
Windows 7 'back by popular demand', says HP as it targets wary consumers - Cbasedlifeform
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/21/windows-7-back-by-popular-demand-says-hp-as-it-targets-wary-consumers
======
malkia
Here is a story that happened last week: I was at my dentist, and we are both
immigrants from the same country - so she said she needed a help with her
computer (while I needed very big help in the tooth department).

She bought this Windows 8 laptop, and man it felt weird for me to explain in
simple words that there are in fact 2 internet explorers - and they should use
the desktop one... Since she was not sure what's desktop, and what's the other
thing (the metro... I said Metro, but I wanted to come up with some other
word).

Their dentist webpage (seems like other dentists are using it too) - only
worked with the desktop Internet explorer, and there was no easy way to run it
right away from the "big icon menu" (how do you call it?).

I had to explain how I'm getting there (I've had to evaluate Windows 8 at some
point), and all I remmember was - well press the Windows Key and hold "D". I
might install Classic Shell for them later.

So it was frustrating - the explaining process at least for me.

Not sure why Microsoft expects people to get their duality?

~~~
Encosia
There's an option in Internet Options > Programs to always open IE in desktop
mode, which might be simpler for your dentist.

~~~
malkia
Thanks for the tip. I'll configure it like this.

------
fidotron
What's so infuriating about Win 8.x is where it improves over Win7 it's clear,
however, MS went out of their way to positively screw it up in whole new ways,
such as Metro. It should never be the responsibility of the end user to tweak
things to decent defaults - defaults should be right out of the box.

Take Metro etc. out (or, better, have it as an app launched from the desktop,
and completely uninstallable), sort out the start menu and a few UI tweaks and
they would have had an easy win on their hands, but their efforts to do things
no one wants are causing them to fail, even to the point of giving people like
Google an in with the latest Chrome for Metro aping a full screen Chrome OS
like experience which, ironically, is more Windows 7 like than Win 8 is.

MS really need someone that understands not only what they're good at but why
people have stuck with MS software at their helm.

~~~
josteink
_MS really need someone that understands not only what they 're good at but
why people have stuck with MS software at their helm_

Microsoft realizes the end of the PC-era is here. (Almost) nobody is buying
PCs and OS-licenses anymore, so Microsoft can't gamble it's future on those
petty things.

They realize that the future belongs to services spanning several devices and
multiple platforms, among which Windows _can_ be one player. That's why you
can have Microsoft-software for iOS and Android these days.

But for Windows to be a player in the future, people must want to have it on
their shiny, portable touch-devices with long battery-life due to apps running
in a controlled environment.

 _Nothing_ from the desktop-era Windows fits into that picture. Nothing. For
Microsoft to be on those devices that just needs to go.

You and I may hate it, but Microsoft is literally forced to make this "new"
Windows-model if they want to remain relevant in the future. Microsoft is
upping its service-game, and it will do so at the cost of everything the PC
used to be.

~~~
kybernetyk
> nobody is buying PCs and OS-licenses anymore

Is this because nobody is using PCs anymore or because consumer grade PCs
currently have an expected life of 5+ years?

~~~
dspillett
To a large extent, yes. A decade ago you needed to significant upgrade every
couple of years to stay current but now a machine can stay useful for the
basics and beyond[1] for considerably longer.

There is also competition from the consoles, cheap media players and portable
devices: instead of upgrading their PCs many home users buy those devices
instead and leave the old PC for when they need to crank open a MS Office
document. And having not spent money on new hardware, they resent paying for
an upgrade to Windows (which traditionally the cost of was hidden in amongst
the cost of that new PC).

[1] even games if you don't mind not playing the latest graphics fests,
especially with the growing indy circuit[2] and the growth of mobile
devices[3].

[2] which is supporting older hardware better than the big players

[3] because once you are optimised to the point where the game works on cheap
tablets, that old PC will probably play a port of it quite well too

------
CSDude
I'm nearly a power user of Windows 8.1 (using it both coding, designing, using
VirtualBox, Photoshop, AfterFX, Office etc), and when you just minimize the
icons in the Start screen to the smallest possible tile size, it is not
different from Windows 7 at all. The thing I miss most is feeling of depth,
which is lost in this flat area. But other than that, I don't understand the
hype. Every single application in Windows 7 is available in Windows 8. You
don't ever have to use Metro apps. I just remove them from my start menu,
since I don't use my laptop as a tablet. I didn't like it first, but I get
used to it and I use it faster than my previous Windows 7 installation.

~~~
zeidrich
That's kind of the point though. You can go through a lot of work to undo the
changes so that it's just the same as 7. Or you can avoid the upgrade at all.

