
What Windows 8 Haters Don’t Understand About Windows 8 - carusen
http://www.7tutorials.com/what-windows-8-haters-don-t-understand-about-windows-8
======
corin_
> _I hate the ribbon in Windows 8 - that’s what most people said about the
> ribbon when it was first introduced in Microsoft Office 2007. And yet, it
> has become a great interface paradigm which makes features more visible and
> easier to use._

Not 100% related to Windows 8, but am I in the minority of disliking the
ribbon in Office? When it first arrived I was excited by it and thought it was
awesome, but after years of using it I still don't find it as useful as plain
old menus, for the most part.

~~~
s_henry_paulson
With menus, it was still possible to page through the menus until you found
what you were looking for.

With the ribbon, I still find myself going through every option to try to find
something, only to end up googling where on earth they hid the function I was
looking for.

~~~
molmalo
So basically, Clippy could be helpful here? Bring him back! A bing-powered
Clippy! lol, Ok, just kidding.

------
andyjohnson0
The whole hater/fan mindset about OSs/phones/technology perplexes me. Why do
some people feel so strongly about these things? And where does these strong
feelings come from? To me these things are just not emotionally engaging in
the way that, say, a book or game or work of art can be - and I wonder if this
engagement is trivial or actually quite important.

Are so many people identifying as haters of fans because these things are
genuinely emotionally engaging? Or is it an amplification effect of the
internet echo chamber? Or because some of us make career investments in these
technologies?

I develop on the Windows platform and have done for about 20 years. Its okay
and practical and I'm comfortable with it, but I don't feel that that makes me
a fan of Windows or a hater of other platforms. Same with my Android phone. I
don't particularly like Apple as a company. Their products seem okay, but I
alternate between wondering if they focus on surface appearance over substance
or whether this might actually be a great thing. Does this make me an Apple
hater?

If I try and get inside the minds of these people, here are my impressions of
their thoughts/emotions:

\- Apple. Haters see an authoritarian company obsessed with style and
controlling its customers. Fans see the long-time underdog finally triumphing
through attention to design _and vindicating the fan's loyalty_.

\- Microsoft. Haters see a big, stupid, evil corporation deservedly slipping
into insignificance. Fans see solid engineering and persistence in supporting
their customers in the long-term.

\- Android. Haters see a lazy, poor imitation of iPhone that is unworthy of
success. Fans see the last hope in a titanic struggle for freedom.

Obviously these are stereotypes and I'm emphasising extremes because that
seems to be what haters/fans do. But how does technology do this to some
people, _and is this new_?

I'd be very interested in other people's opinions on this.

~~~
bornhuetter
> Are so many people identifying as haters of fans because these things are
> genuinely emotionally engaging

I think they are genuinely emotionally engaging. Many of us spend 50% or more
of our waking lives in front of computers and smartphones. If you are used to
a PC or Mac, and you sit down at the other one, it can be infuriating trying
to do what you think should be a simple task.

I also think that the reasons for people loving or hating particular
brands/products are many and varied. But there is clearly a bandwagon effect
with some people - and this happens with everything. You can see it in these
comments very clearly - people attacking Windows 8 who clearly haven't even
used it, or even taken the time to understand how it works.

------
w0utert
Hardly any arguments in that article at all, besides 'if you use Windows 8
long enough you will eventually learn how it works' and 'stop complaining,
Windows 8 is the future'.

Windows 95 and XP/2000 didn't actually have a user-friendly interface either,
in fact, I think it was downright terrible. Yet, everyone knows how to use it,
which makes it appear 'easy' and 'user-friendly'. This article completely
steers around the fact that user-friendly interfaces have to be intuitive,
consistent, and predictable.

Metro could become all of these, but as long as Microsoft keeps insisting on
trying to fuse it with the traditional Windows desktop interface, it will
never reach it's full potential.

