Windows 8 (workstation) review

As quoted from a dailytech reader, "looks like fisher price's puked out juice box"...

From a business standpoint, windows 8 are built to fail in the workstation space. With a highly successful OS slightly 3 year old hot behind its heels, you cant expect workstation users to flog to it.

But Microsoft executives think they can beat the trend but all they accomplished is shooting themselves in the foot. Unless you are some doomsday preppers that just climb out of your nuclear bunker finding our twisted civilization is unfortunately intact, you already know what I m talking about. Metro interface. Or whatever its called now due to some really retarded lawsuit to further reinforce how terrible is our patent ,copyright and trademark legal infrastructure is.

Now back to the topic of Metro interface. I admit I have not tried it on a touchscreen, with my primary usage on keyboard+mouse and trackpad. Even then, I see it being rather intuitive for a touchscreen with its edge gesture and large touchable tiles. In fact, it is still rather usable on a workstation after a surprising short amount of time required to adjust. After 2 months, the final verdict is DEATH. Alright, jokes aside, Metro interface is meant for content consumption and absolutely terrible for content creation. And the last time I checked, desktop are primarily used for content creation.

I m quite fine with not having a virtual start button but the new full screen start screen is a major step backward for content creation on workstation. Every time you launch your start screen, you will lose all the view of all your windows. This issue is also affecting anti virus manufacturers as user cannot receive prompts when their system found a threat. But seriously, multi tasking is the forte of desktop OS and Microsoft thinks its a good idea to take that away?

To exacerbate this issue, is the edge swipe gesture. So u think putting your frequently used applications and folders on your desktop solve the issue right? After being used to using the corner of the taskbar to show the desktop, it is now blocked by edge gesture. If you are following this blog, you will remember that this workstation using a 32" 16:9 HDTV as an output. For content creation, especially word processing and programming, it is best to have more vertical screen estate and I have moved my taskbar to the right. And bingo, the show desktop button is now at the same edge as the start edge gesture.

Then comes the settings hotkey on the charm bar. At first, I thought it was a nice feature to tweak advance settings at my finger tips. That impression immediately turn sour after launching it the first time to realize it only tweaks metro interface settings. And they are smart enough to not include it in the control panel, leaving you with two separate settings panel to juggle all your needs.
Windows platform have always been about flexibility and personalization. WRONG. This time round, Microsoft simply shaft it down your throat and for a very greedy reason. Metro Apps follows the model of their arch enemy Apple's app store revenue model. All apps sold now entity Microsoft to a cut. In fact, there's a business opportunity for allowing professional or ultimate edition to retain the old interface but some internal calculation probably tells them metro app revenue model is worth more dough.

Now come the Metro Apps pathetic state. In general, OS developers will include some really well designed apps to be referenced by other developers. A look at Microsoft 1st tier metro app does not invoke that sense of well designed interface. In fact, its the absence of any interface. Take a look at the metro version of internet explorer and any self respected programmer will tell you they can do better. News apps cannot tweak content and content provider, a recent update make a single scroll on the mouse switched the entire screen. And the messaging apps are so ridiculous I simply uninstalled them within 24hours. Their interface are so dumbed down, iPad and Android tablet's interface looks superior in every way. And remember, this is on a desktop OS with screen close to 10x bigger.


So now back to their Metro App revenue as the primarily push for compulsory Metro interface. The 1st tier apps are so bad and you cant expect developers to produce anything decent. In fact, I never run Metro App store to check for new Apps because I am expected to get disappointed. You don't play angry birds and cut the rope on desktop. They are casual games meant for mobile phones. In my opinion, these games are already rather wasteful of the potential of a tablet. On a desktop? Simply ridiculous.

The madness did not end here. Server 2012 is using Metro interface too. Server OS is required to display a dashboard full of performance parameters and device status will NEVER suit the current iteration of Metro interface. Windows server aren't even popular in the server space in the first place and they aren't doing themselves a favor by forcing Metro interface in this platform. Who wanna bet that if they don't u-turn this strategy soon, even large enterprise currently tied down by Microsoft ecosystem will just bite the bullet and switch for their next upgrade?

Current Microsoft strategy is wrong and their wanton worship of their arch enemy are not driving them to being more competitive in the OS market. If you think the worst is over and just have to get used to this new abomination, there are leaks that Microsoft is looking to bring a more metro dominated interface to slowly phase out desktop entirely in the future. This is insane and I don't want to be using that OS when it happens. They in fact, simply driving people to alternative like Ubuntu which is open source and free.

This Metro heist doesn't just piss off customers. They are also driving away developers like valve. Sure, Microsoft can throw their money around for exclusive title for Metro or even bring in XBOX exclusives as a desperate measure. But that is insufficient as desktop gaming have always been small developers bringing innovations and the modding community. Its never been a walled garden Microsoft is envisioning.

The only redeeming UI improvements are mostly trapped in desktop. The new task manger gave more detailed information and its revamped look isn't that bad. Next is the new file transfer manager, adding ability to pause and restart file transfer. Sadly, similar feature isn't available for web file download but that isn't something a 3rd party software cant fix. Even then, the Metro interface is so bad that these improvements are quickly forgotten.

A big benefit of having a cross platform OS is Microsoft forced to streamline the OS resources.  This OS consumes much lesser memory, allowing more memory for applications. This is required as mobile devices have lesser and slower RAM. Even then, the memory and storage required by Windows 8 is still gargantuan compared to rival OS like Android. Since I do not own or intend to own a Windows 8 mobile device, I would not comment on implications of it.

Another great feature is the quick boot up. The image of the OS is cached and this greatly cut down boot up time. Over two month usage, there are occasion where the image cached create operational problems and a restart is required. According to some benchmarks, even full restart is faster compared to Windows 7 so its a net positive for everyone.

Incompatibility of driver and software is also more common than what I remembered in Windows 7. The good things is most device work out of the box but manufacturer driver to enable special features are rather flaky. Razer Abyssuss driver can be installed but cannot be uninstalled without blue screen of smiley. It must be manually uninstalled in device manager then proceed to uninstall the system software. Intel virtualization will crash the system frequently making Android emulation unbearable to use without it. Games like Borderlands 2 is incompatible out of the box and require the scene to create custom patch.

Verdict:
Performance: 9/10
User Interface: 2/10
Compatibility: 7/10
Overall(not avg of above): 5/10

I should be keeping my Windows 8 installation in the foreseeable future as Windows 8 is still a net positive for me. That is because games are still primarily written in DirectX and major hardware manufacturer still support Windows as their priority. But if Microsoft continue to pursue this strategy and the industry slowly moves away from Microsoft monopolistic ecosystem, things would be very different. Once major studios start migrating their game engine to open source alternatives and you will begin to witness the swift downfall of one of the largest IT company the world have ever known. The only consolation is that during this period, some hefty profit can be made by shorting their shares (just like RIM in 2012 ^.^).