There's other things that 8 does that's annoying, there's some changes to it
so that some drivers no longer work, so there's devices that are left
unsupported. There's stupid decisions like how if you want to shut down you
have to hover in the top right corner with your mouse, then slide down the
right side of the window to go to settings to shut off.

The problem is that they wanted to make a consistent tablet interface, but
it's not easy to use a tablet interface with a mouse. Many many people still
use mice, and still have many reasons to still use mice, but they didn't
design a system that is comfortable with a mouse. Using windows 8 on a tablet
is actually not too bad, but I only use a tablet casually.

~~~
lordCarbonFiber
If you're using the mouse and interacting with windows 8 features you probably
aren't having a good time. However, you have no reason to. As of 8.1 you can
boot straight into the desktop, if you're a power user (or aren't on a touch
device) you aren't using metro apps anyway so their interface doesn't mean
much to you, and all other functionality (shutdown, search, settings, etc) is
accessible with simple keyboard shortcuts (far faster than using the mouse
regardless of what OS you use). The only reason a user without a touch
interface should see the start menu in Win8 is for brief moments when they are
using the search functionality to quickly open programs. The poster you were
responding to is completely correct: they hype against win8 is completely
overblown. In my opinion, slight visual changes are worth the back-end changes
to things like boot time, multi-core performance, and security.

------
raganwald
Windows 8.1 vs Windows 7 is not so interesting to me. But Microsoft 2014 vs
Microsoft 1994 is very interesting to me.

There was a time when they had enough weight that they could force their
vendors to toe the party line on OS versions. Enterprises might drag their
feet on upgrading, but consumers were force-fed the new release even if they
hated it.

They had failures, but even so their vendors were reluctant to push back like
this. Or at least, that's how I remember it. Not any more.

~~~
bad_user
Let's remember the versions history for Windows targeted at consumers ...
Windows 3.0 (1990) => 3.1 (1992) => 3.11 (1993) => 95 (1995) => 98 (1998) =>
98 SE (1999) => Me (2000) => XP (2001)

Besides Windows Millennium, which was a total clusterfuck (and I happen to
have used it), all other versions were better than the ones prior to it.

Also worth considering - 3.11 was released one year after 3.1, however it was
the _same_ Windows, but with improved networking. And Win 98 SE was like a
service pack for Win 98. The only time Microsoft hurried to release a major
version of Windows within only one year of the previous one was after Win Me
happened. And I was in high-school then, but I don't remember many Windows Me
PCs being on display in computer shops.

~~~
dspillett
Many consider WfWG 3.11 a massive beta test for some of the improvements (in
the networking mainly, but in I/O handling chunks too) planned for Win95.

IIRC Windows ME, or Windows Yuppy Flu as is got unofficially renamed[!] was
never supposed to happen: the cunsumer transition from lagacy Windows to the
NT line was originally supposed to happen with Win2K but for various reasons
(MS were not ready for it, and neither were the app/game vendors) this didn't
happen, so they botched together an upgrade to Win98SE so they had something
new to sell to that market until XP happened (by which time everyone (MS, the
users, and the 3rd parties) was more ready to transition).

[!] after the nick name for the debilitating-when-real illness misunderstood
by many and that had a reputation for being faked by certain classes of people
who thought they worked too hard (most of the yuppie types who were genuinely
ill probably had hypertension/stresss related disorders due to lifestyle, but
those did't sound as "cool" to have) which has bouts of chronic fatigue as its
main identifying symptom

------
bluedevil2k
My desktop and laptop have Windows 7 installed on them and my wife's laptop
has Windows 8 on it. As someone who spends 8-10 hours a day on their computer
programming/debugging/everything users on this site do, I'm not sure I could
handle working in Windows 8 all that time. I feel like Windows 7 got so much
right for _power users_ of Windows, and that Windows 8 is for casual users of
their computer.

~~~
pmelendez
As a power user and after discovering "win+x" on windows 8, I can't come back
to windows 7 but it is a matter of taste I guess

~~~
falcolas
I looked that up; what does it offer that the Windows 7 (and 8) control panel
doesn't?

Hitting the Windows key, and typing in any of those names will get you the
same content.

