Sydney Morning Herald:
Of course, these plans could change. But it's almost certain that Microsoft isn't too happy with the adoption rate of Windows 8.1, which stood at just 3.6 per cent this month.
© HD Wall Paperstop
The trouble is he's right. What was wrong with 7? Not much, as far as I can see. There was nothing wrong with XP, either. Instead of a natural progression from XP to 7, we got a knee jerk "Hey, it's whatever year it is. Let's release some pile of crap."
Add to this the "clean install and to hell with your games" motif, and you may be wondering why Microsoft is pretending to be much more than a phone company. There's a reason for that. A lot of developers make a lot of money producing this garbage. It's a club, not a company strategy any more.
It's like DVD zoning, "media players" and other garbage. It's the same data, with proprietary strings attached, making lots of money for geriatrics and people who know PR but don't know a damn thing about computers or users.
Let's get this straight- While you're using binary, all else is window dressing, pun intended. What's wrong with something better than binary? Trinary or nonary, for example? We didn't find that in the cornflakes packet and nobody bothered to think about it. So we clunk along... forever, presumably.
At the bottom of every operating system is "duhh... how do we allocate the power for each function...?" Switches are switches, morons, and nothing is going to make them anything but switches, unless someone grows an IQ point and invents multi valued switches, or the wheel.
Get duo core or quad core and you get cores that can argue with each other, but that's neither here nor there. What's everywhere is lousy, couldn't give a damn, we're making big bucks so what the hell crap. The idea seems to be to do everything as badly as possible, get paid for it, then get paid for fixing the mistakes.
If you highly qualified vegetables want to start making better margins, just make sure your damn systems work. No fuss, no frills, just plain Win 95/98 - not flashy, but it works, Windows.
Lose the "not responding/please wait/your time is worthless" garbage, while you're at it. People need to work as fast as they can click, not as fast as you can retire and get syphilis.
(If you think how much time is wasted just watching that stupid thing go around, break it down to costs per hour per person, you can see how uneconomic this is. If you don't think about it, the world is a wonderful place with no wars, no poverty and no disease. Analogy made?)
Mashable:
PCs running Windows 8 and 8.1 now compose 10.49 percent of the personal-computer market, according to data from Net Applications. The two versions of Windows gained a combined 1.19 percent in December 2013. ...And where would we be without publicity for something that doesn't yet exist:Computerworld:
This is the release...that will see the return of the Start menu and the ability to run Metro-style apps on the desktop. ... Maturing and fixing the "Metro" design language...will be a major focus area...a windowed mode that works on the desktop is part of that. ... Microsoft expects to deliver three milestone releases of "Threshold" before its final release [in] April 2015. ...For those wondering, other useful facts- grass is green, sky is blue, and money is something you give to other people whether you like it or not.
The most interesting thing...is how it recasts Windows 8 as the next Vista. It's an acknowledgement that what came before didn't work. ... There's no way to sugarcoat this. Windows 8 has set back Microsoft, and Windows, by years.
There's another fix - let someone else who is aware of the existence of electricity, like SONY, Samsung, Toshiba, or Google, or maybe Wendy's and Starbucks, get off their butts and create an international standard for these expensive, repetitive slopfests.
This is business. The world does not need another system that doesn't work, includes weird compulsory things nobody needs, or go nuts whenever you click on something and try to work in real time.
I've been a Windows user for about 20 years now, more or less. Core business is what it's always been - Office that works, browsers that work without nervous breakdowns every five minutes, and Cloud access that doesn't go off and do its own damn thing whenever it feels like it. Games that run without some mysterious ritual born in a meeting over decaying livers and fossilizing brains. Videos that play.
Fun and functionality, for God's sake! Is that so much to ask? People loved the first PCs. They were simple, they worked, and you didn't need a double degree in psychiatry and spiritual proctology to operate them.
The equation?
Click = Done.
Tough, eh?
I'm still on XP as long as it works why bother changing - unless you really want to give them your hard earned money??