Windows 'Threshold': Microsoft's Plan To Win Over Windows 7 Users

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According to this article, a Windows 9 preview is expected later this year and the main focus is winning over Windows 7 hold outs.

Windows "Threshold," the next major version of Microsoft's Windows operating system due to hit around the spring of 2015, is coming into focus. And not too surprisingly, one of the Microsoft Operating Systems Group's main goals in designing and developing the coming operating system (OS) release -- which may or may not ultimately be branded as "Windows 9" -- is to try to make it more palatable to hold-out Windows 7 users.
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I will be holding out for some time myself. I don't understand why can't they sell the windows home with the windows 8 garbage in it and 8 professional with the desktop, my problem with 8 is when I try to work on it getting to everything sucks. just stupid, a company that is going to FORCE everyone into something they don't want. how stupid is that. even home users complain to me about windows 8 like I can change anything for them, they are better off getting linux or apple. lol that comment alone will cause all the windows lovers to post hate filled stuff directed at me.
 
ooh, ooh ooh

can I have giant purple and orange buttons please?
 
Autopia said:
I will be holding out for some time myself. I don't understand why can't they sell the windows home with the windows 8 garbage in it and 8 professional with the desktop, my problem with 8 is when I try to work on it getting to everything sucks. just stupid, a company that is going to FORCE everyone into something they don't want. how stupid is that. even home users complain to me about windows 8 like I can change anything for them, they are better off getting linux or apple. lol that comment alone will cause all the windows lovers to post hate filled stuff directed at me.
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Not sure what you're thinking, but it looks like Windows 9 will address everything that you're talking about. The Start Menu by default for keyboard and mouse users, the Start Screen by default for tablet users, the option to change the defaults and windowed modern apps if one wants them on desktop.
 
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that it does consumers a disservice to try and completely reinvent the wheel every two years with a new operating system.

I'd like to see more transparent and evolutionary changes, because people hate haveing to completely relearn how to do various tasks, but like the support and performance upgrades that a new OS can entail.

Quit making us jump through hoops, W7 works fine, just evolve it slightly don't make it a huge chore to find advanced features.
 
from the article:

Microsoft is basically "done" with Windows 8.x. Regardless of how usable or functional it is or isn't, it has become Microsoft's Vista 2.0 — something from which Microsoft needs to distance itself, perception-wise

** good to see they realized that Windows 8 was a failure
 
How to convert me from win 7 to win whatever.

Step 1. Implement Aero and a proper start menu. Not metro, not a hybrid.
Step 2. Profit.

It really isn't difficult. Want to throw in an option that allows the full metro experience for those that like it? Sure whatever, idc so long as I have the option for my desktop to operate like a desktop.
 
From the sound of it they are just going to give a user the option either during installation or configuration to select the modern UI or the modern equivalent of the classic UI. Why did it take them a couple years to realize that giving customers a choice in the matter was a good thing?

With the 8.1 Update I actually find myself using the modern UI more. It works more smoothly on my PCs than it did before the update. I also find that the Metro tiles and Apps are useful when I'm sitting on the couch using my HTPC to browse the web or check e-mail. Things are legible from across the room without having to play around with zoom settings, though at some point I imagine I will need glasses...
 
MrCaffeineX said:
From the sound of it they are just going to give a user the option either during installation or configuration to select the modern UI or the modern equivalent of the classic UI. Why did it take them a couple years to realize that giving customers a choice in the matter was a good thing?

With the 8.1 Update I actually find myself using the modern UI more. It works more smoothly on my PCs than it did before the update. I also find that the Metro tiles and Apps are useful when I'm sitting on the couch using my HTPC to browse the web or check e-mail. Things are legible from across the room without having to play around with zoom settings, though at some point I imagine I will need glasses...
Click to expand...

Having used both OS's for some time. Windows 8 metro has its place, it's just the lack of choice that doomed it.

My HTPC has win8 as metro is fine on that, plus the decreased boot times coupled with an SSD are awesome.

My work PC has Windows 8 with an aftermarket start. It works good, I disabled as much of metro as I could get away with.

My home PC is still Win7. Windows 8 was good, it was simply that "force change" that hurt it. It runs buttery smooth otherwise. So the optimizations were nice. Had they added back the start menu in 8.1 rather than just the start button (lol), they may have seen more adoption.
 
Ducman69 said:
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that it does consumers a disservice to try and completely reinvent the wheel every two years with a new operating system.

I'd like to see more transparent and evolutionary changes, because people hate haveing to completely relearn how to do various tasks, but like the support and performance upgrades that a new OS can entail.

Quit making us jump through hoops, W7 works fine, just evolve it slightly don't make it a huge chore to find advanced features.
Click to expand...

