And Lo, my Windows 10 upgrade reminder popped up today.

[Pattern Ghost]

They should have fired the person who designed Metro back when she came up with the Office ribbon.

[Nolgroth]

I might get a copy with a new machine. I got to play around with it for a wee bit. Seems a decent interface but I am not seeing anything that makes me want to rush out and upgrade. I actually tried to upgrade but too many little warnings kept me from pulling the trigger. So I researched how to remove the upgrade messages entirely instead. With my eventual new machine, I will try it out.

[Nolgroth]

They should have fired the person who designed Metro back when she came up with the Office ribbon.

 

Whereas I think the Office ribbon is the best thing to come around since WYSIWYG. It is very intuitive for me and, as stupid as this sounds, is more attractive than the 20 year old Windows default.

[Pattern Ghost]

True. UI preferences are largely a matter of taste, and it may be a bit better organized these days. I used to find it completely unintuitive, but now it's only mostly unintuitive.

[Scott Baker]

UI preferences are largely a matter of taste.

And sometimes adaptability to change. Change is hard, Rather than showing a perceived weakness that the change is hard to understand or that it just doesn't gel with a person, they often then express their preference or state that something, "worked better before." 

 

This can also be influenced by a person's comfort level with computers/technology.

 

I'm not saying this is you Pattern Ghost, or an absolute. Just another facet. I deal with this sort of stuff for a living, and see these things even from the so-called "experts" in the organization.

[Pattern Ghost]

My complaints about the UI design of the ribbon aren't simple reluctance to change. I just don't like the design. I don't want to sidetrack the thread by cataloging the things I don't like about it, though, as that'd also require me opening an Office app and digging around in the ribbon to do so.

 

As far as reluctance to change goes, I think you're dead on. People learn a certain way of doing things. They learn certain UI conventions. When you break those conventions or change them drastically, it annoys the hell out of experienced people, even though testing may show that new users find the changes more intuitive or faster to learn.

 

My gripes with the ribbon aren't along those lines, though, but more of a personal preference in the arrangement of things, along with a dislike for the aesthetics of the ribbon. Once you get used to it, it's not terrible, at least as of Office 2010. I think they may have tweaked it a bit since the first iteration. Metro (and the assumption that it should be the default UI for desktop and laptop computers without touchscreens) was a far worse misstep IMO.

[Lawnmower Boy]

 

As far as reluctance to change goes, I think you're dead on. People learn a certain way of doing things. They learn certain UI conventions. When you break those conventions or change them drastically, it annoys the hell out of experienced people, even though testing may show that new users find the changes more intuitive or faster to learn.

 

 

So, the company (at the merchandising level), is prone to sending stock to the stores in distributions. Traditionally, this is to "build sales," but no-one says that with a straight face. The stores want to minimise inventory for storage reasons and because of financials, and merchandising tends to assume that we're being lazy, and sending us more stuff will encourage us to get off our duffs and get it out the door. 

 

..Er, actually, that would be "building sales," wouldn't it? Okay, forget I said anything about that.

 

Anyway, each week, we build new merchandising displays, and get distributions of stock to support them. Since our stores are all different shapes and sizes, the number of displays we build varies, and the distributions are at least nominally geared to that. 

 

"Nominally," in this case, means that they are not. Fortunately, we can cancel these allocations. But, of course, for reasons outlined above, merchandising doesn't want that. Not that it would do anything about that, because that would be wrong. 

 

Which brings me to a GUI. You see, if we want to find out what we're getting, so that we can cancel it, we have to look on the computers. Fine, you are saying: a Word file would be fine. An Excel file, at a pinch. But, no. What we have is a proprietary system. You look at the "merchandising notes" to find out which "allocation table" is assigned to which display. You open up a special portal. (The apps do not play well with Windows, so of course there's no nonsense with opening up two windows at the same time.) You type the number of the allocation table in the search window. You wait for the programme to run a search through the allocation tables. it, finally, displays the table. Which may well be wrong, because no-one at the other side understands how to use this proprietary software. Silly people.

 

Or, that's how it worked last week. This week, the GUI has been upgraded. Now, you can type the number of an allocation table in the search window, and it will bring up a "relevant items" search return, consisting of all of the allocation tables. Not all the allocation tables assigned this week, mind you, but all the legal allocation numbers that can be assigned, many of which are null sets. (It's a five digit code, with the lowest number being 203, and the lowest assigned usually in the 80,000s, in case you were wondering.) Then you can scroll through the list from #203 until you get to, say, 83406. I think. The scrolling doesn't seem to be enabled in the current version of the GUI, but you could, if there were a control that allowed scrolling. I don't know. There could be, but I couldn't find it.

