Windows 8 flop?

OU812

Now that its out & they've fired the head of windows & sales of the surface are "modest" & looking around here there's a load of issues. Can we deduce that it's been a bit of a flop?

Overheal

OU812 wrote: »

Now that its out & they've fired the head of windows & sales of the surface are "modest" & looking around here there's a load of issues. Can we deduce that it's been a bit of a flop?

This is a forum for bringing forth issues, so that there are threads with issues is hardly surprising. Even for people who sing the graces of XP and 7, there are a thousand threads here each, or more, of XP and 7 OS issues.

It's current operational level is about 0.45% of Windows machines up and running. During this same period Windows 7 had 2.33% after it's launch.

Not going to call it a flop, the factors are too varied. The change in OS environment has many people still currently sitting on the fence while they enter retailer establishments and get 'hands on' with the new interface. In addition, Windows 7 launched behind Windows Vista and was essentially marketed as "the cure", offering up as it's sales pitch nothing radically different aside from dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability. Meanwhile Vista itself was simply plagued with problems and bad press, the adoption rate for 7 can be just as much attributed to people running away from Vista as anything else. 8 has the disadvantage that 7 is a well respected OS, and the push-rate isn't very strong from it. Vista had the same problem when it launched, with people rooted firmly in XP (and some still are).

The best metrics won't really be available until after the holidays.

Fysh

OU812 wrote: »

Now that its out & they've fired the head of windows & sales of the surface are "modest" & looking around here there's a load of issues. Can we deduce that it's been a bit of a flop?

What, a whole couple of weeks after it was released, when analysts are on record saying that sales of Windows 8 PCs are not bad (and that has to be taken in context of the wider state of the PC/high-end laptop market, which has been struggling for about 5 years due to relatively restricted consumer spending and availability of affordable alternatives).

By your logic, every iteration of OS X for the last 10 years has been a failure, as has Windows XP, Vista and 7. Presence of bugs within the 3-6 months after release is a regrettably normal part of commercial OS development, and unless the bug in question causes lasting loss of data or damage to hardware, it's just par for the territory.

You seem a bit keen to dismiss Windows 8 in a hurry. What's your opinion of it so far, if you've tried it?

OU812

Fysh wrote: »

You seem a bit keen to dismiss Windows 8 in a hurry. What's your opinion of it so far, if you've tried it?

Honestly, I didn't like it. I mostly use a mac, have XP in work (complete with IE7 for some reason) & a windows 7 laptop.

The laptop is great (when I use it). I was strongly considering putting 8 on it as I was given a retail copy of it, but I (wisely) decided to check it out first, so went to PC world & checked it out.

Found it horrible to use, (limited exposure I know), the interface is totally alien & didn't seem intuitive at all.

I can't imagine many businesses going for it (until they ABSOLUTELY have to) & I don't think consumer apart from tech heads will like it either. If anything it's likely to drive some people into the apple camp.

Fysh

OU812 wrote: »

Honestly, I didn't like it. I mostly use a mac, have XP in work (complete with IE7 for some reason) & a windows 7 laptop.

The laptop is great (when I use it). I was strongly considering putting 8 on it as I was given a retail copy of it, but I (wisely) decided to check it out first, so went to PC world & checked it out.

Found it horrible to use, (limited exposure I know), the interface is totally alien & didn't seem intuitive at all.

I can't imagine many businesses going for it (until they ABSOLUTELY have to) & I don't think consumer apart from tech heads will like it either. If anything it's likely to drive some people into the apple camp.

I'm waiting on a new hard drive for my workstation so I can force it on myself for extended testing at work - I really really didn't like Notro on the consumer & release previews and as a result didn't use them much. After installing classicshell I found them easier in terms of familiarity, but I've bought my upgrade to Win8 for my desktop and that'll be my testbed machine. It's not going on my day-to-day videoediting/graphics work laptop (I don't like it/trust it that much - it's an SP0 Windows release, and years of habit have taught me not to trust those too much....).

I did find that once I'd learned more about the new keyboard shortcuts that let me mostly bypass the touch oriented UI changes, and spent a little while unpinning all the default crap that Microsoft want you to use on your tile screen and pinned ordered groups of the stuff I want regular access to, it became a lot more straightforward. I still don't like the new UI for Windows Update or accessing the shutdown menu, but it's a lot less obstructive than I first thought - and the iterative improvements over Win 7 are subtle but nice. I didn't find this on the release preview but the final release boots faster than Win7 (and this is a fresh Win7 install I created immediately prior to upgrading to win8 - I've kept a mirror of it on another drive for testing/reversion purposes).

I don't think it's amazing, but I suspect the UI won't be the major disaster I first feared. I do think that people will still want the option of switching back to the classic interface on full non-touch installs, and to be honest I kind of hope MS relent and reintroduce it at some point -if only because otherwise retraining my users at work will become a pain in the hole...