
The Woman Charged With Making Windows 8 Succeed - protomyth
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508311/the-woman-charged-with-making-windows-8-succeed/
======
sek
[http://minimsft.blogspot.de/2012/11/a-microsoft-without-
sino...](http://minimsft.blogspot.de/2012/11/a-microsoft-without-
sinofsky.html)

Internally she doesn't seem so popular.

~~~
cooldeal
What in that linked article is supposed to imply or prove that she's not
popular internally?

~~~
sek
The comments.

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seunosewa
I've seen positive comments about her work on other blogs. You can't be a
powerful woman without some jealous haters. Even Marissa Mayer was described
as a clueless robot by some anonymous commenters who claimed to be Google
employees.

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Zirro
"An expert in technical design, she also led the introduction of the novel,
much copied “ribbon” interface for Microsoft Office..."

I'm not claiming it isn't true, but I can't say that I've seen it used outside
of Microsoft-products either. Does anyone have any examples supporting the
"much copied" statement?

~~~
shaydoc
I think the ribbon was an absolute disaster, i found it completely annoying
and unintuitive, just my opinion though! In other words, I hated it!

~~~
halviti
My problem with the ribbon is that many options have just disappeared.

With menus, at least you could dig through the menus to find what you're
looking for. With the ribbon, you're forced to rely on google to figure out
how to use your application.

Ever try and figure out how to display the headers of an e-mail in Outlook?

~~~
jpdoctor
> _Ever try and figure out how to display the headers of an e-mail in
> Outlook?_

ld;o

1\. You just open the email,

2\. look for the area on the ribbon that says "Tags", which is under the
message tab,

3, don't click on any of those large icons and look for the itsy-bitsy little
box with an arrow at the bottom-right of the "Tags" area, click on that.

4\. Up pops a window, look for the subbox at the bottom that says "Internet
Headers:"

5\. The headers are _always_ larger than that box, but you can click on the
box and select-all (ctrl-A, very convenient)

6\. Copy and paste into another text tool, which can be a faux-new-email which
you bring up by hitting ctrl-N.

[I just had to go through the exercise this morning, and it was such a brain-
damaged thing that I couldn't resist documenting it.]

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xradionut
Why do I feel that the fonts and colours folks at MS won this round of
"Welcome to Redmond, Let's Make a Change!". From a developer/admin viewpoint,
my workflow is jacked in Windows 8.

~~~
jorts
Could you elaborate on how your workflow is jacked?

~~~
xradionut
There's this big useless Window Phone interface on my desktop. (Yes, I have a
Windows 7.5 phone and do like the interface... on a phone...)

~~~
dangrossman
I'm consistently surprised how little I knew everyone's workflow revolved
around the appearance of the start menu (which has now become full-screen
instead of a vertical popup, a drastic change to be sure). Here I thought most
people interacted with the applications and the task bar most of the time. How
did anyone get any work done for months after the start menu grew from one
column to two in Windows Vista/7?

~~~
marshray
There were three things I liked about the start menu:

1\. The ability to pin my frequently-used items manually.

2\. Showing the recently-used apps that I haven't gotten around to pinning.

3\. The way it arranged hundreds of app icons in a halfway-memorable
heirarchy. (Yes, I know that makes me a small minority "power user", but
Windows had always catered to us PUs.)

I never, ever, used search and don't like having to use it in Win8. The
background search service had such a bad habit (at least through Vista) of
churning my disk drive at the worst possible moment that I disabled it
wherever possible.

~~~
adventured
Here: <http://windows8startbutton.com/>

It's a little customizable bundle of joy, and it'll optionally boot you
directly to the desktop.

And just out of curiosity in response to a comment below, I typed "powershell"
into this menu's search and it instantly found powershell.exe and
powershell_ise.exe

------
cantastoria
_As a program manager in Development Tools and Languages, she was instrumental
in several releases of Visual C++ for 32-bit operating systems and led the
development of Microsoft's first customizable integrated development
environment for Windows._

This impressed most about her resume and makes me hopeful about the future of
Windows. Visual Studio is one of the few products were Microsoft was truly
innovative and she was a key factor. I just hope Ballmer will stay out of her
way.

~~~
xradionut
Did she really accomplish those goals or just take credit for them? It's hard
to tell with all the stories I hear from my MS buddies...

