the tindog coffeehouse

Once upon a time, there was a computer operating system called DOS. It was a command-line, non-graphical OS that required users to type in commands to run the programs they wanted to run. And for a while, Microsoft Windows ran on top of it. Your computer would start up into Windows, but you could exit it and run DOS programs. Windows and DOS each had extremely different user interfaces and different ways of doing things, even though they both ran on the same computer.

Running the Consumer Preview version of Windows 8 is like living back in the days of DOS.

I’ll elaborate further, but suffice it to say, from everything I’ve seen so far of Microsoft’s newest OS, I’m not a fan. Windows 8 is designed first and foremost for tablets with touchscreens instead of PCs with mice and keyboards. It draws heavily from Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, prominently featuring the multi-colored tiles of its Metro UI, while pushing anything resembling a traditional Windows desktop as far away as possible. On a touch-based tablet, this approach makes sense (even if Metro itself is hideous), but on a laptop or desktop, this touch-centric paradigm is a train wreck. Microsoft has clearly bet the farm that everyone will be using only tablets in the future, somehow forgetting that the majority of its customers are enterprises that deploy thousands of laptops and desktops daily.

Here are my initial impressions after playing around with the Consumer Preview:

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A couple of days ago, I was looking through Outlook and came across some emails from 2004 when I was doing some freelance web design work for a small ministry in Nacogdoches. The lady who ran the ministry had had a website built but couldn’t afford to keep paying the designer to maintain it. I heard about her through my wife and offered to take it over for practically nothing. Now, I should preface this by saying that I don’t consider myself in any way to be a web designer. But at the time, I had aspirations of building a web design business, so I was eager to get a real (paying!) client.

The existing site was a mess. The designer had used Flash to build all the navigation menus (almost a dozen of of them), so simply creating a new page required editing multiple Flash files. And the HTML was so convoluted, any significant changes to the existing pages were next to impossible without redoing the whole thing.

I hated that website.

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Gizmodo has a post out about what Microsoft’s successor to Windows 7 will look like. Pretty much anyone you talk to will mention the same things: more cloud integration, better hardware management, better security, faster boot time, expanded use of virtualization, etc. All good answers, and I think accurate ones.

But my gut tells me that if you really want to know what Windows 8 will look like, just look at an iPad. Forget Windows XP, Vista, or even Windows 7. Windows 8 will more closely resemble Apple’s iOS or Google’s Chrome OS than any of its predecessors.

Why? Several reasons:

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This is me eating my words.

After stating my preference for Firefox and saying that Google’s Chrome browser “doesn’t really feel complete”, I’m ready to admit I was wrong. In fact, I would even go so far as to say I love it. As much as a person can love a web browser anyway.

The migration from Firefox to Chrome wasn’t planned and it wasn’t really a voluntary move. Firefox forced me out after multiple add-ons started giving me problems on two different computers. I could disable one or two and be fine for a while, but eventually it would crash again or freeze up or just refuse to open in the first place.  The more problems I encountered, the clearer my decision became: I had to move on. And no, I don’t fully blame Mozilla; after all, these were third-party add-ons. But after several days of troubleshooting, it simply was no longer worth the effort.

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If this photo from ZDNet of an early iteration of Internet Explorer 9 is any indication of what the final product will look like, I have to say it’s downright horrid.

I know, I know, I’m probably the only person in the world who thinks that. Just like I’m the only person to not really care for the stripped-down look of Google Chrome (which Microsoft is clearly imitating).

I understand the trend toward leaner and cleaner browsers: fewer buttons, consolidated toolbars, a fear of anything that might impede upon the sacred real estate that is the interwebs. I understand it, I just don’t fully agree with it.

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Former Microsoft vice president Dick Brass (insert your own jokes here) wrote a pretty indicting op-ed piece yesterday in the New York Times about how his previous employer’s corporate culture stifles any true innovation coming out of the Redmond monolith:

Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason. Its image has never recovered from the antitrust prosecution of the 1990s. Its marketing has been inept for years; remember the 2008 ad in which Bill Gates was somehow persuaded to literally wiggle his behind at the camera? …

What happened? Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.

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