A bleary-eyed Microsoft wakes up after its cloud, IoT party, clears throat: 'Oh yeah, so Windows...' At its Build 2017 developer conference in Seattle, US, on Wednesday, Microsoft turned its attention to Windows and cozied up to competitors. The day before, CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft now sees its business in the context of edge devices and cloud services, informed by artificial intelligence algorithms. Terry Myerson, …
MS, if you want to rekindle interest in your failing OS that is Windows 10, then all you need to do is make a few simple changes.
1. Stop the telemetry. All of it. Permanently. If you don't give us the option to curbstomp that little cluster fuck, we'll simply curbstomp the entire OS.
2. Go back to individual, independant, single file single fix, patches & updates. No more playing Katamara Daimancy with one super huge massive, bandwidth wasting, reboot requiring & not optional/delayable, undescribed under the "More information" link, piece of crap. We want & NEED to be able to vet individual fixes for individual issues, not pray you haven't rendered our computer FUBAR because of a bundled fix for some piece of software we may not even have installed.
3. Stop the ads inside the OS. If we've paid for a computer with the OS on it, we DO NOT WANT ads in the file explorer, web browser, lock screen, games, etc. MAYBE if we had taken the free upgrade it MIGHT be acceptable then, but if we've given money then the ads need to stop. Completely. Immediately.
"But there are options to cover-" Bullshit. Those options are often hidden, confusingly worded, & ignored just as soon as MS pushes out the next update. If we can't be sure that the options we've set have stayed as we've set them, then the OS can't be trusted any further than we can replace it with anything else.
MS, it boils down to trust. You've had it in mountains before, but after decades of shooting yourself *And Your Customers* repeatedly in the feet, you've eroded that trust to nearly negative numbers. You need to work to rebuild it, & ramming a one-size-fits-none, take-it-or-leave-it, we'll rape you for every penny we can because you're our bitch, craptastic OS down our throats is exactly the WRONG way to go about it.
Wake up, wise up, & stop fucking up. If you don't then you'll be going titsup as folks vote with their wallets to prove JUST how brain dead you bozos are being.
Signed, a one time MS evangelist & now linux fan instead.
Just too late, as far as I'm concerned. My home server is now Linux Mint, with the Cinnamon desktop (not that I've noticed a real difference with Xcfe, but I'm not looking at my server's screen all day long). Everything I need server-side runs on it and now I'm out of the Windows world for that.
The next step is going to be fooling around with my other desktop to see how my gaming world fits in Linux these days, but the end game is definitely to get rid of Windows altogether.
Sorry, Microsoft, I've put up with your shenanigans as long as I could, but Windows 1 0 is the last straw. I do not trust you any more and I cannot trust a company that confuses the notion of OS and ad platform. It's MY computer and I'm tired of having to pass through services with a fine-toothed comb to ensure it stays that way.
Goodbye and good riddance.
Also, fix the UI.
Those demented hamburger menus are everywhere in Windows 10, even on the desktop. Although the roots of this thing go way back to the days of Xerox, they've only reached their current obnoxiousness since the smartphone hit the scene in a big way.
As a popular UI item, the hamburger menu/ button was a kludge to begin with; its purpose in life is to hide the menu from the user so he has more space to use for content on his small screen that's used by big, fat, squishy fingers. UI elements on phones have to be large enough to hit reliably with a fleshy finger, and on a screen that's only five inches across, that large button takes up a lot of pixels. So why not hide the entire thing and only have it come out when its needed? Thus, the hamburger button.
I used to think the hamburger button was a necessary evil on small-screened devices, but even then, they're apparently not so great, as this site excellently explains:
https://lmjabreu.com/post/why-and-how-to-avoid-hamburger-menus/
The site is mostly about web and app design, but the principles behind the failure of the hamburger are about how human brains work, and that doesn't change according to the exact flavor of electronic resource he's using. The hamburger is a big step backward in intuitive UI design, and even on mobiles, its utility in getting the UI out of the way so the content can be seen is overwhelmed by the "out of sight, out of mind" phenomenon.
