Do you think Metro will make Windows 8 a flop or a great success?

I've never seen anything quite as polarized and divisive in Windows as Metro is, so I want to ask:

Do you think Metro will cause people to stay away from Windows 8 and cling to Windows 7 for dear life the way people clung to XP during the Vista era? Or do you think Metro will make Windows 8 the most popular version of Windows ever, shattering even the records set by Windows 7 due to astronomical Windows tablet sales?

 

Just as a note to other posters: keep the flaming and personal attacks out, and stay on topic. This is the only warning, so if I or another moderator has to play cleanup in here, the thread will be locked and warnings will be given. Thanks

I think it'll be neither, really. It's a radical departure from the relatively incremental changes thus far to the Windows style, so adoption by businesses will be minimal.

That said, some of the preliminary hardware designs I've seen seem pretty compelling and at least seem to mesh well with W8's duality. This may prompt more users to ditch their old computer in favor of a laptop + tablet solution.

So, I don't think W8 will enjoy the wild sucess of W7, yet I don't think it will be as much of a "flop" as many are making it out to be. Of course, that's partially dependent on MS ironing out the small niggles here and there and providing a polished first experience (rather than the annoyances that Vista had before SP1).

 

I'll have to agree with MidnightSun here, given how Windows 7 was liked and how Windows 8 is a departure from the Windows we know it'll receive mixed feelings. Personally, i think that it has potential, so i'll be giving Windows 8 at release a fair chance. One thing i'm hoping to see though are decent Intel tablets running windows 8. As long as the battery life isn't abysmal (6 hrs or so would be fine with me) i'll likely get one instead of a portable laptop.

 

Pretty sure it's gonna get mixed reviews with people hating on it and the other side loving it.

personally, I'll give it a try and if I find it productive I'll use it otherwise gonna look for ways to make windows 8 into "classic" with all the new bells and whistles on the side

 

The idea of Windows 8 is to please two crowds: the desktop/laptop crows and the smartphone/tablet crowd.

Personally, I use desktops/laptops daily and couldn't care less about smartphones (I have yet to find a reason to use one vs. a regular phone), so Windows 8 is set to be a flop for my uses.

For the whole market, I also vote in "mixed feelings", but with a slight "bad" trend, because Windows's established market (desktop/laptop users) will hate it, whereas people who would like it are not its established market.

 

I vote successful because it opens itself to a new group of systems. As far as a flop that is a tough call. Since nothing, other than gaming, is out there that tax's todays hardware how many people will buy new systems or even an OS just to have it? Present hardware runs it all, if you could run vista then Windows 7 was pretty much a given now the same can be said of the migration to Windows 8.

This alone is a huge hit to OEM's as with the ecomomy the way it is there is little need to upgrade. That and you can buy a SSD and make a $500 system relatively fast. Times are tough for the hardware people and this could backfire on M$ with Windows 8 too.

 

I don't think Vista was as bad as people say it was. I think Windows 8 will be worse. Fullscreen apps? Start screen? Flipping between Metro and desktop? If they don't reconsider a lot of their design decisions and abandon the idea of a unified tablet/desktop experience, I think a lot of users will be turned off.

 

The problem of Vista was that it needed a few more months of optimization before being launched. Vista SP1 was just fine. Unfortunately, by then the damage had been done.

I'm starting to think that, among desktop/laptop users, Windows 8 is starting to suffer from the same damage.

 

They can certainly change their minds and reverse some of their decisions re: the Metro UI.

 

The damage is much worse. With Vista you wanted it to work! The flow was easy and there was some nice eye candy to boot. With Windows 8, who cares if the system boots fast and runs forever. If it is clunky and or just plain unusable for some then do you care if it runs great?

 

I voted flop.

I think that Microsoft's one size fits all solution to having a uniform OS across all platforms is a really dumb idea. Made worse by restricting end user options instead of opening them up.

Microsoft, in typical Microsoft fashion, completely missed the boat. The idea of having a uniform OS across all platforms makes sense, but that doesn't mean that you have to have the exact same OS for every device. If they simply took the core of the OS, and then let users customize it to fit their device they'd have a winner. Instead they want to force an OS on users that is optimized for the lowest common denominator with a interface that makes up a relatively small segment of the market.

