Same thing happens in Windows 7 if you don't run TS with Admin rights or UAC off... "Right click, proprties:compatability:run this program as administrator"
The Windows 8 Thread
- Thread starter MR.B
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Soldato
Android will naturally become the Symbian replacement in a few years. It basically inherited the place that Symbian had in the first place, that's why it's on all the bargain basement priced phones. It currently extends upwards into a few premium priced phones too, but this will eventually end when it begins to get left behind in the war between Apple and Microsoft.
There's nothing wrong with WinPhone7. Many commentators say its actually the best phone OS out there. What Microsoft keeps getting wrong in the marketing. And I'm still not convinced "Nokia" is the brand it once was. I'd rather have a Xbox branded phone than a Nokia...
Soldato
If customers can have the "full meal ticket" at a substantially lower price than an iPad, where do you think the iPad is going to end up?
Apple needs to be extremely careful as history suggests if things are tight they always seem happy to recluse back into their comfort zone of only targeting the premium price bracket. They seem to shy away from doing the "hard sell" to the masses, even when presented with the opportunity. It's happening right now!
The iPad has only shifted ~40mil units in its life because 1) it's priced ridiculously high 2) it isn't a feature complete "tablet PC", and 3) people (correctly) associate it as being nothing but a large iPhone device, and a commodity.
Soldato
40m is a lot and it is a premium device. Not sure it can scaled like a ipod. Ive always thought Apple was a luxury brand
Nokia are recognised by 70 years olds, boxes of x not so much. The bias in the west is to a population getting older.
Nokia are recognised by 70 years olds, boxes of x not so much. The bias in the west is to a population getting older.
Soldato
Nokia killed their brand systematically for several years though. It is a shell of its former self.
Xbox however is a consumer brand that fronts Microsoft to make their products appealing to consumers. It is Microsoft's "decorporatised" brand.
Xbox however is a consumer brand that fronts Microsoft to make their products appealing to consumers. It is Microsoft's "decorporatised" brand.
Apple could lower the prices but they haven't because they don't need to. Ask any of their competitors on creating a low price device with a fantastic ecosystem - you can't, because none exist.
You make 40 million seem like a non achievement in a category that they reinvigorated and actually made popular.
Apple don't need to follow other companies because that's not how the world works. The world of tablets will be more hetergeneous than the PC.
Remember before the iPad came out and analysts predicted it would cost $999, only for Apple to release it at half the price? Doesn't matter, because for some it'll always be too expensive.
The bigger issue is Android. Just what can Google do when someone is standing in a store and sees an iPad and a WOA device? I'm not convinced anyone will care for a third option.
Soldato
These are the same "analysts" that are already trying to write off Win8 tablets as a flop. They weren't worth listening to back then and they aren't worth listening to now.
Android is architecturally flawed and it will fall by the wayside sooner rather than later IMO.
iOS is also flawed as a tablet OS and Apple will need to make sweeping changes to it in order to compete with Win8. Or bring OSX to the iPad. Either solution will do. But I still think Win8 will win out in the end for a host of other reasons. Such as USB hardware support especially for Scanners/Printers/Cameras, DirectX, better SDKs, better programming language options, and homogeneous software covering Win8, WOA, Xbox vNext, WinPhone vNext.
Android is architecturally flawed and it will fall by the wayside sooner rather than later IMO.
iOS is also flawed as a tablet OS and Apple will need to make sweeping changes to it in order to compete with Win8. Or bring OSX to the iPad. Either solution will do. But I still think Win8 will win out in the end for a host of other reasons. Such as USB hardware support especially for Scanners/Printers/Cameras, DirectX, better SDKs, better programming language options, and homogeneous software covering Win8, WOA, Xbox vNext, WinPhone vNext.
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I know. But it wasn't just them that had Apple set for some ridiculous price that would have prevented the iPad from ever getting the breadth of sales it has now. I'm sure even the most hardened of Apple fans didn't see that price coming.
OS X as we know it will not be coming to the iPad and it shouldn't. It isn't touch optimised, like the desktop on WOA devices. I'd love for WOA devices to have been metro only, I can see confusion looming when people buy one, see the desktop only to find they can install nothing into it. Yes, we know it's only there as a legacy system and to provide an environment for a full copy of Office to run but we can't expect regular people to know that. While it also exists for Windows Explorer, I'd say it's more possible to make that metro style than a full copy of Office.
Much like iOS, Metro apps don't have UI's that scale well for full featured apps, so I guess Microsoft didn't want to provide a watered down version of Office.
I do look forward to seeing how Microsoft handle the marketing of the differing architectures for Windows 8 in an effort to avoid such confusion.
What the heck? Reading that, I felt like I'd entered a reality distortion field where the iPad was considered a commercial failure rather than a great success! 40 million is really quite a lot, considering that the iPad has been around less than two years, and reinvigorated a dead market.