 

Or you can enter the allocation table number in the search box at the top of the related items window, and search for it again. I think. I didn't get any results from doing this, so I might be wrong, or all the tables I searched for might have been either actual null sets, or mistakenly labelled as such. Maybe it's not actually a search window? It has tiny little "binocular" tooltips to click. That's intuitive for "search," right?

 

Which is why, a week before Canadian Thanksgiving, I got to order Stovetop stuffing blind, not knowing how much was going to be distributed. None? 46? In the end, I ordered 20, the invoice said we were getting 46, or a 26 case distribution, and 30 actually came in. 

 

The fact that we were shorted 16 cases of stuffing isn't the GUI's fault in itself, but the fact that we can't plan for Thanksgiving is. Or, rather, it's the fault of the IT guys who upgraded the GUI. Or of the people who were supposed to tell us how it works now. Except that I'll bet no-one except the IT guys knows that. They probably sent someone an email explaining their changes, and it is either sitting unread, or has been read but not disseminated, because whoever is responsible hasn't had the time, or didn't understand it. 

 

See? This is why you don't screw around with your GUI for no good reason.

[Enforcer84]

if your IT guys are doing development work in addition to their other duties that's probably where you're screwed if your company is bigger than a few stores. 

[Grailknight]

The worst and most common mistake I've see in getting new interface portals is not showing the developers the old portals. You get something designed from bottom up instead of keeping what worked with improvements.

[Pattern Ghost]

I think that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is something a lot of software companies could learn.

[Markdoc]

I think that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is something a lot of software companies could learn.

The problem, though, is that software companies gotta sell new stuff, and software designers gotta design new stuff, otherwise they both go bust.

 

There's a valuable lesson in the saga of Cricket Software. Back in the 90's, they sold a graphing program that crushed the products offered by bigger competitors. It was clean, swift, intuitive and did a great job. Everybody I knew in biomedicine used it - across multiple institutes, across multiple continents. It was basically the defacto standard. But of course there was a catch. Once everyone had bought a copy, the market was saturated. Cricket Graph 1 apparently sold like gangbusters. The company bulked up, hired some new developers, and produced version 2, which buried the clean, fast interface under layers of added features that nobody actually wanted. Version 2 sold poorly. The company laid a lot of developers off. Then, since adding lots of features worked so well last time, in version 3 they added even more unwanted features, and made it buggy and unstable as well. Cricket Graph 3 basically sold no copies and the company folded.

 

Their problem was that they got it right the first time and no obvious flaws existed to be easily fixed for an upgrade.

 

Cheers, Mark

[Pattern Ghost]

Yep, and Microsoft is the poster child. MS Office has had so much feature creep it's insane. Probably beats Windows in that department. 

[Old Man]

Fortunately for Microsoft, original versions of Office were so buggy and unstable that incremental improvements in reliability over the years could justify the constant expenditures.  I'm seriously considering forcing our merchandising department to upgrade to 2013 since the entire department runs on huge elaborate Excel spreadsheets that get corrupted all the time.

[Cancer]

IMO, Excel peaked in utility back about 2000. It did things I wanted (histograms!) out of the box without add-ons, which is no longer true. It did some things nobody seems to have wanted that I found amusing (Fourier transforms? really? A Fourier transform package that can't read its own output? That almost defines Utter Fail.*)

 

My suspicion is that changes to Office are driven by one thing: the need to sustain revenues for M$ Training Services. Only if things change can they sustain income on their training courses.

 

So, I keep stable, ancient versions of Excel at home on machines that will never again be connected to the internet, and otherwise I use the updated versions minimally. It's just version churn for extraction-of-money-via-multiple-channels.

 

---

*If you don't know what Fourier Transforms are, one of their salient features is that it undoes itself. That means, you hand it data, and it gives you the transform. Then if you re-transform the transform, you should get your original data back. There are other features that make for easy checking as well, but this one is so crucial and so obvious that everyone does this first: when they first get ready to try using a Fourier transform utility, they transform something, then run the utility again on what came out of the first run, and see how that compares to the original data set. Lots of times, you use Fourier transforms to do things that are much simpler in the Fourier domain, which means (again) you create the transform, do whatever manipulation you need, and then transform that result.

