The "Is Windows 8 a Flop?" Thread

cerebus said:
Yesterday I played with an Ativ 500t tablet/hybrid that was bought by my wife's brother. He basically wanted a tablet that he could take around the farm and do Excel inputting on, then turn into a work machine when necessary. Sounds perfect right? The device was a total nightmare from beginning to end:
1) It kept de-connecting and re-connecting the keyboard randomly, so you were never sure if you should be jabbing at the screen or using the mousepad. This was the nr1 issue, and a total dealbreaker.
2) Touchscreen in the Windows desktop environment just doesn't work. It's not made for it. Your fingers hit the wrong menu items all the time.
3) Animations between desktop and Metro were not at all fluid; especially rotating the screen
4) We couldn't get Office 2010 to activate properly after about 20 tries we gave up
5) Couldn't purchase apps from the Win8 store
6) The hardware was very poor. Plastic bendy mousepad, grainy resolution screen for an 11.6' unit. Also 11.6' feels huge for a tablet. Looked like crap next to the iPad.

The only issue was, he sent me one of his Excel files to my iPad to see if one could do it that way, and it struggled with some of the equations in Numbers and Office2HD. So I can totally see why a full fledged Windows machine that could double as a tablet would be attractive.

I'm totally convinced that Windows 8's biggest problem isn't the strategy it chose, it's the ineptness of the execution on that strategy.
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Previous 'Touch' interfaces from MS used a stylus, I'm convinced that this is the way to go for business tablets.
 
alloytoo said:
Previous 'Touch' interfaces from MS used a stylus, I'm convinced that this is the way to go for business tablets.
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The Ativ has a stylus. It works fine but again, the problem of hardware being detected randomly made it impossible to use.
 
cerebus said:
Yesterday I played with an Ativ 500t tablet/hybrid that was bought by my wife's brother. He basically wanted a tablet that he could take around the farm and do Excel inputting on, then turn into a work machine when necessary. Sounds perfect right? The device was a total nightmare from beginning to end:
1) It kept de-connecting and re-connecting the keyboard randomly, so you were never sure if you should be jabbing at the screen or using the mousepad. This was the nr1 issue, and a total dealbreaker.
2) Touchscreen in the Windows desktop environment just doesn't work. It's not made for it. Your fingers hit the wrong menu items all the time.
3) Animations between desktop and Metro were not at all fluid; especially rotating the screen
4) We couldn't get Office 2010 to activate properly after about 20 tries we gave up
5) Couldn't purchase apps from the Win8 store
6) The hardware was very poor. Plastic bendy mousepad, grainy resolution screen for an 11.6' unit. Also 11.6' feels huge for a tablet. Looked like crap next to the iPad.

The only issue was, he sent me one of his Excel files to my iPad to see if one could do it that way, and it struggled with some of the equations in Numbers and Office2HD. So I can totally see why a full fledged Windows machine that could double as a tablet would be attractive.

I'm totally convinced that Windows 8's biggest problem isn't the strategy it chose, it's the ineptness of the execution on that strategy.
Click to expand...

Did he agree with your criticism?
 
OrbitalDawn said:
Ah okay. Shame, must suck to drop money on something like that and have it be a failure. :/
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He was still within the 7 day return period, so I think he went back and got a refund. I'm advising him to get an iPad but like I say, I'm struggling to get his formulas to pull through properly on Numbers or Office2HD.
 
Microsoft blames OEMs for slow Windows 8 sales, plans February "relaunch"

http://www.techspot.com/news/51450-...-windows-8-sales-plans-february-relaunch.html

A report by The Register reveals that Microsoft blames OEMs for its relatively lackluster Windows 8 sales. Purportedly, Microsoft believes vendors didn't adhere closely enough to its hardware recommendations, producing mostly non-touchscreen computers that didn't showcase Windows 8's touchable side. This information comes from a "well-placed" source familiar with the matter.

Between its October 26 release and the end of 2012, Microsoft claimed to have sold 60 million copies of Windows 8. By comparison, it took Windows Vista about six months to sell the same number, but as some like to point out, statistics like these don't always tell the whole story. Official figures on Microsoft's Surface sales are still missing in action too, although Ballmer told a French news outlet that initial Surface sales were "modest". Some analysts estimate that Microsoft has sold fewer than one million Surface tablets.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the report also indicates that OEMs have turned the tables, assigning blame for lackluster Windows 8 sales to Microsoft. The primary reason computer-makers didn't strictly follow Microsoft's internal guidelines is that few companies were willing to risk producing millions of expensive, high-end devices that customers weren't guaranteed to snap up.

In spite of tepid sales though, Microsoft took numerous steps to make Windows 8 a success. The company hyped up Windows 8 as its most important OS since Windows 95, offered upgrades at record low prices and even created reference hardware to ship it on, in spite of possibly damaging its OEM partnerships. Interestingly, the report also uncovers a little-known effort Microsoft also bankrolled: a "contest" between computer manufacturers to create "Hero PCs". Hero PCs were 10 hand-picked computers that Microsoft would have had retailers showcase globally. Disappointing sales though forced Microsoft to call off the promotion.

