Microsoft to drop "Metro" name for Windows 8

[Apache]

Originally Posted by wizwor

Mojave is my favorite release of Windows.

I'm not sure Metro or Zune is worse than iPod or Sansa, frankly. Marketing people are special creatures.

If suspect that a lot of people would love the Zune if you put an Apple on the cover and left it at a bar somewhere.

I have had a Zune for years and love it. Of course I did not buy it because of the name.
Apache

[Phogg]

Riding on the metro

[Belfaborac]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

I think the best approach is to skip Windows 8 and wait for 9, for the same reason that it was a good idea to skip Vista and wait for 7. It isn't that there is anything wrong with 8 or Vista. It's just that Microsoft is making some significant changes and it is going to take developers time to adapt to those changes. It also takes Microsoft some time to figure out what works and what doesn't work, then to make appropriate changes. In other words, let other people deal with the hiccups and only pay for the product when it is ready.

I think you've likely hit the nail squarely on the head here. I guess *might* end up getting Win8, but if so it'll be because I'm curious and useless at resisting temptation. Win7 has excellent performance, is 100% stable and dependable (a first for an OS from Microsoft) in my experience since release day and although the new kid has some nifty built-in features, I've got third party apps which provides all of those and many, many more.

[frahse]

Help me with my thinking here.

I saw where Win8 was going to be offered for $40 or so during Oct. I planned to acquire a copy for my wife's computer which is less than a year old and has Win 7 on it. The computer is a whiz-bang and should be good for at least 4 or 5 years. I even have an extended warranty on it.

I was then going to wait for at least the first service package update to be available to install Win8. Hopefully by then the beast would be tamed somewhat.

Is that a reasonable plan?

[HarryT]

Can you do that, or is the $40 upgrade only for a download "there and then", I wonder?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by frahse

Help me with my thinking here.
Is that a reasonable plan?

Perfectly reasonable...
...if you figure you're going to move to Win8 at some point.
(And you don't necessarilly need to wait for the first official Service Pack--just check the more reputable review sites like Anandtech to see if there are any show-stoppers and when they are addressed.)

You can also do what Harry and a zillion others are doing and try the Preview, even if its in a Virtual Machine environment.

Most of the nay-saying about Win8 is really coming from the Corporate side of the PC world and those folks *always* whine about GUI changes. (Not without reason--they typically have hundreds/thousands of machines to upgrade and users to retrain. But if it were up to them, we'd all be using DOS 15.1. )

Check this from April 1997:
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/feature/19...ills-adventure

What many Windows 3.1-based businesses are waiting for is a good, solid reason to move.

"We're beginning to see resistance to Windows 95 break down and a move to NT. It can't be long before Microsoft says enough to the legion of Windows 3.1 users," says Jeff Jones of UK PC manufacturer Carrera.

(Note that the whining came from Win3.1 users--not even Win3.11, the dominant release before Win95. Just as the majority of Win8 gripes come from XP users.)

Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 had similar "issues" mostly because MS moved graphics drivers down to the Kernel "endangering" stability.

(shrug)

Windows servers many customers so any change is certain to rub somebody the wrong way. So Win8 nay-saying is just business as usual. They'll get over it. Eventually.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Most of the nay-saying about Win8 is really coming from the Corporate side of the PC world and those folks *always* whine about GUI changes.

The only real change is that you launch apps from a screen that looks very like the iPad or Android home screen, rather than a heirarchical "Start Menu", and that makes a lot of sense to me, given that a lot of people are now familiar with such interfaces.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The only real change is that you launch apps from a screen that looks very like the iPad or Android home screen, rather than a heirarchical "Start Menu", and that makes a lot of sense to me, given that a lot of people are now familiar with such interfaces.

And you still have a desktop to go to if you absolutely have to have one.

The thing people forget is MS has extensive usability labs where they test how actual users actually use PCs. And, as they've pointed out, over the past decade, people have been relying on desktop and launchbar shortcuts more than the Start Menu. So the (no-longer) Metro interface is just a natural evolution of that user mode.

It's a tempest in a teacup: I fullly expect to see a hundred different Start Menu tweaks to come for Win8, right from launch.
With at least one coming from MS itself, just like TweakUI and the other PowerToys.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweak_UI

All it takes is a tweak to force a boot to the desktop and allow a hotkey to a text menu version of the Start Screen.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by crossi

Why bother with stupid names where you can't even tell by looking at them which ones are the newest release? Why not just call it Windows 8? The Android names are the stupidest. They aren't stocking a candy shop or something.

