Will Windows 8 Be Ready For Release In 2012? 504
MrSeb writes with an excerpt from an Extreme Tech article on the Windows 8 release timeline: "...A Microsoft vice president announced that the Windows 8 beta would begin in late February 2012. The beta will be feature-complete and will allow developers to begin listing their apps in the Store. The timing of the beta is curious, and ultimately quite telling. ... The first public build of Windows 8 ... emerged in mid-September 2011; by the time the beta rolls around, it will have been ruminating for more than five months. If we follow the timeline forward — it took 10 months for Windows 7 to go from beta to public release — then it's possible that Windows 8 might arrive just in time for Black Friday 2012, or perhaps not in 2012 at all. Will its late arrival affect its chances of cutting out a swath of the tablet market from Apple and Android? Or will Windows 8 be different enough that it will do well, no matter when it arrives?"
In related news, an anonymous reader notes that IDC predicts Windows 8 will be irrelevant to the traditional PC market.
Not in 2012 for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not in 2012 for me (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of having a nice GUI with lots of options, it's a purdy GUI with few options and the rest buried in some power shell syntax.
So... they're making it more like Linux?
Phone UI Hell (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows 8 (Score:5, Insightful)
They can certainly do all of that in Windows 8.
Are you under the impression that they can't?
Re:It's because of those XP EOL users (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Win8 is a non-event (Score:5, Insightful)
You're wrong on Win95. 95 was a revelation when it was released; a much better user interface than 3.1 and preemptive multitasking, and more stable (given good drivers) than 3.1, plus built-in TCP/IP. Sucked that they didn't give OSR2 as a free upgrade (or indeed at all except to OEMs) so that we could have had FAT32 sooner.
98 sucked when it came out, so you're wrong there as well. 98SE was pretty awesome in its day, though.
Re:Cyber Monday at IDC! (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, it's even better than that. A new release of Windows might be released later than originally planned, according to random speculation from someone completely unrelated to the Windows development team or even Microsoft.
Re:It's because of those XP EOL users (Score:3, Insightful)
Vista didn't sell because it was crap at release.
It was a crap at release. It was a crap 6 months later. It was a crap 1 year later. It is still a crap and it will be until the end of time.
Worst OS ever released. I mean it. Even worse than Windows ME.
Re:Windows 8 (Score:5, Insightful)
"Windows 9 is going to be everything and nothing at once. They're stripping the kernel to its core and use it as the basis for all their products. Desktop OS, mobile OS, Xbox, set top boxes, etc. It's going to be a great thing for MS because they'll be able to focus on improving a unified core. Basically, they're trying to do with Windows what everyone has been doing with Linux for years, make it something that's easily scalable and customizable across a family of products.
It's going to save MS a ton of money and allow them to focus on keeping their products secure and fast instead of constantly having to patch crappy modules of code that have been carried over for a decade"
How is that going to work? They'll be supporting the New, Really new We Mean It This Time This Is The Shiznit API and all the old ones starting from WFC, J++, silverlight, some of the .net, etc etc rot but still need to be patched.
How much of the support problems are from the kernel and how much from the huge layers of stuff on top?
Re:Not in 2012 for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows 8 (Score:5, Insightful)
so.. in other words. everything a *nix based os has had for years. why do i get the feeling microsoft is like a horse in a race wearing a dunce cap?
Re:Cyber Monday at IDC! (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess: Win will own the corporate tablet market 80+%. Maybe ~25% of tablet/netbook type devices people buy for home use since people will feel "more comfortable" buying something they know will work with the programs they are used to. Funny thing for home use for a lot of people: even though it is their personal computer they still in my experience, base a part of the decision on "will it do the stuff I do at work?" which for most people means windows. They might dual boot but few people go completely Windowsless.
Re:Phone UI Hell (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing about Lion is if you ignore the tablet influenced features, you forget they are there and just don't use them. I'm with you. Something tells me Microsoft will get this part all wrong in their effort to jump on the tablet bandwagon (2 years late).
Re:Windows 8 (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, I've read every single post of yours in this discussion up to this point, and have one question: Are you indeed a Microsoft employee, or an employee of a PR firm talking on behalf of Microsoft? Please be honest. I won't think less of you if you just come clean, I'd actually think more of you.
I ask this because there is no way in hell any person on this planet could fine absolutely no fault with a product, especially one that introduces completely new UX principles, and changes the long term functionality of an old system. Most OS X (or Windows, or iOS, or Android, or Linux flavor) fanboys can at least list one or two gripes about their pet platform. You, on the other hand (correct me if I'm wrong), think that Win 8 is the second coming of Christ, and Metro will wash away all of our sins.
You have to eventually (outside of not being paid to) realize that various UX schemes world for various people and various tasks better than other schemes. While Metro might be nice for some people, and some uses (information consumers), it somewhat fails in other areas, and for other users. I played with the dev preview, and will not be purchasing it. This isn't an objective judgement on its intrinsic merits, but rather an observation that it completely fails for my own personal way of doing things, and clashes with my subjective aesthetic considerations. Further, its functions would be redundant for its role on my desktop PC, since I already use my phone and tablet for the tasks that it seems to think that I find important. I find touch UIs to be great, on touch screens, and I might even try a W8 tablet someday (when my forthcoming Transformer dies) Again (to avoid trolling), this is purely subjective.
There are obvious failings in Win 8, or at least from a standard usability context. These failings might be mitigated by great implementation, or decent added functionality. But from this point of view I don't see this. I haven't seen anything in Win 8 (outside of under the hood stuff, which isn't really all that innovative or as much improvement to make me want to put up with the other changes) that really makes me want to switch from Win 7. I was genuinely excited by Win 7, and lived though all the hassle of the dev preview and beta just because it was that much better than Vista (or any other version of Windows). Windows 7 fits my workflow perfectly, and if something isn't broke I see no reason to fix it.