LiveBrianD, on 15 November 2012 - 09:05 AM, said:
Quite simply, I refuse to put up with garbage shoved in my face. Also, I'm worried that they might eventually try to get rid of the desktop entirely, so that everything has to come from the store. (OK, maybe that's a bit of a conspiracy theory.) Quite simply, poor sales are the only way to teach them. And so far, it looks like that's what they're getting.
How often do you reinstall the OS? I'll easily take a better interface over a feature I use once a year or so (if I trust that to do a completely clean install, that is). I, and most others, don't use MCE, so I don't care about it. You may as well argue that an electric car is better than a gasoline one. Sure, they're better for those few times you need to go a long distance, and they cost more upfront, but the rest of the time, there's really no advantage.
I showed Windows 8 to a few guys on my laptop a few days ago... and let's put it this way - there are now a few more people who have decided they will not be switching to Windows 8. (I didn't say anything about my opinions there.) As I keep saying, good OSes sell themselves, and bad ones don't sell no matter what you do. This is exactly what Microsoft is now finding out.
You are confusing "better" with "more successful" with whether or not there are improvements.
With regards to "more successful", we really won't know for a while. My
opinion is that it will almost certainly be less successful than Windows 7, if for no other reason than many "enterprise" clients won't adopt Windows 8 anytime soon, if not ever. I don't know if it will reach the poor success of Vista (or worse), but it might.
With regards to "better", that is entirely a subject thing that is purely a function of personal
opinion. Some people believe it is better than Windows 8, others don't. At the moment, it appears there are more of the latter than the former, but only time will tell if that is really the case or not.
With regards to whether there are improvements, I would argue there is little doubt that there are improvements in Windows 8 compared to Windows 7. Will everyone benefit from those improvements? Probably not. In the same vein, not everyone benefited from the improvements going from Windows XP to Windows 7. Did that make Windows 7 a "failure"? Nope. If you look at Vista, there were definitely improvement in Vista compared to XP, but Microsoft botched enough other stuff with Vista that it basically boomed.
The point is that I believe it is fairly clear that Windows 8 is "superior" to Windows 7 (and previous version) in some areas. At the same time, there are definitely some areas where Windows 8 is considered to be way worse than Windows 7 by many people (i.e. the user interface). Will Windows 8 be a success or a failure? 1) Only time will tell and 2) it will highly depend on how one defines success/failure. Personally, I expect Windows 8 to be much less successful than Windows 7, but I don't know if it will reach Vista levels or not. I do expect that Microsoft will at some point regret their decision to "cripple' the desktop mode (i.e. not allow users to boot directly into the desktop mode or not allow users to have a Start menu in the desktop mode) and might even reverse course (of course, to my knowledge, there are ways to achieve that result without Microsoft's help). They might even go so far as to "separate" Windows 8 into a laptop/desktop version that solely uses the "desktop mode" (maybe with the option of Metro UI) and a tablet version that stays as it is. Only time will tell if things are that bad and Microsoft feels the need to really reverse course.
Now, as to my personal opinion of Windows 8...
I believe that forcing the "Modern UI" (what was Metro UI) on everyone was a mistake. I believe that this will cause Windows 8 sales to suffer, maybe to the levels of Vista (Microsoft setting the upgrade price for a period of time to $40 will help counter balance that for a while). I have not used it enough to know whether I personally consider it to be an insurmountable hurdle for my use, but I suspect that if I found it to be my only option (i.e. I HAD to use Windows 8), I would likely adapt to it...but then I tend to be able to adapt pretty well to changes in OSs (it helps that I basically constantly switch back and forth between the Mac OS and Windows as well as different versions of both).
BTW, your analog with cars seems to be confused. I cannot tell if you are really stating whether you believe an electric car to be "better" or "worse" than a gasoline car (based upon many previous comments of yours, I assume the former). I will note that by your seeming definition of "better" vs "worse" for Windows (i.e. sales levels) would tend to suggest that electric cars are "worse" than gasoline cars because so few of them get sold, yet many would argue that there definitely "superior" things about electrics.
The point is that somethings that are less successful and considered "worse" by many people can still be "better" in someways...maybe just not in enough ways to make them successful.
Help
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