If the hamburger menu is crap even on mobiles (its purpose in life), what is it doing on our desktops? Every iteration of Windows 10 seems to bring more of them, and as MS continues to push UWP, that's not likely to stop. Even GNOME on Linux has fallen to the hamburger, with most (all?) Gxxxxx programs like Gedit, GpartEd, etc., trading the trusty horizontal menu bar (File, Edit, View, etc.) for a hamburger button instead-- on a title bar that is twice as tall as it used to be, so it's not even saving any room over the menu bar!
All of the negatives, none of the (few) positives. What sense does that make?
Windows has the hamburger menu, but that's not the end of it. It also has the huge buttons and other UI elements that you'd expect to see on a mobile screen-- only now they're enlarged nineteen times larger (going from a 5 inch screen to a 22 inch, in that example), even though a mouse can reliably and quickly hit a target only a few pixels by a few pixels.
Not only does the oversized phone UI look incredibly stupid on a non-phone, it's a poor use of resources. Unless a desktop PC has a touchscreen that's being actuated by a human 26 feet tall, those elements don't need to be that big! Microsoft claims the goal is to have the UI adapt itself ideally to whatever platform it is being used on, but is that really what we're getting? All I see is phone UIs grafted onto a PC screen, with no adaptation to the platform at all.
On top of all of that, Microsoft's Metro/Modern/UWP interfaces are the most horrendously ugly examples of mobile UI design I've seen. I know the trend is minimalism, but come on, even the new "skeuomorph-free" Apple iOS and Google Android UIs aren't that barren.
The essence of it is that I refuse to accept any reduction in UI quality made to accommodate devices other than the one I am using at that time. Running one OS on everything is Microsoft's fetish, not mine; it has zero value to me, so there's no tradeoff between competing interests. It's just worse. As it stands, the Windows 10 desktop UI is a disjointed, flat, ugly, inefficient, counter-intuitive mess.
So Microsoft... I don't care what you do with mobile UI. If you keep it on mobiles rather than forcing it on desktops where it does not belong, there's only about six people who are going to see it anyway. Knock yourselves out! When it comes to real PCs, though, the mobile UI should never make an appearance (unless the user specifically enables it). The traditional desktop UI should be all we see, and it should be customizable. You want to push this idiotic ribbon on everything? Fine, as long as there's an option to turn it off and replace it with the menu bar.
Remember, MS, that it is the job of the OS to facilitate whatever the user is trying to do with the computer... and since one size does not fit all, stop trying to make one size fit all! People will be a lot more forgiving of whatever your latest wacky UI misadventure is if they can turn it off and make things look the way they want them to look. It's not the job of the UI to force the user into new patterns of usage or workflow, even if you think they're better than whatever it is we're doing now. Give the option to change to the new way; if it is truly better, people will recognize it-- but not if you force it down their throats. That only makes people dig in their heels and resist. People hate being told what to do, and it doesn't matter whether or not what you're telling them is actually better or not.
That last point loops back to the telemetry thing. I don't care if the data sent back to MS is anonymized and harmless and fluffy and nice. MS has told me I have no choice in the matter, so the answer is "Hell NO!" If they asked, I might consider allowing some telemetry (I did allow Windows XP to report errors back to MS, for example), but the odds of that drop to zero if you attempt to take away my ability to choose for myself. Judging from other people's reactions to 10, I see that I am certainly not the only one to think that way. The attempts MS has made to explain why I should be okay with telemetry just made it worse; I asked for (really, demanded) an OFF button, not excuses about why I shouldn't want one.
