Re: VS 2012

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Mike <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> At all times, the desktop is just a Win+D away.  So I'm not worried about
> power users at all.  Ordinary users will probably rebel, but that's OK,
> they'll just stay on Windows 7 and be happy.
>
> In the meantime, tablets and Windows 8 will evolve.  The desktop slowly
> goes away as Metro evolves into something more sophisticated yet still easy
> for consumers.  All of us get used to using Windows 8 on tablets and start
> wanting that experience at work as well.  Tablets and touch everything have
> become cheap unremarkable commodities.  Nobody wants to use a mouse
> anymore.  All this is probably only a year or two away.
>

Something about the phrase "Nobody wants to use a mouse anymore" is
bothersome - maybe it's just so ingrained in me, but I've use touch screens
& tablets, and the precision of my finger sucks, frankly, compared to a
mouse. It was surprisingly difficult / annoying to do things like select
text, or do file manipulation with any confidence in a positive outcome.


> In other words, Windows 8 is too advanced for people and hardware at this
> moment, and that's OK, because Windows 7 is just fine for now.  Instead, MS
> skated to where the puck will be very soon.
>

I think you're nearly right, but I think "very soon" is probably "someday".
It feels too radical - it's all but unusable on the desktop, and that's
where MS gets a good chunk of it's money - the corporate world, where
uptake is likely to hover around "0" for quite some time. Everyone is
acting very much like a technology apologist - "just a little retraining",
and "the desktop is easy to get to", and on and on. It's not usable in the
enterprise, for standard, humdrum business use. Further news flash: the
economy sucks. Nobody is buying their people tablets to use in addition to,
and certainly not as a replacement for, their desktops. So I'm less
convinced that even if people buy Win8 tablets that there's gonna be any
serious corporate uptake. I'm sure we'll hear of a smattering of examples,
and they'll be in small-medium sized businesses in niche markets.

People in this group - s/w developers and the like - like it because it's
the new shiny, and we're pre-conditioned to want to like new and shiny.
Hell, people here were happy about Vista when it first hit, hailing it as
the second coming.

Maybe just grumpy because my cheese has been moved? Maybe; I *like* finding
new cheese, though. I'm much more concerned now than ever the following
MS's roadmap will end in tears, though. If they've misguessed where the
puck is going in a few years - even by a little, it feels like it'll have
gone very ugly.

Herb.