Windows 8 is the new Windows XP


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But on the contrary, I can't make the tiles bigger so they are easier to see and better to use with that 10 foot experience.

Sure you can. Go to the Metro CP -> Ease of Access -.> Make everything on your screen bigger.

Boom. Done.

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Windows 7 will be the next XP. 600 million licenses sold.

Windows 8 is going after the tablet market. And it needs to dethrone the iPad and Android tablets. Do you realize how hard will it going to be to do so? Nowadays people have two devices: tablet and PC (usually running Windows 7). AFAIK, very little people upgrade unless they need so. Furthermore, bad press is always a bad thing. Windows 8 is nearly its release and it's being bashed by the majority of the people at tech sites VS Windows 7 which was praised starting its mid-beta, RC stages.

Windows 7 brought a huge performance boost in comparison with Windows Vista. 8 brings performance increase, but not the magnitude on felt going from Vista to 7. That will hold off many people.

Where I could be wrong

There's a fact I'm not taking into consideration, and is MS hard ad campaign: It's everywhere! People will know how to adapt to Windows 8 in a blink of an eye. But that does not assure them that they will upgrade.

In conclusion

Let's wait and see that's my answer.

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Windows 7 will be the next XP. 600 million licenses sold.

Windows 8 is going after the tablet market. And it needs to dethrone the iPad and Android tablets. Do you realize how hard will it going to be to do so? Nowadays people have two devices: tablet and PC (usually running Windows 7). AFAIK, very little people upgrade unless they need so. Furthermore, bad press is always a bad thing. Windows 8 is nearly its release and it's being bashed by the majority of the people at tech sites VS Windows 7 which was praised starting its mid-beta, RC stages.

Windows 7 brought a huge performance boost in comparison with Windows Vista. 8 brings performance increase, but not the magnitude on felt going from Vista to 7. That will hold off many people.

Where I could be wrong

There's a fact I'm not taking into consideration, and is MS hard ad campaign: It's everywhere! People will know how to adapt to Windows 8 in a blink of an eye. But that does not assure them that they will upgrade.

In conclusion

Let's wait and see that's my answer.

Where are the articles bashing 8? All I see are articles that are saying it's a change. There isn't anything to bash about 8, unless you're one against the Start Screen.

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Sure you can. Go to the Metro CP -> Ease of Access -.> Make everything on your screen bigger.

Boom. Done.

.... The magnifier? :laugh: No, that isn't even close to what I'm looking for.

Edit: Hmm... maybe there's another place? I forgot that there is two control panels now, part of the wonderful disorganization and confusion of Windows 8. Funny enough, I don't think Windows 2012 has this Metro control panel. Or maybe it's so obscurely located that I once again can't find it? I don't see a devices menu like in normal 8 either. Perhaps the 2012 start screen has features stripped, that'd be even further more confusing if it's missing control panels and things that are in Windows 8. This is a prime example of why Windows 8/2012 isn't ready for prime time.

Edit 2: Yep, it appears that 2012 doesn't have this Metro control panel, yet it does have a start screen. How you have the start screen with the ability to run metro apps without the settings for it is crazy to me, but I highly doubt anyone will ever use a Metro app on 2012, so I suppose it's omission isn't that bad. I see the make everything bigger in a screenshot elsewhere, but I'd have to try it to see if it works at all like it should. And my only option is yes or no? No slider to change how big I want things? It's not one size fits all, it's not two sizes fit all. Especially on a UI that you'd think would be designed to work across a massive array of different screen sizes, resolutions, and DPIs, Windows STILL can't handle DPI scaling properly.

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[. . .] Let's be honest here, Windows 7 requires far less training than Windows 8. It still requires some training, we had to do it for a few employees, but Windows 8 will cause a nightmare in a business environment.

No one should need to be trained on how to use Windows 8. It really shouldn't be this hard for people. It's very simple and intuitive. The problem clearly lies with how the average user takes to new interfaces and computing in general. This is a huge problem that many people in society need to sort out. It could harm innovation.

You can't keep every little feature forever. Code bloat, security issues, and other nasties occur as a result.

And as you, I, and everyone else who understands the situation have seen, Brandon Paddock has explained why the Windows 7 Start Menu couldn't be kept in Windows 8.

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yeah. I'm saying that windows 8 likely won't be adopted because of exactly how different it is. It's not that the start menu has bee slightly redesigned. It was removed and replaced with a touch screen environment which is mostly foreign to a desktop PC.

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No one should need to be trained on how to use Windows 8. It really shouldn't be this hard for people. It's very simple and intuitive. The problem clearly lies with how the average user takes to new interfaces and computing in general. This is a huge problem that many people in society need to sort out. It could harm innovation.

Your view on the general public is flawed. And people shouldn't be expected to have to stumble around to figure something new out. There isn't so much as a quick walkthrough of where things have been relocated to in Windows 8. Hell, what happened to that tour that was always on XP. Unless that's something that will be in retail builds and wasn't in builds I've used, I never saw anything like this. People shouldn't have to poke around until they find something. If you can't smoothly transition in a way people can understand, even if a little instruction is required, you failed. I'm incredibly computer literate and I can't tell you the number of times I've just sat there for 5 minutes trying to find where a feature was moved in Windows 8. Sometimes they were moved somewhere where I should have expected it, but the fact that I had to sit and look for it is totally unacceptable to me. I can deal with change and enjoy it, when it's for the better. Nothing about the Windows 8 UI feels like it's "for the better" over Windows 7. It feels like it COULD BE for the better, but it feels like it's such a half assed version of it that it's absolutely not. The mere fact that the start screen fills the entire screen and breaks concentration from applications you may have been using is all as completely backwards as you could get in proper UI design.