Yeah. You can't help but notice the constant stagnation and depreciation of features. For no reason at all perfectly good tools steadily lost features and were depreciated. Look at what's happened with Media Player over the years, or Media Center, or the stuff that became 'windows live essentials' want the nifty photo editor tools from Vista's photo viewer? Now you have to install two different photo viewers. Remember Movie Maker? Its a glorified YouTube uploader now. Then Windows 8 happened and they managed to FUBAR the basic WIndows UI. Every time Microsoft tries to roll out something new, big or small, be it things like Plays for Sure or Games for Windows or Metro and the Windows Store they half-ass it and don't follow through or respond to criticism. You see the same thing on the hardware side. From MP3 players to phones to tablets they've failed over and over again because they don't understand what customers want and they don't follow through.

Moving to a more rapid release cycle hasn't helped, look at how long it took them to even acknowledge the need for a start menu. Turning into a 'services' company and moving to subscriptions isn't going to help, either. This is an organizational problem.
 
heatlesssun said:
Not sure what you're thinking, but it looks like Windows 9 will address everything that you're talking about. The Start Menu by default for keyboard and mouse users, the Start Screen by default for tablet users, the option to change the defaults and windowed modern apps if one wants them on desktop.
Click to expand...

Not sure what your smoking, windows 9 beta isnt even out .

must be good stuff you smokin bra! :rolleyes:
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Yeah. You can't help but notice the constant stagnation and depreciation of features. For no reason at all perfectly good tools steadily lost features and were depreciated. Look at what's happened with Media Player over the years, or Media Center, or the stuff that became 'windows live essentials' want the nifty photo editor tools from Vista's photo viewer? Now you have to install two different photo viewers. Remember Movie Maker? Its a glorified YouTube uploader now. Then Windows 8 happened and they managed to FUBAR the basic WIndows UI. Every time Microsoft tries to roll out something new, big or small, be it things like Plays for Sure or Games for Windows or Metro and the Windows Store they half-ass it and don't follow through or respond to criticism. You see the same thing on the hardware side. From MP3 players to phones to tablets they've failed over and over again because they don't understand what customers want and they don't follow through.

Moving to a more rapid release cycle hasn't helped, look at how long it took them to even acknowledge the need for a start menu. Turning into a 'services' company and moving to subscriptions isn't going to help, either. This is an organizational problem.
Click to expand...

The start button on win8 is the least of worries if you try to create a 2nd admin account + 2 more guest accounts on win 8. The horror !

Makes win vista good in comparison ( 1 minute per account)
Win 7 ? piece of cake !

setting up a PPPOE connection on XP/vista/7 is even faster than Win 8 (zomg i have to youtube to find the goddamn settings , wtf? )
 
heatlesssun said:
Not sure what you're thinking, but it looks like Windows 9 will address everything that you're talking about. The Start Menu by default for keyboard and mouse users, the Start Screen by default for tablet users, the option to change the defaults and windowed modern apps if one wants them on desktop.
Click to expand...

my thinking is this, windows 8.1 with metro, I can see why they wanted to do it, ALMOST all home users will only do: pictures, email and surf the internet. so for me windows 8.1 or 8 makes sense for home users. for someone in IT I don't want to go through all the hoops to get to control panel, (just a simple example) so windows 7 works better so rather than having windows 8 you give me windows 7 professional, this will take away metro and leave me with just the grey plane desktop... this gives you the best of both worlds. nope they will force everyone into 1 operating system, to me that is just crazy.
one more thing the article starts off by saying they want to make windows more palatable, what the hell does that mean, they want to tweak window 8 so that it has both metro and desktop, I personally hate metro, even though I hate it I can still see why a home user will like it, one huge tile that says internet explorer, people can't miss it they will never need or know about event viewer. I just hope they don't incorporate both for one operating system. just my personally feelings.
 
Ducman69 said:
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that it does consumers a disservice to try and completely reinvent the wheel every two years with a new operating system.

I'd like to see more transparent and evolutionary changes, because people hate haveing to completely relearn how to do various tasks, but like the support and performance upgrades that a new OS can entail.

Quit making us jump through hoops, W7 works fine, just evolve it slightly don't make it a huge chore to find advanced features.
Click to expand...
:D

Vista release.
XOR != OR said:
Most places are putting 1gig, if not 2, on the desktops now a days.The unjustifiable overhead of introducing a new OS. The thinking is this; XP works fine. Does everything we need it to do. Vista has a brand new interface and introduces quirks of it's own that disrupt software compatibility.
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Met-AL said:
Right on. The benefits of going through the upgrade from XP to Vista is not that great, and that is no fault of Vista, but more of a compliment to XP. XP works fine.