 

So, when a Fourier transform routine can't read its own output, it's like a bicycle where the pedals are not actually connected to the wheels and to make it go you have to get off and push.

[Pattern Ghost]

Fortunately for Microsoft, original versions of Office were so buggy and unstable that incremental improvements in reliability over the years could justify the constant expenditures.  I'm seriously considering forcing our merchandising department to upgrade to 2013 since the entire department runs on huge elaborate Excel spreadsheets that get corrupted all the time.

 

I did an upgrade project at The Gap's corporate HQ one time. They had an entire half a floor of their building dedicated to actuaries running multiple HUGE (I forget the file sizes, but they were monstrous, loaded with macros, and tons of data, plus Excel files were pretty bloated anyway at the time) spreadsheets linked together to determine product mixes for each store. I think they were on Office 95 at the time. I'm frankly surprised they got any work done.

[FrankL]

10-14 years ago I worked for a place that had a policy of don't touch the VBA macro unless you wrote it. I was an editor there, but understood the policy. I finally heard how it came to be. Seems one department had a macro written by one of their employees. It ran once a week and did exactly what they needed it to do. Run time, 5-10 minutes. He left. A couple of times, he was called in as a consultant to fix it because someone had tried to improve the macro. Finally, he said, "This is the last time. I refuse to fix this macro anymore."

 

Sometime later, he gets a phone call. A new employee had tried to improve the macro again. It was now completely inoperable. The former coder stood by his promise and did not come back to fix it. The newbie had not made a backup of it nor had anyone else over the years.

 

The department had to hire two full-time employees to do what this macro did in 5 minutes once a week.

[Cancer]

"Don't mess with the wom-wom."

[tkdguy]

Looks like Microsoft keeps trying to get you to install KB3035583, which is a reminder to install Windows 10. It's not important, but it's tagged that way. Make sure you check your updates before downloading and installing them. I've already turned off automatic updates. I was thinking of turning it back on, but not anymore.

 

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2989896/microsoft-windows/windows-snooping-and-nagging-patches-return-kb-3035583-kb-2952664.html

[Christopher]

Anyone else going to adopt early? 

I haven't been using the trials which is probably wrong since people actually ask my opinion on these things

I have a virtual machine with a unlicensed copy running (that is not an issue ever since that time Vista got a bit too agressive with detecting illegal copies).

That is about as close as I let the thing to my Hardware.

 

I'm going to wait until some reviews are in, but I did take advantage of the free upgrade offer. I can always decline to actually change over.

Okay, here is what happened if you registerd for a free Upgrade:

First Microsoft will check if most of the drivers for your computer are avalible. No point upgrading if you got no GPU driver afterwards.

 

Once that happens, the Upgrade will appear amongs the Windows Update Downloads. If you want to opt out of it, you have to uncheck it now (and possibly set it to never appear). If you don't you have Windows 10 after the next proper boot.

 

You can within one month decide to roll back to your previous version. The Windows installer has been modified to save a copy of your old windwos for just this situation.

I am note quite sure what happens with your original licesne if you don't. I would alsume you loose your original License of Windows 7, if they could make that happen legally. I don't think they can however.

In either case effortless rollback may stop after that one month. But I have not yet checked how solid that 1 month check is (could I just turn back the clock to fool it?) or if there is any actually effect if the upgrade was one month ago.

 

Reinstallation and resale of the Windows 10 licences:

For technical reasons you don't get a proper Windows 10 key yet. The activation for your copy is based on the previous licesnse + hardware id. The key will be some of the generic public ones, that indicates special activation rules.

If you need to reinstall it, you first have to put the system your upgraded from back on and activate it. Then upgrade to Windows 10 again. Annoying.

Once you do get teh key, you can directly reinstall it. And in countries with proper legal background (Germany*) even resell it.

 

*truly hardware bound licenses are not valid in my country.  I think they still stand in most other countries.

 

 

Is it worth upgrading?

I personally ask a different question:

Will it be the new default that the commercial sector will be using?

Windows XP was supported way beyond it's original lifetime, due to commercial pressure/being that widespread.

 

And frankly so far everything points towards Windows 7 to be the new XP (in longelivity)

The GUI is nice (compared to 8) and there are some cool new features. But the thing is utterly terrible for any power user:

You can't make half the settings anymore.

