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by natmaster0 5106 days ago
Yeah, pretty weak arguments there. Somehow what some people claim or have said is supposed to apply to me?

I don't know about others complaining about ribbon on office, but I loved it when it launched, and I loved every Facebook iteration except the last one. I'm an early adopter, and not only does stuff I adopt early have an incredibly high success rate, but there aren't many things that are successful that I don't like (twitter is the big counter example for me...still don't really use it).

However, from what I've seen of Win8 it's a terrible step backward in a blind attempt to compete with Apple. What Microsoft doesn't understand is that Apple has a separate OS for their desktops for a reason. iOS is a useless piece of gimpware for doing anything productive - it is primarily a consumption device, and the iPad will never replace the desktop as productivity (don't cite some anecdotal story as a counter example - we're talking broad strokes here, not one weird dude.). Hopefully one day the keyboard and mouse will be replaced, but currently they're the most efficient mechanism for interacting with a computer that is available. It appears Microsoft is pushing a product that is abandoning it's entire revenue (businesses) for some small market of people who buy iPads. (Which is a market they will likely have trouble in, given how successful WP7 has been.)

Now to the ribbon. It's a great design for applications that involve rich editing - like office, or even photoshop or 3dsmax. Something that requires a complex set of verbs that are hard to remember. Explorer is not an editor - it's a browser. The ribbon is wasting space, and is obviously the result of some bandwagon PM that thinks copying everything successful is a good way to design because they have no creativity or understanding themselves. Instead of figuring out why things work (ribbon, ipad), they simply try to copy them, but miss the whole point and make it bad.

Win8 is the new Windows ME. This is coming from a Win7 users, who thought Vista was awesome, had every iteration of the Zune, and thought Zune HD was the best music player ever.

3 comments

I remember the initial design post about the Windows 8 Explorer was all, "We saw that very few people use the toolbar to get around Explorer. So we decided to make the toolbar bigger, and put more things in it."
Who is voting these comments down? This is actually a pretty reasonably thought out argument. Even if you don't agree with it, for goodness sake make a comment - don't downvote it.

Wrt the UI - I disagree that the ribbon is a great UI paradigm. I can't imagine using the ribbon on a touch screen, looks far too fiddly!

You are right with the explorer thing. Even the large toolbar buttons in windows xp's explorer where nicer for touch I believe. Luckily, that new ribbon can be hidden.