[Long Post] Windows 8 and My Opinions

When I saw the brand new user interface of Windows 8 I was impressed. In fact, make it flabbergasted. It felt so futuristic, so polished, so new. I went through many websites looking at the first impressions and hands-on sessions, and I felt that Microsoft finally made something that I could use very easily.

However, after all the hype and the huge events, I started to dig deeper into the concept of the UI, the concept of the Metro interface, and even the whole concept of having two different types of interfaces go into one experience. I started to be scared that Windows 8 was going to become something that would give me the feeling that Android gave me back in the day. Android for me was just one word: messy. I could not stand the fact that all that bloatware and other types of junk littering my screen before even using it for a day. Now, you may think that Windows 8 looks very organized, very clean, and a completely spotless operating system, but the actual problem lies in one of the things that I feel that destroys the fundamental cleanliness of all technological interfaces: fragmentation.

Fragmentation is what makes the Android ecosystem seem cluttered and messy in comparison with Apple; it's what makes most businesses suffer from the diseconomy of bureaucracy and miscommunication between managers; it's what I feel that may make Windows 8 a very crippled system.

When you look at the user interface, it seems clean from almost all aspects, but when you dig deeper into the system you see that the fullscreen Metro apps and the desktop just don't give you a uniform feeling to your usage. This would already be enough to ward off many people that want their experience obsessively clean (like me), but it doesn't just stop there. Duplication is a very scary subject of Windows 8. There are two file system explorers, one each for both the Metro and the desktop interface. This makes me think, "is that really helping me become more organized, or is that just making it worse?" Also, advertisements are present in many apps that Microsoft themselves have developed, which just does not seem logical to me. It's a good way to make money, but this is your own product that will eventually be running on billions of computers, do you really think that this will be a great idea?

To conclude, Microsoft must change something about the ways Windows 8 interacts with people, and make it more clean fundamentally, instead of superficially. Member of iFans are welcome to leave comments of their own opinion of Windows 8.

Where are the ads in the built in apps?! I've used Windows 8 with both keyboard and mouse and touchscreen and I personally prefer it with keyboard and mouse. I don't understand this fragmentation argument, the so called metro interface is just the start menu, I can only use one file explorer?! If you want to find anything while on the metro screen you just type it in and it finds it instantly.

This is great! My dad and sister are switching to Mac because if Windows 8. My brother, a Microsoft Fanboy, doesn't even dare upgrade after trying it at a friends house. My mom took one look at it and said she would be content using Windows 7. Overall my family hates it. It is a very nice UI, but you are very correct. Hate the ads.

Switching to mac when there is no need to upgrade at all?! That's the craziest thing I've ever heard since OS X is a way different OS to Windows. Most people hating on Windows 8 try it for about a minute then hate it because they've made changes to it. It's so simple to use, I'm so puzzled as to why and how people are having a hard time with it.

It's because they are making it harder than it should be. A majority of the people complaining, I bet have never even used Windows 8 and are just following the crowd by agreeing with them or going based on videos or how it looks in screenshots. Take Android as an example. People said android was so complicated to use when to me, it was just as easy to use as iOS (yes 1.5 also). You have your app drawer, where all your apps are at. You have your notification window to find your notifications ect. Same thing for Windows 8. You have the modern ui with your tiles. Click one and you have opened an app. You have your app store. You have your classic desktop. Click the tile! People are just making it harder than it needs to be.

My dad is on Vista. My sister hates W7. My brother doesn't understand W8. My mom is one of this XP people. It was hard to make her change to W7 from XP.

I totally understand, but here's the problem; Microsoft CANNOT get rid of the desktop. They just can't, that's a detrimental blow to Microsoft if they did that. Windows RT is a different story with the same tune. They're trying to distance themselves from the desktop as much as possible, without totally getting rid of it. They want you to use Metro as much as you can, but Windows was built upon the desktop, and taking it away is a huge problem. Instantly, you take away all support for legacy, and the productivity apps like Microsoft Office aren't as productive (which is why MS Office is on Windows RT). I personally think MS wanting to get away from the desktop is why Windows RT has such strict limits; MS knows damn well that if they let you all develop for the desktop on ARM, and not the Metro side of things, a ton of developers would go for the desktop and totally ignore Metro, resulting in a lack of application support, and just piles on top of piles or fragmentation. If Microsoft gave developers access to the Desktop on ARM, people would wonder what the hell was the point of Metro at all. By forcing as much development into Metro as they can, they loosen the users dependency on the Desktop.

The transition from Desktop to Metro isn't something that will happen instantly, and will most likely take years before most of the Windows users are fully satisfied in the new ecosystem. And until Everyone stops loving the desktop so much, we may be able to say goodbye to it. I don't see it happening any few Windows releases soon, but it just may happen.

Microsoft combined metro and desktop instead of making a mobile OS for tablets, they aren't trying to distance themselves from desktop since you only have to click desktop. The reason why it starts on metro is so people just don't avoid it.