"With Windows 7, PC users will at last have a..."

http://www.marco.org/207584319

by tomh • 17 years ago

18 36 17 years ago

wyday• 17 years ago

Has Mossberg always been the king of trumpeting diminished expectations, or is this a new thing? Is Microsoft a major Wall Street Journal advertiser?

So if a critic expresses a view contrary to your own views he's a shill? Great argument. Windows 7 is actually really good. And here's the shocker: so is Mac OS X.

Must we have religious wars over which bits are on your hard drive?

monos2• 17 years ago

it's an easy to understand piece about the advantages of win7 vs winxp, as perceived by the average (definitly not HN-reading) user.

that, for me, reads like the ads on TV selling drugs.

please ask your doctor / sysadmin which OS to use, not that guy on TV / tech column. or else we will make fun of you.

sorry for ranting so much, but it drives me crazy. my girlfriend actually was asking about windows7, how much she needs it and how much better everything is going to be.

of course i will encourage every normal person i know to install windows7 (just to get rid of IE6 within the next years, hopefully).

foldr5• 17 years ago

>please ask your doctor / sysadmin which OS to use, not that guy on TV / tech column. or else we will make fun of you.

Maybe people would rather read an easy-to-understand column than ask a snobby nerd.

thismat2• 17 years ago

I can't upvote you enough, your OS does not define you, you CAN (I do) regularly use both for work and play and enjoyment and like them both.

yumraj• 17 years ago

So, according to Marco, Win 7 will have to be better than Mac OSX in "ALL" the areas only then will it be able to better compete with it, else not. If Mossberg's review is biased (not that I'm saying it is), Marco's take on it is even worse.

monos2• 17 years ago

exactly.

part of it reads as if he was defending it against macos (mentioned it 6 times).

then he describes in excruciating detail small GUI improvements that gnome (or any other wm i guess) pushed through in 6month (oh wow windows-previews in the taskbar).

he admits that in the area of networking there is still room for improvement but at least "now you can see all available wireless networks by just clicking on an icon in the taskbar". way to go!

but windows wins in other areas: windows7 has "some of the same kind" (!?) of multitouch gestures the iphone made popular. yeah.. how would i even..

Compatibility is also satisfactory: firefox, adobe, etc. work. good job MS! though he fails to mention that they don't work out-of-the-box. how could they: they are not in the box.

let's just hope their migration plan gets better when the next BIG THING gets pushed out in 10 years... or so. improving shouldn't be hard: it's not possible to upgrade without whipping your HD - assuming you now have an XP install.

oh right: that's basically everybody.

Goronmon• 17 years ago

To most computer users, overall industry progress has seemed stagnant for nearly a decade.

If we are considering "most" computer users, then I'm not sure a majority really care.

makecheck2• 17 years ago

There are a lot of people working in the computer industry, and it moves much faster than other industries. This is why 10 years seems like an eternity for users to accept no real advancement.

Then again, if you aren't really into computers, and just use them, you might look at it as a tool like any other. My car is 10 years old, there are probably people at Ford who hate that I still have it, but I don't yet see a reason to change it.

Similarly, while I'm very aware of how the actions of one dominant company (Microsoft) have made the computing industry practically stand still, I am also mostly aware of this because I'm in that industry. There could be a Microsoft of vacuum cleaners, that has kept us away from truly great cleaning machines for the past 50 years, and I wouldn't know. People don't generally have the time, or take the time, to figure out which products could be truly great for them.

SamAtt2• 17 years ago

The 10 years line is kind of BS anyway. Yes XP has been around for 2 years but there have been 2 massive overhauls of security (2 services packs). Tons of Microsoft enhancements (Desktop Search for example) and even more tons of 3rd party apps that add functionality.

It's not necessarily an OSs job to innovate. The OS is supposed to make it easy to connect hardware to software and get the annoying hardware interaction stuff off the 3rd party programmers plate. So XP is fine because it's solid and allowed 3rd parties to innovate around it

decode4• 17 years ago

Over the past three releases of Windows, I've noticed that I've become more alienated from the UI with each release. First with XP, then Vista, and now Windows 7, it seems like each release is just a little more annoying to use. It's like the two stories Joel Spolsky tells in the first chapter of "User Interface Design for Programmers". About every minute I try to do something and I'm just a little frustrated with how the UI reacts. Consequently, the first thing I do on any Windows computer is make it look and act as much like Win98 as possible.

It's the same thing with OS X. Right now my favorite UI to use is Gnome, because it acts mostly like Win98 with a few improvements that make sense to me (primarily virtual desktops). It makes me simultaneously feel like an old fogey shaking his cane at progress, and also like those ratpoison and xmonad users I could never understand.