You can't even choose wich updates to install or when to install. MS can force an update onto your computer, and the only way to stop it would be totally disabling the update function (wich makes you vulnerable). If they choose to add a popup every 10 minutes to buy the next one, you can't do anything about it. In fact you already have one.

It's lifetime is unclear. Some information say it will be short and there will be a newer version (a Windows without a number) afterwards. That may or may not be installed automatically.

So far the only advantages are that they finally got a new default Browser without Active X support. And it is somewhat easy to roll back to a previous version. (Install a Firefox on a Windwos 7 and you got that first one already. And the second shows a certain amount of distrust into thier own products).

So far it offers nothing worldshakingly new over Windows 7, it is slighly better then Windows 8 (same way 7 was to Vista), but it adds a whole lot of inconvenience and uncertainties.

 

Windows 10 becomming the new commercial default? Not like this. And it seem they a driving it further away from that point with every update.

 

Is it worth upgrading soon:

A new Windows. So nope, of course not. There are still people naive enough to even think that around?

Never be the first to upgrade to a new Windows (outside of a VM).

Also this Windows is still in a serious state of flux, with important changes to the GUI being rolled out. Just recently there was one change where I could no longer change the Desktop settings on my Computer without activation*

To top it off, even with the drivers being out already there is a decent chance that programms and games still won't work because half the WMI and other API calls are not working as they used to in the last 2 decades. MS really has to fix that. Until they do, there is a whole host of Windows Vista through 8.1 programms that should run on Windows 10. But can't because the OS lies to them. And there is nothing the prorammer can even do to fix that.

We can say more after it was out about 6 months. Then we might look again.

 

*I always turn on some old Desktop symbols like system, network, computer. I don't have access to those options anymore, but the ones I had turned on stuck around.

[Enforcer84]

Unless 10 is the unmitigated flop 8 was, and it doesn't look like it is, my guess is it will be pretty quickly adopted as the software model for just about everything is now constant updates with monthly licenses replacing buy it and own it licenses. 

 

Short of Governments who have the capital to make it worthwhile for microsoft to keep patching (for them) older OS's they're simply going to be closing them down sooner and stop supporting them. XP's 13 year official lifespan was probably an anomaly. 

[Cancer]

* Cancer reassuringly pets his one Win2K box and two Win98 boxes that will never ever be connected to the 'net ever again *

[Ragitsu]

Windows 7 and proud!

[Old Man]

For technical reasons you don't get a proper Windows 10 key yet. The activation for your copy is based on the previous licesnse + hardware id. The key will be some of the generic public ones, that indicates special activation rules.

If you need to reinstall it, you first have to put the system your upgraded from back on and activate it. Then upgrade to Windows 10 again. Annoying.

I'm not sure this is accurate. Once your machine is upgraded to Windows 10 and activated, and the activation goes through successfully, you should be able to install Windows 10 directly on that box forever. (This does have the unfortunate side effect of tying your license to that piece of hardware, however.)

Windows 10 becomming the new commercial default? Not like this. And it seem they a driving it further away from that point with every update.

Windows 10 will become the new commercial default, but it will take around four years, just like it took 7 four years to become the new default.

 

Also this Windows is still in a serious state of flux, with important changes to the GUI being rolled out. Just recently there was one change where I could no longer change the Desktop settings on my Computer without activation*

Of course the OS is broken if it's not activated. I've found 10 to be far more lenient in this regard than 7.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

I finally pulled the trigger. I upgraded from 7 to 10, and aside from the long time spent performing the actual upgrade, it went without a hitch.

 

I'm neither over- nor underwhelmed by 10. I have to look for things that used to be readily available, but usually not too big a deal. The metro interface on the start button is still useless to me, but I don't need to use it so no biggy. The only real problem I've run into so far is that they screwed up some settings in the explorer, so no details pane and preview pane at the same time anymore. Not sure what prompted that change. I found a 3rd party workaround, but it's ridiculous that I had to go 3rd party for it. As to speed, I can't really say yet. It seems fine but I haven't noticed a great increase on the things I do, at least not yet. So far so good, we'll see over coming days.

[Pattern Ghost]

I'm not sure this is accurate. Once your machine is upgraded to Windows 10 and activated, and the activation goes through successfully, you should be able to install Windows 10 directly on that box forever. (This does have the unfortunate side effect of tying your license to that piece of hardware, however.)

 

I believe  you're right. My father-in-law installed with the upgrade option from 7 to 10. He had issues and did a clean install after, and didn't have to reinstall 7 first.