Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice and Power Users

I think a lot of this comes down to your preferences, and if Windows 8 on a tablet works well for you, then that's great. I think the article, which exposes 12 users to a Surface tablet in a controlled test carries a bit more weight, though.

Also, I don't know how much time you've spent with this generation of winrt devices, but if you think your iPad is 'clunky' and 'slow', you're going to be disappointed. The Asus tablet I work with here at work is slower, in response to user actions at least, than any iOS device I've ever used.

4) Microsoft's autocorrection and keyboard layouts

Yes, the winrt touch keyboard is very nice. The best typing score I've ever achieved was on an old LG phone running windows phone 7. The suggestions ribbon that winrt copied from Android is fantastic - Apple needs to license this from Google.

The scenario is like this: used to be that computers were big things that sat on desks. Used to be you kept all your files on one PC and moving them from PC to PC was difficult. Used to be that not everybody used computers. Used to be that the internet was a niche part of computer use. Used to be that no one had persistent online social networks integrated into their lives. Used to be that tablets weren't prevalent. Etc etc. Then all of these things changed - and now the world's most popular OS is changing in response to these changes. These are all technical problems (or whatever you want to call them) and W8 is an attempt to begin solving these problems.

No, it really isn't. W8 is an attempt to deal with what Microsoft believes is the existential threat of iOS and Android. I'm not going to argue the merits of Metro itself the way the article seems to because I like the Swiss design principles that seem to have guided the development of Metro and because I think Metro has generally been a technical success with windows phone 7 and would do at least as well on a tablet.

Metro on the desktop makes sense if you believe in the fairy-tale of tablet-PC convergence. I don't think that even Microsoft is foolish enough to believe this, which is why I think this is a cynical move to metastasize Windows and devour tablets the way Microsoft tried to devour PDAs with PocketPC. The Start Menu didn't belong in a PDA interface 15 years ago, and Metro doesn't belong on the desktop today. Tablet-PC device convergence would make sense if tablet-PC device use convergence made sense. Just the contradictory technical constraints on these two classes of devices - CPU/GPU power and precise UI control vs mobility and long battery life - tell us we shouldn't expect tablets and PCs to converge.

This isn't innovation - its the crude simulacrum of innovation. It doesn't make desktop PCs any better - if MS was interested in that, they'd bring proven fixes like pervasive desktop search (or at least a promoted UI element for the existing desktop search) or tiled window management to W8 - not Metro. Both of those features actually make desktop users on other platforms (and on Windows with 3rd party add-ons) more productive, right now.

Second: at the end of the day, the best marketing move Microsoft can make is to build great products that take advantage of all the possibilities of modern technology. I still argue that, after a period of relative stagnation, computer interfaces are starting to respond to the massive changes in computing technology and culture. Windows 8, whether it is particularly well-executed or not, whether it fits well with the legacy desktop or not, whether it breaks some parts of the desktop work environment PC model or not, is a step in that direction - the right direction.

It's not the right direction. At all. This is what kept tablets out of most users hands for so long - the notion that Tablet UIs should be similar to PC UIs. Remember Windows tablet PCs? Both of these classes of devices should be allowed to evolve in their own directions rather than being crudely stitched together to satisfy a wrong-headed convergence fetish. Apple probably knows this better than any other company at this point, given the backlash over tablet-esque features that were added to Lion. One would hope that Microsoft could learn from Apple's experience. Maybe like small children, this is something Microsoft has to learn for themselves through their own mistakes.

I recall my Dad asking me if I was looking forward to getting Vista (back before it was revealed to be the train-wreck it was) and I replied that I wasn't. It simply had nothing I cared about. Windows 7 was the same way. Its improvements over XP are, IMO, few and of little impact. I do not find its performance to be consistently better than XP and its interface most definitely is inferior (but "Classic Shell" fixes that).

The only thing I've seen from Microsoft that was even remotely interesting in the last 10 years was Kinect, and I don't play the kind of games it's good for. Call me a hater, but MS simply doesn't have anything to offer me.

And like many people, if it weren't for games and a small handful of apps that I could live without if I really had to, I would run Linux on all my machines. However... Steam is coming to Linux and a good number of GOG games run in Wine, so soon there may literally be no reason for me to use Windows (at least when not at work).

Maybe it's the economic reality that Microsoft simply doesn't care about experts who have been using computers for 30 years because there are so few of us. We power users, experts, software developers and others may smugly abandon Microsoft because we think they aren't worth using any more, but Microsoft may simply think, "Good riddance, we don't need you any more."

I don't read what most people read, or listen to what most people listen to or watch what most people watch, so I'm used to it and that works for me.

But it's a little different with Microsoft, because they are still a very effective monopoly in some ways (e.g., Office) and even if you have no personal use for them, you can't completely escape Microsoft yet.

You've also got a good point, jsz0. Microsoft has completely forgotten how to compete. They are so used to forcing whatever they want on people and having them accept it because they have no choice. If they want to enter a new market, they used to just overwhelm the competition with their massive resources, and there wasn't much competitors could do. But it's not like that any more. They are behind the curve and falling further behind with every month. And as long as Mr. Too-Many-Y-Chromosomes is in charge, it seems unlikely to me that will change any time soon.

Opening the Start Menu only to type something in seems like a useless hybrid of two disparate ways of interfacing with the computer. Once I get it set up, it takes very little effort to keep it organized in a way that's useful for me, as opposed to just being advertisements for the companies who made the software I use. I can find any app I need usually in 4 clicks (Start, Programs, Category, the app I want). That's incredibly fast, at least when Explorer doesn't have to swap in 3 gigabytes or whatever it's always doing that makes it pause for ridiculous amounts of time for the most trivial of operations.

The Start Menu was only ever "useless" because it was never implemented intelligently. Just like that useless shovelware pre-installed on new computers, it was just another place where every company that got access to your computer dumped a whole bunch of crap, most of which was only useful for _them_, not you, the user. Kind of like the \Windows directory back in the bad old days.