I have often asked myself why this is. The obvious answer is I'm set in my ways and don't want to learn new things. Certainly possible, but I don't see that in other areas of my computer usage (programming languages, web design, etc). Sometimes I wonder if it's because these new UI improvements are largely meant to help your average user, but don't help me much. For example, both OS X and Win7 are optimized for only having one window per program open at once, but I often have many open. It frustrates me that it's harder to switch between those windows than in Win98.

I wonder if any of you other power users are experiencing the same thing.

Quiark• 17 years ago

In my case, I like the UI changes in XP and Vista (yay for transparency :) and setting it back to Win98-style seems silly to me. But I think I agree with this optimization for a single window, because I usually have many windows open at a time. Hopefully I'll get to try Win7 early and see for myself.

raintrees• 17 years ago

Here are my observations, fwiw: A few of my clients choose the same route: Turn off the newer Windows XP Start Menu of two columns and go back to Classic Win98 single column. I honor their choices and leave their systems the way they want them.

But after forcing myself to use the newer version, I have found I can get to programs faster from the Start Menu by having Printers, Control Panel, My Computer, Network Neighborhood, etc. on the Start Menu, and keep my Desktop less cluttered.

Likewise, a quick glance tells me what that person's default browser is, as well as the default email program: They will be at the top of the first column.

At times, I will take the time to present these observations to those clients and I find that some will consider converting, while others will shoot me down, because change=evil.

The ribbon in Office 2007 seems to be the same deal: Since I am a previous version user, finding things is aggravating. If I hadn't clicked on the "glowing" round Office icon, I would have searched for Save for quite some time. This in a word processor!

But to a new user, the most obvious things I might need to do are right there, without all of the noise of all of the items I don't need in my way. The most basic markup tools are on the first ribbon presented. If I move to a slightly more advanced task, like outlines or inserting graphics, I get a different ribbon that has the exact tools I need.

Just because I forced myself to get used to the structure of the menus does not mean it was the most efficient way to organize those tools. Reminds me of what I have heard regarding qwerty vs. Dvorák.

So, just like going to a new restaurant and taking a chance on the house special outside of my comfort zone rather than ordering what I am used to, with each new operating system and version, I try them out for a few months before passing judgment.

lurkinggrue• 17 years ago

I do like Windows 7 but I have hated the direction of the start menu for years.

I just keep a folder of program icons that I can launch from the taskbar, much easier to deal with.

That and I do love pinning programs to the taskbar as I can keep the things I run all the time in the exact same position.

barrkel2• 17 years ago

I wrote a reasonably extensive post on all the things that annoyed me about Vista here (and many of them are also applicable to 7):

http://blog.barrkel.com/2008/08/venting-on-vista.html

cturner• 17 years ago

     It makes me simultaneously feel like an old fogey
     shaking his cane at progress

You're not, you're perceptive. The stuff that has happened to UI will make people of the future react like we do when we hear that this car was considered to be the pinacle of style: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ford.anglia.105e.moors.arp...

Was the world mad?

OSX has somehow pushed everyone (including competing systems) into a state of madness where gaudiness is prized. But phones will encourage sensible interface developments because normal people find them less intimidating and have increased expectations of a clean, powerful, responsive interface.

unalone2• 17 years ago

How is OS X optimized for one window/program? Switching between windows is fast. I'm not sure what you mean.

decode4• 17 years ago

Here's my problem: if I have 4 console windows open at the same time, and they're all hidden behind other windows, how do I switch to that one console I want? In Windows 98, each one had a button on the taskbar that didn't move, and it was one click on a known location to bring my desired window to the foreground and give it focus. In OS X, clicking on the dock icon won't help. I could alt-tab, but since I have 20 windows open, it will take a while. I could start minimizing windows until I see it, messing up my workspace. I could move windows around until I see it, messing up my workspace. I could use Expose, which is useless, since all the command windows look the same at 200px square. Is there something I'm missing?

jodrellblank• 17 years ago

I am experiencing exactly the same thing.

A fogey shaking his cane at progress? No, I like progress. I like the new start menu design. I don't like the fact that I have a Core i7 with 6GB of RAM and the start menu still takes as much time to start populating results as it takes to open a TCP socket to somewhere tens of miles away over half a dozen intermediate systems, submit a search query, Google to run it through ~700 servers and return the results.

Or that it doesn't match substrings, so 'irefox' has no results. Irefox? IREFOX? Are you an idiot, there's no program called irefox!

Or that it sorts in useless order - so a search for 'i' shows "IBM National Support BBS.ht', a Hyperterminal shortcut I've never used, above 'Internet Explorer'.

But even with that, the start menu is good. It's progress. I like it.

I don't like the changes to Sharing and Security and Ownership on files and folders going from XP Pro/2003 Server to Vista Pro/2008 Server. That's not progress, that's just adding extra button clicks and extra popups for no benefit to me.

I don't like the magic directory tree either, where 'my computer' is inside 'desktop' and the tree structure is hidden by default so folders like "work - october" float around in a detached and ethereal fashion, instead of making it clear that they are located somewhere. I don't see how non-technical people don't find that immensly confusing and unhelpful, because I do.