Originally Posted by mikeayers

I like the way Ubuntu does it. Each release has a (silly) name, but also it as a number, the year/month of its release. The 12.04 release is called Precise Pangolin. You can easily tell how old a version is this way.... How old is my XP box anyways?

Originally Posted by HarryT

The Android ones go up alphabetically, so it's actually trivially simple to tell if one version is later than another - if it starts with a later letter of the alphabet, it's a later release.

Ubuntu and Android do almost exactly the same thing: an official number and also a silly code name in alphabetical order. Android uses treats, Ubuntu uses animals.

I didn't realize the year.month thing about Ubuntu though. Interesting I guess, but major and minor version numbers have some understood meanings in the dev world. It seems odd to tie those numbers to dates.

ApK

[ScotiaBurrell]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The only real change is that you launch apps from a screen that looks very like the iPad or Android home screen

Lawsuit bait?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by ScotiaBurrell

Lawsuit bait?

Hardly.
The GUI-style formerly known as Metro is an evolution of existing MS GUIs. It's not all that similar and, where there is similarity (Live Tiles, etc) it is in areas where Android and iOS have been copying from ZUNE, Windows Phone, and XBOX.

Anyway, to understand why the corporate types are hyperventilating over Win 8, check this out:
http://www.zdnet.com/will-the-real-w...up-7000002134/

[wizwor]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The only real change is that you launch apps from a screen that looks very like the iPad or Android home screen, rather than a heirarchical "Start Menu", and that makes a lot of sense to me, given that a lot of people are now familiar with such interfaces.

So, 8 is to WinME and 7 is to Win98 as Vista is to Win95. 95 and Vista brought dramatic under-the-hood changes which were finished/polished under 98/7 and Me/8 dropped a new interface on the whole thing (which, btw, tested a lot of ideas that evolved into the XP UI).

Win7 was the first OS update I paid for unless you count Me where MS upgraded my memory, disk, and gave me a digital camera for free when I dropped $90 on the OS upgrade. I got the three pack for ~$120.

I have a v8 upgrade which Staples is paying for. I hope it is not tied to the machine I just purchased because my wife is not a fan of change (would not go from Vista to 7) and I am.

[tubemonkey]

I plan to go from Win 7 to Chrome as soon as they slash ~$100 off the Chromebox.

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Most of the nay-saying about Win8 is really coming from the Corporate side of the PC world and those folks *always* whine about GUI changes. (Not without reason--they typically have hundreds/thousands of machines to upgrade and users to retrain. But if it were up to them, we'd all be using DOS 15.1. )

Retraining is a huge issue, and cost sink, for corporations so I don't really blame them. Another issue is software testing, especially if they have some software that was developed in house. Then there is the cost of downtime. Even an orderly rollout, where machines are upgraded after hours, involves pulling some staff off of regular duties to perform the upgrades and dealing with user's issues. So yeah, I don't blame them for wanting to use "DOS 15.1".

On top of that, some of the upgrades are intended for consumers. I doubt that Metro will be used in most corporate environments for anything beyond an application launcher. Yes, there are some new features in there for corporations but are they going to be enough to outweigh the hinderance of the consumer features?

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The only real change is that you launch apps from a screen that looks very like the iPad or Android home screen, rather than a heirarchical "Start Menu", and that makes a lot of sense to me, given that a lot of people are now familiar with such interfaces.

I find this terrifying. (On a personal level; no statement about overall usability.) I find the iThing/Android screens frustrating and hard to use--I'm easily confused by all the icons collected in grids. I have a hard time learning new symbol sets and much prefer text, and when I do have to deal with symbols, I want to be able to arrange them.

No idea if ipads etc allow users to arrange the icons as they prefer (my experience is limited to very frustrating incidents with other people's devices), but I'd gotten the impression that even if they can put them in the order they want, they can't leave blank spaces--I wouldn't expect to be able to put "all the word processing/doc conversion software" at the top of the screen, and "all the internet/email/communications software" at the bottom, and "all the games" on a line at the right-hand side.

I use the Start menu for most of the programs I open most often, with most of the rest of my activities starting from an explorer window.

I'm considering that when my XP box finally needs to be replaced, it's time to learn Linux and run a Windows emulator so I can use Finereader and the handful of other programs I care about that don't have Linux versions. If I need to learn an OS from scratch, it might as well be something I know I can configure the way I'd like it to be.