~~~
tjoff
They were very user friendly. They might not have been beginner-friendly but
that is a short-sighted goal to aim for.

~~~
w0utert
I have to disagree. The traditional Windows interface is full of
undiscoverable hidden stuff, inconsistent and illogical ways that make doing
simple things hard, the start menu was never a good UI paradigm to begin with,
the taskbar has always been a big mess that basically became unusable if you
had more than 5 windows open, the way you interact with the file system is
completely arbitrary, task management is basically limited to a list of
running processes, nothing like Spaces or Mission Control like OS X has, and
so on.

Really, after installation and configuration, any Linux system with Gnome 2.x
or XFCE is more user-friendly than Windows before W7, even though both
basically try to copy almost every aspect of the Windows desktop user
interface.

Don't you think there is a reason why almost anyone who has ever used a Mac
says OS X is more user-friendly, or why both Gnome and now Microsoft are
moving away from the classic Windows desktop paradigm? It never was so great
in the first place.

~~~
tjoff
All your points can as easily be stated for Gnome 2.x, XFCE or OS X as well.
Only that windows UI is in my opinion vastly superior just because it is
consistent and well thought out compared to the rest.

 _Don't you think there is a reason why almost anyone who has every used a Mac
says OS X is more user-friendly..._

Yes there is a reason. OS X might be more _beginner-friendly_ but as soon as
you actually start to use it you realize it isn't _user_ -friendly. As on
most/all simple systems (including OS X) doing stuff that wasn't intended is
extremely cumbersome.

Doing things on Windows is comparatively both easy and logical, which enables
you to do what you want (and not what the designer thought you wanted) way
faster than OS X allows you to.

Just see how well OS X handles multiple windows, it's a joke compared to
Windows.

~~~
w0utert
> All your points can as easily be stated for Gnome 2.x, XFCE or OS X as well.
> Only that windows UI is in my opinion vastly superior just because it is
> consistent and well thought out compared to the rest.

Half of what you are saying is exactly what I said myself: Gnome and XFCE
indeed follow almost the exact same desktop paradigm as Windows, so obviously
they share many of the same problems. Most notably the problems of having a
start menu to do things or a taskbar that quickly gets cluttered if you have
many applications open at the same time. The other half of your statement
doesn't make any sense to me. What exactly is more 'consistent' or 'well
thought out' in Windows 9x/XP/2000, compared to Gnome 2.x/XFCE?

> Yes there is a reason. OS X might be more beginner-friendly but as soon as
> you actually start to use it you realize it isn't user-friendly. As on
> most/all simple systems (including OS X) doing stuff that wasn't intended is
> extremely cumbersome.

I guess one of us must live in some kind of bizarro world, because what you
are saying is completely the opposite of my experience.

OS X = easy out of the box, consistent, great window management, powerful CLI
for power users. Yes, it has 'hidden settings', but so does every other OS,
and for almost all of them you have nice GUI tools to control them

Windows = cumbersome to use and many non-discoverable functions out of the
box, inconsistent in almost everything, very basic window management
(basically min/maximize/close plus a taskbar), a CLI that is almost an insult
to the user. Yes it is also full of 'hidden settings' which are all stuffed in
some kind of binary blob called the registry, indexed by cryptic keys.

Care to give some examples of things that are easy in Windows and hard in OS
X? I'd love to hear them.

> Doing things on Windows is comparatively both easy and logical, which
> enables you to do what you want (and not what the designer thought you
> wanted) way faster than OS X allows you to.

You can't be serious about this, if you are, you have never used OS X (or any
modern Linux desktop environment, for that matter). I've been using all 3
platforms extensively over the last decade, and Windows is decidedly the worst
when it comes to doing things faster. OS X is hands-down the best in that
respect. Just count the number of clicks or key presses required to do
anything. In OS X most if not everything I regularly do takes at most one
keypress and/or 3 clicks. In Windows I often have to click through 5 or 6
windows, dialogs, dropdowns, tabs and whatnot. Just launching applications in
a 3-level deep start menu already takes 5 clicks.

You really come off as a lifetime Windows user who got so comfortable with the
desktop environment that you simply don't notice how backwards and
inconvenient it is.