That's the thing that MS needs to fix that underlies all of these issues. STOP thinking you're the boss! It's clear that's what you think "Windows as a service" means, but that's not it. Windows 10 is not a cloud service... it's not any kind of service. It's an operating system, and an operating system needs to have only one master, and that's the owner of the PC. If he wants a start menu without tiles, make it happen. If he wants a Windows without apps, make it happen. If he wants to turn off telemetry because the purple dog no one else can see tells him in Mandarin (which he doesn't even understand, yet he knows what the dog's saying) that the underpants gnomes secretly living in the walls of the Redmond campus are using the telemetry data to figure out what step 2 is, then allow that user to turn the telemetry off. The reason doesn't have to be accurate or even make sense; if the owner of the PC (that's not you, Satya... just saying) wants it, that's reason enough.
Symbian Belle also did hamburger menus, but at least Nokia understood that the menu bar goes at the bottom, the hamburger icon goes in the bottom right, and the menu itself popped up at the bottom right of the screen.
It's as if nobody thinks about UIs any more, they just unthinkingly regurgitate bad designs.
"Also, fix the UI."
A *bit* TLDR but I thumbed-up your post anyway. I *hate* hamburger menus and both Chrome and Firefox swallowed THAT coolaid within the last couple of years... [at least in FF you can get a REAL menu back, but can't eliminate the blasted hamburger].
And don't forget getting rid of that 2D FLATSO FLUGLY mandate. Sinofsky deserves a special place in HELL for having INFLICTED that upon us all.
Can't upvote you enough.
Also GUI is terrible and the customisability of GUI is worst than Windows 3.11. Reminds me of Lisa, Windows 2.x, Gem etc.
You CAN NOT EVER have one set of GUI and applications (other than widget or trivial) for a tablet (touch only), smaller screen, TV and a workstation/laptop using mostly keyboard input.
Win10 APART from the stinking adverts and evil telemetry and nasty updates, is POO for people creating content. Making it like Andriod or iOS is stupid, because those are designed primarily for small touch screens or tablet screens mostly for consumption. There is a good reason why hitherto Chrome Books and Macs use a DIFFERENT OS.
Instead of continually adding new unwanted add-ons to Windows it would be nice if microsoft concentrated on getting the software they already distribute to work properly. Excel in particular is very prone to crashing, Access is not much better. As for the cloud, if I was a hacker this is the resource I would most like to hack.
Ever since Microsoft failed to notice the internet and had to play catch-up they seem to be in a state of desperation to jump on the new bandwagons, whenever these appear. No rhyme or reason is deemed essential to that process. So it all has to be 3D, cloudy, adserving, whatever.
Being userfriendly or innovative seem not to be important.
"The cross-platform value proposition – write once, run anywhere – is generally seen as a promise that can't be kept. Developers understand that it often means write once, test everywhere, and lowest common denominator features."
That's a pretty pessimistic view. Lowest-common denominator features? For shame. I believe Microsoft and Google would tell you that being cross-platform is easy. Just write one version of your software for each possible environment, and then include more functionality to make a run-time decision as to what features the app can and cannot support. Release only a single version in the app store, and let your customers hope their setup will support the features you advertise.
Windows 10 on ARM with 2GB RAM loading from an SD card vs Windows 10 on a Core i7 with 32GB RAM and XPoint? Is there even a difference?
can be achieved with wxWidgets, GTK, and Qt. Yes, it's C++. wxWidgets is also a lot like MFC, probably by design.
So, if you're like ME, and have been using MFC for windows programs since the 90's, *REFUSING* to jump on the "new, shiny" bandwagon and drink the coolaid of "C-pound" and ".Not" and now "UWP" (where 'P' stands for PATHETIC), you code in C++ and could (with some effort) port an existing MFC program over to wxWidgets [for example] at the source level, assuming there's no ".Not" in it.
C++ with wxWidgets, GTK, Qt... and of course the Java language stuff. *REAL* cross-platform tools that have been in use for QUITE some time now.
(if it won't run on Linux, BSD, and a Mac, it's not truly "cross-platform", and phone 'apps' aren't for the desktop anyway, and deserve their own separate implementations accordingly)
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