Windows 8

Side note..

In a company we own we probably spent close to $2M-$3M installing and configuring and using a ERP application that we discovered when we went to sell certain assets that we could not transfer this license or sell it. Essentially in the agreement was language that we had "purchased" a right to use the software. We never actually owned it. Am I shocked??.. no.. since this was exactly what I told everyone on several calls when we were going through the M&A process. If the entire company was getting acquired in a majority fashion.. the acquiring company would essentially "acquire" the existing agreement.. but in any fashion that the Vendor felt wasn't qualified then we were stuck with it.

As well.. its been like this for like.. ever. (at least as long as I've been in this business).

Yep, software licensing sucks and is a horribly exploitative system in many cases. Massively. Ask me some time about what was involved in changing the company name on all our SolidWorks licenses after the merger and subsequent rebranding we just went through.

Wait a minute, you don't think Microsoft paid Asus for the Surface branded tablets? I'd say Microsoft is attempting to go the Apple route because it seems that that is the way the market is trending, good or bad.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

Yep, software licensing sucks and is a horribly exploitative system in many cases. Massively. Ask me some time about what was involved in changing the company name on all our SolidWorks licenses after the merger and subsequent rebranding we just went through.

In light of this.. I have for the most part found Microsoft to be extremely "generous" and accommodating when it comes to transfer of licenses. We just stepped through a consolidation of various Dynamics ERP licenses in some portfolio companies and we got everything done.. preserved all the user counts and paid a very minor fee that essentially worked out in our benefit once you tabulated the old Software Assurance yearly fees. Not to mention rolling up all our existing VLK's for Windows and Office.

Tried the same with Oracle in the past and wow.. its like a brick wall.

Looking for the silver lining, I'd say the upside of today's curated walled-garden type app stores on the consumer side is that I really don't pay for software anymore. Sure I spent some money on several iOS apps and I'm also not including video games in this scenario. The future is in software-as-service and apps be they local or cloud are only going to be the ui to the services we decide to pay for.

PaladinTom wrote:

Looking for the silver lining, I'd say the upside of today's curated walled-garden type app stores on the consumer side is that I really don't pay for software anymore. Sure I spent some money on several iOS apps and I'm also not including video games in this scenario. The future is in software-as-service and apps be they local or cloud are only going to be the ui to the services we decide to pay for.

The thing is, you don't need a curated walled garden for that, heck, I've read articles pointing out the lack of curation in the windows store, with the example of media players.

Scratched wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:

Looking for the silver lining, I'd say the upside of today's curated walled-garden type app stores on the consumer side is that I really don't pay for software anymore. Sure I spent some money on several iOS apps and I'm also not including video games in this scenario. The future is in software-as-service and apps be they local or cloud are only going to be the ui to the services we decide to pay for.

The thing is, you don't need a curated walled garden for that, heck, I've read articles pointing out the lack of curation in the windows store, with the example of media players.

Agreed... which is why I think they'll eventually go away. Hopefully the ecosystems open up once web apps work seamlessly on mobile devices.

i guess we can close the thread then,
Thank you! G'Night!

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

(though I can take or leave the Start Menu, no one uses it anyway)

What? I use it.

RolandofGilead wrote:
Parallax Abstraction wrote:

(though I can take or leave the Start Menu, no one uses it anyway)

What? I use it.

So do I. I guess that makes us nobodies

I stopped using it with Win7. All I really need is something that pops up (on the desktop side - I don't want it to flip over to Metro just to search for the program I want) and lets me start typing into it. Note, I haven't used Win8, so I have no clue whether that thing exists.

I use the Start menu all the time. Sometimes I'm clever and remember that I can type, but reflex is not known for brains.

I'm not even all that fond of it, really. I don't think I've ever truly liked it, although my dislike has softened over the years. It's clunky, but no matter what, it's better than Metro. At least it's designed for a mouse and keyboard.

