Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9:
1. Customers
Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9
41–50 of 75 posts
Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9
#42Am I the only one who hates the old Start Menu? I find it tedious and useless. I'm all for re-adding a start menu, but it should be one that doesn't suck, like the one in Kubuntu. Also absent from this list is an updated console. Windows 8 still uses the old DOS shell. You can't even resize the window past 80 characters. It's embarrassing.
The old start menu may not be perfect but the new start screen is definitely a step backwards. Over the life of a Windows installation, many, many programs tend to be installed, and almost every single one of them dumps a bunch of icons onto the start screen, which quickly kills its utility for visually identifying an application and launching it. After a while there is so much crap that the only way I ultimately launch anything is by typing to search. At least the old start menu had the concept of hierarchy, which meant I could identify a single start folder for an application, rather than having to wade through the vomit of 3-6 secondary icons that every installer also feels the need to dump on the start screen.
Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9
#43The "miserable counter-productive "ribbon" interface on Microsoft Word" was the result of a lot of actual user testing. I could understand people disliking it just because it was new, but it's been years now... How long does it take people to realize a better interface is more productive? Edit: oh I just noticed it's Dvorak. Never mind.
Wait, how do you go from "result of a lot of actual user testing" (PM who had the new ribbon designed, sold internally and implemented hosts and evaluates "user testing") to treating it as a truth?
My impression is that by the time companies are large enough to have "actual user testing" going on, they have lost the ability to make something truly nice and coherent, the naive "ribbon" being a prime example. I know it's been years, but I haven't gotten my gunslinger muscle memory from the old menu-days back.
Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9
#44A nice rant from John C. Dvorak. First though surely MS have to work out what a Windows PC is for in 2014 and beyond. (I accept their true response would be something like "make money on every PC sold like we always did"). Chromebooks have demonstrated a minimalist PC for our age. Now what value can Windows deliver on top of that? I think that is difficult to answer from a consumer's point of view. There might be a b…
>"Chromebooks have demonstrated a minimalist PC for our age. Now what value can Windows deliver on top of that?"
It depends on your definition for "value" here. For instance, for me "value" would be to create content in a comfortable way even if I am offline. So, since I can't edit a video, develop an app or edit a photo being offline during my commute to work, it is very unlikely that I will get one, and hence they have very limited value "to me".
Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9
#45Rarely would I agree with Dvorak, but his conclusions here aren't too far wrong. If you live with a Chrome OS device and Windows machines rapidly the Windows machines get relegated to "legacy apps only" status (this coming from someone that really doesn't like the overall Google direction). MS need to face the fact they've lost the client war, and focus on their true killer apps of Excel and Exchange. Exchange should…
They probably look at Blackberry as a lesson of what happens when a company focuses on Enterprise and not Consumer.
Consumers come to work and bug their IT departments to use what they are familiar with, forcing the pure enterprise players into obsolescence.
Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9
#46Rarely would I agree with Dvorak, but his conclusions here aren't too far wrong. If you live with a Chrome OS device and Windows machines rapidly the Windows machines get relegated to "legacy apps only" status (this coming from someone that really doesn't like the overall Google direction). MS need to face the fact they've lost the client war, and focus on their true killer apps of Excel and Exchange. Exchange should…
They probably look at Blackberry as a lesson of what happens when a company focuses on Enterprise and not Consumer. Consumers come to work and bug their IT departments to use what they are familiar with, forcing the pure enterprise players into obsolescence.
That's not quite right, because as long as Exchange plays well with the devices people are using who cares what it's running on? The money is made selling the server anyway.
iOS adoption in big companies has been driven, to a large part, by the fact integration with MS servers wasn't so hard. MS have been playing Windows platform lockdown for too long and, with the exception of the Exchange group, forgotten the embrace and extend idea, which currently finds itself at home more in Mountain View.
Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9
#47The "miserable counter-productive "ribbon" interface on Microsoft Word" was the result of a lot of actual user testing. I could understand people disliking it just because it was new, but it's been years now... How long does it take people to realize a better interface is more productive? Edit: oh I just noticed it's Dvorak. Never mind.
I stopped using MS Office entirely with the introduction of the ribbon. Granted, that's about when OpenOffice.org was about on par. I now use LibreOffice which I find, in many ways, superior to Microsoft Office.
And don't even get me started on the complete idiocy of ALL CAPS MENUS. It's demonstrably proven that all caps has a big negative impact on readability. To include ALL CAPS as part of the UI is just asinine.
Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9
#48The "miserable counter-productive "ribbon" interface on Microsoft Word" was the result of a lot of actual user testing. I could understand people disliking it just because it was new, but it's been years now... How long does it take people to realize a better interface is more productive? Edit: oh I just noticed it's Dvorak. Never mind.
Is it? Shortcuts are not discoverable anymore, most actios are hidden within tiny icons (or dialogs full of tabs, oppened from actions hidden within tiny icons), often there is no logical grouping of the actions (ok, maybe the old menu wasn't better), ribbons appear and disappear out of nowhere, and there are hiden ribons that take a Google search to get.
I quite like the "ribbon" idea, but the Office's implementation? I see no reason to think that it's more productive, and I certainly do not feel more productive on it even after years of training.
By the way, MS also had lots of actual user testing supporting their decision to take the start menu away and maximizing every window.
Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9
#49https://www.readability.com/articles/6w09uyph 1. Fix the file system. The company promised it would develop a database-style file system that would allow for easy and super-fast searches for keywords within the structure of the file. This means it should quickly retrieve every .doc file containing the words "Android OS." The biggest problem with such a file system would be the indexing costs. It is likely that a giga…
1. Yeah WinFS would be nice but it seems to be out of reach still from a development point of view. Perhaps if it were a totally new file system and not having to maintain some kind of backwards compatibility with NTFS? Who knows I am not a file system developer but I do know Microsoft put some serious development work into WinFS back in the pre-Vista days and it was just too difficult. 2. God yes! Why the hell did t…
About #1, it just takes something like Beagle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_%28software%29) integrated with the file explorer, MS does not even need to touch the filesystem. But I never tought it was that usefull, and I can't get all the hype around the concept.
About #3, yep, XP's pinball is just great, I'd expect the number of good games to go up in newer releases, not down.
Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9
#50Am I the only one who hates the old Start Menu? I find it tedious and useless. I'm all for re-adding a start menu, but it should be one that doesn't suck, like the one in Kubuntu. Also absent from this list is an updated console. Windows 8 still uses the old DOS shell. You can't even resize the window past 80 characters. It's embarrassing.
You can't even resize the window past 80 You can if you know those good ol' mode-commands. But yeah, no drag'n'resize like on all other platforms unless you install third party software like MinTTY and ConEmu.
You not need to use "mode" command to do it. If you search in the options of cmd.exe, there is a way to set the width in characters, but cmd.exe can't remember it for the next time that you open it (so is useless by laziness).
ConEmu is far better that cmd.exe, but I really wish having Konsole or Yakuake running in Windows.