 

I still don't know why people, and Microsoft especially, think it needs to be ONLY the Metro UI. Why not have a check box to use Metro UI or classic start menu? Done.

 

I resonate with all of this. Especially rob's point. Basically, Microsoft is betting that Windows tablets (some x86, some arm) take over the PC market and just want to barrel into that market without looking back. But this doesn't make any sense, there are just too many desktops and laptops out there.

I don't understand why they didn't take Apple's approach, honestly. Apple gives developers a set of mostly-consistent APIs (wherever compatibility makes sense), with some APIs that exist only on desktop systems (including laptops) and some only on touch systems (touch phones/tablets). This gives the developers the tools they need to create mobile and desktop versions of their applications which are separate but are able to rely on a mostly shared code base, especially for the business logic.

The operating systems behave as you would expect. The way they work underneath is similar. The look and feel is very different between iOS and OS X. I'm not saying that Msft needs to make windows more like os x or their tablet OS more like iOS specifically, but the above idea is something they should have followed. Keep the operating systems separate, create separate interfaces, keep the systems underneath shared and consistent where it makes sense.

Giant belly flop.

 

Flop

I have been playing with Windows 8 since the developer preview was released on desktops, laptops and within virtual machines. I find that I am far less efficient when using Windows 8 versus Windows 7 or even Vista. It feels like Microsoft wanted to compete in the tablet market and slapped an interface on Windows 7 while removing useful features such as a standard Start menu. I feel Microsoft should at least offer the user a choice of Metro or a traditional style Start menu for desktop and notebook users. As of now I plan to hold out on Windows 7, it has been a good stable OS for me and I see no need to change to 8 for some flashy Metro tiles...

 

Actually, with the addition of Launchpad in OSX Lion and unified notifications in OSX Mountain Lion, Apple is doing exactly the same thing Microsoft is doing: bring mobile interfaces for program-launching to desktops and laptops. The Launchpad comparison to the Start Screen is particularly apt, since it's a pop-up mobile-style program launcher.



In OSX, you can either launch programs from the dock or you can bring up the iOS-style Launchpad. In Win 8, you can either launch programs pinned to the taskbar or you can bring up the WP7-style Start Screen. Profoundly similar interfaces, really.

Anyway, I voted best ever. For every geek (not meant as a pejorative) who switches to Linux for his desktop/laptop, two new Windows 8 tablets will be sold to average laypeople. So Windows 8 will lose a little ground on the desktop/laptop market but gain a lot of ground on the mobile market, resulting in a net win.

 

How many touch screen laptops and PC's are releasing this year? 1% maybe? I'm so confus-ed.

 

Based on the past two days of convertible tablets, tablet-laptop hybrids, and all-in-ones, a substantial portion of new models are going to have touchscreens.

Also worth noting?

Percentage of new Apple computers that have touchscreens: 0%.
Percentage of new Apple computers that have the iPad-style Launchpad: 100%.

Just sayin'.

 

Actually, this is indeed an excellent example to demonstrate how badly Microsoft is screwing things up. There are a number of crucial differences between Apple and Microsoft here. I'll just point out some of the most obvious ones:

• Apple, in stark contrast to Microsoft, does not force their users to use Launchpad. People are free to go about things the way they're used to.
• Note that Launchpad continues to use visually distinctive and appealing icons, rather than uniformly bland tiles.
• Apple does not touch the overall visuals of their desktop chrome.
• The transition to Launchpad is much smoother than the stark context switch that occurs when you invoke Win8's Start Screen.
• Of course, the utter idiocy of introducing full-screen only "Metro apps" is entirely absent in OS X. Say what you will about Apple (and there's lots to be said, to be sure), but at least these guys understand that a desktop, or a laptop, is not a tablet. What an insight... Don't even get me started on the "wisdom" of introducing a PDF reader in Win8, but then provide it as a Metro app only.