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There won't be another XP, because Microsoft will not repeat the Longhorn debacle and wait 5 years only to put out a sub-par release.

If anything, Windows 8 is the next Vista: a radically new but immature OS, coming after a highly polished and stable one (Windows 7). By the time Windows 9 comes out, it will still lag far behind Windows 7, and will quickly be forgotten. Windows 9 should be to 8 what 7 was to Vista: basically the same thing, but with a more refined user interface; it won't break much new ground as and such people will love it.

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There won't be another XP, because Microsoft will not repeat the Longhorn debacle and wait 5 years only to put out a sub-par release.

If anything, Windows 8 is the next Vista: a radically new but immature OS, coming after a highly polished and stable one (Windows 7). By the time Windows 9 comes out, it will still lag far behind Windows 7, and will quickly be forgotten. Windows 9 should be to 8 what 7 was to Vista: basically the same thing, but with a more refined user interface; it won't break much new ground as and such people will love it.

Vista was far less inconsistent compared to Windows 8.

With 8 Microsoft should've either completely metrofied everything (yes, every little thing in there including the full control panel, device manager, ...) or have given the users the complete choice in what environment they want to use. The Frankeninterface they have right now where you have to go through the most illogical hoops to get somewhere and hope you don't get kicked back to a legacy desktop with virtually no touch support is just horrible. The Metro part is fine for tablets and devices focused on touch, but they should've segregated it completely. There are innovative things to do on the desktop that don't require touch.

It'll be really interesting to see the real public opinion on 8 when the first computers come preloaded with it. I really, really wonder what will happen. I'm pretty sure my mother wouldn't even know to shut down the computer - it even took me 5 minutes to figure it out.

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^ by the time I wanted to shut down, I already knew it was in the settings area of the charm menu, and that's because when i started up the CP for the first time, I went poking around in all the new areas to see where everything was

but that could just be me. it's one of the reasons I'm so good at learning new things

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I'm pretty sure my mother wouldn't even know to shut down the computer - it even took me 5 minutes to figure it out.
It's amazing how Windows 8 is training me to rely on keyboard shortcuts more than before, simply because the user interface is so unproductive. I now only shutdown using Alt-F4 on the desktop.
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It's amazing how Windows 8 is training me to rely on keyboard shortcuts more than before, simply because the user interface is so unproductive. I now only shutdown using Alt-F4 on the desktop.

CTRL-ALT-DELETE here... :p

Although, to be fair, I disabled the Charms bar on the Desktop, so I guess I'm not even giving the UI a chance... :blush:

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CTRL-ALT-DELETE here... :p

Although, to be fair, I disabled the Charms bar on the Desktop, so I guess I'm not even giving the UI a chance... :blush:

Win Key+R -> shutdown -t 0 -s here. I'm so used to typing that at work to bypass the shutdown trackers on the servers that it's far faster than clicking around.

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I wont go nuts in this thread as I'm sure it will descend into chaos...

There is may be one major difference between XP and Windows 8. Windows 8 most likely won't be on the market as long as 2 or 3 Windows releases. Businesses warmed up to XP because it was on the market so long and SP2 heaved a lot of fixes onto the OS (still the only MS OS to get feature enhancements via SP).

It may be worth remembering XP in context before you consider them the same.

The reality for Windows 8 is no one knows where this will end up. The only thing I can say is that if it doesn't go well I'm beginning to believe that it will be the death kneel for Windows (meaning this would mark the point where it started to fade into obscurity if Windows 8 were to fail). The future is the same as the past always was. It is the ecosystem of third party apps that secure the dominance of an OS. If Windows 8 fails MS will be too far behind against the iOS and Android ecosystems to recover as we're looking at around 2 years between Windows 8 and Windows 9.

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I see no reason for Windows 8 to fail on tablets. It is a great experience for touch. It will probably be shunned by desktop users however. I think Microsoft is aware that they're frustrating desktop users to a certain point, but they need to conquer a new market and Windows 8 was the best they could come up with as a "unified" experience, for now. So I think Windows 8 will be a transition OS a bit like Vista, and Windows 9 is the next "mature" release.

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Just for fun, somebody should go into a Microsoft store after Win 8 launches and ask for reasons why to buy 8 over 7. I'm curious to see what they see as the major selling points.

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Just for fun, somebody should go into a Microsoft store after Win 8 launches and ask for reasons why to buy 8 over 7. I'm curious to see what they see as the major selling points.

I can tell you that after beta testing this entire past year, there are many. Even on desktops.

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Can we stop with all the analogies?

Windows 8 will be Windows 8. Whether it's a success or not doesn't change that. Microsoft has had a lot of success, and a lot of failure. But Windows ME and Windows Vista aren't analogous, in the same way that Windows 95/98 and XP aren't.

There's *absolutely no way* to know what's going to happen here. Either customers will like it, or they won't. Predictions of what people are going to and aren't going to buy are really just a waste of time. It's been discussed to death.

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