My complaint with the start functionality is that I dislike being taken away from my desktop (where I have notifications for Outlook email, or Microsoft Lync instant messages, etc), and brought into a whole different look/feel environment with "live tiles"...which often distract me from getting back to my desktop where at the present time is where my actual work is taking place.
.............. You hate Windows 8 because you don't know how to use it, and that makes you feel embarrassed. That's why most techies hate it, because they are no longer the experts their ego has set them up to be... so they hate it.
Hi there
I don't think that's true of pparks1 at all -- I'm sure he knows how to operate more different types of OS'es than the number of hot dinners most people have ever eaten in their lives.
I've also run loads of different OS'es including old IBM mainframe stuff which was essentially command line only stuff.
Windows 8 does undoubtedly contain some good features -- and the idea of a common interface across tablets, phones and computers will make a lot of sense to quite a few people too who will appreciate the commonality.
What a lot of "power users" have problems with are basically two fold
1) The whole idea of totally full screen mode by default for new apps (Metro UI stuff) - especially if you are using very large monitors, multiple monitors or a combination of both. Most Office type power users usually have many windows open at the same time -- typical examples would be translating documents from one language into two or more different languages, incorporating data from several documents into a new spread sheet / presentation, simply comparing documents, or preparing high quality photos / images for pre-press using Photoshop where you could have several layers -- especially if using CYMK for the press submission.
2) The lack of any sort of hierarchical structure to be able to quickly access applications that are sub functions or sub-sub functions or even sub sub sub functions of the main application. - Scrolling endlessly horizontally isn't a good way to work efficiently -- and you can't always pin everything to the task bar or desktop -- particularly if you do a lot of photoshop where a basic plain grey background is probably the best place to start from.
Things like Mounting ISO's as a native function, enhanced security, better hardware detection, ease of installation, system recovery, improved performance etc are definitely welcome in W8 and shouldn't be overlooked - even by W8 haters.
The reason W8 isn't selling like W7 is basically because even compared with 2 years ago we use a variety of devices for our computing / internet needs rather than automatically use a computer so sales of laptops / desktops will of course be less than before --although they won't die - at least not for the foreseeable future.
Further new hardware is much more powerful and robust compared with a few years ago so the need to get a new machine is much less now and with the global economy still in a fairly bad way a new computer isn't at the top of most people's wish list.
W8 will come into its own later on in its development cycle -- remember how people absolutely LOATHED XP when it was introduced and Ms's offices were nearly burned down when the interface was changed from the old Windows 3.11 to windows 95 / 98.
The main problem really with W8 is that Ms probably didn't listen enough to people who still need the Classic desktop type of interface and who aren't interested in the Full screen UI. However it IS basically liveable with - but I would still myself prefer the option of switching off Metro completely.
Most people though that I've seen and who are just "normal" users seem to quite like W8 -- my experience seems to be that seasoned I.T workers have the most trouble with it rather than "poor old simple Users".
(I have W8 on a test laptop and a couple of VM's --for my main work I am still using W7 and probably will continue to use W7 for some time yet).
Cheers
jimbo