I very much doubt that, but we shall see. Personally, I think that even on a tablet Metro sucks, at least it doesn't measure up to the competition. The switch will not be as much to Linux as it will be to OS X. Looking at college campuses all over the nation, that switch is already in full swing, and Win8 will substantially accelerate it. Those college kids will continue to take their Macs to their jobs, where businesses who have naturally refused to "upgrade" to Win8 will slowly but surely gravitate more to OS X. The writing's on the wall.

Like I argued before, with Windows 8 Microsoft is making disastrous mistakes at the worst possible point in time for them. Whether or not they will be able to recover from those is very much an open question. No, they will not become irrelevant anytime soon, but Apple will make even more serious inroads into their market than they already have.

P.S.: I would also add that the numbers on this poll speak volumes, even though I have no illusions as to how representative those numbers are. Certainly, if you had done a similar poll shortly before the release of Windows 7, the results would have looked very, very different. More generally speaking, those people at Microsoft who try to dismiss the overwhelming criticism that Windows 8 is facing, are doing so at their peril. They're really just whistling past the graveyard...

 

The problem with it ever being a flop is that there are no real alternative to Windows aside from Apple. Linux is still not mainstream and most are turned off by it. Windows is ubiquitous and supported by the industry, and Microsoft was smart to keep the traditional desktop alongside Metro. For those reasons I don't think it will flop, despite some others including myself that would love to see it crash and burn, I just don't think it will happen.
To the OP, your poll options are too limited, I just don't agree with either, sorry, so I'm not voting.

 

• 
  
  OSX gives you four choices: (1) tablet-style Launchpad, (2) pin it to the dock on the bottom of the screen, (3) shortcut on the desktop, (4) navigate to it through the Finder.
  
  Win 8 gives you four choices: (1) tablet-style Start Screen, (2) pin it to the taskbar on the bottom of the screen, (3) shortcut on the desktop, (4) navigate to it through Windows Explorer.
  
  
  These aren't visually distinctive?
  
  
  
  As for "appealing," that's as subjective as you get.
  
  
  With OSX, there's chrome on everything. With the release version of Win 8, there's chrome on nothing. It was only on the beta versions where you had chromed desktop with chrome-free start screen.
  
  
  Nit-picking much? The opening animation of the launcher?
  
  
  Full-screen mobile-style apps are part of OSX Lion.
  
  Apple - Full-Screen Apps - Work and play without distractions.
  
  But you're not forced to do things full-screen in either OSX Lion or Win 8. Once again, no distinction.
  
  
  
  So Windows users will use Adobe Reader or the equivalent on the desktop, just like they always have? Adding an integrated Metro app that does X doesn't prevent people from using desktop programs that also do X.
  
  
  Do you remember when BMW introduced Chris Bangle's styling? Internet forums had similar levels of hate. Now the Bangle Butt dominates the luxury car industry.
  
  If internet forums were any indication of real life, 95% of people would drive rear-wheel-drive manual-transmission cars, use primarily open-source software, and root their mobile devices.

 

That is a self contradicting statement if I have ever heard one. You make it right after trying to make your point(s). This means you assume your points are valid and others are not. Well there are two or more sides to every story and one of them over time may prove itself correct. Then we can all say if we listened to those other posts how wrong we'd have been. Then again there were the post that were correct but it seems you tend to focus on the negative statements.

In all hind sight is 20/20. Where multiple opinions exist differentiating the field only a few, if any at all, will be proven correct. Stop focusing on the fact no one really knows for sure yet, including yourself, and just join the discussion.

As far as full screen only apps I believe most are refering to the Metro apps. This and the metro UI. The desktop, at least for now, functions mostly as it did before.

