MS Experience - that means suffering, right?

@Down not across "Hardly. My life does not revolve around windows. Yeah sure it exists in corporate environment"

And, as I've said before, this is Microsoft's major problem (or one of them). Windows is that irritating OS you are forced to use at work. For people, using Windows is about as fun as the average kid having to do school homework instead of going out with his mates and having a good time. (Assuming kids actually do that any more, now the councils sold all the playing fields).

MS has an image problem - people associate it with their humdrum jobs. Who wants to be reminded of their day job every time their phone rings, or they decide to watch a movie on their tablet?

Microsoft sales droid: "hey kids, let's hang out and chill to the Super-Exciting Microsoft Windows Experience! Are we cool?"

Kids - "WTF?!"

Re: How to predict share prices.

Nokia were doing fine until MS (sorry, Elop) took over, plundered it of patents and turned it into a windows phone factory.

MS will learn the masses - or it's LOST DECADE II

" will they learn that I don't want to spend hours rearranging / resizing tiles?"

Microsoft noticed how easily the plebeians have accepted the Ribbon, so now they are pulling the same trick with Metro UI. Once people get used to it, then they will gradually accept it, and eventually demand it, as they will not want change.

So there is a contest. Will MS win by forcing the masses to move to the new UI, or will the masses rebel and force MS to go back to "Classic" style? If MS fail to force the masses to accept Metro UI, then MS have just suffered their Second lost decade, wasting another cool trillion on failed project after failed project.

The first Lost Decade (mostly caused by Vista and Bing) cost them the mobile market and browser war. The Second Lost Decade will cost them the desktop, with Office and the Serverside falling in tandem.

So MS are betting everything on their METRO UI. If the public continue to reject it for another couple of years, then it's GAME OVER.

Re: nothing to see here

@mmeir - no it's not a SP, it's going to cost you money, which makes it a New Upgrade Version.

Also "Blue" is not a "service pack style" release concept. It's Microsoft's Let's Copy Apple's (and certain Linux distros') regular upgrade cycle concept.

The service packs were stepping stones to major releases. Windows Blue is about an Agile Upgrade process, whereby annual (thereabouts) updates replace the old 3yr update cycle.

Re: @Eadon

@This Side Up "if the product is no good"

But the quoted statement is talking about a product that is "good" where as you are talking about a product that is "no good". In reality, many products are neither particularly good, nor particularly bad. So therefore your logic fails.

But even your more extreme comment is incorrect, always was, always will be. "No good products are quite often successful. Look at modern music, modern art etc, for non-techie examples. In the techie world, for example, you may have a poor product but use your relationships with big business and governments to sell it.

That is true, for example, of Windows (all flavours, desktop and server) because the competitors' products are of a much higher quality. (More secure / scalable / cheaper / higher quality / faster / runs fast on lower-spect hardware, better engineered / more versatile / better UI / more maintainable, no "Windows rot" / don't need rebooting all the time, etc etc.) But without OEM support, then you're screwed (unless you're huge, like Apple). And if you don't have power over the OEM's then you can have a good product yet still fail in the market place.

QED.

Re: @Eadon

@Mr Young " I for one don't see your point..."

You do not see my point for a simple reason, you are making wrong assumptions. Those items you are listing are operational costs and activities required to sell and support the product, they are not the product itself.

Hope this helps.

Re: Word? LibreOffice? LaTeX? Pfft

LaTeX is used by professionals, especially academic researchers to write papers. Unlike word processors Tex/LaTeX is used to make perfectly formatted documents that look beautiful.

It takes more effort than using Worms For Widows, but you have full control over the output. And it's open source.

In particular see projects such as Gummi

Re: Ribbon exists to create MS Office LOCK-IN

@COMPUTERJOCK - yes you can autohide the ribbon, but where's the tool bar? You have a menu and nothing else. So what you suggested is not so useful. And that's not all your fault, it's because there is no good answer, because MS's UI is moronic.

Re: Death of the sensible UI

@M Gale - "I would like LO and OO to please, pretty please, take some damned steps forward."

Good points, but LO is a collaborative effort. If you have usability suggestions, why not contribute by requesting them to the devs? Or by reinforcing the opinions of those are are in a like-mind?

