Re: My experiences with Windows 8 as a consumer
I think Windows 8 will capture the tablet market fairly well, and that's where all the growth is. Sure, Android has a staggering lead and iOS has a loyal fanbase in the millions. But seeing the uprising of Windows Phone in the last 18 months has been interesting and Microsoft is making smart moves here. It might not appeal to everyone on the desktop but on a tablet, where there's a functional and usable desktop mode for apps that won't run in Metro, it has no equal.Originally Posted by Legion
Everyone who bought an iPad for the OS and shelled out extra money for iWork will re-consider their next tablet upgrade more carefully now, especially if they aren't so heavily invested in the app store. Apple itself is in the beginning of a GUI refresh to match up with Microsoft and I expect something to materialise this time next year.
I find this a bit unfair. Sure, DirectX corners the market but that's no fault of Microsoft entirely - OpenGL programming has been in a very bad way for years and there's been no lack of developers trying to support it. There's only two dev companies currently that use OpenGL extensively in their titles - Valve's Source and id's in-house Doom 3 engine, now an open-source alternative to those companies who can't afford more expensive engines from the likes of Crytek or Codemasters.
If you offered devs a nicely documented, moderately supported API that has the chance of making them bundles of money by running their game off it with a wide install base, then that's what they're going to go for. They have their own families to feed at the end of the day and devs work very hard for the money they receive.
That's an argument one can extend to any platform that has dominance in its respective market. Android in particular will suffer exactly the same fate one day, being ubiquitous and massively targeted because of its wide user base. Every software will have its flaws and backdoors that can't be seen until someone figures out how to exploit them.
If you liked Windows 7 and dislike Windows 8 because of this reason, then you have double standards. Take Linux, for example - in a few African countries, Linux has been deployed on a massive scale for use in government, corporates and large-scale businesses because it saves the country in general money. I believe Kenya is one of those countries, and guess what? There are Linux viruses currently doing the rounds there. Not too many, mind you, but enough to make admins wary. If OS X achieved global install numbers on the same scale as Windows, you'd be complaining about the same thing.
And here you're uttering the same thing the rest of the internet has been saying. Vista was its own special case because Microsoft used it as an incentive to change the way computers worked and operated. Today we have more than 4GB of RAM on average, quad-core processors by default, GPUs that process math in the teraflop region and hard drives that scale well beyond 2.2TB in size with SSDs to boot. All that hardware is still there and now its Microsoft's turn to get the software into a spot where all that power can be exploited properly.
Windows 7 started this by being a better, less resource-intensive version of Vista while still using all the resources available to it properly, and more efficiently than any OS based on the Windows kernel. Windows 8 just continues that trend.
That's a design decision, not a fault on its own. This isn't iOS and OS X we're talking about here. Even the Metro design language changes between the desktop and the mobile platforms based on Windows 8. You tailor experiences for different hardware, not shoving out a one-size fits all product. Look at how that philisophy turned out for Adobe Air - its a terrible platform to code for. The write-once; deploy everywhere scenario is a pipedream, at best and only would work on an OS that's designed for it - that happens to be Android, starting with Ice Cream Sandwich.
Granted, I'm not thrilled with Starter versions either, but how else would you have differentiated the OS so that it can fall under different price segments? The Starter version of Windows 7 is, at the end of the day, only slightly further away than the stripped-down ISOs users build for benchmarking and taking up as little space as possible. Microsoft just chose to go with the trend and take it one step further. Besides, for Netbooks the Starter version of Windows 7 matches up exactly to the use-case that it was designed for. Its the users who ended up wanting more and there's nothing stopping them from purchasing upgrade packs either.
Wait, what?
Now you're just trolling. Get with the fact that you don't have to use Windows 8 if you don't like it, and move on.
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