'Dated and cheesy' Aero ripped from Windows 8 Microsoft must really love Windows 8, or hate its legacy install base. The Aero interface introduced with the hated Windows Vista and perpetuated with the loved Windows 7 is being canned from Windows 8, the company has revealed. In another achingly long Windows 8 blog post, Microsoft called the Aero interface it once …
Balmer & Co need to wake up and actually look at who buys and uses their software, in particular, businesses. My company has 12,000 desktops in the UK and 40,000+ in Europe of which 95% still run XP. Why? because it's stable. Yes, we should have gone to Windows 7 much earlier but political infighting and waiting to outsource IT put paid to that. The Windows 7 rollout is going to start later this year if they think that companies like mine (and I suspect, many others in the same boat) are going to jump to Windows 8 when it's so massively different, is ridiculous. It's simply not going to happen!
Why would businesses jump to Windows 8 when we're all using mice, keyboards and ordinary monitors - NOT TABLETS! Tablets are consumption devices, they are NOT productive devices. The Metro front end is a joke from a business point of view and even getting rid of this the loss of the start button had my tech colleagues and I going WTF?!
When W7 came out I jumped on the pre-order bandwagon and got 3 copies for £45 each from PC World but I'm avoiding W8 like the proverbial plague. W7 ain't perfect but it works, the kids like it, my wife has got used to it - so it's staying!
I think the problem is that they *have* looked and have drawn entirely the wrong conclusion.
They seen that people don't always upgrade and have concluded that the only source of revenue for a new version of Windows will be OEM sales on new hardware. In fact, this is arse backwards. They already *have* a product for new hardware (Win7), whose development costs have by now been amortised to nil. All the cash they've spent developing a new one only makes sense if they can persuade existing customers to upgrade (i.e., selling them Windows for a *second* time). Then there's the fact that an OEM licence for Windows on new hardware makes them sweet FA whereas each upgrade makes them several times as much.
Commercially speaking, upgrading existing customers on existing hardware should be at the forefront of their minds whenever they design a new version of Windows.
"This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now, but at the time, it was very much en vogue."
But big monochromatic squares are so haut couture, oui?
Fuckin' puh-LEEZE awready! Shut the fuck up and just give is what we the customers want. (You do remember customers, don't you?)
Why force a touch-based user interface when 99.9% of people won't have touch screens.
I love my Mango phone but I'm not really looking forward to metro on the desktop as:
1. it doesn't work that well with dual screens
2. While it is quite elegant (perfect for many "content-presentation" apps such as newa, stocks, entertainment) one size does not fit all and the traditional desktop feels like a second-class citizen.
3. I absolutely despise the fact that the IE Metro is not the same as the desktop IE, with among other no support for favorites and no support for flash (hello Youtube).
But I am happy that at least 2 people are bullish with Sinofsky.
99.9% ? The Far East supply chain figures suggest factories are currently tooling up for about 15-20% of laptop displays being multi-touch next year. I don't have figures for monitors. Windows 8 has to look to the future not just the installed base.
Its looking like multi-monitor on Windows 8 desktop will be a worthwhile improvement on Windows 7.
I agree with the Microsoft line that once you've experienced touchscreen on a monitor, it feels a bit odd not to have the feature despite the fact that its still mouse/trackpad and keyboard most of the time on laptop/desktop. Most of the criticism seems to come from those who have not tried it but somehow know it will feel wrong.
I just reached out toward my closest monitor. Finger got to about 1cm away from the screen surface. Do I really have to try anything more to know touch control on it is not usable and likely to cause severe RSI?
I look forward to the lawsuits when the RSI aspects sink in.
Modern games on the PC have similar interface problems because the designers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmoneymen want to release simultaneously on consoles but don't want to change the interface to make it more sensible on a PC.
E.g. the second and third iterations of Deus Ex. Absolutely disastrous.
As for Linux - I agree Unity and KDE4 are absolute horrors, but that's why the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) was created. It's basically an optified fork of KDE3.5, which can coexist with a KDE4 installation and run KDE4 apps.
Currently running it on Debian Sid. Very handy.
http://www.trinitydesktop.org/
"Time for you to re-evaluate on KDE 4.8."
I have.
It's an improvement, but not yet enough of one to force me from KDE 3. Actually, I was better impressed with the previous iteration of KDE 4, so I've no idea what they did to 4.8 but it seemed a lot more sluggish to me. Possibly they added another lump of bloat to it to replace what they took out before? I dunno.