 

Actually, I did. The results are very interesting in hindsight - if you'd like to see them for yourself, go to:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...ictions-will-windows-7-beat-windows-95-a.html

I'm also planning to do a similar poll when Windows 9 (or whatever MS decides to call the next version of Windows) comes along 3 years from now

 

At first I was skeptical of the radical change that Metro appears to be, because for most laptop/desktop users it would be a totally pointless change designed for input that a keyboard/mouse lack.
However, I tried it on my laptop convertible and was unexpectedly blown away. With pen/touch input, Windows 8 is incredible. I have all these menus I can pull down from all sides of the screen with flicks of my fingers like I'm in Minority Report. It works better than some of the things (touch keyboard in particular) that Fujitsu programmed/created for their own laptop (though whether that says something about W8 or Fujitsu, I'll leave to you).

And to top it all off, the desktop is still there. Give it the option to boot straight to that instead of having to go through Metro first, and everyone's happy. Desktop users may just go 'meh' and see a marginally improved OS, but tablet owners are going to love it. And if Microsoft pushes for development of multitouch/pen input in the same way Intel pushes for development of Ultrabooks, then pleasing what is today a niche market may turn out to be a worthwhile long-term strategy that may rival Apple's basic consumer-oriented iPad.

 

Definitely not. If this year's Computex is any indicator, there's going to be a wide gamut of tablets and hybrid/convertible designs from every manufacturer, across both their consumer and business lines (yes, there's even a hybrid Thinkpad in the works, in addition to the Lenovo Yoga) and extending from a bit above bargain-basement pricing to high-end.

 

So you're saying if I visit hp.com or dell.com or acer.com or sony.com or asus.com or youreverydaylaptopstore.com I will be able to order pretty much any laptop I want with a touchscreen? Hardly. There will be touchscreen notebooks out there, but very very small minority. Tablets and touch screens are for consumption, not creation. They have their place no doubt, but hardly the machine for any amount of productivity.

This makes zero commercial sense. 99.9% of the time the minority is left out. This time they cater to the 1% crowd. And don't even leave the option for the traditional start menu.

They will keep desktop, but the start menu is the annoying metro ui tiles. Again, I still don't understand why Microsoft doesn't make it an either/or option. One tick box to check to enable windows 7 start menu and done. But they won't do that. They aren't doing that.

 

Very interesting. Nevertheless, this poll is radically different from the one in this thread: It was asking whether Win7 would be as wildly successful as Win95, which people were mostly raving about at the time. All it shows is that, right before Win7's release, there really was little doubt that it would be a runaway success. That's a little bit different from the situation we have with Win8, I daresay...

That would help, but it turns out that Microsoft will be taking away that option.

 

OS X now offers an additional choice, Win8 replaces one that existed before with a different one, that is less productive in some important scenarios.

No, they're quite clearly, and in a formal ergonomic sense, not visually distinctive. Not at all. What distinguishes one green square from an identical green square? That uniformly colored text in there, and, perhaps, if you're lucky, one of those bland tiny little icons?

Exactly. Somehow Apple didn't get the memo that chrome is so yesterday.

I do. Even Bagle admitted that it looked like crap. Well, not exactly in these words, but he said his cars don't look good on pictures...

 

Metro is the future, even if Microsoft doesn't get it right this time they will succeed eventually. Laptops are only getting thinner and faster while tablets and phones are getting more powerful so the pc industry needed a game changer and this is it
Win 9 will probably have a better metro pc experience but they have to start somewhere. Its a good time to be a pc user at the moment. Competition and innovation always brings prices down and especially here in the UK where the prices they charge here are ridiculous.

 

Personally, I think it'll take people some getting used to especially if the Metro app store isn't gaining traction for a great selection at launch.

I, however, enjoy metro. Having messenger or calendar run alongside my classic desktop without covering up any of my open windows or requiring me to use a tool like DeskPins to keep stuff on top of each other is amazing and incredibly addictive.

Because if they did, everyone would rush to the metro/start screen toggle and switch it to "classic" mode.

Sometimes to move forward, you gotta drag people kicking and screaming.

Right. Everyone's committed to at least several designs. Granted not every machine will have touch but with features like "indirect gestures" the playing field is now far more equal than many first thought.

What seems to be buried constantly is that all laptops (and i guess desktops which can be had with third party trackpads) that ship with windows 8 will have multitouch trackpads capable of "indirect gestures".

