Windows 8
When I first installed the windows 8 enterprise evaluation, I became so very frustrated that if i had the 10K in the bank to replace all my windows based PC’s and phones around the house with apples products I would have that night. (I originally started out on MAC’s so it’s always a little bit of a temptation to separate work and home with a platform change). If I had not just finished building this nice new PC I might have even taken some joy in making use of some of the demolition tools I have laying around, alas I’m not rich, and the computer is new. The next day I sat down, and eventually was able to manipulate the start page, desktop icons, and task bars to the point where I feel I’m about 70% as productive as I am when I boot up into windows 7. (I expect this to go up as I get more familiar with the system)
The two biggest problems I see with metro are:
1. Metro runs more like a VM. And metro does not support multi monitors.
2. The Metro start screen consumes an entire monitor.
Metro runs like a VM:
Metro apps run inside metro, you can’t have two metro apps up on separate screens. You can drag a metro app where ever you want on your monitors, but as soon as you hit that start page it minimizes the metro app that was open, no having two metro apps open on separate screens. (You can snap them together on one screen though, but this isn’t useful to me) This may be great for a small low power single screen device where it would not be practical to multitask anyway, but on a desktop it’s a productivity killer. With multiple monitors is down right irritating. I don’t see myself using metro apps much.
The Start Screen consumes an entire monitor:
Opening the start screen is just jarring, it’s like that new kid you hired who gets your attention by flipping your light switch on and off then shoves whatever it is that he wants you to see so close to your face that you have to step back just to see what it is. From a focus perspective, it’s just disruptive to workflow and it’s disruptive to any thought process, creative or otherwise. Metro is just not conducive to productivity nor the creative process.
How Microsoft could fix it:
If metro could just slide up, say 1/4 or 1/3 up from the bottom or down from the top of the screen, I’d be ok with it as a menu system. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like metro’s trying to be a menuing system. It acts more like a virtual machine.
Metro apps should not be restricted to running inside the metro window. They should also stay up and active when the menu is opened. If this means spawning multiple instances of metro then so be it.
How about just allowing me to turn off metro completely, windows 8 is fantastic without metro. I don’t care about the apps store and I don’t need Microsoft to give me a shortcut organizer, I can organize my own or get a nice little utility to do that for me. Portable apps make one that looks remarkably like the start menu but hangs out in the system tray. There is also nu2menu (though I don’t know how well it works with multi monitors or window 8). There are countless others.
How I deal with it:
First off it’s not that hard to just make shortcuts and organize them into folders. I do this on my desktop, along with adding the icons for control panel, documents, and computer, then I add the “desktop” toolbar to my task bar and presto! I have a menu system that’s very similar to the start menu that I can move around to any place on any of the taskbars on my screens, it just says “desktop” on it instead of start. I also pin a lot of items to my multiple task bars (I love this feature and love the multiple task bars just as much).
Secondly when using multiple monitors psychologically you generally have a primary monitor. In windows 8 I’m more aware of the intrusiveness of start page so I make sure to keep what I want to always see on my primary monitor and only bring up the start page on another screen. Planar makes some (comparatively) inexpensive touch screens that might be interesting to use just for metro, so that I can have full use my primary screens.
Server 2012:
I have the preview of server 2012 installed in my Windows 8 Hyper-V environment. I don’t mind, nor really care that it has metro style menu. It’s a server and I don’t use the menu system on my servers all that often. I pin what I need to the task bar or throw a shortcut on the desktop. (Usually control panel, admin tools and the command prompt). That or I script what I need to do and run that. 2012 reminds me a lot of exchange, it’s all Active Directory and PowerShell under the hood, the GUI is just a front end for power shell commands and the GUI lets you see the PowerShell commands before you run them. That’s pretty cool, and reminds me a lot of the Linux systems I use to administer only should work a lot better than the GNOME or KDE interfaces GUI’s. (I always just gave up on them and edited the files myself). Far from pushing people to Linux, server 2012 seems to be becoming more like Linux. Sure 2012 will require a lot of training, but so did 2000 / 2003, and it was a significant improvement over NT4. If you really can’t handle metro being on the system then install server core and throw a menuing program on it. (One would hope server core does not have metro)
Other thoughts:
Windows 8 is largely irrelevant to the business world. Windows 7 is a great product, many have already migrated to windows 7 as part of lease renewals, and downgrade options will keep windows 7 in play for the next round too. In regards to owned systems a fair number of owned XP machines are only moving to windows 7 for end of life / security reasons. The business world knows and is beginning to trust windows 7. By the time windows 7 is close enough to end of life that we start looking to migrate, windows 9 will already be a few years old. Even if windows 8 was a dream for businesses, it would probably still be looked over given product cycles. In the business world computers have been fast enough for a long time and the primary reason to upgrade is the support costs of aging systems.
Windows 2012 will be adopted if its features are useful enough to warrant the training cost, if not then downgrade licenses will be used for 2008r2 and Microsoft will still get its money as the downgrades will still follow the new 2012 licensing agreements. Personally I see 2012 coming into wide service in 2014 or 2015 (after the first or 2nd service pack).
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