~~~
andyjohnson0
_"a CLI that is almost an insult to the user"_

In my opinion Windows PowerShell is superior to bash or tcsh.

(I know PS is not installed by default, and I agree that the default windows
cli is awful.)

~~~
w0utert
I have never used it, but supposedly Windows PowerShell is pretty good. But
Windows 9x/XP/2000 don't have it, and no matter how great the shell features
are, it's severely crippled by the fact that Windows has never had anything
like your typical Unix userland. Meaning that most of the CLI programs still
have their old and crippled DOS CLI interfaces, none of which were ever made
to be easy to combine into anything more than a simple .BAT file.

------
forgottenpaswrd
Oh, let me see: A person that has vested interest on Windows(with a page about
Microsoft Windows tutorials) defends Microsoft products against people that
don't like it.

"Haters" is too strong a word. I had used windows 8 too see where Microsoft is
going and I don't like it but hater is too much because honestly I don't care,
if other people is happy using a product, good for them. I'm happy using mac
and Linux.

I hear fear on his words. I remember feeling the same with the people that
wanted to continue selling CDs, calling those wanting to sell digital wanting
to "destroy the music".

No, some people don't like ribbon, or text going outside of screens like in
windows 7, buttons without 3d shadows, or vibrant colors for anything
unimportant and the most important of all, the "we are going to force you to
use this and you will like it because we can with our monopoly" attitude.

------
markessien
Most people bashing Windows 8 have not really used it, or were not using
Windows 7. I recently upgraded, and most of the time, I hardly realise I am in
Windows 8. All my desktop apps work the same, I have all my apps pinned to the
Dock (like in OS-X or Windows 7), and the few times I need to go to the start
menu, I move my window to the left and then type in the name of the app I am
looking for.

I have had zero interaction with metro or any new windows 8 features, because
they stay completely out of your way. When you see someone demonstrating
windows 8 on youtube, it looks like you will suddenly be plunged into using
metro only or things will change, but that's just wrong: Windows 8 is
practically the same as Windows 7 for anyone who actually works with Windows.

~~~
molmalo
That was my experience in my 2 months of using it. Then I had to format
(bought a new SSD), and came back to seven. But I have to admit that I was a
little worried at first about the changes. And some weren't of my liking. But
in my day to day there was no difference with seven.

------
lucian1900
Regardless of the other arguments, the ribbon _does_ suck immensely.

Ever watched a "normal" person try to use it, even after enough time to have
supposedly become proficient? The damned thing is useless.

~~~
chrislomax
I came here to make that exact point. We are 5 years on and I still think the
ribbon bar is the worst design decision made in a UI. It's useless, it makes
things harder to find.

I introduced my grant parents to Office 2007 from the offset, not an earlier
version and they found the ribbon bar a pain in the ass. Even late adopters
have a hard time with it.

------
CrLf
Sorry, not going to drink the kool-aid.

There is something to be said when almost everybody you talk to hated their
first experience with Windows 8, and those that didn't, feel the need to make
excuses for all the faults they found: "this and that isn't very good, but you
get used to it."

Being new and different doesn't imply being "innovative" and "better".
Sometimes it's just worse. And Microsoft is, again, touting something new as
something better. We all know how that worked out for Vista...

If Windows 8 is about the future, then it's a future I'm not interested in.

------
wardenclyffe
They are still fighting the popularity of Windows XP which is a tough act to
follow. I upgraded to Windows 7 about 6 months ago, and despite tweaking it to
get it very close I still suffer bouts of profound exasperation when using it.

I'm not saying that XP was flawless by any means (and I was using the much
reviled 64 bit version), but it accomplished an excellent balance between
simple ease of use and access to more complex features, which no Microsoft
product has managed since.

There has been a gradual shift toward automation which in a few cases is
welcome but in others has become an impediment to actual use. The automated
functions just aren't up to task at this point, either technologically, or
because of the assumptions the designers have jumped to about what you want to
do are just wrong.

In addition some people don't cope well with context sensitive menus (and I am
one of them I freely admit), they are messy and unintuitive after a certain
point. Sure once you learn them they can be helpful but if you have to learn
something it's not intuitive.

Nowadays there should be no reason to learn technology, it should just work.

------
tjoff
There is waaay too much focus on metro. Which is kind of natural since it is
new and different, but because of the focus on metro people get confused and
honestly think that there is nothing but metro in windows 8.

Metro is targeted towards Media Centers, tablets and casual consumption. _Not
workstations._ If you are not doing your work on an iPad today you probably
won't do _work_ in metro tomorrow. Simple as that. The media and the PR
department of MS of course would like you to think otherwise (just to hype it)
but that is pure lunacy, of course you will have a real workstation OS as well
(and that is also where you will do your work).

The thing I look forward to in windows 8 is that it will probably be the first
OS that is suitable for a tablet as well as being able to actually do
something useful with it. For the first time the tablet will not be a toy but
actually real, albeit niche, alternative to a laptop. That is _huge_ , and
_that_ is what windows 8 brings to the market.

