I moved from the Customer Preview to the Release
Preview, and it has turned me off Windows 8 in many ways. I presumed that there
would be significant improvements from the Customer Preview to the Release
Preview, but there are hardly any. It looks like the Customer Preview was
basically the finished interface.
I love the speed, visuals, freshness, and file manager.
In fact, I was ecstatic when I first played with the Customer Preview. It's just that weaknesses in the Charms bar,
Metro apps, and the Start screen have not been fixed in the Release Preview, and
it makes this OS feel transitional and half-baked. I hate that. It means
another 3 years of limbo.
By now, MS should have made the perfect Desktop/Laptop operating
system, but they have given up on that in the pursuit of regaining market share
in other categories. And in the process they are alienating Desktop and Laptop
users. Computers are such a big part of my life that I want the OS to be good. I'd
happily pay $500 for a great OS for 3 years.
Regardless, I was unhappy with the old Start button. It
felt clumsy and graceless as an object. It was like squeezing through a narrow
corridor to get to a shambolic filing cabinet. It really was a hopeless mess - small
writing, small arrows, having programs in folders below individual icons, and
having a mix of recent and pinned programs. And I didn't like the layout of the
more administrative links in the other half of the Start menu. It all just felt
old and clunky. So I think it needed to be changed, so long as that change was
an intuitive evolution.
At first, the Start screen looked to me to be a
wonderful solution. It's bigger, prettier, graceful, speedy, and customisable.
However, it is primarily designed for Tablets and Phones, so it simultaneously reduces
functionality for keyboard and mouse users. This is true in so many obvious ways
that I won't bother listing them all. One clear example is that when you right-click
a tile, instead of being given a contextual menu of many functions, you have to
mouse down to the bottom left of the screen to access a few limited functions. The
Charms bar is completely for Tablets and Phones, so it's just an irritation on
the Desktop/Laptop. Likewise for Metro apps - they don't give me anything that
websites don't already give in a much more controllable fashion.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's probable solution for
Desktop/Laptop users will be merely to bring back the Start button in the final
version of Windows 8. Thus, Desktop/Laptop users will be stuck with the clumsy
old system for at least another 3 years.
Already, I'm looking ahead to Windows 9. If it has a
Desktop/Laptop version for the Start screen that implements all the
functionality of the Start button, and adds improvements, then it could be
great. But it would have to be brilliantly done. And they have to do something
about the Charms bar too - probably turn it off for Desktops/Laptops and put
its functions on the Start screen.
As it stands, W8 is a weird and annoying limbo
experience for this Desktop/Laptop user. It's like having a Tablet/Phone
operating system intruding on your computer. I suspect it will not be ideal as
a Tablet/Phone system either. So it feels like an experiment gone wrong, like
Frankenstein's Monster. I hate being subjected to experiments in this way. Microsoft
has a social responsibility to do better than this.
If Microsoft bring back the Start button and turn off
the Charms bar for Windows 8, then I would enjoy the improved speed, visuals, freshness,
and file manager. It would be a nice upgrade from Windows 7, but nothing
dramatic, so it would have to be cheap too. But if you have to stick with the
Charms bar and a compromised Start screen, then I think I would skip it. Third Party
solutions might pop up, but it's risky using them for core OS functionality.
Anyway, that's my take on Windows 8. What do you
reckon?
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