That means that interacting with elements such as the "app bar", charms, and features like semantic zoom, will be nearly as natural as they would be on a touch device.

This one development levels the playing field dramatically IMO, and many existing systems will likely gain this functionality in touchpad driver updates.

 

No, absolutely not. If you have to drag people kicking and screaming, you need to look at whether or not you're actually moving forward or just changing something for the sake of changing something. If it were really a step forward, then people should be able to see the merits of it and choose to use it. The backlash so far should make it plain that it's a poor decision.

 

Ah, now look here! And why do you think would that be? Because this interface is so great?

Besides, I do not agree with you here. Personally I think Microsoft could have avoided a huge amount of bad feelings and outright resentment simply by giving people a choice. If indeed it turns out their interface has productivity advantages then surely, over time, people would migrate to it. If they won't, well, that only means the UI sucks. Simple, in'nit?

Thing is, you can't. Nobody is forced to put up with this crap. The customer decides.

Who cares? Why should anybody care? In my experience, a very significant percentage of laptop users either never use their trackpads at all, or never use anything beyond the basic functionality.

Trouble is, nobody was asking for these "features" in the first place. Lots of people have no interest in them now they're there.

 

But you have the same four choices on how to launch programs in Win 8 and OSX Lion. So saying people are going to switch to OSX Lion over Win 8 because they don't like how you launch programs in Win 8 is nonsensical.

What distinguishes a deer crossing sign from a crosswalk sign from a slippery road sign? The 2D image painted ON the sign. Knuth: Diamond Signs There IS a symbol; it's just painted in 2D on the sign. It's easy to interpret at a glance...or else every Department of Transportation is barking up the wrong tree with road sign design.

In both OSX and Win 8, the calendar app is a little picture of a calendar. Are you telling me that you can't see the calendar if it's a 2D icon on an opaque background instead of a 3D icon on a transparent background?

If that's your beef, it's purely aesthetic and stylistic.

And the market as a whole is going away from chrome. The most ironic and clear example would be the icon for Google Chrome, which has switched from a 3D, chromed icon to a 2D, flat-colored icon. The current layout for gmail is also chrome-free.

If you prefer the Star Trek style of OSX Lion to the subway station style of Win 8...well you're free to vote with your wallet. But that's a totally subjective issue, not something where there's a "right" look and a "wrong" look.

That's twisting his words. If he didn't like flame surfacing, he wouldn't have styled cars that way.

You're not forced to do it in full screen because there's no task where the metro app is the only way to accomplish that task. The PDF reader is a great example. You wanted a built-in PDF reader for Windows? Well, it's never existed before, so you're not losing anything you already had. They've got a super-simple one in the Metro format, probably aimed at people who don't know how to find a third-party PDF reader of their choosing. But Microsoft knew that most power users (the ones who insist in not doing stuff in Start Screen apps) probably are going to hunt down third-party products of their choosing anyway, not use built-in programs, so they didn't expend the money to also develop a desktop-style PDF reader program, etc.

 

I tried to play around with things just to see.

Start8 still works with the RP. You can have a start button (the button itself was never really the problem for me) and it changes the metro start screen into a metro start menu. Honestly, it sucks even worse. It made it harder to use in the little I played around with it.

I tried to set it up to boot directly to the desktop with the task scheduler. It was buggy, but it worked. I got error messages on shutdown, and it was kind of slow and clunky on start up. Also, doing it the way I did it you ended up with Explorer open when you did boot.

I removed most (trying to remove IE10 made Win8 hang) of the metro apps.

All in all, my opinion hasn't changed. If I was forced to use it, I could, but I have no desire to run out and buy a copy to replace Win7.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with Win9...yes, I'm getting a bit ahead of things.

And I wonder, IF Win8 is a total flop, and IF Microsoft continues down this road with Win9 will it open up the OS market to another player?

 

I don't think MS would vanish that simply. After all, the infrastructure they've got is pretty huge.

 

Not if you think about it just a little: Having the familiar Start Menu in Windows represents a barrier to change. If people are forced to change anyway, why not go whole hog and switch to the more glamorous OS X right away?

