower than using the keyboard.

But Vista, 7 and 8 include this built in anyway? Press the start key, type Word, press enter and Microsoft Word opens. :\

[crossy]

Where have all these Win8 fanboys come from ? All veteran Hexus member like Windows 7!

+1 on this. Actually, I'd change that to "All veteran Hexus members like Windows 7's GUI" - after all there's some nice bits in '8 that I'd like on this Windows7 box I'm typing this on at the moment (can't be bothered to power up my proper - i.e. Linux - box).

But Vista, 7 and 8 include this built in anyway? Press the start key, type Word, press enter and Microsoft Word opens. :\

Erm no, think you've forgotten about "Wordpad - which is first on my select list at the moment. Pedantry aside I'm going to agree - pressing that Windows key and typing something is faster than MUI except if you happen to have put that particular icon on the first page and can spot it quickly. Although therein lies one of my (many) MUI-hates - sometimes that Window key switches to the "classic" desktop or MUI (depending on what you had up at the time) rather than start a search.

Oh, and folks who say "oh you only hate MUI because you haven't used it" ... you're wrong. I have to do (unpaid!) support on three Windows8 boxes and while there's bits of that OS that I really like - MUI isn't one of them, although it's actually pretty decent on the touch-equipped one of those three.

[Demigod]

I just want jump lists back on desktop bar and in start icons, other than that win8 is better than 7 (for me) in every way.

[this_is_gav]

Erm no, think you've forgotten about "Wordpad - which is first on my select list at the moment..

Word appears first for me (on Win 8). Maybe it's intelligent in that your most used program for any given word goes to the top of the list. Not that I ever open Word from the start screen—I usually open a document or template directly from Dopus—just though I'd give a popular example.

[Percy1983]

Interestingly I started using 8 from day 1, at first I was using classic shell.

Then one day I got rid of classic shell and haven't looked back, I organised the metro home screen added some heading to the groups of tiles and all is well in the world.

I have found I end up doing more 'the windows 8 way' on my windows 7 machines now too.

It does seem it may just be cool to hate it, like vista which is also a great OS if you install the service pack.

[Lucio]

Ultimately the biggest problem with Windows 8 is that it represents change, and people don't want to, or needed to change but Microsoft needs people to continually upgrade, otherwise they stop constantly growing in size as their shareholders demand.

Let's face it, most people on these forums are techy, we can figure out most PC related issues, or do the research to help ourselves, but for a typical corporate user, they have neither the time or the inclination to cope with the change. Therefore big business won't be buying Win8 until they get something far closer to Win7 in terms of usability.

[3dcandy]

Ultimately the biggest problem with Windows 8 is that it represents change, and people don't want to, or needed to change but Microsoft needs people to continually upgrade, otherwise they stop constantly growing in size as their shareholders demand.

Let's face it, most people on these forums are techy, we can figure out most PC related issues, or do the research to help ourselves, but for a typical corporate user, they have neither the time or the inclination to cope with the change. Therefore big business won't be buying Win8 until they get something far closer to Win7 in terms of usability.

Which is why XP is still on loads of machines...

[Akdude110]

Which is why XP is still on loads of machines...

And we can completely skip out Vista, for obvious reasons...

[devBunny]

Win8 has gestures?

It has at least one, because I gave it a gesture.

Lol! Was it the one, fingers tips to thumb tip and a shaken wrist, that sounds like "hanky"? ;o)

[iiee]

Windows 8 reminds me of the dying days of windows mobile. They have attempted to cover a system which is build around a precision controller with a touch friendly interface. Go beyond the surface of metro and attempt to do any system configuration (such as setting up a new hard drive configuring drivers or installing a non metro application or even just access the control panel) and touch is completely useless. Metro actually could work well with mouse and touch control if microsoft had implemented it completely rather than just moving the windows 7 gui backbone across and porting metro on top of it.

Full screen start for instance is great on small screens but it should have a smaller (1/4 screen maybe) option that a single corner press would bring up from desktop on larger devices. All system apps should have been redone with windowed and full screen metro versions with touch friendly controls (drop downs sliders etc ala android or windows phone). There should be metro desktop style sheets (and a fully scalable fullscreen multiple window system (seriously why on earth would you limit that to a single not particularly useful third of a screen size sure set a minimum window resolution but let the dam things scale).

Windows 8 is a great example of 2 separate teams doing there own thing and not successfully integrating there work. Individually the work is great Windows 8 is the best versions of windows from a technical point of view that they have made yet and metro is an interesting and well made touch interface. However the two products are not well joined and most of windows 8s problems come from where the old back jars against the new interface.

[cjs150]

There are many thinks I like about w8. I do not miss the start button (although I do wish they had made it easier to switch the computer off - make an app for it!). What I do hate is they way the OS has been designed primarily as a means of extracting more money out of users:

1. Want WMC, you have to pay for it
2. Use the Movies/Music apps - they are advertising billboards with very limit functions built in as a way of luring you in (fortunately you can have WMP and VLC)
3. Use a NAS, sorry MS wants you to all use the cloud and pay for it once you exceed their free limit.
4. Want to play DVD/Blu ray? Need to buy more software for that.

I could go on but I think you get the point. This is consistent with MS moving office software to a subscription system.