1) The iPad is priced competitively. Which competitor has been able to deliver a tablet at an equivalent price to the iPad, with parity in terms of design, feature set and ease of use? None.
2) The iPad has 80%+ of the tablet market. A large majority of the tablet demographic doesn't give a hoot that the iPad isn't a fully-featured PC. Surely the flaw in your theory is that there are plenty of fully-featured tablet PCs around, and every single one is a miserable commercial failure compared to the iPad.
The tablet has been accepted as a "post-PC" device and as a commodity. Very few people want a tablet which is as fully-featured as a traditional PC. That has already been tried without success. The market is littered with failed Windows tablets.
Even Microsoft realises this now - hence why the Metro UI is going front and centre on Windows 8. The point of Metro is that it'll make a Windows tablet feel more like an 'appliance' and less like a PC with a traditional operating system. The fact that on ARM devices, third-party apps will only be available on Metro, not the traditional desktop is a pretty clear indicator that Microsoft sees W8 tablets as having interaction paradigms a lot more like an iPad than a 'feature complete tablet PC'.
The Windows 8 tablets which will compete with the iPad won't be tablet PCs. They'll just be tablets. Even a company as traditionally conservative as Microsoft can see that the writing is on the wall for the 'tablet PC'.
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Soldato
In terms of what Windows 8 will do in this market, the iPad is a minor player at the least or a failure at worst. Microsoft is looking for around 50mil units in the first year alone, and that's just tablet PCs not W8 desktops. And over 3 years they're looking for the tablet form factor to account for a quarter of their W8 licenses. And remember that W7 has sold 450mil licenses and counting. Microsoft is also betting that many people will own both a W8 desktop PC *and* a W8 tablet device. So shifting two licenses per user, in some cases. As W8 tablets gain momentum (and applications) this effect will of course cool off, as more and more casual computer users trade in their laptop for a W8 tablet PC instead.
The point I was making (if it wasn't clear enough) is that the iPad will be considered woefully uncompetitive as soon as the Windows 8's WOA tablets hit the market.
You're falling into the Apple-designated trap of defining a tablet PC in the same bracket as the iPad. This is incorrect. The iPad is a tablet device or tablet prototype, but not a tablet PC. A tablet PC is the real McCoy. And no I'm not referring to the Windows Explorer desktop here, not at all.
The main complaint everyone had on the iPad launch day was that it was nothing more than a large iPhone. I still hear people today make similar comments. It is definitely a big issue for people. They find it hard to justify spending 500 quid on something that is essentially an iPhone with a bigger screen.
They absolutely will be tablet PCs. And people absolutely do want them. The Windows brand is very very strong.
Metro is simply a touch-first next generation Explorer shell. Having that instead of the traditional Explorer does not preclude it from being a tablet PC. Windows is heading in a new direction. Hundreds of thousands of applications will be redesigned with a Metro user interface. Even Office will, one day, become a set of Metro applications.
Being a tablet PC in terms of definition is about having a capability and set of underlying functionality that is several orders of magnitude greater than just a tablet device (ala iPad, Android etc). Windows 8 will have development tools, SDKs, frameworks that rival platforms can only dream of. DirectX will mean that next generation games will be designed with "touch and sense" play in mind. I'm not talking about crappy little Angry Birds games either. I'm talking about proper blockbuster games built on engines from the likes of id games, Epic Games, etc. I'm also talking about "simple" things that users want to do from even their iPad today: things like being able to scan documents, print documents, modify documents. These all sound simple to solve for the iPad but they're really not:
- it has no USB connectivity
- it has no driver models for printers or scanners or digital cameras
- its touch-first GUI, whilst revolutionary at the time, is now out of date and doesn't scale well to document editing.
- it has no filesystem, storing user-edited documents is simply not possible at the moment.
These are big architectural issues that reflect greatly on iOS. And this is why, as I have been saying, iOS has a limited shelf life. At some point Apple will need to either add support for all those things above to it, or, more realistically, bring OSX (together with a iOS-like touch-first GUI, of course) to the iPad.
There are a lot of doom-sayers about Windows 8 on tablets. But the fact is that these people (or research organisations) do not yet realise the full potential of the tablet form factor. They think that what we see today is the full extent of the market. They are thinking "inside the box" that the Apple iPad represents. Which is a small box. Windows 8 on tablets presents a far larger capability. Businesses for example will be rewriting their line-of-business applications to be Metro apps. In offices all over the world, people will carry their tablet device wherever they go. Just like the scientist guy remarking "wow that's a lovely brain!" whilst looking at his tablet PC in the Avatar movie. It was Avatar's "Minority Report" moment.
Mobile working is here to stay and it is still in its primordial stage! Windows 8 will unleash mobile working. Large full scale business applications will be developed upon Metro.
