This isn't even news for nerds. Nerds have already been using the Developer and Consumer Previews and await the first beta, like me.

Flattening of window widgets is not news. It's not even a story.

And a link to the MSDN blog that discusses the entire history of Windows from 1.0 to 8 to justify the shenanigans in 8? Come the hell on. The Windows "defenders" here already do that in the comments. I can't even imagine the flood of grievances filed with the MWSU.

The story is Metro. The story is how maddening Metro is going to be to the vast majority of desktop users when you can't turn it off. The story is about how Microsoft thinks they've found the holy grail of a "one interface for all devices" when it's self-delusion, again. The story is how you and I and every other nerd on the planet is going to have to answer dumb questions about Metro just to be polite. Repeatedly. Until Windows 9.

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BMO

The windows OS was largely similar from Windows 3.1 to Vista. Stop toying with it. I think it's find to have these as optional or even the default GUI if people really want it. But some of us have been using the windows GUI for ages and it's frankly not appreciated when things are moved around.

We know where all the buttons and features are supposed to be guys. There is no other place you can put them that will be better.

Every new version of windows is like some guy randomly coming into your kitchen and reorganizing everything only to leave a little message behind saying "I fixed your kitchen, you're welcome.".... Well great... I can't find the maynanese... my spice rack is completely out of order... and there are about a hundred things that i have to patiently remove from whatever stupid location they were put and put them back where I want them.

What? I can't move it there because you outright removed cabinets and installed totally different appliances? I had that experience in Windows 7 where they took away the ability to sort folders manually. Happily I found a registry hack that added the feature back into the system.

This is obnoxious Microsoft. And beyond that, we've lost compatibilty with most of the old dos apps in the 64 bit version of windows. There's no good reason for that since dos was already being emulated. You can't tell me that you can't emulate a 16 bit environment in a 64 bit environment when there are a dozen dos emulators on the market that will do just that. Of course, most of them are designed for games and so don't work with networked printers or any of the other fun stuff that we've been counting on for YEARS.

Seriously Microsoft. You're killing it. Your selling point forever has been standards and backward compatibility.

I can over look a lot of nonsense if you just give me an updated version of the same thing. I don't use windows to be wowed by the GUI graphics. I use windows because that's how I launch the programs and manage the files that I ACTUALLY care about. Changing everything around randomly is not helpful. Stop doing it. At the very least, at least provide some buried Classic mode somewhere in the system.

I'm tired of New Coke Windows. No one stick with you because you're innovative. We stick with you because you're consistent.

This.

Windows 7 is killing the platform for me. Yes, I can see how there are various improvements.. which is good, but this price to pay for them is terrible.

So far as I can tell, Windows 7 is just XP with some extra features and some bug fixes. Pity that they still haven't bought out Teracopy. It is extremely annoying for some things which are now crippled. I can't imagine putting up with this in Windows 8. The only reason I persist is because it is easier, on this machine, to leave W7 installed. Linux Mint dual boot now. Windows only stays due to old programs.

As you say, the day of ubiquitous VM software will probably spell the end of Windows.

Yes, but do bear in mind that "that pasture" they want to stay in can extend to *specific* versions of Windows. The great mass of Windows XP users didn't jump to Windows Vista when MS would have liked them to (admittedly that was because Vista was shite) and it was only some time after the launch of Windows 7 that they started to seriously move away, around 10 years after XP first came out.

If I have to guess what to do, the GUI lost its purpose. May as well just go back to DOS

The purpose of the GUI is to keep UX designers employed. The year 24-bit color becomes standard, XP's Fisher-price look is "needed" to make that boring and stodgy NT/2K look go away. The year 3d graphics appears on commodity hardware, Aero is "needed" to make that "childish" XP look go away. The year touchscreens come out, Metro is "needed" to make that "distracting" 3D glossy look go away.

Same sorta deal with Firefox - a few years ago, a browser with lots of options and user control was a good thing. Now it's "distracting" and even the status bar and the name of the communications protocol in the title bar needs to go away to make it "clean".

It's not UX design, it's fashion design. Bunch of artistes wanking away on Photoshop trying to out-trendify each other. It's an utter waste of computing resources, and I'm sick of it.

Shush now....you're making sense. You can't do that if you use Windows!