Try to understand what I was saying: The icons that were possible in Win7 are more distinctive than Win8's tiles. From far away, or even without my glasses on, I can immediately recognize and distinguish large numbers of relatively small icons, because they have wildly varying shapes and color combinations. With tiles of the same color and shape, with bland little pictographs that are also uniform in color, this only works, imperfectly, if you have very large tiles.

Note, by the way, that this is not a shortcoming of the idea of tiles by itself, but of the self-imposed restrictions on the iconography used on those tiles that Microsoft seems to suggest. I'll grant you that this is subject to improvement, and your screenshot indeed does show tiles that use a less restrictive interpretation, such as your CookBook and SketchBook tiles, which do not follow the philosophy of the Metro style. In other words, what is really at issue is the idea of the Metro styling, not the tiles themselves (as a style element, mind you).

In your screenshot, the Calendar tile is a mostly empty green rectangle, with some tiny text saying "Calendar", and the day and date in large text. Sure, if I think about it, I can figure out that this may be the Calendar app even if I don't have my glasses on. But once you have a minimal understanding of the physiology of object recognition, it is entirely clear that, say, the OS X calendar icon is much, much easier, and therefore quicker and more effortlessly recognizable.

Quite obviously so. The thing is, a very large and quickly growing number of people seem to really like OS X' styling. It really doesn't matter one wit what you or I think, but it matters a lot what many people think.

 

Just gonna chime in here since i gave my vote to the pool.

Im scared to think how Metro will affect Windows Server 8 now that they removed the classic UI.
Sometimes i like to remote desktop into my server to check how my server tasks are going along and im not at the level yet where i can do everything with text commands.

Sad to say im sticking it with Windows 7.
Usually i have been pretty quick to adopt the new OS releases from Microsoft, and i even upgraded to Vista a couple of days after release.

 

If you think Star Trek = glamour, you should just switch over now, because you'll never be happy with the aesthetic of subway stations regardless of what Win 8's interface is.

It's not that I don't understand you, it's that I disagree with you. There's a difference.

Actually, there's a strong argument that simple bold shapes are easier to read at a glance than minute, exquisitely detailed pictures. That's why cross-walk signs have stick figures crossing the street instead of photorealistic people crossing the street. Road signs, unlike icons on a computer, can be life-or-death issues if they're not understood at a glance, so there's been a lot of research as to how to make them instantly recognizable. They're designed the way they for a reason. If you want to talk about the "physiology of object recognition," let's talk about Department of Transportation road signs.

Actually, as a WP7 user, I have a lot more first-hand experience of what Metro actually means in practice. On my phone, some tiles have simple 2D pictographs (alarm clock, IE, messaging). Others have other stuff (people hub has pictures of people cascading; Xbox Live has my Xbox avatar poking its head around the corners of the tile; Zune has a portrait of the last band I've listened to). The Xbox and Zune tiles are not examples of third parties ignoring the metro aesthetic; they're Microsoft products. The Metro aesthetic isn't as simple as you're painting it to be. The combination of the two approaches to tiles, mixed together, makes it easy to pick out both at a glance.

The calendar tile is blank because they don't have anything on the calendar. As soon as they populate their calendar with appointments, the calendar tile will display their next appointment and its date and time without even having to open the app. It's incredibly useful. I love the double-wide calendar tile on my phone.

By "a very large and quickly growing number" of PC users, you mean 10-15%. I don't have any beef with OSX--I own two OSX laptops myself--but to argue that everyone is going to jump ship to high-priced luxury laptops, just because you think most people prefer a Star Trek look to a subway station look? Not going to happen.

 

I'm not saying that MS would vanish, just that they could (possible) slip enough in the market that the door would open up for another OS. Which wouldn't be a bad thing at all.

 

Specifically, after repeating the point a number of times my beef is not with aesthetics.

Apples and oranges. How many different road signs are there? How many different programs are people using? I'll refrain from pursuing this further, for a number of reasons. Prime among these is that this is really a sideshow, and ranks far down on the list of grievances with Win8's UI.