~~~
chris_wot
So I don't really understand Metro. If it's been designed for tablets, and not
workstations, what UI do you use for day to day work, on a workstation?

~~~
molmalo
This is what I think that a lot of people is misunderstanding. You will use
the desktop as always in a workstation. Only while launching apps you will use
the new start screen, unless you pin your most used ones in the taskbar. That
way, you could work all day long without using the new start screen.

~~~
chris_wot
So I guess I'm not sure what compelling case there is for Metro on the desktop
then. What does it give me that the old UI didn't?

------
natmaster0
Yeah, pretty weak arguments there. Somehow what some people claim or have said
is supposed to apply to me?

I don't know about others complaining about ribbon on office, but I loved it
when it launched, and I loved every Facebook iteration except the last one.
I'm an early adopter, and not only does stuff I adopt early have an incredibly
high success rate, but there aren't many things that are successful that I
don't like (twitter is the big counter example for me...still don't really use
it).

However, from what I've seen of Win8 it's a terrible step backward in a blind
attempt to compete with Apple. What Microsoft doesn't understand is that Apple
has a separate OS for their desktops for a reason. iOS is a useless piece of
gimpware for doing anything productive - it is primarily a consumption device,
and the iPad will never replace the desktop as productivity (don't cite some
anecdotal story as a counter example - we're talking broad strokes here, not
one weird dude.). Hopefully one day the keyboard and mouse will be replaced,
but currently they're the most efficient mechanism for interacting with a
computer that is available. It appears Microsoft is pushing a product that is
abandoning it's entire revenue (businesses) for some small market of people
who buy iPads. (Which is a market they will likely have trouble in, given how
successful WP7 has been.)

Now to the ribbon. It's a great design for applications that involve rich
editing - like office, or even photoshop or 3dsmax. Something that requires a
complex set of verbs that are hard to remember. Explorer is not an editor -
it's a browser. The ribbon is wasting space, and is obviously the result of
some bandwagon PM that thinks copying everything successful is a good way to
design because they have no creativity or understanding themselves. Instead of
figuring out why things work (ribbon, ipad), they simply try to copy them, but
miss the whole point and make it bad.