Just jump on the hate wagon, and ignore the fact that Linux(in terms of real freedom) is just as compromised by the US Govt. as any other OS.
Ignore the fact that the collective Linux UIs still look 20 years old(unless they look just like Win Aero-I'm looking at you KDE, oh and I can point to elements in Unity that mimick shit I have from pics of 1970's nightclub signs).

Look I hate M$ as much as any Linux fanboy....I'm just not willing to call a duck anything other than a duck, even if I'm partial to geese.
So far, the elephant in the room, is that Aero was the most advanced 'looking' UI to date. It is clean for the most part, feels bright, and rarely, if ever, gets in the way as much as I've heard so many complain about. When it does, it's usually some clueless application developer that thinks he knows better than M$, breaks with convention, and ends up creating more problems in the long run. I'm looking DIRECTLY at you Adobe!

Either way, the M$ argument for dumbing down UIs to 20 years ago, is lame. Not once have I ever been 'distracted' by a UI element unless it ceased to function properly(yeah KDE, staring at you, M$ Ribbon-you too). I would fault M$ for not coming up with a better way to manage the desktop for the last ten+ years. Their answer now? Ditch it as the most used UI element.

It's still there, but now they hope to force users to learn to lose it's overall workflow. All this......all this UI change crap, was never needed by Desktops, Laptops, or Servers. Nobody was clamoring for it en masse, and I swear it's the reverse knee-jerk reaction that AMD had over netbook chips not being ready. Tablets needed this, that's all. The whole damned OS changes due to a niche product. This is what hype gets you.

Where the functional limits of the device are more important than designing a UI that's ergonomic to all platforms. (DO NOT let me hear whining about the cost involved...they can suck it up with spades and not notice.)

While I will agree, Windows on tablets sucked badly....such a massive restructuring of the core OS was not necessary, and will end up hurting them in the long run.

All of this said....many of the new features in W8 are welcome additions, and I know they will never be backported to 7, so the wait is on, to see how well it does....and how well folks learn to hack Aero back in for those that realize change for change sake is no excuse to "shift a paradigm". Forgive me, I know, the biggest bullshit phrase in business, their words, not mine.

You lose Aero Peek. That's one of the few features of Glass I actually care about it, the shiny gradient crap can get lost.

You mean like an OS GUI? That's the whole point. The OS GUI should just get out of the way so that you can run your programs. It should be intuitive and maybe aesthetically pleasing. Changing a GUI, creating a pointless learning curve, and very likely making things less intuitive just because it sells more copies of the new version is the wrong way to do things.

Linux has the right idea when it comes to GUIs. You can just choose whatever style you like best. You can have a dock if you want or a taskbar or multiple taskbars in various locations. You can change nearly everything about the GUI. Since everyone has different taste the best solution is customization, and that's precisely what Microsoft does not allow.

sudo-like interface for running things that require elevated permissions

The reason for UAC was not to recreate sudo. UAC is, and was, exceptionally intrusive for one purpose only: to create negative feedback to developers who insisted on using Admin permission for everything. Even some games required Admin access under XP, for example.

Microsoft had finally given consumers a multi-user OS in XP and developers were insisting on defeating the benefits of multi-user, making limited user accounts especially painful.

Thus UAC. If your program was bringing up UAC for every stupid thing, then you were doing it wrong.

Now, most programs need to bring up Admin privs for installation and that's the last you see of UAC if you are not doing admin-specific tasks.

It annoyed the piss out of end users when UAC first showed up and everyone in the press misunderstood its purpose. UAC was considered a black mark against Vista. But you have to ask, how else was Microsoft going to force developers into obeying the practices everyone else did on other multi-user OSes?

I am a Unix and Linux guy, but I have to give credit to Microsoft for doing it right for once.

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BMO

Two points:

1. OS X started the "glossy" look. Aero was a response to Aqua. Now, Apple has seriously "toned down" the glossy effects, jelly-bean buttons, etc. And now look: Microsoft falls right in line. Jus' sayin'...

2. Your second reason is the REAL 800lb elephant in the room. If your high-powered graphics card can't keep up with the inefficiently-coded Aero, there is absolutely no chance that Windows-on-ARM (I forget what they're calling it) will be able to execute Aero; so MS is simply deprecating it, and hiding the fact that it's a dog, by saying "Look at our fresh new look!"