Back when businesses did the upgrading from something like 9x to XP, it was a no brainer. It took alot of trials and alot of testing, but the benefits were huge.
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7 Release
eon said:
i still dont see why people get so emotional of what others do with their own computers. For some like my mom who just looks at pictures and browses the net, XP works fine as it is so no way will I suggest for her to shell out the $100 to upgrade.
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8 Release
mesyn191 said:
Are you kidding? XP works fine still and was a huge improvement over the old Win98/Me OS's in terms of reliability and performance.

Switching to the NT kernel for their consumer OS was one of the best decisions MS ever made.
Click to expand...
 
MrCaffeineX said:
From the sound of it they are just going to give a user the option either during installation or configuration to select the modern UI or the modern equivalent of the classic UI. Why did it take them a couple years to realize that giving customers a choice in the matter was a good thing?

With the 8.1 Update I actually find myself using the modern UI more. It works more smoothly on my PCs than it did before the update. I also find that the Metro tiles and Apps are useful when I'm sitting on the couch using my HTPC to browse the web or check e-mail. Things are legible from across the room without having to play around with zoom settings, though at some point I imagine I will need glasses...
Click to expand...
Yeah i've actually preferred the windows 8 UI for my laptop and HTPC for awhile now, for my desktop i can take it or leave it, i don't see much benefit one way or the other.
 
I finally reclaimed the space Win8 was wasting on my laptop's SSD since I never dual booted into it willingly*. As long as MS keeps its mind on productivity users (corporate or otherwise), I'll look forward to Win9.

* Win8.x's stupid boot selection boots Windows 8 so it can display a Metro boot selection menu, then cycles all the way back to POST if you choose something other than Win 8. Perfect idiocy to sum up many of MS's bad choices in Win8.x.
 
Autopia said:
for someone in IT I don't want to go through all the hoops to get to control panel
Click to expand...

Huh? All you need to do is right click on Metro's start icon and click Control Panel. For me Win8 is actually slightly easier to deal with as far as getting under the hood. Not a huge Microsoft defender, but I actually don't find any issue as far as admin use goes for my purposes.

Though I could see how many basic users who just expect it to work like standard Windows would have a problem, I avoid browsing tiles like the plague personally. The most I ever do in the Metro start menu is type the first few characters of a program title I want to launch and hit enter.
 
Windows 9: Much Ado about a Start Menu.

Seriously people, it's an icon based start menu. It doesn't take any longer for you to start your software than it did before.
 
convexion said:
Huh? All you need to do is right click on Metro's start icon and click Control Panel. For me Win8 is actually slightly easier to deal with as far as getting under the hood. Not a huge Microsoft defender, but I actually don't find any issue as far as admin use goes for my purposes.

Though I could see how many basic users who just expect it to work like standard Windows would have a problem, I avoid browsing tiles like the plague personally. The most I ever do in the Metro start menu is type the first few characters of a program title I want to launch and hit enter.
Click to expand...

Yeah threads like this are just pure flamebait from people who have absolutely 0 to little experience using windows 8. I use Win 7 at work and Win 8 on my desktop at home, zero complaints about it in fact i prefer windows 8 multi monitor support, and boot up times
 
Well I'm pretty much sick of Microsoft in general.

I lost my hard drive when my power supply took a crap. I tried to install Windows 7 Pro Retail and got a message that I don't have a valid product key. i wasn't even trying to do the online activation yet. I called Microsoft and was told that I had used up my activation limit and have to buy another License.

I've never tried Linux before, but now that it's starting to make some headway with software and game compatibility, I may be parting with Microsoft after Win 7.
 
I don't care what Microsoft does anymore. Linux Mint is just fine for the moment and if/when it turns super stupid, I'll just go find another Linux distro that I like. It's not really as if I have to learn anything new now that I understand the fundamentals of the OS so whatever Microsoft, you keep right on doing whatever you do and I'll do something else.
 
xSystemFailurex said:
Windows 9: Much Ado about a Start Menu.

Seriously people, it's an icon based start menu. It doesn't take any longer for you to start your software than it did before.
Click to expand...

Some of us want a choice not to have to deal with said "icon" based start menu..is that really so difficult to wrap your head around? It is about choice and the complete lack of it in Win 8. Like i said earlier, all MS has to do to make Win 9 a success is make it Actually optional, not pretend optional like it is in 8.1.
 
VladDracule said:
Yeah threads like this are just pure flamebait from people who have absolutely 0 to little experience using windows 8. I use Win 7 at work and Win 8 on my desktop at home, zero complaints about it in fact i prefer windows 8 multi monitor support, and boot up times
Click to expand...

Like or dislike Windows, there are a lot of supposedly Windows savvy people that didn't even try to understand even the basics. Hard to find the Control Panel? I can't understand how anyone that claims to be a power user and spends time learning about computing misses something like the Win-x/Start Button right click menu. I've never said Windows 8.x was perfect but if you don't have a lot of preconceived notions about it and take a few minutes to pick up some things, 8.1 Update 1 works well on a desktop as a desktop OS running windowed desktop apps with keyboards and mice. And I'm with you, it's better than 7 with multiple monitors.
 