What I really super-duper like is being able to pin programs to the taskbar in 7. That's the best Windows feature in a long, long time. I was really irked that Quicklaunch had gone away, but when I discovered that taskbar pinning was thoroughly superior, I was sold in about a day.

I'm weird because I use a mixture of methods, sometimes it's mousing through the various levels of the start menu, sometimes typing into start menu, sometime picking through the file system (I've got tons of stuff that's not linked into the start menu), and my most frequently used stuff pinned to the task bar. I find it's easy for the taskbar to get crowded with icons though, seeing as I use the old-style buttons with labels option.

I think improving start is a worthy pursuit, but I'm not sure it can ever be 'solved' for everyone.

I think partially this is down to (in many cases old legacy stuff) app installs not following the MS guidelines and nesting everything in folders making it more steps than necessary to dig through the menu to get at the relevant icon. As far as I know, everything should put their shortcut on the base level, so it's flat. Even MS doesn't follow their guidelines religiously, so I'm not sure I can blame any other developer. I'd like to see MS improve the 'old' start menu, but I can appreciate it being an uphill struggle.

As MS introduced metro, it makes sense to tackle the problem for that side of the fence, make all the metro stuff comply and be nice, tie it up in their store for installing/updating. It makes less sense to do the rough treatment for the desktop side. I just don't think MS have the will to come up with a good meeting in the middle.

seeing as I use the old-style buttons with labels option.

I got used to Quicklaunch in XP, so using small icons with no labels looks just like that. It takes very little space when the program isn't running. The icons are pretty distinctive, so you might find it worth switching, and dealing with the grump, so that you're less crowded. Small icons will probably take about a third as much space as they do now.

Of course, they go full size when you run the program, so if you typically have many or most open, it will make little difference.

Scratched wrote:
RolandofGilead wrote:
Parallax Abstraction wrote:

(though I can take or leave the Start Menu, no one uses it anyway)

What? I use it.

So do I. I guess that makes us nobodies :(

Do you use it in terms of actually going through the menus to launch applications or do you just open it, type what you want and press enter? That's all I do and a lot of other people I know. Maybe more people use it in the more "traditional way" and if so, then yeah, it would be smart of Microsoft to bring the full thing back. As someone who just used Start Search, that's the one thing that didn't bother me about Metro, because I could still just hit the Windows Key, type, press enter and that still worked great. The rest of Metro's a different story.

I actually click on stuff, Parallax. I only rarely use typing.

My new laptop should be arriving today, with Windows 8 installed. What's the concensus on it? Should I wipe it and install Win7 (I have two unused licences) or can it be massaged into a Win7-like experience. Metro turns my stomach and I'm concerned about any compatibility issues with Steam and GOG games that work fine on Win7.

Thanks

D-Man777 wrote:

My new laptop should be arriving today, with Windows 8 installed. What's the concensus on it? Should I wipe it and install Win7 (I have two unused licences) or can it be massaged into a Win7-like experience. Metro turns my stomach and I'm concerned about any compatibility issues with Steam and GOG games that work fine on Win7.

Thanks

I'd say run it and see. I've been fine on my Yoga living 95% of the time in desktop world, and it sounds like the upcoming 8.1 will allow staying in that environment to be even easier.

I have not had any troubles with either the GoG games I have played nor Steam games on Windows 8. I never use the Metro stuff at all and when my box reboots I just click the desktop icon thingy and do everything on the desktop. Only thing you may miss is the start button but I think being able to easily make folders of stuff on the taskbar makes that far less of an issue.

D-Man777 wrote:

My new laptop should be arriving today, with Windows 8 installed. What's the concensus on it? Should I wipe it and install Win7 (I have two unused licences) or can it be massaged into a Win7-like experience. Metro turns my stomach and I'm concerned about any compatibility issues with Steam and GOG games that work fine on Win7.

Thanks

Windows 8 is better under the hood than Windows 7. If you don't like the Start Screen/Metro (and I don't blame you), go download Classic Shell. It's free and makes it work like Windows 7. The Windows 8.1 update coming this year for free will add boot to desktop and Start Menu options back in anyway. The UI is now easy to work around and it's faster and works very nicely once you do that.

