Microsoft will be saved by open-source

You may think today's piece is one giant trolling, but it is in fact an important article explaining why the Microsoft company flagship product Windows 8 will be saved from ruin in the desktop market by the open-source utility called Classic Shell, which allows skipping Metro and restoring the classic Windows menu, with business analysis of the reasons and mistakes made that led to Metro usage on traditional computing devices as well as smartphones. I hope you will like it.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/microsoft-saved-by-classic-shell.html


Cheers,
Mrk

 

When Yandex and Google have open source projects and are enormously successful search engine giants - why does Microsoft insist on sticking with a closed source model - I guess for legacy reasons? Even Apple made the underlying Darwin core on top which the proprietary Acqua GUI runs public long time ago.

If Microsoft wanted to develop an OS that could work on all devices, it could have taken a lesson from Canonical in how to build one. Metro may have a place on smart phones and tablets but doesn't really work on anything on which people still rely on the good old fashioned keyboard and mouse. I think people will wait to see if someone comes up with a hack to allow them to remove the Metro crud on Windows 8 altogether.

In the meantime, the rest of us have no compelling reason to ditch Windows 7.

 

Different business model. Google primarily sells services, Microsoft primarily sells software.

This, I think, is the crux of the matter. Microsoft has no effective competition, so everyone will just fall back on Windows 7, and Windows 8 will be the new Vista. Microsoft will still make vast amounts of money, and will now have an additional small but workable foothold in the mobile market.

 

Exactly, I've been skipping every other MS os for years.

Remember ME? Vista?


Why do I need 8? I don't. MS sells SW so they just keep making it users don't have to buy it let alone install it.


I know a guy who still runs fine on windows 95 another on 98. No support?
Doesn't matter to him.

xp still works as well.

 

If it wasn't for Metro, I'd consider upgrading - it would have made a decent Windows 7 Service Pack.

If its a flop - you can bet Microsoft will extend Windows 7's life and go back to the drawing boards.

Windows 8 doesn't work because it bolts two incompatible interfaces together. If you're going to introduce a new OS - leave the past behind and make the look and feel consistent and user friendly.

In that respect, Windows 8 is a disaster - from a design and usability standpoint. Some people will love Metro but most don't want to move away from how they work in Windows.

Good luck to Microsoft in trying to overcome human nature and resistance to radical change.

 

Eh, I've actually gotten somewhat used to it. I'm still not a big fan of the flat visual style, and some things are very unintuitive (like shutting down), but overall I find it to be quite reasonable once you get used to it. Oh, and I remove all of the Metro apps and replace them with my desktop apps, and once I do that it doesn't look bad.

Granted, removing the Metro apps isn't exactly what they had in mind. But on the other hand, it's not as if past versions of Windows are great out of the box. Any time I install Windows 7 (or previous versions), I have to make a lot of changes, like enabling the details view in Explorer, making the Control Panel expand as a menu, changing some of the folder settings so I can see the file extensions and hidden files, and on and on. I think 3.1 was the last version I pretty much left alone.

 

I changed everything back to the traditional Windows layout. Functional and and intuitive.

Why mess with something that works? There's nothing in Windows 7 that needed fixing. No other software maker has ditched its operating system. If you find something that works for you, keep it.

Do they change the interface of cars? No! Then why ~Phrase removed~ does Microsoft need to change how Windows works? Their bread and butter is the desktop! And they're throwing that away on the slim chance of gaining a market share where there's a very low profit margin involved.

Like Dedoimedo wrote, sounds like stupidity to me. Would any sane business do that? If smartphones and tablets hadn't come along, would Microsoft have dreamt up Metro? I bet it would never have seen the light of day.

It needs to be deep-sixed on desktops and laptops, for Microsoft's continued good health in the future.

 

The only thing I can figure is that they really believe that "traditional" PCs are going away soon in favor of tablets (or at least will no longer be profitable), and they want to be prepared for that.

 

Like it or not, hybrid laptop/tablets are the future. Microsoft would be stupid to neglect this. They already KNOW it's happening, just one look at the vast amount of hybrids announced already tells you this. OEMs have probably been begging Microsoft for something like this for a while.

FYI, you remind me of the people that whined their hearts out, preaching the command line, in the 90's when MS was pushing the GUI and the mouse. I know it's pointless trying to argue with you about it, so I'll just sit back and let you watch how the computing world will change yet again.

Exactly.

 

I loved 98 as well,just stopped using it about a 2 years ago !