On a phone, mildly so. On a desktop machine, with a user that never sees it since s/he is [gasp!] working on the desktop, it's utterly useless. It is also of limited use for the more busy among us, who may have more than one appointment they need to keep track of.

 

Ok, guys i've had to do some mild cleanup, stick to the facts. Any more derailing from anyone, will result in this thread being locked. I didn't lock it since not much happened, but you have now been warned twice anything no matter how remotely insignificant and it's lockdown.

 

Well if Microsoft is going to force Metro on everyone instead of making it a choice for those with the input hardware to best use it, this is going to be a disaster.

I love using Windows 8 on my laptop convertible, but thinking about a network admin or server/Dbase user having to use Metro just seems absurd. I don't even know how that would work. Some users need straightforward utility over fancy cosmetic interfaces... and Metro is very cosmetic.

Maybe there'll be a Windows Server version that will be what Windows 8 should be for everyone besides tablet users: functionality over form.

 

And I get that when you're arguing Win 7 versus Win 8. But when we start talking about OSX Lion versus Win 8, it's harder to follow because the differences between OSX Lion and Win 8 are primarily aesthetic. With the recent changes to both OSes, the two OSes are now extremely similar function-wise, more similar function-wise than they've ever been before.

Tons. Here's a non-exclusive list. US Road Signs

The fact is, for anything you could have a 3D photorealistic icon of, you can have a 2D roadsign-style tile of. Cow? Hang glider? Helicopter? Tractor? Any of these things can either be represented photorealistically with glinting chrome in one corner, or they can be represented with flat 2D pictographs.

It's visible for casual users who are using the Start Screen for the primary interface. For power users, they'd be using a more detailed calendaring program instead of the entry-level Win 8 app anyway, so they'd access it as part of their desktop workflow just like they did in Win 7 (probably pinned to the taskbar).

 

off topic: devil's advocate:

- sphere

or, if you think that a projection of a sphere on 2d is reasonable with shading:

- hypersphere (n-sphere)

 

The World Bank logo

 

my opinion:

for tablets, convertible, and touchscreen laptops, users will love windows 8.

on regular laptops and desktops, people wont care. Its functionality will be an incremental increase over win7, and after using it for a while the metro interface will not annoy people as much as they think it will.
* Most of the complaints seem to come from power users who think the 'touch-designed interface' will slow them down on non-touch systems. I consider myself a power user and like most my only interaction with the start menu is hitting the start key, typing a few letters, and hitting enter to open the program of my choice. That functionality will be exactly the same on win8. Very few power users actually use their mouse for navigation within the windows OS.

to those who hate metro, i ask (as many others have as well), how much time do you actually spend in the start menu? That's how much time you'll be spending in metro.

 

Indrek, you are right. I can't stand the metro music and the video apps. I had to change the default media program to WMP.

 

The removal of the Start menu and the force default to the Metro UI is the big reason why Windows 8 will be a big flop. My mother and my grandmother put there computers on and wants to see a desktop. My mother will check her email and then launch Google Chrome pinned on the taskbar. My grandmother just goes right into her card games which she knows are pinned on the taskbar. Switching to Windows 8 trying to default and force Metro would only confuse and annoy them which is the reason why I won't upgrade any of our three machines to Windows 8. We will be sticking with Windows 7 for a long time.

 

Personally, I don't particularly care for W8. W7 is doing well for my needs, and even Vista was a decent OS (my family bought a Vista desktop *after* the driver issues were resolved). Still had my XP desktop up and running just fine until I ran it over with an Ubuntu install.

I dislike the Metro interface for use on a desktop or laptop, but I can see its value in the tablet environment. IIRC, there is a way to disable it, so it could be a decent desktop OS with the Start button and the sha-bang. I agree with tonyr6 with it being a flop though (and I voted accordingly) because the average user will have a hard time adjusting to the new interface (and not know how to switch to the "classic" desktop). Same way as how Joe and Jane freaked out with the XP --> Vista transition, and that was just a minor design change...

 

No, there is no way anymore to disable "it".

 

In that case, I'm sticking to W7 then