Honestly, even if you don't care for the Modern UI, it's not in your face that much. The old habit of bringing up the Start Menu and typing to find an application works exactly the same way. Anything you pinned to the taskbar is still there. You lose the jump lists for anything not pinned and Aero, but otherwise, it's not going to change much for you. Unless you always wipe the OS on principle and start over from scratch, I don't think it's warranted.

An OSX-inclined coworker asked me yesterday if I do most of my work in Metro or on the desktop, and I realized that 95% of the time I'm on the desktop.

The Metro Start screen is easy to ignore, in my opinion.

All that said about staying in desktop most of the time, there's no way I'd personally buy a Win 8 laptop that wasn't touch screen. It's really pretty handy, desktop or metro.

MannishBoy wrote:

All that said about staying in desktop most of the time, there's no way I'd personally buy a Win 8 laptop that wasn't touch screen. It's really pretty handy, desktop or metro.

Oh, definitely. I was using a new Dell Win8 laptop yesterday for testing, and partly because the trackpad on it is garbage, I found myself really wanting to swipe/tap the screen even though it wasn't touch enabled. I wouldn't use the touch screen all the time, but it would be perfect for the other 5% of the time when I'm not on the Desktop.

T-Prime wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:

All that said about staying in desktop most of the time, there's no way I'd personally buy a Win 8 laptop that wasn't touch screen. It's really pretty handy, desktop or metro.

Oh, definitely. I was using a new Dell Win8 laptop yesterday for testing, and partly because the trackpad on it is garbage, I found myself really wanting to swipe/tap the screen even though it wasn't touch enabled. I wouldn't use the touch screen all the time, but it would be perfect for the other 5% of the time when I'm not on the Desktop.

Even on the desktop it's nice. I've been doing a lot of screen sharing doc editing, and the ability in Word to just reach up and zoom the screen to exactly the size I want instead of gradually stepping there with shortcut keys, or going into the view part of the ribbon is really nice. It can also be done on the touch pad, but it just feels better to do it on the screen. Just lots of little stuff like that that I'm learning.

You can still do stuff without it, but on a laptop where the screen is so close, it just...works.

(And Civ V can be played in touch mode!)

LiquidMantis wrote:

Yeah, I live in Win8 now. I prefer the new desktop UI over Aero, it just seems cleaner and fresh. My main complaints are that Win-E takes me to the Start Screen as my Autohotkey script to launch XYplorer doesn't seem to override the default like it did with Win7. That and the wireless network UI annoys me.

After getting a new bluetooth set of headphones, I find that the Bluetooth pairing is buried way more than it should be, too. I don't mind the regular stuff, because it's pretty easy for the average person, and the old more technical way of doing things is still there if you need it.

BTW, here's how the 8.1 Start stuff works. I think that scroll down to the list of apps on Start will work OK. I never launch anything with an icon anyway. I've just been typing into search for years.

Yeah, I live in Win8 now. I prefer the new desktop UI over Aero, it just seems cleaner and fresh. My main complaints are that Win-E takes me to the Start Screen as my Autohotkey script to launch XYplorer doesn't seem to override the default like it did with Win7. That and the wireless network UI annoys me.

[Edit] Typing that out inspired me to care enough to see about fixing it. It turns out this was a Start8 issue, not a Windows 8 problem.

NOTE: Cross post from Game deals thread. Lost track of which tab I was in.

Thanks for all the advice. I think I'm going to give it a go. Though the prospect of installing everything and THEN deciding to go to Win7 makes me pucker a bit. I have to say, as I've gotten older my will to tinker has dropped off considerably.

I found this video on Start Is Back which is pretty convincing. I think I might pick it up to help me pretend that I haven't p*ssed out on a re-install.

They've Metrofied a lot of the settings applets, so you'll feel like an idiot who's never used a computer before for a short while. Then you'll eventually get used to it.

It is much leaner and faster than Win7 too.