"Windows 8 is trying to be all things to all people, and thus failing to be good at anything in particular"
Wow, what a wide sweeping generalization that only the hater crowd could love. It's easy to say something because it goes with the crowd. Really quite an exaggeration if you truly stop, and think about it. There are some thin spots, but Windows is good at LOTS of things. Just games in itself is something it excels at. What other OS can boast having direct X, a huge library of code that handles the most complex graphics, along with the largest support from gfx card manufactures? OSX, nor linux couldn't even hope to come close. What about the vast amount of peripherials it supports? Others comes up short again. What OS has as many hardware and software options, providing so many choices on affordable, recent hardware? NONE. If you want an OS that doesn't do that, just pick something else, but it is a strong suite for windows.
When I saw Windows XP, I sort of went along with everyone saying it wasn't needed due to win 98 being fine. There was the 98 hater crowd, of course, but many people were afraid of the change. Little by little, it became glaringly apparent that XP was needed even if when you stared at the desktop, it wasn't far different. So MS got to hear how un-needed it was because it was about the same looking. Then with Vista, they reached too far ahead in the hardware world and it seemed to gobble up resources and had other little problems. Yet, it was still OK if you had an ounce of patience, and two years later hardware caught up just fine.
Then windows 7, seemed to take off nicely, but there were still a good share of people saying there was no use for windows 7 and they'd stay on XP. Remember? Please think back, because it's all true. You see, on the month of release, any OS appears to be the SAME because people are ignorant about what new features it has. Windows 7 seemed nice, but not really any better to me than XP for about 2 or 3 years for me. So I stuck with XP on one machine, but put 7 on another. By the end of about 2 years, I couldn't see how I'd ever want to go back to XP and give up what 7 had to offer.
Now Windows 8 kind of scares me like windows 7 did. But we just got this new lap top, core i7, touch screen and windows 8. I waited for the dreaded, I-can't-find-my-desktop problem. And all I had to do was push the windows button, or slide my finger from the left to get to it. Once I saw a desktop, my anxiety went away. But now I keep going back to that page with all the squares and tapping on them, running games and other apps. Some times, it's just easier than the mouse. Like a touch calculator is easier to me with touch screen than positioning a mouse pointer if the keys are big enough, which they are.
If I were on a more mobile device, or phone, that I'd want to stay with the icons/squares because a desktop would just be too tiny. Pushing icons is just easier and that's part of what the addition of 8 is about. I'm not a famed legend like Carmack, but have been a programmer since 79 and know quite a lot about GUI's and graphics on several platforms, including game development. I worked with Interplay and Parallax on Descent back in the day on music and programming. Me and a friend also knew Carmack.. I'm not trying to impress, but trying to impress upon, that I'm simply not an icon pushing, smart phone using newbie. I really love making my windows 7 machine do all sorts of things. As long as windows 8 allows this, I think it's cool. I also run a recording studio and am thinking about getting a huge touch screen monitor to move the faders up and down via touch screen during mix. I already know Sonar (the recording environment) supports touch and new windows 8 gestures. I'd put this on a separate monitor and tilt it down on the table so it could be a virtual mixing console.
I'll be honest and say, I've haven't gotten way into windows 8 yet... But I'm kind of intrigued by what pluses it may have and think Carmack and others are just apprehensive. And that's a bit understandable because every-time there is a new OS, it's a bit of work to get used to, to set up, and sometimes needs a new computer to take full advantage of it. It takes time and there is a learning curve. My point being I wasn't eager to jump into windows 7 and learn new things on day one, but now really like it and it seems like a no brainer. Maybe windows 8 will be a similar story in a couple of years. As long as there are shortcuts, and work-arounds to allow it to do what windows 7 does, I think it's worth waiting to see what new things it could possible offer. And of course a software developer will think it's a headache because they must recode some things. We always went through that back in the day, but it's often worth it. And yes, sure, MS could have offered everything Seven has to XP, but notice that they didn't. Little by little XP had less and less of seven's features. Again, I wouldn't go back to XP today for my main computer. Just saying..
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