Somewhere along the line the marketing departments of many companies developed a strange theory regarding consumers; customers have no idea what they want until they are told what they want. Somehow this theory has managed to become quite lucrative in some industries but has left other companies scratching their heads as to why it won't work for their customer base. One example of the head scratchers would be Microsoft; a once a might empire with no competitors and the ability to dictate customers desires who now find themselves confused as to why no one wants Windows 8. One particular reason is the removal of our beloved Start button, not the prettiest or best designed interface but one we have become accustomed to. Pretending to put it back in Win8.1 but instead making it a button that simply metrosexualizes your GUI was a dirty trick but it was easily solved as third party companies would sell you a product which restores the familiar Start menu if you somehow found yourself forced to use Win8. According to the leaked slides The Inquirer has seen Microsoft continues in their state denial with no sign of a restored Start button which will obviously lead to a huge increase in sales as we enthusiasts finally lobotomize ourselves and start buying only what we are told we want to buy. At least some companies may benefit from Microsoft's delusional state.
"According to Neowin, a leaked early build of the update has been seen in the wild and appears to change very little, having much in common with the Service Packs of older versions of Windows."
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It just more of M$’s real and
It just more of M$’s real and original intent, come to light, of forcing a closed Apple style ecosystem on users/owners of third party OEM laptop/PC hardware. M$ wants its closed ecosystem crAPP store interface/stripped down runtime, squatting on our productive desktop OS
real estate, and duplicating, very poorly, the dasktop full function productive applications that already exist, and have been bought and paid for! M$ wants to force its brave new nightmare world, of new crAPPS purchasing at 30% off the top, stright to the M$ money vault of pure milked M$ profit fortified “goodness”! M$ wishes users/owners to be forced to stroll through the maze like virtual store aisles, of flashing ad tiles, promoting more crapp and slurping personal marketing metrics with each tile click, with which to construct personlize assaults our senses, as we try to get real work done. A perpetual running tiled grid of flashing/metrics gathering ads hell, is M$’s marketing’s monkey’s version of a captive audience heaven, for M$’s “want to be” LUST of a Google style ad business paired with Apple’s closed ecosystem app business model!
Awesome article, Jeremy. I
Awesome article, Jeremy. I just recently decided after leaving Windows 8 and going back to 7, to go back to 8 again this year. It just seemed my PC ran so much better on 8 for some reason.
I’m glad 8.1 gave me (sort of) a start button, but I just wish they would give me an option to 1) keep the taskbar always on top and 2) not open all applications in full screen.
Perhaps they can slowly get back to the way we want things over time. I encourage their UI innovation, but the worst thing they have done was take away our choice to use the new UI or not.
They just need to give us our choices back without the need to downgrade to an older operating system.
You can already open in
You can already open in windowed mode in win 8. Just use desktop versions of applications, not modern ones. Remap the default applications first time if needed. Ideally ms would make this an installation choice but it is possible to not ever touch the modern apps in win 8. Then just remove modern apps from the start screen and set (8.1) to boot to desktop.
I liked the non start button in 8, stopped using it in 7 once apps could be pinned to the task bar, it’s a step backwards in my opinion. It makes the gui cumbersome on large/multi monitor setups.
I didn’t think of that.
I didn’t think of that. Thank you.
Though I do like some of the apps that come with Windows 8.
Another annoyance is when you use those apps you have to close them by moving your mouse to the left corner of the screen, rather than them being available in the taskbar.
Perhaps Windows will add these features over time. I’m sort of optimistic. I’m sure Microsoft knows how hated their new Operating System is, and they can’t afford to just accept that. Surely they must be making changes, if they are smart.
Great article Jeremy.
After
Great article Jeremy.
After giving Win 8 pro a full year’s chance I’m going back to Win 7 Pro and not looking back.
Sure Win 8 boots faster but in the long run I am LESS productive as I’m constantly having to jump to Google to figure out how to do one thing or another that’s simple and intuitive to do under Win 7.
I hope whoever replaces Balmer gets their head on straight and just admit they fucked up and turn the Win 8 interface back to Win 7’s.
There’s a very good OS buried somewhere in Win 8, if only they give us back our interface that the vast majority wants.
It should be no wonder to
It should be no wonder to anyone why we keep seeing dual OS devices such as Windows/Android devices.
I don’t think anything is going to get fixed by MS any time soon. The CEO is on the way out, it is taking way to long to pick a new one, and this is leaving all the upper level managers time (and reason) to cement their position in the company via whatever crazy ways they can think up.
Whatever new CEO they choose, they’ll either stick with the Win8 theme and be out the door in 1 year when their plans fail to materialize, or they’ll make the hard choice and do something proper like make the start screen 100% optional, stop with the silly Windows App store, and start listening to customers.
Can you imagine how much of a better position they would be in if they just stuck a no-frills VM running Android and let people access the Android Store? Then they could slowly slide in with their own store, rather than this current forced hand of death.
How about all new computing
How about all new computing systems coming with a type one hypervisor, and the laptop/PC user can pick their choice of OS/OSs to run on the VM. A nice opensource hypervisor (KVM,Xen, etc) to host the system specific software/drivers, and abstract away the need for a system chained to a particular company’s/group’s OS/OS distro. I know some gamers may complain, that the VM adds overhead, but that could be solved by building complete gaming “APU” type systems on a PCI card, and running a bare metal gaming OS/distro on the PCI card based complete gaming system, with its own GDDR5 memory, fatter bus, and large on APU die RAM! The motherboard CPU could then be given the task of hosting the main Hypervisor system with its hosted OS/OSs, while the PCI card based complete gaming system could go about its happy way running what ever gaming engine/gaming OS, on its own bare metal, unfettered by the added Hypervisor overhead and main OS/OSs running on the motherboard with its CPU and slower memory. I am sure AMD, could take the gaming systems APUs that is has produced for the consoles and integrate the whole kit and caboodle onto a PCI card, same goes for Nvidia, come Maxwell and beyond.