Sam Reed asked me what, specifically, I dislike so much about Windows 8. I know this is an old subject, but I had to do some work today to testbed an application (it failed miserably, as expected) so it brought my rant of earlier to mind. This is not a complete answer, nor would Kelli Quadratic EquAsian Martino be pleased with my lack of conciceness, but here is an answer for Sam. Please keep in mind my comments are from a person with an IT background, running workstations with the windows OS in a server/client environment. Briefly :) Windows 8 is a radical departure from the workstation OS that Microsoft has offered in the past. There are several things that an OS needs to be good at to be successful. It must first and foremost be transparent… it must get out of the way of the user so that the user can just get stuff done. Operating systems need to give the end user control of their work experience… the user needs to be able to put things on their screen where they want, when they want, and not have the screen cluttered up by a ton of stuff that they dont need. The OS needs to be simple to drive so that the user can figure out where to go to get what they want done, and just do it. An operating system needs to have great continuity, where everything in the OS simply works the same way… printing ALWAYS works the same in every situation, no matter where you put your mouse on the screen the OS should react the same way (hot zones are an anathema to continuity, as is that touch screen that comes and goes. Any time you have to internally think something like well, if I move my mouse somewhere over here, its likely to… you know you have a poorly designed OS. You want keystrokes and mouse movements to do exactly the same thing no matter where you are in the OS. You also need to be able to look at an OS and say oh, this must do X and this must do Y without any random crap popping up and interfering. XP was a greatly better UI than 98. Vista, as bad as it was (horrible speed and reliability) still had a better UI than XP, Windows 7 was everything Vista should have been. Then, Windows 8 comes along and BAM, workstation users with mice and keyboards get a touch screen tablet UI. 8.1? Basically, Microsoft admitted they screwed the pooch, and sort of half fixed the UI. The UI is bad, and while there are some good parts of the OS (performance is better) they basically slaughtered a lot of stuff under the hood to do it, stuff that a lot of integrated apps depends on. In a workplace environment, we do not use touch screens but we do have some touch pads on our keyboards. Windows 8s UI was built around the swipe gesture, which of course is great on phones and tablets, and horrible on laptops with touch pads. Without them? Horrible. Again, somewhat mitigated in 8.1 but not really fixed. Windows 8 has two basic things going on, it has desktop apps and Metro apps. Desktop apps act pretty much like apps we have seen in the past from Microsoft. You can resize them, move them from screen to screen, etc. Metro apps take over your system, and cover your entire screen. They are horrible in a work environment, where workspace on our screens (and we use multiple screens) is at a premium. One of our customer service representative will have our agency operating system open on one screen (it has many windows so it takes one full screen) and he or she will have Chrome, our agency IM system, outlook and our document management system on the other screen. There is ZERO room for Metro apps, just as there is zero NEED for them. All that crap Metro does? We dont need. We dont need to know the weather, we dont need their version of mail, their calendar (we use office), the store… we dont use their people thing, we dont use their photo stuff, we dont use their maps or their messaging, we dont pay people to read the news, goof with travel, we dont allow games, we dont care about sports… NONE OF THIS HELPS US GET OUR WORK DONE, so we do not want it on our systems. We are not there to play on computers, we are there to help our customers and to do the work that we need to do to make sure they are properly taken care of. That doesnt involve any of the crap Metro (The Start Screen) does. Additionally, a lot of stuff was changed for no reason anybody outside of Microsoft can figure out. The control panel has been vastly downsized, and its hidden inside the desktop which is hidden on the start bar of 8.1 for no particular reason. Want to just run a program? In XP, it was hit the start key, click on run. Under 7, you just typed in the name in the search bar and ran it. In 8, well what you have to do is click the start button, click all programs, click accessories, then click run. REALLY? Seriously? This is streamlining? And yes, this is something I do ALL the time. Under Windows 7 to map a network drive, you simply open my computer, click on map network drive browse to the drive or type in the computer name and drive name, give it a drive letter and you are done. In windows 8? Open by swiping from the right edge of the screen (assuming, of course, you have a touch screen, if not well then try and figure out how to get the damned search function open) entering computer in the search box, then finding apps some where, then taping land clicking on computer, then tap or click on network drive, In the drive list, you choose the drive letter, then pick the folder or grouse, the click reconnect on start up, then click finish. REALLY? Are you kidding me? Today I said screw it, opened a command prompt and typed in net use g: \\servername\drivename and I was done. Thats worked since 3,1 but then again I had to figure out how the hell to get a command prompt open on the machine to start with. Then theres the Charms bar, which you have to click on the top corner to move down to right hand side to open. What? Really? Were they drunk when they thought of this? Why would I want to do this, open this Charms menu? Because thats where the search button that actually lets you find the crap you need to use, like the apps that are on the system that dont appear on that funky first page thingy… under all previous versions of windows, to do this you simply clicked on the start button, and all the programs installed on the computer pooled up in front of you in a nicely organized system. Again, lack of continuity for no discernible reason whatever. Bottom Line, Windows 8 sucks so bad not because of the OS under the UI, but rather because the UI gets in the way of the OS. It is trying to be two things, a touchscreen UI and a desktop UI. TOTALLY DIFFERENT ANIMALS. It fails. If I were just doing a couple of things on a computer… if I was just running Photoshop and Lightroom, and using the net, I wouldnt think it sucks all that much… its fairly stable, its fairly fast, and installs go pretty well. But I am NOT just doing that, I am in an enterprise environment using a lot of networking stuff, using multiple file servers, using a lot of java apps, some SQL stuff, using custom apps for agency management, for crop management, for document storage, using multiple instances of terminal services, interfacing with iPhones and androids and iPads, multiple monitors on every desk, signature pads, wireless and bluetooth devices, yadda yadda yadda. I need stone cold, absolutely, rock solid performance where the UI just gets the hell out of the way and lets us work. Windows 8 manifestly does not do this. Thats why corporate level adoption is next to non- existent. Its OK for a laptop with Office and the internet on it, perhaps a game or two and Lightroom. But in a hard-core environment where we may have 10 simultaneous apps open, running everything from 8 bit on up to 64 bit requiring multiple processors, yet remain consistent in its conveyance of usage? Absolutely not.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 02:40:36 +0000
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