~~~
Spearchucker
Less effort. Key-strokes + click on 8/8.1, as opposed to opening the Control
Panel, finding the most likely group for the thing you forgot the name of, and
then clicking on the thing you need. The control panel is bloated, and it's
organisation is not entirely logical (to me, at any rate).

~~~
falcolas
Effort reduction is a fair point. However, most of the shortcuts presented are
for tasks I do so rarely that having a quick shortcut to them adds relatively
little value.

The few that I do use frequently from that list already have their own key
bindings, or I can find them with 2-3 keystrokes after pulling up the windows
start menu (something you can't do with Windows 8 if they aren't regular
applications; you have to type and then select a different application
category to search in).

Ctrl-Shift-Escape == Task manager

Win-D == Desktop

Win-R == Run

Alt-F4 (from Desktop) == Shutdown

The net result is that this is not enough of a value add to elevate Windows 8
above Windows 7.

------
njpatel
For me, Windows 8.1 'made sense' after I installed a third-party utility
called ModernMix
([https://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/](https://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/)).
It allows you to run all or some metro apps on the desktop in normal windows.

This was the turning point, as I could use apps from the Windows Store (mostly
media consuming apps) when I wanted to, as I wanted to. I didn't have to leave
my desktop or have a SoundCloud app take up all 27" of my monitor, and the
Store apps are much nicer to use and look at when you're in the mood for
consuming media. On the opposite sense, I still had Putty/Office/etc right
next to them.

This really fixed Windows 8.1 for me, and I think Microsoft should consider
having it as an option in 9.

(disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Stardock, just a huge fan of ModernMix)

------
Nursie
I find 8 awkward to work with. 7 felt like a breath of fresh air after Vista.
It cleaned up the interface, it improved (incrementally) the same user
experience and flows that MS originally deployed with Win 95 and NT 4.

Win 8 felt like they looked at how I use a computer and decided to try to hide
everything I use. Everything. And when I can find it I get weird fullscreen
fisher-price versions.

I'm sure you can relearn the interface just fine. That's not really how I want
to spend my time though. Even after two months of using it in parallels, all
the windows features I want to use are pinned to my MacOS dock.

I'm mostly a linux guy these days anyway, but after 20 years of PC use Win 8
is the release that drove my dad to Apple as well.

------
billyhoffman
The core trouble I've seen with non-technical people on Windows 8 isn't Metro,
its confusion/paralysis with a mobile-like interface suddenly on a desktop.

People had 5-6 years experience with touch computing on mobile devices. Pull
here, touch here, gesture here to make X, Y, Z happen. 1 app at a time and its
full screen. An app store is the only way to get software. Instant power-on,
single user, very simple shell/OS/application launcher. People know what to
expect and do with this interface.

Windows 8 force dumps new users into a mobile interface going against 20+
years of how they have used a desktop PC. It's jarring, its weird, it "feels
wrong." I've seen this time and time again. My mom is a wiz on her iPhone, and
she is just fine with Windows XP/Vista/7\. I put her in front of Windows 8 and
she had no clue what to do. All her reference points are gone.

It feels more and more that Microsoft should have focused on making
phones/tablets running Metro, and a Desktop OS that iterated on Windows 7.
They crossed the streams [1] and that's bad

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_pack#Crossing_the_Stream...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_pack#Crossing_the_Streams)

------
sremani
It makes me minority - I started using Windows 8 from Day One, and actually
like it. I completely understand why people who are computer semi-literate
bash it. I just exposes their inability with computers, but I am also aghast
why people who make it to a site like this one - hate it passionately. I have
to reconsider my assumptions about a Hacker News visitor.

------
maresca
I've noticed over the years that every other Windows release is good. The next
version should be good.

Win 8 - Crappy

Win 7 - Good

Vista - Crappy

XP - Good

etc.

~~~
jgalt212
I agree. At work, we have a limited number of Windows PC's. They have never
run Vista (stuck w/ XP), and hopefully never run 8 (running 7 now).

------
Shivetya
and here I am trying to figure how to migrate my parents off of XP to newer
machines. The hold back to buying them newer machines is that both like the
look and feel of Office from that generation.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
Give then OpenOffice, it comes from the classic menus instead of that
abomination called the ribbon. That's the very reason why I use it, even
though MS Office is still better in terms of functionality.

------
r0h1n
Jesus! How many times are we going to be played with this non-story on the HN
front page?

Previously:

> HP brings Windows 7 back 'due to popular demand' as buyers shun Windows 8
> (theinquirer.net) > 54 points by chakalakasp 16 hours ago | flag | 82
> comments >
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7092164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7092164)

> HP promotes Windows 7 PCs (smh.com.au) > 27 points by hiharryhere 12 hours
> ago | flag | 43 comments >
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7093073](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7093073)

~~~
GnarfGnarf
Maybe, but this is the first time I notice this story on HN.

------
lowlevel
I can't believe HP was the first major vendor to see Windows 8 as the goat is
really is. Usually HP is well behind everyone else.

------
dserban
While I agree that HP selling Seven isn't news, the shift in marketing focus
from Eight to Seven __is__ very much news.

