Microsoft's 11-year itch: The uncelebrated anniversary of Windows 8
- Reference: 1698750072
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/10/31/windows_8_turns_11/
- Source link:
Even with the benefit of hindsight, one cannot escape the sense of "what were they thinking?" when looking at the operating system.
Microsoft was still basking in the success of Windows 7 as its successor began seeping into the channel. This hack has memories of firing up a beta and being alarmed by what he saw. Could this really be the future of Windows? A full-screen Start menu that looked better suited to a mobile device and one's familiar applications hidden behind the scenes?
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Microsoft certainly thought so, and perhaps mindful of the success of Apple's iPad, had decided to bolt a touch-friendly interface to the operating system, obscuring the familiar desktop with chunky, full-screen applications, over-sized fonts, and menus hidden in various obscure places.
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When the operating system was released, [4]The Register described it as "painful and incoherent." However, it was noted that once a user had become accustomed to the operating system's quirks, the underlying platform was actually rather good. You just had to fight through a lot of touchscreen nonsense that did not apply to the vast majority of Windows users to get to that all-important "legacy" desktop.
The Windows 8 user interface made sense on tablets and mobile devices. Microsoft's line of Surface touchscreen PCs benefited hugely from the new working method. Still, it never represented more than a tiny niche of users compared to the majority who struggled to understand how a company that had moved from Windows Vista to Windows 7 could have followed up with… this.
[5]Windows 8: Microsoft will declare victory, but will anyone believe it?
[6]Salesforce CEO Benioff: Win 8 is 'the end of Windows'
[7]Windows 8 wait prompts PC sales droop in EMEA
[8]Windows 8 ads hit US screens: Death Metal, exploding laptops
There are various technical reasons behind Microsoft's approach, not least a desire to create a consistent experience across all its platforms and craft a unifying framework.
Alas, the IT giant didn't succeed, and the operating system failed to surpass its predecessor in usage.
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Windows boss Steven Sinofsky, flush with Windows 7 success, would [10]depart from Microsoft shortly after the debut of Windows 8 , and Microsoft worked feverishly to undo some of the damage with Windows 8.1, released less than a year after its predecessor.
The tragedy of Windows 8 is that the controversial user interface masked what was actually a useful upgrade on Windows 7. It included additional security and safety features as well as the introduction of an app store, which was an improvement on the various installers and uninstallers found in previous versions of Windows. The whole thing also felt a good deal snappier.
However, that touch-friendly interface sharply divided users. Some liked it, many did not, and that is what Windows 8 is most remembered for. Microsoft's tone-deaf insistence on an interface that served to alienate large swathes of its user base remains a decision that the corporation is still working to roll back today. ®
Get our [11]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZUEyt8MVaIKB7IlKWqqCDwAAAA4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZUEyt8MVaIKB7IlKWqqCDwAAAA4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZUEyt8MVaIKB7IlKWqqCDwAAAA4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2012/10/24/windows_8_should_you_upgrade/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2012/10/22/larry_walsh_on_windows8/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2012/10/19/benioff_on_windows8/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2012/10/19/q3_pc_market_emea/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2012/10/15/windows_8_tv_ads/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZUEyt8MVaIKB7IlKWqqCDwAAAA4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/13/steve_sinofsky_exits_microsoft/
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: There's no 'benefit of hindsight' required.
I remember seeing it on a work PC for the first time. All of the "Modern UI" apps ran full screen, which on a 27 inch 1440p monitor was ludicrous.
MS dropped the ball on the Windows 8 UI, it should have been a simple option when installing Windows 8. Are you using a touch screen device or a PC with a mouse and keyboard? And then it loaded up either classic start menu or Metro depending on the choice. With maybe a simple toggle to switch between the two for people who used both.
As the metro interface was just horrible on anything other than a touch screen device or a media centre PC
But that'd have been common sense, wouldn't it? Brain-dead marketing droids had probably heard of the concept
The biggest failure was that they then skipped Windows 9, and opted to release 10 instead...
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2613504/microsoft-windows-microsoft-skips-too-good-windows-9-jumps-to-windows-10.html
And now with 11, everything is out of kilter again....
In fairness to Microsoft, they skipped Windows 9 because there's software out there which detects "Windows 9*", looking for various flavors of Windows 95/98. One notable example is, I believe, the Oracle Java runtime. Obviously, Oracle could fix that problem, but there are probably many legacy software packages out there which would have exhibited strange behavior on Windows 9, expecting a wholly different architecture.
I quite liked Windows 10 and found it to be a decent successor to prior versions. Even 8 wasn't bad once you replaced the full-screen Start Menu with Start8 or something similar. I'm forced to agree that 11 is a step backwards, however.
