Microsoft Co-founder Dings Windows 8 As 'Puzzling, Confusing'

CWmike writes "Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has called Windows 8 'puzzling' and 'confusing initially,' but assured users that they would eventually learn to like the new OS. Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975, left the company in 1983 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. In a post to his personal blog on Tuesday, Allen said he has been running Windows 8 Release Preview — the public sneak peak Microsoft shipped May 31 — on both a traditional desktop as well as on a Samsung 700T tablet, designed for Windows 7. 'I did encounter some puzzling aspects of Windows 8,' Allen wrote, and said the dual, and dueling user interfaces (UIs), were confusing. 'The bimodal user experience can introduce confusion, especially when two versions of the same application — such as Internet Explorer — can be opened and run simultaneously,' Allen said."

Re:Like he said

[Panoptes]

"Just like people like Ribbon now" Personal opinion presented as a fact doesn't really contribute much to the discussion.

Re:Peak?

[Zuriel]

Relevant Twitter bot: https://twitter.com/StealthMountain [twitter.com]

Re:Like he said

[maxwell demon]

Sure. If I'll ever come across your software, I'll probably not complain either. I'll just not use it.

Re:Better than the unix command line? Seriously?

[cbhacking]

You may be unaware of this, but Powershell supports remote operation, and can be used to completley administer a machine (recent versions of Windows Server ship without the graphics subsystem, relying on Powershell for full administration). People do what you derisively suggest that somebody "try" all the time.

Re:Like he said

[sortius_nod]

As someone who runs the IT for an office that uses Office 2010, the biggest complaint is the Ribbon. Everyone hates it, they ask why they can't use the old system, blah blah blah. It drives me nuts.

Those that I've shown Windows 8 laugh at me & say "I just got used to the start menu, Microsoft can get fucked if they think I'll use this".

I'm not sure who committed to this interface, but they need to be publicly flogged. Some streaming would be good too during said flogging.

Re:Like he said

[Gadget_Guy]

I hated the Ribbon in Office 2007 for a few reasons.

1. I had to re-learn where everything was.
2. Microsoft's rule that an option could not appear on multiple ribbons meant that some things on the home ribbon were isolated from their related options on other ribbons.
3. It failed the telephone test because it became harder to talk someone through an unfamiliar operation to them.
4. The important ribbon that had the file open and save functions was hidden behind what just looked like a logo. They did fix this with Office 2010.

But having watched the staff at my company use Office 2003, I came to realise that the ribbon was an excellent invention for them. Most of them refused to use menus, instead prefering the toolbar for absolutely everything. Even when I stood next to them and told them which menu to choose, they would slowly hover over every single button on the toolbars trying to find the function they wanted. I used to find this extremely frustrating. But now they have got used to the new layout, the ribbon makes it much easier for them to navigate having to go near a menu.

Oh, and as a tablet user of Windows from way back, I can see the advantage of the ribbon when controlling the OS with a pen or your finger. It wasn't until I realised that this new system wasn't just replacing the menus, it was replacing the menus and dialog boxes. So while some things may take more clicks, other take much fewer. I now find myself less tolerant of large portions of the screen changing with a popup windows. Having most options available on the ribbon is a much more serene experience.

Which is why I hate Windows 8. Changing the start menu into a full screen popup is a completely jarring experience. And if I hated the ribbon that was hidden behind what looked like a decoration, you can image how much I hate having to click in the space where the start button used to be to access the horrible metro interface. How intuitive is that? Not very. It is as Paul Allen said: puzzling and confusing.

Re:Better than the unix command line? Seriously?

[bertok]

What rock have you been living under?

Upgrades and installations have been doable as a 100% unattended task for over a decade now, with Microsoft tools only! Not only can you do it remotely, it's possible to power on a machine over the network, have it upgrade itself, and shut itself back down without any human intervention whatsoever.

PXE boot, reliable network broadcasts, image-based installation, pre- and post- installation scripts, driver injection, update merging, various upgrade scenarios, backup and recovery of user data, etc... are all old hat. Most of those don't even require any additional licensed software such as SCCM, which just provides a GUI and a database for tracking progress.

Tada: Windows Deployment Services [microsoft.com] and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit [microsoft.com]. Just because you aren't aware of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

On top of that, Group Policy shits all over the desktop fleet management systems available in Linux, because it's based on a hierarchical policy engine instead of flat text files, which have poor support for things like rollback.

For example, I bet every Linux admin here can tell me a dozen ways they can set arbitrary values in configuration files across 10,000 machines, but not one of them can give me a good solution for undoing various random subsets of those settings years later! For example, you may want a site-specific setting to revert to defaults when the computer is moved out of the site, without undoing other settings in the same file that are relevant to all sites.

Good luck implementing a general-case solution for that problem in Linux, because the text-file configuration paradigm just doesn't work that way! You'd have to convince the entire Linux community to switch to some other paradigm first, and that's just not going to happen.

Re:It's improductive

[MachineShedFred]

Where is it written that Microsoft must force users of one device category to use the same interface as a completely different device category, no matter how flawed it is for that device?

They did this before with Windows XP Tablet Edition - a mouse driven stack on touchscreen / pen input devices. It was horrible. Now they've flipped the coin and we have a touchscreen / pen input driven stack on keyboard / mouse devices. It's horrible, and people don't want it.

Google and Apple have done this right - a different UI layer and API over a (mostly) common lower system. This way you can have a user experience that is tailored to the device you're using. Android does this. Chrome OS does this. iOS does this. Mac OS X does this.

Windows does not.

Re:Considering that there are standard data format

[Zero__Kelvin]

You have completely missed the point, since they are simply using proprietary formats when open ones are available solely to create vendor lock-in and squeeze competition out. Also, you are assuming that those format specs are 100% accurate and always adhered to my Microsoft. Over the course of a products life they change things as handled internally. Once lock-in is achieved they then document one particular state of the "evolution" of the format. You are acting as though they document everything up front, make it available to everyone prior to use, and then adhere to it religiously. The actual fact is that they implement it, change it on the fly, release outdated specs when it is too late for any competitor to use them to create a competing product, and just generally use it to leverage people into a deeper state of lock-in. Furthermore, they make sure their internal guys in the OS side have access to it (and other specifications vice versa) well before anyone else.

Re:Like he said

[omnichad]

For the benefit of those who haven't got a copy of Outlook in front of you or aren't familiar, here are the steps actually needed:
1) Double-click the message to open it in its own window.
2) Click File
3) Choose Info
4) Choose Properties

And for all that effort you get a 1-inch scrollbox that you can't resize