Win8 is the new Windows ME. This is coming from a Win7 users, who thought
Vista was awesome, had every iteration of the Zune, and thought Zune HD was
the best music player ever.

~~~
quarterto
I remember the initial design post about the Windows 8 Explorer was all, "We
saw that very few people use the toolbar to get around Explorer. So we decided
to make the toolbar bigger, and put more things in it."

------
spobo
Windows 8 is designed for touch devices. Using a UI that's designed for touch
with a non-touch input SUCKS!

Do we need touch on a desktop or laptop? NO! I'll never touch my screen on a
laptop or a desktop. It's tiring and clunky.

Do we need touch on tablets? Obviously.

Does everyone want a tablet? NO! I don't want one to do my main work on. I
can't imagine I'm the only one here.

The problem is that microsoft is slowly transforming their main operating
system and its application ecosystem to the touch-friendly metro-style.

So what's happening is ... MS is alienating their non-touch userbase. Which is
now oooh ... let's say 99%?

I'll never feel comfortable using an interface designed for touch with a mouse
& keyboard. And I'll never feel comfortable fondling a standing screen either
from a laptop or desktop. So please don't force developers to develop for your
touch ecosystem as I won't be using it.

------
userulluipeste
The entire transition to something new could have been made without alienating
the current Windows's big user community. The reasons underlying the adopted
changes are weak, change done mostly for the sake of change or because the
existing state being "too old", and less considering the potential real
benefits in usability. For example this - "the old Start Menu was crowded,
forced you to scroll a lot through shortcuts". What the solution could have
been? Addressing the mess of having too many useless shortcuts! Every time I
was installing a new Windows version I had to manually clean the Start Menu
clutter. What Microsoft did? What prevents now the new Start Screen to become
overloaded with too many items? You won't be forced to scroll a lot through
shortcuts, you'll be forced now to scroll a lot through loads of bloated
screens! Where is the real progress here?

------
RSO
I'm not really in to these Windows 8 discussions, basically because I'm not
using Windows myself, but the main argument against Windows 8 that I have come
across so far was that there are two different interfaces.

As I understand this new interface is called the Metro interface, which
(without having it used) looks promising, bu t is totally different than the
old Windows interface (which I have used).

It seems to me as if Microsoft couldn't finish the Metro interface so it was a
good replacement for the old interface, so they just kept the old interface as
a backup.

But then again, this is coming from someone who hasn't used Windows 8 in any
way.

~~~
alexro
In the new Metro UI you cannot run traditional desktop apps - these that use
Windows API - and there are loads of them around already. So keeping the old
UI system in parallel is the only viable option to get Metro slowly adapted.

------
maggit
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------
willvarfar
That the haters hate Windows 8 cannot be brushed away by saying they are not
the intended customer!

Microsoft needs everyone to like Windows 8.

~~~
InclinedPlane
And there you have it. MS needs everyone to like Windows 8. Period. They need
grand mothers who might otherwise use an ipad to like windows 8. They need
high school kids to like windows 8. They need pc power users to like windows
8. They've come fairly close to betting the company that they can create a
singular experience that can be all things to all people.

~~~
bornhuetter
Complete nonsense.

They only need a sufficient number of people to like it. Even if not a single
grandmother in the world likes it, they'll probably be fine.

> a singular experience that can be all things to all people

You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Grandma's ARM tablet is
going to use Metro, and Joe Accountant is going to spend all day in the
classic desktop environment. The only thing Joe is going to notice is a new
start menu, and that's not exactly going to be a deal breaker for anyone.

Regardless of whether you like the new Metro interface and the new start
screen or not, it's simply idiotic to say that if not everyone in the world
loves it then the company will collapse.

~~~
InclinedPlane
If MS was planning on selling a version of Windows 8 that didn't have Metro as
the default UI then that argument would hold more water, but I don't see that
being the case. Windows 8 would make a perfectly fine workstation OS in "old
fashioned windows UI mode", but you need to go out of your way to get to that
state. I think people are just as likely to live with Windows 7 or choose
something else (Windows Server as a desktop OS, or ubuntu, for example) as
they are to use Windows 8 if they don't like metro.

------
shellox
A lot of people will switch to Mac and Linux soon ;) Why should anyone like
this design fail? They really need to explain their operating system to their
customer. OS X is simple to use and everyone know how it works if you start
using it. Windows was never logical or intuitive to use and Windows 8 confirm
it again.

~~~
efdee
Yes. 2012 will finally be the year of Linux on the desktop. >_>

~~~
shellox
hehe, like the last 10 years. But Android is also Linux and we may will see
Web OS as desktop OS this or next year.