The report claims that due to its underwhelming performance, Microsoft may be planning a February "re-launch" of Windows 8. What that exactly entails is unclear, but the Surface Pro and Office 2013 should also be landing on shelves that month. It sounds as though February may be a particularly busy month for Redmond.
Click to expand...
 
Garyvdh said:
http://www.techspot.com/news/51450-...-windows-8-sales-plans-february-relaunch.html
Click to expand...

Blaming your hardware partners for not investing more in your software - classy Ballmer. The king of deflection strikes again. This is going to alienate the manufacturers even more than they already are.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/28/3924524/hp-first-chromebook-revealed-in-leaked-spec-sheet

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...rome-pcs-as-windows-fails-to-drive-sales.html

They're already looking to new pastures.
 
kingrob said:
Google Chrome OS and perhaps a much "beefier" OS from Google in the not so distant future?
Click to expand...

The nice thing about Chrome is it doesn't really need to become beefier in itself; so long as the web services are being expanded sufficiently it can stay relatively bare. It probably won't ever scale upwards to compete with Windows on complexity.
 
cerebus said:
Yesterday I played with an Ativ 500t tablet/hybrid that was bought by my wife's brother. He basically wanted a tablet that he could take around the farm and do Excel inputting on, then turn into a work machine when necessary. Sounds perfect right? The device was a total nightmare from beginning to end:
1) It kept disconnecting and reconnecting the keyboard randomly, so you were never sure if you should be jabbing at the screen or using the mousepad. This was the nr1 issue, and a total dealbreaker.
2) Touchscreen in the Windows desktop environment just doesn't work. It's not made for it. Your fingers hit the wrong menu items all the time.
3) Animations between desktop and Metro were not at all fluid; especially rotating the screen
4) We couldn't get Office 2010 to activate properly after about 20 tries we gave up
5) Couldn't purchase apps from the Win8 store
6) The hardware was very poor. Plastic bendy mousepad, grainy resolution screen for an 11.6' unit. Also 11.6' feels huge for a tablet. Looked like crap next to the iPad.
Click to expand...
So samsung made a bad tablet ?
 
Mouse said:
If they relaunched using a version that completely disabled metro and brought back the old start button + start menu they might have a winner.
Click to expand...

That!

And brought solitaire back as a default installation item

Metro + tablet = great
Metro + desktop/laptop = terrible

How difficult is this for MS to understand
 
Mouse said:
If they relaunched using a version that completely disabled metro and brought back the old start button + start menu they might have a winner.
Click to expand...

Well to be honest nothing is wrong with Metro UI. The only thing Microsoft did wrong was "force" people to use it. They should have given an option on fresh install. I do believe that forcing people is what creates the negative press in the 1st place and that in turn makes people that would normally use it shy away by default.

If there was no force, people would have praised to OS, hell some of the people that bad mouth it might even have ran it openly and sing a totally different tune. They could have left the "force" to version 9 plus.
 
AlphaJohn said:
Well to be honest nothing is wrong with Metro UI.
Click to expand...
Oh there's plenty wrong with Metro UI. It's a tablet UI that just doesn't work on a desktop. Visual cues are ambiguous. Responsiveness is lacking. Mouse gestures aren't properly defined.

The only thing Microsoft did wrong was "force" people to use it.
Click to expand...
There are many things they did wrong. Branching the OS into 2 incompatible versions for one thing. Giving RT users Office by default but not 8 users. Making it so that a 32gb tablet only has half its usable disk space because of Office etc. And it goes on. It's a monumentally badly executed launch.
 
Sigh. I've been threatening to uninstall '8 from my HTPC for a few weeks now.
It is a strange mix of really great and really crap.
It has a dual monitor setup. My secondary being a 32 inch Samsung LED tv that I run Media Center off. It keeps on losing the secondary monitor, or randomly switches the desktop icons between that and my 'normal' monitor. Media Player could take up to 45 seconds to load a mp4. My Compro Video remote will load Media Center from the dedicated button if I press it TWICE (No kidding).
A lot of this is driver related. And I love the level of customization you can do to the settings. You can basically set everything except for disabling Metro and its related apps. Which is great for a tablet application, but extremely irritating on a HTPC.

The reason I'm holding back on rolling back to trusty '7 is not the hope that the first service pack will resolve some of these issues. Its because rolling back to 7 is just as difficult as installing 8 was easy. You basically have to re install it. The only reason I have not yet done that is because the irritations have not yet become worth the effort.
 
I've been using Windows 8 at work in dev environment and its been nothing but smooth sailing. Last night I very quickly formatted and installed it on my home pc. It does have a few annoyances but I really enjoy the OS :D
 
Did the Makro R549 Pro upgrade on one of the support systems over the weekend to beat the Jan 31 cut-off (it was running the preview version).

I'm neutral about Win 8, sure it's different but having come to terms with Gnome 3 and Unity it's not that big a deal :)
 
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