
Microsoft Customers Always Win - shawndumas
http://www.marco.org/2014/01/31/microsoft-customers-defeat-microsoft
======
Zarel
I disagree; I think the biggest problem with Windows 8 has always been its
poor usability: specifically, its discoverability.

It was really bad back in the times of the developer preview. You booted into
the lockscreen, and all you saw was a clock and a picture. No "continue"
button, no clue of any sort for how you were supposed to get past it - back
then you could only get past it by clicking it and dragging it up, which a lot
of people could not figure out.

This sort of design, the idea of "remove affordances to make things look less
cluttered, even though it makes it harder to learn to use" is all over Windows
8.

Say you double-click an image file. By default, this opens the image in the
Metro app. Which means now you have the image full-screen, with nothing else
on the screen. What do you do? There are no buttons on-screen to hint at all
for how to go back. Esc doesn't leave the app.

The biggest reason a tablet-optimized OS is so unusable on desktop is that
tablets have a big obvious "Home" button. On mouse+keyboard, the Windows Logo
Key is the analogous button, but that's not clear to most users. If you ask a
user what button they'd expect to use to leave an app, they'd say Esc (which
doesn't leave Metro apps).

The way Windows 8 is now, it completely eliminates one of the biggest
advantages of a GUIs: the ability to use a computer without reading a manual
or being taught in some way.

[http://xkcd.com/627/](http://xkcd.com/627/)

GUIs were an amazing invention because they made possible the workflow of: "If
you want to do X, look for a button with 'X' written on it, or look through
menus for 'X', or look for buttons with labels related to 'X'."

OS X works like this, Windows earlier than 7 works like this, even most Linux
distros are set up to work like this by default. But Windows 8, you just get a
bunch of nothing. Critical functionality is hidden away and can only be used
by obscure mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts. I've seen someone described
it as "user-hostile" \- he opened the Charms bar by accident from moving the
mouse, finally being able to shut down, but could not figure out how to get it
back.

Usability has slowly gotten better between the first Windows 8 developer
preview and Windows 8.1, but it's still incomplete, and a Windows 8.1 Update 1
is yet another a step in the right direction.

------
thaumaturgy
The worldwide combined enterprise IT budget is somewhere around $700 billion.

A huge number of those businesses don't want to upgrade from Windows XP to
Windows 7, let alone Windows 8. (A lot of them still haven't.) The cost for an
enterprise-class business to upgrade all of their machines from XP to 7 is
_enormous_
([http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/1427413](http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/1427413)).

And this has nothing, _nothing_ to do with the quality of Windows 8.

So why does everybody keep blaming this on Metro?

There is a $700 billion market for whom the decision-makers largely see I.T.
as nothing more than an operating expense.

Microsoft has multiple markets. Why they keep trying to mash their different
markets together and serve them the same products, pissing off everyone in the
process, is beyond me.

For the rest of us, that means there's a $700 billion (per year! That's bigger
than Facebook) opportunity to provide enterprises with I.T. infrastructure at
a lower long-term TCO than Microsoft.

------
magicalist
Ugh. Just because a UI is innovative does not make it necessarily a good
thing. That should be obvious!

When I first installed Windows 8, the first thing I had to do was disable the
Metro versions of each and every staple app so they launched in desktop mode
when run. Before upgrading to 8.1, the first thing I had to do _every time I
started up my machine_ was switch back to the desktop.

I did this not because I'm low end and abhor all change, I did this because my
machine doesn't have touch, just a mouse and keyboard, and because it's
completely ludicrous to take up my entire (rather large) monitor to show
things like a single progress bar when I could have that to the side to
monitor while doing something else in a OS that supported windowed apps.

Microsoft hasn't done a good enough job fusing their UI metaphors yet. It was
incredibly ambitious to even attempt to do so, as interactions are so diverse.
Regardless of ambition, though, _in practice_ it's really a drag to force a
half-baked attempt on everyone when desktop users are just going to have to go
around adjusting things to be fully usable on the large class of machines that
don't have touch support.

I'll note also that, in spite of UI innovation in iOS and OS X, I don't have
to depend on Siri to launch an app or only use Launchpad on the desktop. Apple
doesn't do this because they know these interfaces aren't so good that they
could forever replace what users have today.

If LaunchPad became the only way to launch apps in OS X and by default all the
built-in apps ran fullscreen iPad style, you can bet your life there would be
just as much grumbling and moaning from those famed Apple customers as you're
seeing today in Windows-land.

------
Encosia
Seems a bit hyperbolic to claim that Windows 8 is "one of the biggest
disasters in Microsoft's history" even though Windows 8 usage seems to have
already surpassed all versions of OS X combined:
[http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-os-ww-
monthly-201307-2013...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-os-ww-
monthly-201307-201312-bar)

Similarly, trying to make a point out of HP selling Windows 7 machines is
disingenuous since they still sell overwhelmingly more machines with Windows
8.

------
lingben
> Microsoft’s customers don’t like change.

That is a ridiculous statement. Users don't like change when that change is
for change's sake or when the change is for the worse.

Users do LOVE change when it makes the UX/UI better and they are more
productive.

Shoving metro down people's gullets when metro is atrocious and is obvious to
anyone who has even a rudimentary familiarity with UX is what causes the -
well justified - backlash.

------
billyjobob
I don't think it's fair to characterise Microsoft as innovators held back by
their conservative customers. After all they did succeed in forcing the ribbon
interface on everyone. Windows 8 failed not because it was too different but
because it was too rubbish.

------
yardie
There goes the Metro on everything train of thought. When Balmer said it I
really thought they were going to figure it out. Apple kept OS X and iOS GUIs
separate.

I really tried to like Metro on the desktop but 256x256 tiles just didn't make
any sense. I don't think the iOS GUI is much better but I also don't spend
hours looking at it. The desktop GUI is just a transfer point to what I need
to do. I close Vis Studio to open Word, I close Word to open Excel, and etc.

------
aluhut
In my opinion Metro was bad. I couldn't see anything useful in this UI. It was
an unbelivable waste of time every time I had to use it.

I understand that for MS it would have been great to have one OS for multiple
devices but it did not work out for the PC users. Thats why it was not really
an innvoation but a huge design test that has shown us: this is not the way
they should go.

------
dserban
Why do journalists at The Verge keep using the terms "the software giant"?
Isn't that company "the devices and services giant" now (by their own
admission)?

------
pbreit
Windows 8 doesn't strike me as a very Apple-like move. Mac OS changes have
been utterly iterative and the Mac OS / iOS separation is utterly purposeful.

------
waps
It's really too bad. Microsoft is the (main) company that got everyone out
from under centralized control, and now they're being shoved aside, hey that
centralized control is back. People also seem to have completely forgotten
that what microsoft is doing with lock-in, when compared with mainframes
they're like San Francisco's liberals versus the taliban.

Not that I want to put credit for destroying mainframes entirely with
microsoft, but they're certainly the biggest single contributor, together with
IBM. Imho IBM only did it because microsoft tricked them into doing so. It was
massively against IBM's interests.

How the pendulum swings.

And the old complaints are back : "this application is not written for me",
"they removed my app from the mainframe !", "I caused a problem for the admin
and now I'm locked out of my entire life", "suddenly I'm inundated with ads in
applications I paid for" (granted usually university ads or at least from the
company you work for in the mainframe days, not so much now), "this app
suddenly switched to pay-as-you-go and I have to spend $x00000 to do what I
used to do for $100", ...

We don't seem to be learning. I just wonder. Will it be microsoft that breaks
the mainframe (again), or will it be some other company ?

