Day 2: Windows 8 not ready for the masses
Posted By Mike Bender / 3rd March 2012
I have to say that I was very excited to finally get a chance to play with the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview bits this past week. I pulled down the ISO the morning of the release and installed it on an old Vista laptop I had. The install went great and the machine performed surprisingly good. So I thought why not running a little test with my wife as my subject. So that is what I have been doing.
After loading this machine I took her old laptop away and told her to use the new one. I have been observing her use of Windows 8 as she attempts to use it in the normal manner she used her old Windows XP machine. I am actually quite amazed at the shear level of frustration she has had.
She first had an issue with one of the websites she uses frequently for creating photo books. Yes it is has a flash based editor. Once I got her going in the desktop mode she was fine for a short period of time. Then I began hearing grumblings of issues browsing our network. We quickly resolved these and were on to the next round of issues such as frequent hangs in the flash application she is using.
Today’s final failure was when she wanted to pull some photos off of her iPhone. We went to Apple’s website, downloaded iTunes and began the install process. Everything was going smoothly and then bam the installer just quit installing. It remained in the state for well over 5 minutes before she clicked cancel. Doing so had no effect so she then attempted to restart the machine. It sat on the logging out screen for several more minutes until finally a hard reset was done.
Seeing her frustrations too date leads me to believe that Windows 8 in its currently released state is not ready for the masses. This mixture of Metro and desktop mode is quite confusing to the average user and I believe is a major flaw that needs to be addressed before the final bits are RTM’d.
I plan on continuing to watch her usage until she finally tells me to give her old laptop back.
today and enjoy the feeling of touch and Windows 8.
