RAMBLE ALERT: It really bothers me when we get complacent and assume things should stay the way they are...just because. I've still never bought a Mac, but I'll be the first to tell you Windows has always been absolutely horrible from a user perspective.
WHAT?
1) I used to have to do a plethora of admin stuff for a smaller company (actually, the company was quite large, but our sub company of the parent company was quite a bit smaller (700 workstations, 50-60 servers) with a LOT of legacy/old applications. In my 7 years of being there, I can't recall many times where a Microsoft update broke one of our apps, and we had to go through and pull said update. The only things that come to mind are vendors refusing to support Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9, or 10. There was one vendor that 'forced' us to keep IE6 around for a LONG time.
Windows Vista/7/8 breaks a LOT of business apps that only run correctly on XP. I'm not talking about Windows Update breaking things (though it does happen, it's much less likely). Another point I made was that 64-bit Windows won't encapsulate 32-bit drivers, making it impossible to use many pieces of hardware. Like us, Microsoft software engineers own computers and peripherals. They don't seem to mind that there's no technical reason their own hardware with 32-bit drivers can't work with a 64-bit OS. I guess each team member thinks of a limitation as someone else's responsibility and they just accept it (just as the rest of us are forced to do). This kind of ignorance is what's killing Microsoft.
The framework for drivers has needed better definitions and restrictions for a long time. For example, I always sort Device Manager "by connection" and I could never understand why printers didn't appear there at all. What's so #$^$ing special about printers versus other classes of hardware? I think printers finally
do show in the Device Manager with Windows 8, but I'm not sure because I don't have a locally-attached USB printer. If you can even figure out how to get to the old school "Printers" folder in Windows 8 (very difficult for most users), you'll notice this ridiculous mess: There are like 10 places that you can end-up while looking for Printer Properties (trying to find the one with the option to print a test page). There is even a "Properties" pages that contain another "Properties" button, leading to another "Properties" page...ugh! On top of that, options worded 30 different ways that take you to just 4 or 5 different screens. It's a convoluted disaster.
Why can't Windows let me assign a custom name/description to devices and USB controllers in the Device Manager? Just being able to name USB controllers would be a HUGE help for me. Examples: "Front," "Internal Header," "Back 2.0," "Back 3.0," "Back (red, always on)," "External Hub (in monitor)."
Here's another thing users have absolutely NEEDED since the Win9x days:
Windows Update should allow drivers and software to register their own update server that delivers update notifications in a lightweight way. Basically, it would be like having the Windows Update service subscribe to third-party RSS feeds with version information and changelogs. Just this one thing would have improved the whole Windows experience TREMENDOUSLY. It's so simple. I can't explain why they wouldn't have done this over a decade ago. The only explanation I can come up with is: Ignorance.
3) Backwards compatibility is not something that many get right. Java? We had several Java based applications that all required a specific version (down to the sub version) and making two Java apps work for the same system was frequently a PITA. Couple that with the fact that Java by default wants to update itself, and there is a LOT you have to do to keep those apps from breaking. Far more than I have ever seen from anything from Microsoft.
At this point, it's easier to get your XP stuff running in Parallels on a completely different platform. That's just unacceptable. Microsoft should be able to handle legacy compatibility better than any third party. The "XP Mode" virtualization feature needs massive improvement. I've tried to use it for a few different things and, each time, it simply failed to do what it was supposed to do. For example, the way it handles USB devices prevents me from using my Adaptec GameBridge, which works perfectly with other XP virtualization software. Microsoft doesn't give a shit and that's why they deserve to lose market share.
Basically, this is Microsoft's problem when it comes to home users: If Windows breaks compatibility anyway, what's stopping you from getting a Mac now?
With tablets and mobile devices, this is also beginning to apply to the workplace.
4) As for sandboxing apps, that's not really the issue. The issue is what the application uses to work. Is it Java? Is it Flash? Is it .Net? Is it? You can sandbox an app all you want, but the problem that hits the surface is a shared component of the OS. Sandboxing the app is going to do nothing to prevent app problems if you update Java, unless the developer can build Java into the app installer that is specifically available for the application and not a shared component.