I just hope they don't do something stupid like bring back Aero.
 
convexion said:
Huh? All you need to do is right click on Metro's start icon and click Control Panel. For me Win8 is actually slightly easier to deal with as far as getting under the hood. Not a huge Microsoft defender, but I actually don't find any issue as far as admin use goes for my purposes.

Though I could see how many basic users who just expect it to work like standard Windows would have a problem, I avoid browsing tiles like the plague personally. The most I ever do in the Metro start menu is type the first few characters of a program title I want to launch and hit enter.
Click to expand...

see? how damned retarded win 8 is?

control panel is and always was a left click on start button task since there was the start button in windows 1.0 till win 7

who the f knows this right clickity shit esp on the metro start ICON ??
 
heatlesssun said:
Like or dislike Windows, there are a lot of supposedly Windows savvy people that didn't even try to understand even the basics. Hard to find the Control Panel? I can't understand how anyone that claims to be a power user and spends time learning about computing misses something like the Win-x/Start Button right click menu. I've never said Windows 8.x was perfect but if you don't have a lot of preconceived notions about it and take a few minutes to pick up some things, 8.1 Update 1 works well on a desktop as a desktop OS running windowed desktop apps with keyboards and mice. And I'm with you, it's better than 7 with multiple monitors.
Click to expand...

with your asinine thinking ... you might as well genetically reengineer pigs that grow bacon on its sides so that you dont have to kill it to get bacon right?

you dont fuck up something that has been working perfectly for at least a decade dude.

its like replacing water with gatorade in that movie related to human stupidity.
 
ktk said:
who the f knows this right clickity shit esp on the metro start ICON ??
Click to expand...

There has long been a right click menu on the Start Button, in 7 it exposes Start Button properties and Windows Explorer. The desktop itself, taskbar and Start Button have had all had right click menus since XP believe.
 
ktk said:
with your asinine thinking ... you might as well genetically reengineer pigs that grow bacon on its sides so that you dont have to kill it to get bacon right?

you dont fuck up something that has been working perfectly for at least a decade dude.

its like replacing water with gatorade in that movie related to human stupidity.
Click to expand...

Huh? The point I was making is that as far as desktop usage goes 8.1 Update 1 isn't that different from 7.
 
Try teaching all the dumbass new "shortcuts" win win8 to say

X amount of people who are ALREADY PROFICIENT IN WINDOWS 95/7/vista

Its a HR/ it admin nightmare mind you.

Say you have 10 family members using computers on win8...

thats ALOT of time you are not getting back trying to educate your immediate family.

and that doesnt include downtime from asking you forgotten shortcuts win win8

which they would have already have known since windows 95...

Wipe your own shit microsoft ! This gets personal real quick if you have multiple coms running different OS's.

Im not gonna pay you to slave myself over an already known problem on the scale of time and education.

PS. the big companies know this too. no way in hell they migrating over to win8.
 
heatlesssun said:
Huh? The point I was making is that as far as desktop usage goes 8.1 Update 1 isn't that different from 7.
Click to expand...

Huh? im talking bout control panel / deep level access and controls , u dense or something?

My household has Vista 7 AND 8

I DO ALL THE MAINTENANCE.

vista is just slightly buggy and unoptimized after all the updates.

Win7 is near perfection AFAIK.

Win 8 is a total PITA to work with , everything is NEW , i have to google and youtube everything to relearn and get pissed off when it doesnt work properly because its buggy as its NEW.
 
heatlesssun said:
Not sure what you're thinking, but it looks like Windows 9 will address everything that you're talking about. The Start Menu by default for keyboard and mouse users, the Start Screen by default for tablet users, the option to change the defaults and windowed modern apps if one wants them on desktop.
Click to expand...

If I could just have gotten little things like the corsair link software to work with windows 8 I would have tried to stick it out a bit longer but that did it for me. I love 7 especially after the hot-fixes and core unparking is done.
 
heatlesssun said:
Again, just not that different between 8.1 Update 1 and 7 overall.
Click to expand...

1) You must be high

2) you clearly dont work at all in multi OS enviromnents

3)you have no compassion for IT admins who have to work at home too

Win7 doesnt have tiles and never will.

Win8's modern UI is a PITA when it pops out unexpectedly.

So what do you do when your DAD who is an ENGINEER since the DOS days says that win8 is unusable?

dad using display win8 laptop "how do you use this?"

do you

1) update it to win8.1? AND educate your old man for 30 mins ?

2) slipstream win7 and make him very happy as his last laptop which he has no problems using is also win7 ???

Im guessin you must be the dumbass who chooses option 1
 
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