The beginning of the end
I'd used all Microsoft operating systems from the days of DOS 3.1 and earned my living as an application developer on all those platforms. Windows 8 went too far for me and it was the moment when I started dipping a toe into Linux. By 8.1 I was dual booting Windows and Linux on the same laptop. Then one fateful day a Windows update trashed the bootup and made the laptop 100% Windows destroying the Linux boot option. That was the final straw and I deleted Windows and went 100% Linux, eventually settling on Mint. Not looked back since.
s/unforgettable/unforgiveable/
I was a huge fan of Windows NT and its progeny for a long while, but between Vista and 8 I started to suspect that there were folk in Microsoft who really didn't like me. Win 10 worked fine, but I was always suspicious that they might go all 8 on me again. I haven't had cause to use Windows for a few years now and I can't say that I miss it.
They don't seem to have learnt tbh
I didn't mind the Metro and it was great on a touchscreen. Improved in 8.1 but yeah a simple choice would've helped & the odd hide the close X issues did not help at all. Shame they have not learnt as the WORST thing about Windows 12 is again it insistence of hiding all your apps in the start menu, Painful.
Server 2012 ?
Server 2012 had the metro interface as well. Who @ M$ decided that was a good idea? Luckily Server "core" came out at the same time. Switched any new 2012 servers to the core version. Now I don't have a GUI on their server 2012 products. That works for me.
Re: Server 2012 ?
Oh G-d. Up until recently we had some internal dev servers running 2012, and i literally winced when I had to RDP into them to do something. Then I would forget that hideous interface existed until the next time. All gone now, thankfully.
Not just that
Win 8 was in many ways a continuation of Microsoft's view that user couldn't be allowed to make decisions, as seen with the "Ribbon" in Office.
Ribbon removed the ability of the user/their managers to modify menus to better suit their pattern of use, removing items from a menu or moving them to where they made more sense to the users. So, for example, I used to put some stuff in the WORD edit menu, which is where my staff would be looking for it when working on assessment reports, and got rid of stuff that they'd never use in a squillion years.
With Win 10 onwards the same approach is being applied to the Start menu. It's becoming ever harder to remove distracting crap that software install in there or moving programme links into purpose folders (image editors in a folder called "Graphics" etc so that they were easy to find even when you couldn't remember the name (which is far too likely,since so many programmes have bloody stupid, unhelpful names that someone though was clever)) making the menu over long and difficult to navigate down.
Win 8 should have given the users the option, but that wasn't and isn't Microsoft's way. So now Store apps can't be moved around in the Start menu at all, sitting there in alphabetical locations and fucking up any attempt to keep things organised.
For some reason they seem to have elevated their manager's whims to some kind of Holy Writ that users must accept.
Ten years on, we’re still picking up the pieces
Windows 8 had some innovative designs, but the gamble did not pay off. It was easy enough to remove some of the nonsense (at least for non touch devices) with some inexpensive utilities.
Re: It was easy enough to remove some of the nonsense
Indeed. I got W8 pre-installed on a laptop, and at first sight I even thought it looked rather nice. However, I never actually used W8 for anything, ... because straightaway I installed linux on it and never booted into W8 again :-)
I had already jumped ship at the time
After having worked with MS poor excuses for operating systems for a long time (win 95, win98, winME, Win Vista) I jumped ship to a linux desktop after XP was deprecated.
And anyway it just fits MS one decent / one trash scheme for desktop OS (I have omitted winNT, Win2000 here):
win2 - trash
win3 - decent
win95 - trash
win98 - decent
winME - extra trash
winXP- decent
win Vista - extra trash
Win7 - decent
win8 - trash
win10 - decent
win11 -trash
Re: I had already jumped ship at the time
2000 was very decent. Probably the best os Microsoft ever shipped.
Vista was actually not to bad after a couple of service packs.
Re: I had already jumped ship at the time
win10 - decent
By "decent" you mean "more tolerable than Windows 8, if you're not bothered by the data slurp" right?
Re: I had already jumped ship at the time
Just out of curiosity, what evidence do you have that the telemetry collected by Windows 10 went beyond what Microsoft outlined and/or that they misused that data in any way? Did you ever even read the explanation of what data is collected and what it's used for, or did you just make a bunch of wild assumptions? This isn't a gotcha type question either. If you have actual evidence that Microsoft is selling telemetry data collected from Windows to third parties, I'd genuinely be interested in seeing it.