You could write a patch and submit it if you wished - or get someone else to do so. With the old OO under Sun and Oracle they generally ignored the "community" but LO are much more inclusive, so I hear. LO is evolving much faster than OO ever did.

It is open source. You use the software for free - contribute! If you don't like something, you can actually fix it, by requesting others do so, or fix it yourself. It's a freedom, and option. Will MS listen? Well, their belligerence over the Metro UI answers that question :)

The little tweaks tend to get ignored by programmers who prefer to add bold new features. But the little things matter and that's where we can contribute.

Re: Death of the sensible UI

@AC 14.05 - thanks for the suggestions, I'll try that. It's still more fiddly than having a simple Paste Unformatted Text button, which you can tie up to a keyboard short cut, however :) And I abhor fiddly, I'm a power user!

Re: Death of the sensible UI

@TeeCee - "I'd kill for one in Outlook though." - don't get me started on how utterly lousy corporate email systems are, in fact all email systems such except for Gmail, and even that sucks (privacy issues not least).

It's not just MS and co - some open source email systems default to putting the cursor at the bottom of the email when you reply. Most people will miss your text when you do that. It's a fact of life.

Re: Death of the sensible UI

@Sil - "just loved the new Office with the Ribbons"

- that does not mean ribbons are good. They "love" the ribbon (if they do) because they're monkeys who, once they get used to something, like it, because they don't want to change what they are used to. In fact they can grow to love the ghastly UI.

Psychologists call such love of torment the "Stockholm Syndrome" and MS are relying on it to lock people in. However, the ribbon UI is poor when it comes to mobile / touch interfaces. OOPS!

Re: Death of the sensible UI

"Word does have such an option" -

I investigated this a while back, and it's not the same in Word. Yes, you can get word to paste special by default but that's not always what you want, because then you have to faff about when you want the opposite of the new default behavour.

I want a "paste-unformatted-text" button, simple as that. And you can't do that in Word even after 2007 (correct me if I am wrong). Word 2007 has an ugly work around only.

Also - Word Paste Special does not default to unformatted text, yet 98% of the time, that's the only reason for hitting paste-special. The MS UX guys really are retarded. I reckon it's because they're stuck in the MS-only universe and do not work in a real world where there exists a mixture of apps that are used in conjunction. Even then, they're still retarded. Their attitude seems to be, how can you not want formatting preserved?

MS Word is not for power users, only LibreOffice is for power users. The latter is the most professional of the office suits.

The Microsoft "experience" for me is to be annoyed by a thousand cuts, little things that seem designed to lock you into MS at the expense of productivity. And now MS are pushing us onto it's "clouds" things will only get much much worse!

MS PASTE SPECIAL FAIL

Re: Death of the sensible UI

@Dave 126 "I've just upvoted you. Hmmm, I feel kinda grubby."

That *you* upvoted me makes *me* feel kinda grubby.

Re: The worst thing, by a mile...

"are those functions that remain invisible until you hover over them "

- this is the "Mystery Meat" problem with bad UI's. Just as you don't know what meat is in some pies, you don't know what some UI elements do until you have to take an action, such has hover over them. Designers love mystery meat as they can make their software look cute. But it's a usability atrocity.

The Ribbon itself has a lot of "Mystery-Meetness" about it, as you have to click on quite a lot of tabs to hunt down a feature that is often represented by a non-intuitive icon or some such.

Re: What is this article supposed to be?

If an organisation is making people's lives miserable in stupid ways, it's not "bashing" to point that out, whether satirically or matter-of-factly. To the Ad-hom-crazed MS apologists here - can you seriously say that MS is making its software more usable, more customisable, more pleasant to work with, more productive?

@anons

@Anons anon - I'll bite, why not.

Didn't you get the memo? It's MS's software that is "too darn awful". People avoid it when they can, e.g on mobile devices and in the server centre when they have serious computing to do. Ribbons... Metro... viruses... bloat... shoddy software and services with epic downtimes...

Open source is Android, Linux, LibreOffice, Inkscape, PostgreSQL, Gimp, Blender, Eclipse, Samba4, Android, BSD, etc etc, it's superb, more than professional-quality stuff, far better than MS drivel and at $0 cost. Remember that, $0! And no licence management, no begging MS salesmen for a discount.