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Soldato
I'm not a hardened Apple fan and I totally saw the price coming? Apple was talking for years about bringing a "net book" (remember those?) competitor to the market. So of course it was going to adopt a similar pricing strategy to net books. Alas it was basically £100 more expensive than a decent net book at the time.
Why do people assume I am being a complete idiot when I say "bring OSX to the iPad". I'm not saying they should bring the mouse-optimised GUI with it! I thought that was so obvious that I didn't even feel the need to mention it!
It's about bringing the core functionality, the kernel, the driver model etc, the commonality, the SDKs. The god damn GUI would have course not be ported across. That would need to be redesigned to take the best elements out of iOS and the best elements of Metro.
It's currently looking like a small risk bringing the Explorer desktop to WOA. But I am certain it will be a lot cleaner and elegant than people first expected. It certainly won't be a full featured desktop either. I doubt it will even have a task bar or start menu, for example. It may run each application in a different logon session also, which then translate back to being a Metro tile per session/application on the Metro HUD. And it may possibly prevent things like minimise and maximise etc, so as to ensure the application is always full-screen.
The reason Office isn't Metro yet is because Microsoft wants to do it right. I wouldn't jump the conclusion that Metro "doesn't scale well for full featured apps". That totally remains to be seen. What is clear is that Microsoft intends for Metro to be the Explorer of the future. So of course, over time at the least, it will need to support full featured apps. There is a lot of innovation going on at the moment to find ways to bring complex UI concepts to touch-first user experiences. Everything is possible, so you shouldn't be so negative!
Me too. I think Service Packs will take on a new meaning for Windows 8. I believe that Microsoft will start doing yearly service packs in an effort to compete with the release cycle seen on rival platforms such as iOS.
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I'd just like to point out that while some news sites are making out that the desktop on WOA does not support 3rd party apps. MS have only said existing x86/64 desktop apps cant be recompiled, ported or emulated. Nowhere have they said new desktop software for WOA can not be created from scratch using new dev tools.
Even if thats the case though, theres always Intels new x86 Atom based SoC which is just as power efficient as ARM SoC's (finally) and should be in tablets just as small and thin. But a WOA tablet will still be far more capable than an iPad, while also remaining easier to use IMO. I dont think a UI could really get much easier and more user friendly than Metro. It also supports far more programming languages than iOS. Apps can also interface with 3rd party servers and services, and WOA devices should still support the millions of existing PC peripherals (as long as they work with the build in Windows drivers, which many do including things like USB sticks, external hard drives, mice, keyboards).
Another thing iOS cant even do is run different web browsers... all browser apps on iOS are simple UI shells. They either use a UI shell over the native WebKit renderer (like Dolphin) or they render off-device and send an image of the webpage (like Opera Mini). There are no other browsers that actually run on iOS.
Which reminds me, Firefox is coming to Metro.
Even if thats the case though, theres always Intels new x86 Atom based SoC which is just as power efficient as ARM SoC's (finally) and should be in tablets just as small and thin. But a WOA tablet will still be far more capable than an iPad, while also remaining easier to use IMO. I dont think a UI could really get much easier and more user friendly than Metro. It also supports far more programming languages than iOS. Apps can also interface with 3rd party servers and services, and WOA devices should still support the millions of existing PC peripherals (as long as they work with the build in Windows drivers, which many do including things like USB sticks, external hard drives, mice, keyboards).
Another thing iOS cant even do is run different web browsers... all browser apps on iOS are simple UI shells. They either use a UI shell over the native WebKit renderer (like Dolphin) or they render off-device and send an image of the webpage (like Opera Mini). There are no other browsers that actually run on iOS.
Which reminds me, Firefox is coming to Metro.
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Soldato
Ooh that's a nice post MR.B. Finally someone else that actually knows what they're talking about 
Didn't know about the Firefox for Metro thing. I can't stand Firefox but can accept that this is a big deal for a lot of people. Next stop... Chrome!
Didn't know about the Firefox for Metro thing. I can't stand Firefox but can accept that this is a big deal for a lot of people. Next stop... Chrome!
Associate
Sigh. If only creative were supporting X-fi drivers for the beta on release. I'd love to give Win8 a try.
Permabanned
Windows 8 is looking more and more crap the more i hear about it. I read an article in the newspapers about how tablets are causing major SSRI issues with people. I don't realy think that tablets are viable for long term use and end up being a glorified remote control. Desktop pcs are making a big come back and are not going anywhere. So it is time for MS to get their **** together and get off the apple band wagon.
Associate
Windows 8 is looking more and more awesome the more I hear about it. Can't wait.
Yep. You'll be able to use it the same as Win 7, the classic desktop is still there and works mostly the same. But it no longer has a Start menu any more, Metro replaces that as well as doubles up as the main interface for touch devices. You can switch between desktop and Metro using the Windows key or by moving the mouse to the bottom left of the task bar.
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