Well if i remmeber correctly it was after the launch of VISTA that the RAM prices started to drop LOL

only good thing that came of it.

 

A shame. They should have let them choke on that decision.

That's irrelevant. There's no reason that a corporation as big as they are, and with their hands into most everything else that's computer oriented (game consoles, automotive electronics, servers, etc) can't maintain separate operating systems, one for desktop/laptop equipment and one for small portable devices.

 

Amen.....

 

There's plenty of reasons. Really a multitude.

 

Nice article.
BTW i agree with all what you said, honestly.

 

I can't speak to your assertion about Microsoft being saved from ruin, but I can say that Classic Shell has been around for some years and is a wonderful product, as described to me by my brother, who uses it on both his Win7 and Win8 systems.

For those who want the Classic Interface, this program seems to be ideal. I'll get it when I have to upgrade.


----
rich

 

I've been using Classic Shell on all the Windows 7 boxes I touch for over a year now. Love it.


Oh I just thought. Remember when Vista started getting howling boos reviews everywhere after the MS propaganda machine lost it's steam? Well I predict the same thing will happen with Windows 8. That is to say, just about every Windows 8 laptop & desktop will come with a free Windows 7 downgrade option. MS will still make a killing on Windows 8.

You heard it here 1st. So when I'm proved right. Acknowledge that I zapjb predicted the free downgrade option to Windows 7 of virtually all laptops & desktops that come with Windows 8 installed.

 

Or maybe they would unlock the desktop mode.

The other thing is that i just simply can't believe they also pushed the Metro interface in Windows Server editions . . .
What's the point of having a touch interface in a . . . server OS?

 

Sorry for swearing but is it really necessary to censor it? I think sometimes there's no other way to express just how badly Microsoft screwed the pooch. There's nothing wrong with the command line. They removed DOS after Windows Me but you can install Windows PowerShell to work from a CLI-based interface. I'm not sure this justifies a radical redesign of the Windows desktop. They could have taken another four or five years to get it right.

 

Now that is really stupid. Very few people use GUI on servers. What the heck was Microsoft thinking? I know they want to push this Metro crap on people but this is beyond absurd!

 

I definitely would like to see Microsoft to make Windows a freeware like Linux does

 

The future of what?

Don't confuse change with progress.
Or conservatism with anti-hypeism.

BTW, if you take a tablet and connect it to a keyboard and mouse or other external devices, it is no longer a tablet. And for anything that takes more than 20 words of typing, touch interface is meaningless. You can spin it any way you want, but there's such a thing as efficiency.

The world of computing needs to change. No problem with that. Only a change that is incremental to the existing world and not a replacement as media tries to portray it.

BTW, DOS problems were not related to GUI. Linux words perfectly well without GUI in 2012, the question is what is the purpose of intended use? Command line is a perfectly acceptable medium of information exchange. you are using the command line to communicate in this forum right now - you are using streams of text. Words. You did not communicate this to me via images or video. Your communication is identical to a 17th century baron writing to his love in Florence.

The future of computing, one small facet of it, is yet another change in the form factor yet again. Nothing more nothing less. That is not the issue at all.

But answer me this:
Do you use keyboard/mouse/external monitor?
Do you use your computing power for anything other than light use?
If the answer is yes to one or both, claiming that tablets and smartphones are somehow the future is like saying planes are the future of automobiles.

Finally, the fact Microsoft can exact a change upon the world does not make it good. The fact Soviet Russia could spread communism around the world for 70 years does not make it a good idea, meaningful or useful. Just a manifestation of power.

Mrk

 

They have already have an OS for small portable devices, called Windows CE, the same kernel is used in Windows 7.

But sadly their cash cow, MS Office (the main reason for Windows on the desktop and the existence of MS servers) is a huge [mess of ?] code that can't even currently (in realistic time scales) be converted to the Metro interface, alone converted to run on a different OS, so MS is stifled by its own legacy and forced to incorporate a desktop mode (even in the ARM version) of Windows 8 just to offer MS Office and if you try (like I have) on a touch screen you will find it as clunky as you expect from a desktop app with minimal adaptation being used on a touch-screen.

 

Its already started happening (according to Forrester 11% of all employees globally use an iPad - http://www.zdnet.com/blog/forrester...enterprise-laptop-replacement-gets-closer/834) and MS they were not prepared for it, Windows 8 is an attempt to catch up with IPads (and to a lesser extent Android tablets).