~~~
brudgers
She was 31 when she came to Microsoft. She started at Aldus, and pretty low on
the totem pole - in Tech Support. Like Tammy Reller, she worked her way up the
industry from a true entry level position.

Their careers contrast markedly with that of Sinofsky who went from straight
from grad school to Microsoft.

------
RyanZAG
"As the head of Windows product development at Microsoft, Julie Larson-Green
is responsible for a piece of software used by some 1.3 billion people
worldwide", and hastily dropping.

Luckily for her, she will have a much easier number of users to worry about
shortly, and her efforts are helping greatly in reducing this number further.
Bravo!

~~~
debacle
What a useless and trite heap of snark. This isn't Slashdot.

~~~
RyanZAG
Slashdot or not, she has a lot to prove. She was one of the driving forces
behind Metro - and as current sales stats show, W8 is not succeeding in the
market, with most users citing the Metro interface as the reason for the
dislike. My comment was snarky for the sake of humour: the facts/opinions in
the snarkiness are sound.

Here is an interview with her from 2009. Make your own judgements.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdlPKmAJGRs>

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adventured
I've been pretty happy with Windows 8... with a few changes. 1) I boot
directly to the desktop 2) I abandoned the start screen entirely 3) I added a
start button for faster program access. It becomes a slightly evolved Win7 at
that point.

It feels incredibly solid and fast at the core. I use Win8 as my work machine
now and the only thing that would make me happier is if they'd stop shoving
the apps approach down my throat.

~~~
wtetzner
>3) I added a start button for faster program access

I'm interested in why you think having a start button provides faster access
than the start screen.

With the start screen, you can press the windows key to bring up the start
screen, start typing the name of a program you want to start, and press enter
to launch it. It seems like a more efficient way to start programs than the
start menu.

~~~
adventured
A few things

1) The start button menu has a built in search function that makes the search
typing function in the start screen pointless - if I want to use the search
approach. It responds in real time just like the start screen search does as
well. And importantly: no need to switch visual interfaces to get to the
program search. Windows key > type, all inside the desktop visual mode.

2) I use a two-pronged approach to pinning programs. First, I pin everything I
use for work to the taskbar, so that's one click and no typing or start screen
visual switching (which is obnoxious to work flow). Then some slightly less
frequently used programs I pin to the first layer of the start button menu, so
that's two clicks (to launch) and no typing to access another ten or so
programs (20 programs, in one or two clicks, no switching screens and no
typing; covers 99% of what I use daily). And if I want to, I can obviously use
a key approach to opening the start button menu as well. Windows key > start
typing, initiates a search, or an arrow key tap upward rolls me into the
program list or into my pinned group. All from the same interface, without a
visual switch.

3) With the start button menu I get a very fast alphabetical listing of
practically everything on my system. Tiles take up considerably more space and
require a left / right roll to see everything. It's cute for a few items, it's
obnoxious and messy for 50.

4) The start button menu has a settings section that I can roll over to a
control panel sub list or network settings sub list etc etc. The control panel
item, for example, spawns an alphabetical list of 50 items on my system that
relate to system management. This is similar to the small icons view under
Control Panel, but I can get to the list with one 'click' and it's nicely
hidden away in a compact multi-use start button menu.

5) This is just purely convenience: the start button menu has direct access to
power / reboot (switch user etc). With the new Win8 approach I can swipe the
right side of the screen (annoying), then access "Settings" and then access
power control (more steps, less options under one item, much slower). And
obviously ctrl-alt-delete still gets you quick access to these options as
well, but that's just another reason the swipe screens and start screen are
pointless for me on the desktop.

6) I can customize the start button menu more than I can the start screen.

7) I work in the desktop mode, everything I use is in the desktop mode, it's
ridiculous to boot me into the start screen to begin my experience.

The start screen doesn't even come close to how compact and fast the start
button menu is. Not to mention the visual switching the start screen requires
is a nasty work flow breaker because I have to dive into and out of a
different interface, when I shouldn't have to do that just to access simple
programs.

~~~
wtetzner
> The start button menu has a built in search function that makes the search
> typing function in the start screen pointless - if I want to use the search
> approach. It responds in real time just like the start screen search does as
> well. And importantly: no need to switch visual interfaces to get to the
> program search. Windows key > type, all inside the desktop visual mode.

Cool, I didn't realize you could do windows key > type with the start menu
(it's been a while since I've used Windows beyond just trying out the new
stuff).