The crunch moment for me was when all that "semantic desktop" garbage became a compulsory part of KDE and kmail in particular - I'd been using KDE very happily for most of a decade until then. Still, sylpheed's not at all bad and e17 does what I want very well, desktop wise.
Windows has never, ever been configurable enough to achieve that, leaving aside the ten million other reasons I won't use it.
I agree. Put a 7 desktop and an 8 desktop side by side and one does indeed look dated and cheesy.
Their analysis is correct, it's their targetting that's off.
Those Metro applications look to me like a global implementation of the UI from Windows Media Centre. I always thought that was shit too.
In a previous comment I jested at MS removing support options from Windows (keyboard / mouse) because people could be bothered with the inability to use them.
However, this latest move makes one seriously wonder....
Aero is /much/ more than merely a shiney interface. Its highly functional as well; the option to have status bars display in the taskbar icons is IMO invaluable. In Windows 7 you can /always/ see the progress of a download or copy action.
In Windows 8 you should be using full screen crapola anyway, so who cares about all that Aero nonsense anymore?
Well: I DO!
This is yet another reason to avoid Win8 on the desktop.
...and long overdue for tablets but for a desktop user there are no reasons to chose it over Windows 7.
I really cannot imagine someone buying an upgrade from vista or 7 to 8 and definately not for the amount of money that they are charging.
"Many remain in the dark as to how programming for this thing will work." Euhm Install the developer tools and get programming?
So us software developers will now have to code for 3 OS's that are really quite different from one another. Believe it or not, in most corporations, XP is still the OS of choice. At the moment we have to test against XP SP3 and 7 (we skipped Vista, but if it runs on those two it probably runs on Vista anyway). Now we're going to have the craptastic 8 to throw into the mix too.
I think you are worrying too much. Apart from replacing the start menu with a scrolling screen of pain, the desktop experience on Win8 is not noticeably different from 7.
As I noted in an earlier comment, Win8 is 6.2 at the API level, so you'll be able to treat it the same way you currently treat Vista. Focus your efforts on XP and 7. Perform basic sanity checks just in case you have customers blighted by having to use Vista or 8, but focus the testing efforts on XP and 7.
The people have spoken and Microsoft have listened. People no longer want a grid of static desktop icons and a start menu leading into silo'd applications they want interactive live tiles bursting with useful information that only the Windows Metro Interface can provide. This is the future people embrace it
You are being funny, right?
".... interactive live tiles bursting with useful information ....."
........ priceless!!!! You should be on the stage! It was when I read that part that I went bursting with coffee over keyboard. Worth it though - I am going to remember that soundbite for a long, long time.
Ye right on microsoft because what looks like a not too bad UI on a 4" or less touchscreen is automatically going to scale up to a 24" plus monitor using a good ole mouse and keyboard? Why not leave aero in and let the USER decide which shell they want to use! If I wanted the metro interface I would have bought a windows phone, but instead I bought an android!
The first thing I did, was swtich it off and go to windows classic, with the coffee bean (tiled - so I could defocus and turn it into a sird to save my short range eyesight,)
I also switch off all the other stupid stuff their marketing staff have come up with in the last 5 years, such as menus that don't show you everything (deliberately done I think, to remove any advantage of memory muscle.) and all new features that are style over content, such as "Combine all buttons to one on the taskbar."
My dream would be a restore of the Up button, and the removal of the Ribbon, which sucks the sweat of a dead man's balls.
There should be a simple switch. "Make this look like a really fast, really powerful, windows 2000 installation, that shows you everything, doesn't pseudorandomly change the relative positions of things relative to each other and so on, and doesn't remove features because cocaine addled marketing types don't need them personally." which does exactly what it says on the tin.
These pointless glass effects have looked cheesy even when they were introduced.
And they where completely non-functional: Because the main part of a window needs to be easily readable, they only made the outside border transparent, while the rest of the window stayed opaque. That looked idiotic. And even on the outside border, this caused problems, e.g. for the window title. So they had to add drop-shadows to the text of the title bar, etc.pp. Jut a bad idea that they tried desperately to fix, but it did not work because it was a bad idea right from the start.
Of course power users used the "classic mode" on Win7 because of this. I am glad that MS understands this and will fix it.