Please Microsoft Sir, I will pay "EXORBITANT" prices, just don't screw me any more, cry the sys admins.

Re: Thanks for the heads up

@Field Marshall Von Krakenfart - Good luck with that, the updates are binary / closed source.

Re: Errm

@Dave Bell, for starters Linux doesn't suffer from the endless stream of gigabytes of security patches that plague windows, including remote exploits.

The Linux designers did know best. They built a POSIX based system with a solid security architecture that is intrinsically immune to viruses and other attacks that windows is vulnerable to.

The Linux API's are more modular and are better designed, making Linux an extremely hardened OS compared to Windows.

Windows can't fix its security problems without creating backwards compatibility issues. So it takes a stove pipe approach of endless patching over the cracks.

Re: Useful Service Pack

@msage - others have already corrected your technical misunderstandings and errors.

Let me add that Linux has a huge advantage over Windows, the repository (or repositories if you also use third party repos) updates not just the Linux kernel, they also update all the apps that are associated with the distro.

Furthermore, with windows each program you install has its own update mechanisms, often involving "services" that live in memory and talk to external mother ships.

Re: Education is how you LOCK THEM IN

@keithpeter - Kudos on teach open source, that's the only rational way to go in education. Free and open software.

"LibreOffice? No go, it 'might confuse people'"

Sorry, I am not sure what you mean by that. I doubt that kids would get confused by an open document format file vs a MS Office doc file, and if they are, then simply tell them the difference. It's useful knowledge after all. But I reckon that it is not the kids that are confused, it is the adults.

It's simple, LibreOffice opens both MS formats and open formats such as ODF. MS Office only opens MS formats (give or take a half hearted hack or two). Therefore the best way to avoid confusion is surely to use Libre Office. It opens and saves in any word processing format you like.

I cannot see how "confusion" is relevant here. The tax payer is having to fork out for our kids to learn a dodgy office suit that is produced by a foreign enterprise, when a superior open source suit, Libre Office is of professional quality, more than adequate to teach school kids. The "No go" attitude is the equivalent of adults putting their fingers in their ears.

Such attitudes are failing our children and costing the tax man a fortune, whilst locking us deeper into proprietary formats and s/w.

Education is how you LOCK THEM IN

That's why MS is keen for Windows and Office to be "taught" to our kids in schools. Of course our kids should *not* be taught these closed, proprietary products, it's tantamount to giving a competitor an unfair advantage and we, the tax payers, pay for it.

Re: It is HILARIOUS...

@levente - MS screwed up the previous Xboxen, with billion dollar recalls on red ring of death and other fails.

Also XBox is still in debt, it's total life score is 10 billion bucks in the red, with few profits to offset exorbitant R&D, marketing and hardware failure costs.

Nevertheless the XBox guys are relatively independent of the rest of MS, compared to most departments, so there is hope :)

The issue for XBox though is that consoles are not an area where there is much money to be made. Competition from tablets and other mobile gadgets is making their market shrink. New Linux consoles are around the corner, that will offer customers much more freedom than the present locked down appliances.

XBOX FAIL

Re: What does "works" mean anyway?

@dogged - what FUD? It is well established that Android is just as happy on low-end cheap hardware and on high-end multi-core hardware.

It is also well established that Windows Phone 8 needs hefty hardware to run on. Windows 8 is a resource hog and requires a lot of juice. It's WINDOWS FFS.

There's no FUD about it. Android == Linux, and Linux runs fine even on Rasp Pi hardware. Linux is modular and highly efficient. Whereas Windows is a pig that needs god knows how much RAM, CPU and hard disk footprint, it's bloatware, it's as simple as that.

This is not FUD - Rasberry Pi runs Linux - FACT. Android is Linux - FACT. Android runs on low-end phones and tablets. FACT. There are some "citations" for you. Happy now?

Tizen - more fun

"Tizen? so more Linux fragmentation then...."

Not unless they fork the kernel to make Tizen. Linux being the kernel is not fragmented, you have Torvalds's official kernel - no problem!

Google have learned, for example, that it's better to keen in sync with Torvalds kernel because it's much less work than keeping porting stuff over all the time. This is a lesson learned by all Linux systems engineers, stick to the official kernel and add stuff to it upstream. Or it is too much work keeping up, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of using Linux to save money.