You're not seeing the picture from a user perspective. The operating system is meant to be a USER interface for the computer, but Windows lefts software do whatever-the-#$% it wants to do without giving the USER the absolute control we need.
I'm just talking about a sandboxed software architecture to make sure the user and OS control things they previously had little-to-no control over. A piece of software should be an object.
Dump the current mess into an isolated compatibility environment and stop messing with it.
If an application was treated like an object, the OS would handle the install/uninstall. An app could not leave files wherever-it-wants all over your hard drive and leave settings wherever-it-wants in your registry. It would never, ever associate file types...and only the user could do that. All related settings and files should be tracked the the OS (mostly in one place). When deleting an app, the OS would ask the user if the app's preferences and user data should be retained or deleted. If you want to delete 10 apps, you simply delete them. As it currently is, you have to go through *minimum* 10 uninstall processes (probably more) that can be completely different. Many will force you to restart before you can move on to uninstall the next one. Often, a single install results in multiple entries in the installed programs list. Unscrupulous software vendors will still leave other things behind after "uninstalling" the app that put it there. Some unscrupulous apps might not even register to appear in the list of installed software at all. They often have vague names that don't obviously associate them with each other (or with the main application they came bundled with). So un-doing a software install completely might require you to remove 7 things with vague, unrelated names; requiring the user to resume after each required system restart. If you're a busy person, good luck getting through that before something interrupts you and you have to leave it half-done. Good luck remembering what those other things had been associated with. Each uninstall process can be completely different. Even legitimate software pops-up surveys and promotions during the uninstall process. Why are applications allowed to perform the uninstall process? This should be handled by the operating system.
"But...but...package dependencies!" - Software dependencies #$%^ SUCK! iOS phones and tablets have severely limited memory, storage, and processing capabilities compared with desktop PCs, but they do just fine without requiring dependency packages that get updated separately and break things.
If you absolutely must have software dependencies, implement them in an object-oriented way that gives the user complete control. Individual apps can be associated/disassociated by the user. Multiple versions of a dependency framework can co-exist so apps don't break when one app updates to a new version of [X] dependency. The user can reset/initialize the settings for the dependency (and individual applications).
Microsoft kinda/sorta does modular software with the Modern UI, but it's something I've wanted for
all desktop apps since long before the advent of multi-touch.
... I don't buy this as a MS problem. They're doing what they can to help on their side. Compatibility mode in the new browsers has made supporting legacy sites a breeze.
The handful of cases where I've needed to use compatibility mode, the results were still problematic or completely unsuccessful. This
definitely needed improvement.
But for the life of me, his discussion is about a 13 year old operating system, and we're talking about Microsoft moving to fast? Holy crap. I'd say that most people could move to Windows 7 after it's been out a year and realize that it was the one OS that was the "new" XP. The face of most business workstations. I can see the metro-ness being a turnoff in Windows 8, but frankly, the functionality is similar to Windows 7. There is no reason for companies to hold back on updating their workstation platforms for 13 years. 5-7, sure. 13? What dafuq?
If Windows (or any OS) was my personal pet project, I wouldn't arbitrarily restrict features and I would want to continuously improve it to be as good as it could be. Microsoft clearly doesn't want Windows to be as good as it can be. There shouldn't be completely separate versions of Windows. It should be continuously updated and improved. The core would be as light as it ever was and would still run on a 1995 system. The "bloat" we have come to expect would be optional components, so there would still be only 1 "Windows." Licensing should still exist because Microsoft needs to generate profit and fund development. A license should merely give you a digital ID that authorizes the system to use online services like Windows Update (and, now, Microsoft Account / SkyDrive / etc). The license would also allow you to activate other optional components, such as Exchange Server / IIS / etc.
In the Win9x days, I fantasized for years about making my own open-source Windows-compatible OS to show Microsoft how it should be done (specifically, the way application software is handled). I saw the value of an online App Store 10+ years before it started earning billions of dollars for Apple. Microsoft didn't do it (correctly) until it was way too late. If I had the free time to study and reverse engineer Windows way back then, I would have dedicated myself to reverse-engineering it to make an alternative. Now, Windows is a huge mess and no open-source OS could ever hope to thoroughly reverse-engineer it.
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