Why does it matter to Microsoft if Aero is in Windows 8 or not? Surely this is a user preference. If there's a performance problem on a specific implementation, it seems to me an appropriate course of action is to make the default something other than Aero. Maybe no one uses Aero? I do. How many Windows 7 users will this affect?
So I'm cheesy, huh? But then I have about 2 billion CPU cycles per second free so squander. How much effort does it for Windows to process key clicks (that's what my laptop does most of the day)?
Even modern A10 chips run at nearly 2Ghz (I know CPU speed is not always a good proxy for processing speed but we don't have anything else). So another question is: what is Windows 8 doing to consume so many cycle that it can't paint the screen? Maybe malware is built in to the OS?
Not being funny, but how come _everyone_ is a fricking expert? I mean come on - it's an OS, and if you don't like it don't use it. Yes, most versions of the M$ OS have been buggy in the early days - our general rule of thumb was to wait until the first SP before looking to upgrade - but having jumped ship to Ubuntu some time ago I can say the same for the LTS releases there.
_But_ lets be realistic - with a choice of XP, Windows 7, Vista (if you are feeling sadistic) and all of the various Linux distro's - not to mention MAC - I fail to see the vitriol behind a companies release.
News update folks - M$ didn't make it for YOU, they made it to make money. It's their train set, and if it works then great, if it doesn't, well, there'll be another along in a year or so.
This shit is almost as dreary as the Olympics.
Apologies for the grammar/punctuation etc, I'm doing this on mah phone.
You have a point. From my own POV, however, what annoys me is this "we know what's best for you" attitude that Microsoft is adopting here. I want my computer to do a certain job in the way I want it to be done, not how some "expert" wants me to do it.
So when I see that they are forcing me to change (this is a big problem here - the word "change") the interface to a method that is not suitable for purpose just to make some fashion statement, I get annoyed.
And I HATE being annoyed!
The wages of Metro is.... oh sorry. You nearly brought out the Virtue in me!
But, as I said, the word "change" is the important one here. Change for the sake of change will always get up the collective noses of the great unwashed, but change in itself will always provoke some people regardless. That being the case, change should be presented properly, and Microsoft appears to have completely forgotten how to do that. Hence the comments we have here.
Everyone is a fricking expert because the topic is usability and we are all users. I'd guess that most of us here are fairly heavy users and have far wider experience than average of different UIs on various systems past and present.
Not being funny, but the real question is what are Microsoft smoking? Twenty years ago, GUIs were sufficiently close to being "designed" that vendors frequently issued design guides with references to actual research in human-computer interactions and models of how people think when they approach a computer. Every version of Windows in the last ten years is sufficiently far from those models that MS don't dare publish similar guides. They may have something called a design guide, but it doesn't reference research and is instead full of arty comments about the emotions they want the UI to inspire in their users.
I'm gald somebody's said that. My first experience of Vista was trying to fix it on a friend's computer. This was pre-SP1 and it was truly awful. My home PC runs Vista (amongst other OS's) and, with the service packs, is perfectly usable. I can see no reason to upgrade to Win7, let along Win8.
As I have found through rebuilding many Vista Machines from scratch over the past three years, once you put on a clean build and SP2 + patches its fine.
No more disk thrashing, sluggish behaviour etc. Works just as well as 7 really. Customers call me back a couple of days after I've rebuilt them to ask what it is I did to make it work so fast.
The reason Vista was bad at launch was it wasn't quite ready (needed another 3 months of tweaking and the other companies to get their arse in gear and make some drivers) and all the crapware that Dell/HP/Acer/Toshiba etc. installed, wasn't really designed with Vista in mind.
..MS had simply given us back the beloved feature - Custom Install.
Oh how I miss you from Windows 98SE. When I could craft out all the crap I never used.
How mature it felt to be trusted with choosing what I wanted on my PC. Now I have the choice of install what MS deems I must have or not install it at all.
Unfortunately Linux or OSX doesn't do it for me either. So I put up with it. Tough shit!
However, the main point is that MS isn't giving us the choice over Metro because it is desperate, oh so desperate to join the successful apps store bandwagon. So It's prepared to alienate a huge chunk of its currently happy user base by shameful plugging of its crappy apps platform.
How very tacky.
I have tried Win8 and the UI is basically a mess. It may be fast and fluid but it is still less productive and useable.
I am less worried about Aero Glass than the whole mess that is the Metro start menu.
This really is Metro vs 1 not Windows vs 8!
Now where did I put those Bob disks?
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