You are also aware that basically every other OS does the same thing, right? macOS has telemetry data collected. Android has a voracious appetite for telemetry data. iOS/iPadOS/tvOS all collect telemetry data. The Linux kernel may not collect telemetry data, but plenty of apps bundled with any given distro do. The simple fact is, developers can get a lot of very useful data from it. Data that helps them fix bugs, plug security holes, and identify problems before people even report them. You can't always rely on users submitting bug reports, and even when they do, unless they're developers themselves, often times the reports are next to useless. Sometimes even then. Telemetry data can be really useful for helping figure out what the user was doing at the time and aids immeasurably in trying to reproduce bugs.
Re: I had already jumped ship at the time
These comments are trash. They always get repeated and it's always by people who probably never even used half of them, and couldn't actually tell you why any particular version was bad if you asked. It's also full of rose colored glasses and overlooks a lot of factors like how it took XP until SP2 to really stabilize. Or how Win98 had two versions, because the first one was that bad.
Microsoft did a pretty good job of exposing this kind of bullshit with their Mojave Experiment. You take Vista and you remove all the Vista branding. Then you tell everyone that it's a beta build of some new version they're working on to replace Vista, and everyone instantly loves it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Experiment
It's great you think you like Linux. It's a great OS, if you know what to expect and are properly prepared. However, in your particular case, it's clearly not as good a fit as you seem to think, otherwise you wouldn't be making such obvious attempts to convince yourself of that fact like your above post. If it really were such a great fit, you'd be content knowing that it's good enough for you, and you wouldn't need to try to turn every single conversation back towards Linux. Maybe you should spend a little time doing some introspection and figure out what it is you really want. Maybe it is Linux, or maybe it's one of the BSDs. Could be it's a Mac or maybe Windows is the best fit for you. I don't know, nor do I much care. I just want you to find whatever it is actually fits what you want out of an OS so that you will stop overcompensating and STFU about it.
I had honestly forgotten that Windows 8 existed and that I had to use it at home until Windows 10. Nobody I knew used it apart from me.
MSFT just didn't get it
I got to participate in "reviewing" MSFT training courses for Windows 8 in Redmond in advance of the GA release of Win 8. There was something like 18 of us in the classroom and we were all horrified at what we were seeing. The poor instructor did everything she could to keep us on track but it was a losing battle. I guess our universal dislike of what we were seeing bubbled up to "the powers that be" and our class started to be visited by various management and product groups. There were lots of heated discussions between the 18 of us and the various Microsofties with the gist being, "are you people out of your minds????". It was five very memorable days and all of us left Redmond wondering if Microsoft had just killed the crown jewels.
A few weeks later a work colleague got to do the same thing for Server 2012 and the same scenario repeated itself with the various sysadmins attending the course apparently expressing their views in an even stronger fashion than we did in the Win 8 review. It's sad that the underlying good bits had to fight with the visual layer of crud. Just another example of a technology vendor losing sight of what it's user base actually needed versus the whizbang marketing drive that forces "features" into a product that no one really wants. Sadly, we see this at all levels of MSFT (and others, to be fair) where the good bits are often lost in a sea of "what were they thinking" cruft.
Sadly, that was the last time the core of WindowsNT got any attention. Everything since has been adding layers and rearranging the deck chairs.
Kind of a pity. I used Win 8 for a while, and liked it for the most part. It was a little jarring being shifted from the desktop to a black screen with icons, but you got used to it after about a week unless you're the sort who likes to nurse even the smallest of grudges. Once I had my core set of apps pinned to the taskbar I didn't really think about it that much. And the number of improvements made in Windows 8 were enough that I'd happily overlook the UI oddities. Again, after about a week you just sort of stopped noticing it. Humans are incredibly adaptive creatures after all. So it looked a little different. Big fucking deal. As long as I could find what I was looking for, who gives a shit? Took me maybe 2-3 days to adapt, then by the end of the first week, I stopped really noticing it. All it really takes is an ability to get over yourself and realize that life is change. You can resist it and be left behind, or you can embrace it.
. . . or you can take matters into your own hands and change the UI using third-party tools. Adapting to change doesn't just mean blindly accepting what's thrust upon you, it can also mean taking steps to ameliorate that change. For some users, that meant switching to Linux, for some that meant changing the Start Menu, for some that meant skipping Windows 8 entirely, and for you, it meant accepting the new UI. I found it dreadful and, more to the point, less useful than what came before it, as did a lot of other people. The fact that you were willing to adapt your workflow to the new UI doesn't mean that those of us who weren't so willing were inferior or wrong.
There's no 'benefit of hindsight' required.
Man + dog knew at the time it was an improvement on Windows 7 saddled with a UI that made zero sense on desktop machines. The 'future is all touchscreen' mantra was rampant like the 'future is pretend AI' mantra today. Remember how consoles and gaming PCs were going to be dead and it would all be tablets and phones?