Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Windows 8 user interface is useless on tablets. And useless on desktops. So it's just useless.

As a case in point for how useless Windows 8 is on a tablet, consider the common source of confusion since version 3.5 of Windows NT, when a printer queue is paused.  First users don't think about printer queues and so the idea of them as paused, is unnatural to users.  Secondly, Windows has never improved its print queuing.  First the queue itself (the list of documents awaiting printing) is hidden away in a sub-window, even in Windows 8, and secondly, the means of resuming is hidden in a pull down menu in a sub-window.

I can tell you how this happened. Incompetence. I'm not talking about the developers here.

I'm talking about the incompetence of Sinofsky, who has now been fired because he did too much too fast, rather than being fired for the reason he who should have been fired, which is for not rebuilding Microsoft more boldly than he attempted to.

Sinofksy had to fight the inertia of a giant organization, a giant codebase, and a lot of internally warring stack-ranked factions at Microsoft, and thus, in the end, I blame the incompetence of Steve Balmer for not giving Synofsky carte-blanche to rebuild the Windows organization as he saw fit..

Again, let me be clear. The incompetents working on Windows 8 that I am referring to are the now-fired Synofsky, and the still-CEO Ballmer, who created the toxic stack-ranked corporate culture and the internecine warfare style of company management  that in turn gave us the worst version of Windows ever, Windows 8.





P.S. If you're curious, the new Settings UI in the "Modern" (Metro) part of Windows just dumps you out to the desktop Printers and Devices pane, and there is no "modern" UI for working with printers yet. 

2 comments:

  1. I would advise Microsoft to separate Windows 8 into 2 OS versions - Windows 8 Desktop Edition and Windows 8 Touch. The "modern UI" can be an option on the former. And then put back the "start button" and "boot to desktop"; retain the flat looking windows.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Microsoft clearly intends to use their near-monopoly on the nearly obsolete corporate-desktop-computing scene to establish a power-base in the mobile-touch-app scene. That they are failing to do so surprises me not one little bit. They have a long history of failing to understand what consumers want, with Windows CE, and Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone. I think Windows Phone 8 is actually reasonably good though, it needs a killer device before it's going to sell a few hundred million phones, and until it sells a few hundred million more phones, developers will not write apps for it, and the failure of their Windows Phone platform is assured.

    ReplyDelete