Feelings on Windows 8 are ‘overwhelmingly negative’

Posted on Monday, October 15th, 2012 at 12:01 pm. PT

The sentiment around Windows 8 was overwhelmingly negative during our trip as the supply chain is experiencing little life ahead of the October 26 launch.

Uh oh.

http://ComicsPundit.com/ Shawn L.

To be fair, we are talking about the opinions of Wall Street analysts. Take with a grain of salt.
- http://twitter.com/shycophante Shyco Phante
  
  Yep but this one is saying bad things about an Apple competitor so that’s okay.
  - JohnDoey
    
    If either of you guys can point me to a positive review of Windows 8, I would like to see one. Because you are implying that Windows 8 is great and this one analyst doesn’t know what he is doing and this is actually only being talked about because this is an Apple blog. In that case, there must be a hidden wave of Windows 8 enthusiasm I am not seeing. Maybe that is only visible to IE users or something. No less than Paul Thurrott has panned Windows 8, and Paul Thurrott is paid by Dell and other PC manufacturers to promote Windows for them.
http://twitter.com/dmkraig Donald Michael Kraig

@Shawn_L., I agree with you that we should question the validity of comments from a group of people who get paid to do nothing more than make guesses at what might happen with less verification or proof than weather forecasters or palm readers. The truth is that Microsoft has always been a dismal failure when it comes to selling to endusers. Instead, their customers are manufacturers like Dell and HP and IT departments. Using their monopolistic methods they pwon the manufacturers, so they’re going to buy–er…license–Win8 in massive quantities. And IT honchos, bringing the old saw about IBM up to date and saying that “Nobody ever got fired for buying Windows,” will support the eventual upgrade to Win8 through the purchase, over time, of new desktops and laptops. So while adoption will be achingly slow, it will happen.

On the other hand, will endusers–you know, people like you and me who actual USE the products rather than sell (manufacturers) or enforce their use (IT departments) and who made Apple the most valuable company in the world–rush out and buy it? A relatively small number will. Most will not. Most will wait until they need to update their computers. This means years before large-scale adoption of Win8 at best, and grudgingly at that.

Most pundits look at the marketing models to compare Apple and MS. I think it’s important to also look at the philosophical background. MS, following the decade-old philosophy of Bill Gates, wants to put “Windows Everywhere.” Therefore, in order to have the same thing on tablets, phones, and PCs, they had no choice but to have the double GUI on Win8. To my mind this is a sure way to confuse consumers and limit sales, but the market will tell the story in the future.

Apple, on the other hand, has a different philosophy: put a easy-to-use GUI on each device that makes it clear and obvious to understand, and make sure that they all can easily communicate. Thus, there is a common core to the software used on the different Apple products, but completely different GUIs. Mac OS X is good for PCs. iOS is good for tablets and phones. The ability to easily transfer data from one to any of the others could be more elegant, but the iCloud is changing that.

Personally, I think Win8 will slowly saturate the business market while losing more share to OS X, but it will still dominate due to MS’ monopoly. Years from now, however, people will look back at the Win8 disaster and call it JAZ: Just Another Zune.
Mother Hydra

Let me try this, salty IT dude op-ed style:

Closing in on the release of Windows 8 one things is frighteningly clear: Microsoft has managed to duct tape the worst of touch with a confusing dichotomy of quasi-desktop products.

But seriously, I’ve been using the RTM for a month or however long it has been available. The metro side gets absolutely ZERO use in my daily activities which focus on communication and productivity inside IT/Infrastructure. The process of going from metro to traditional desktop is simply bizarre, slightly random and suddenly jarring. Yes, all those sensations at once makes for a huge amount of confusion. Wanna jack with services or system-wide settings? It will likely reside in the stalwart control panel they have shoddily tried to hide. Clicking on a VPN program from metro drops you mercilessly to the desktop so you can input credentials in the traditional-style windows app. And then nothing. Oh yeah, you now have to either go back to the nigh worthless metro interface for the IE or chrome link OR you have to hit a favorite on the non-start bar. But didn’t I just start by clicking a metro-themed icon in the new start menu? Oh it just hurts my head because I know, I BLOODY KNOW that app makers are gonna keep pushing this puerile waste from their damned electronic orifices (orifii?) that looks like a windows 95 app. People will fall back on making the more simple and less sophisticated traditional windows apps unless Microsoft decides to stand for something quick.

Apple: Says no to perfectly good ideas to stay focused on a few things they think they can do expertly. Microsoft: Says yes to everything with “no compromises” pleasing no one.

Windows 7 is the new Windows XP in the corporate IT world. How many Vista-level mistakes will it take for MS to do something truly self-disruptive?
jacobchristie

While I agree Windows 8 will likely be welcomed with a negative reaction, but aren’t these the same people that said the iPhone 5 was “disappointing”?
JohnDoey

Imagine that instead of shipping OS X Lion on Macs and shipping iOS 5 on iPad, Apple had instead shipped iOS 5 on both, and included a “Desktop” app on Macs that ran “legacy windowing apps” by which they mean all of your Mac apps. And both versions of Safari were there! The regular one (which has Flash) and the mobile one (which has no Flash.) And there was no Mac Dock — only the LaunchPad from iOS. How would Mac users have felt in that case? Overwhelmingly negative.

The problem for traditional Windows users is that there is no longer any high-end Windows PC market. People with $999 or more to spend all buy Macs. So there are no high-end HP/Dell/Lenovo to subsidize the low-end $500 Wintel boxes, meaning they have to make all their profit there. On a Wintel system, the hardware maker is keeping maybe $25, but if they switch to making ARM-based hardware, they could conceivably make $50 or $100 per unit because the components cost a fraction and only require much smaller batteries to get much longer life. So there is a real move away from Intel going on in computing. For Apple, the Intel chips seem big and hot compared to all the Apple-designed, ARM-based chips they are selling. For non-Apple PC makers, the Intel chips now seem expensive compared to ARM-based chips. And there is simply more demand for touch/ARM than there is for the same old $400 Wintel PC. So Microsoft is changing Windows for the customers of 2013, who want tiny ARM touch PC’s, not the traditional Windows user who thinks of himself as using the equivalent of a Mac with OS X.

Basically, Mac clones are going away and iPad clones are coming in. People who still want Mac clones are going to lose their frisking minds over the next 2 years, while Microsoft hopes that people who want iPad clones will outnumber them. Based on Mac versus iPad sales, it is a good bet. However, it may not be possible to make a successful iPad clone because, unlike with the Mac from 1985–1995, Apple is pushing iPad innovation forward as well as prices downward, and pushing even deeper integration between hardware, software, and online services. The first Windows RT tablets are $100 more than iPad in spite of their low-res screens and no apps. By the time they catch up to iPad 3, Apple will be selling iPad 7, and the hot features of that time will still be many years away on Windows-based iPad clones. The thing that made Windows successful in the 1990′s was when Microsoft and Adobe/Macromedia apps started showing up at the same time on both Mac and Windows. So users began to think of themselves as Adobe Creative Suite users who choose either a Mac or PC. I don’t see what is going to slow Apple down or what is going to speed Microsoft up (or both) in order to bring that kind of parity to their ARM-based systems. And it is Apple that has the advantage in both economies of scale and sales channels this time, whereas in the 90′s, Microsoft had both those advantages.
satcomer

The new Vista?
- http://ComicsPundit.com/ Shawn L.
  
  At the very least Windows 7 is likely to be the new XP.