Progress is good, but I'm not feeling progress, I'm feeling 'paper over the complex stuff we don't want to change so it wont look so scary, even if that means what you see has little relevance to what's going on thus making it more difficult to understand'.

tptacek2• 17 years ago

Mossberg on Win7: After using pre-release versions of Windows 7 for nine months, and intensively testing the final version for the past month on many different machines, I believe it is the best version of Windows Microsoft (MSFT) has produced.

Mossberg on Vista: After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced.

Mossberg on Win7: Like the new Snow Leopard operating system released in August by Microsoft’s archrival, Apple (AAPL), Windows 7 is much more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary product.

Mossberg on Vista: Overall, it works pretty much the same way as Windows XP. Windows hasn't been given nearly as radical an overhaul as Microsoft just applied to its other big product, Office.

I do not care what this person has to say about operating systems, and by extension, about anything anyone writes about what he cares about operating systems.

SamAtt2• 17 years ago

Link for the above Vista quotes...

http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20070118/vista-worthy-unexciting...

foldr5• 17 years ago

What are you saying exactly? None of those quotes seems obviously false, and they don't contradict each other. (It's of course perfectly possible that Vista was the best version of Windows that MS had produced until Windows 7 arrived.)

tptacek2• 17 years ago

Mossberg on Win7: In just two weeks, on Oct. 22, Microsoft’s long operating-system nightmare will be over. The company will release Windows 7, a faster and much better operating system than the little-loved Windows Vista, which did a lot to harm both the company’s reputation, and the productivity and blood pressure of its users.

Mossberg on Win7: Even in beta form, with some features incomplete or imperfect, Windows 7 is, in my view, much better than Vista, whose sluggishness, annoying nag screens, and incompatibilities have caused many users to shun it.

Mossberg on Vista: It has taken the giant software maker more than five years to replace Windows XP with this new version, called Windows Vista -- an eternity by computer-industry reckoning. Many of the boldest plans for Vista were discarded in that lengthy process, and what's left is a worthy, but largely unexciting, product.

I'm saying, leaving aside his actual reporting on what the products do, his editorial opinion doesn't appear to mean anything.

barrkel2• 17 years ago

Windows XP hasn't stayed still for all that time. When XP came out, minimum specs were 64MB and a 233MHz processor, 128MB / 300MHz recommended. Try running an XP SP3 machine on those recommended specs today and you'll quickly see how limited it is, especially with browsing the modern web, or running any "big" productivity app, like a photo or video editor, or an IDE.

The fact is, XP has been quite scalable as hardware has moved on; it hasn't been a significant factor in limiting the amount of hardware juice getting through to applications running on top of it, which is one half of what you want out of an OS; and in terms of virtualization of hardware resources across multiple apps, the other half, for the majority of desktop usage it's been fine.

Windows 7 for me primarily means an improved kernel with more API functionality; a very confusing shuffle of configuration locations; a space-inefficient shell UI; and a start menu / task bar combination that I dislike compared XP's start menu and task bar. Oh, and less menus, for increased user frustration. (I'm not a fan of whizz-bang GUI gloss, it's generally the first thing I disable.) Win7 for me is a very mixed bag, but a necessary "upgrade", simply to track what end users and customers are experiencing.

gord2• 17 years ago

What percentage of HN readers use windows?

I'm assuming : 70% mac, 25% linux, 4% BSD derivative ...

patcdr• 17 years ago

I'd wager much higher than that. At the very least, I'm using Win7. Statistics on browser/OS usage from pg would be interesting though.

whatusername• 17 years ago

Seconding the request for Browser/OS Stats.

makecheck2• 17 years ago

This is a tough question to ask accurately.

What you'd really want to know is who uses an OS by choice, subtracting all other factors (e.g. if you're only using an OS because it runs some app that your work requires). There are plenty of reasons anyone might be using several different systems.

In my case, I use 3 different OSes. My only Windows machine is at work; and while I use it for occasional development for Windows, it is mostly a dumb terminal to access a Linux box. At home, I use a Mac by choice, but I can also use it to access Linux at work. Am I a "Windows user" if I visit HN from work? Well, I'd rather not be counted as one.

gord2• 17 years ago

My usage of windows over last 5yrs has been as you describe 'a dumb terminal to access a Linux box'. [ A long time ago I was very much into the COM electric cool aid, so have used it as a dev platform commercially, but not recently. ]

To be fair my use of OSX over the last year has also been around 50% 'dumb terminal' due to web work.

I just never see people hacking on windows laptops anymore, and on balance I think its a good thing.

thismat2• 17 years ago

There are plenty of people around like me who are fine with any OS and use them all for slightly different things. Don't be married to your platform, makes you much happier.

"With Windows 7, PC users will at last have a..."

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