The only people complaining about shutdown being under the start menu are the kind of people who get their panties in a twist over "less" vs "fewer" and things like that: pedants. The start menu is clear the place to make things happen, as it includes programs, configuration options, file browsing options, etc. It makes sense that you go there to make your computer do things, including shutting it down. I never had to think twice about it. Not even my computer illiterate family found it confusing.

I realise that. That wasn't my point though. In XP, if I am logged in as a restricted user and want to do something that requires elevated permissions, such as install some software or do something in the Control Panel that isn't an everyday task, I can either right click on the icon, chose "run as a different user" and hope for the best; or completely log out of Windows, log back in as administrator, perform my administration task, log back out again, and log back in as my restricted user account.

In Windows 7 (and Vista), if I want to perform an administration task that requires elevated permissions, I get the UAC prompt, type in my password, and do what I want to do, exactly the same as I do with sudo in OSX or Linux.

I don't think you can really say 'most people prefer GUIs'.

You can. And it would be true.

It depends what market segment you're talking about

"most people"

I certainly prefer a command prompt to a GUI when dealing with administrative tasks, it just makes it a lot simpler and more efficient to do that sprawling through menus and options.

Meh, beause reading through a 20 page man page to sort out what option you need on some rarely adjusted setting is better how?

The command line is great for scripting .. to make something easily repeatable, or to apply the same setting to a lot of systems.

To look something up, or make a change on one system, especially a change that isn't something you do daily... the gui is simpler, faster, and less prone to error.

Really, you want *both* - a GUI for being able to set standard options, config etc., and a command-line/config file you can use for setting all those odd little options that only 10 people in the world care about.
Even windows has this, but they call it the registry and it's one heck of a mess.

That all being said, my view of GUI vs Command Line is that a GUI is best for new users and graphical manipulation of objects. A command line is best once it's been learned and people are trying to get /work/ done . Just look at Autocad for instance: Seems every user who isn't a complete newbie uses the command line in it for a lot of stuff... though you'd be hard pressed to find someone who uses it exclusively.

And Microsoft are not changing for cosmetic reasons, but because the environment for computers is changing. We're entering the post PC period. Metro is there because they need a UI that work well with touch. And windows (small w) don't. (e.g. People already think that the resizing border on Aero is big at 4 pixels. To be a size to hit reliably with touch, it'd have to be 40+ pixels.)

Having created a new UI, they are then have the problem that the old monolithic apps don't work with it, and so they need to have the old windows UI still available to support all those 1st and 3rd party apps. Trouble is the visual jarring between the two UIs is terrible. So they need to wind down the visual effects on the old UI to make it less of a clash with Metro.

The reasons are solid, and they're not frivolous.

(And I say this as someone who doesn't like Microsoft. I switched to Mac 10 years ago.)

As a final note both Dave Cutler (the designer of the NT kernel) and of all people Apple showed them the way but MSFT didn't listen and now its too late. Cutler pushed for NT to be kept portable and Apple showed that if you want to change arches you need to have a crossover period where you can run both new and old on the new platform.

There have been a number of other cases where vendors moved the arch underneath their user base. HP-UX comes to mind, the PA->Itanic conversion happened pretty much seamlessly, except for the fact that PA apps ran pretty bad on itanium for about 5 years.

And that is where the problem lies, see they could write an x86 emulator for ARM, and detect the binaries, and make the whole thing seamless. The one huge problem is that when apple moved from 68k to PPC, and then again from PPC to intel, there was a pretty extreme performance advantage on the newer platform to hide the inefficiencies of the emulation layers.

With ARM vs x86 this simply isn't possible there is at a minimum a ~2x to ~20x performance delta between the fastest ARM available and a x86 (atom to intel EE). So even with fat binaries, its going to be a noticeable speed impact for anything that is performance intensive.

All this is sort of moot though, because MS has been pushing .net for the last decade. In theory anything written for .net can run on any platform, the same way java could. Its just a matter of getting the .net layers working. Of course MS doesn't have a good track record of getting it working on new platforms. Look at the delay between the beta release of windows x64 and .net for the platform.

Not exactly. I noticed that look creeping into 19th century Water Closet signs long before it was implemented in webcomics and anime. Instead of a flat font, you add highlights (especially on the W and the C) and a shadow along the borders to give it a more 3D look. I think the increased use of synthetic dyes made it easier for artists to add darker shades to otherwise limited palettes in order to enhance them.