The great Windows 8 debate

The other day I got a phone call from a friend I’ll call Dave (since that’s his name). He was sitting in front of his computer pulling out what little hair he has left. The reason: Dave had ignored my sage advice and purchased a new desktop over the holidays running Windows 8. Now he was desperately searching for the Start button.

“It’s right next to the Any key,” I told him. Dave, who has been using personal computers for more than 10 years but is determined to remain a novice, did not appreciate my sense of humor. (In this he is not entirely alone.)

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I am normally Dave’s go-to guy when he gets stuck with a computer problem, but I was totally useless in this situation. Other than playing with a Surface tablet over the holidays, which I thought was pretty slick, I don’t have a lot of experience with Windows 8. That’s deliberate.

I have a few standing policies when it comes to Microsoft products. One — a pretty common ploy — is to avoid using any Version 1.0 product coming out of Redmond. Another is to avoid every other operating system upgrade (again, not uncommon). I didn’t do that with Vista, and I regretted it. Windows 7 has been a much better-behaved houseguest, and I see no good reason to evict it for the not-yet-housebroken Windows 8, especially if that involves a system upgrade.

I figure at some point I will need a new laptop and/or tablet, at which point I’ll struggle with the question of getting Win8. But unless that device has a touchscreen, I see no point whatsoever in adopting it. And I’m in good company.

A couple weeks back, Consumer Reports made the same recommendation: “If you’ve been happy with Windows 7 and even Windows XP up until now, there’s no compelling reason to switch to Windows 8,” wrote Donna L. Tapellini.

Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer confirms that sales of Win8 reflect the same hesitation. Though Windows 8 sales jumped in December — no doubt a reflection of people like Dave who decided to get a new Windows PC for Christmas and had little real choice of OS — Windows 8 uptake is less than a third of Windows 7’s. It’s even slightly worse than Vista’s. Keizer writes:

The inability of Windows 8 to keep pace with Vista is a troubling sign for the new operating system. Vista was pegged a failure, in part because it was adopted by relatively few customers, so associations with that flop rather than with the triumphs before and after — Windows XP and Windows 7 — could paint Windows 8 with the Vista brush…. Experts have said it’s unlikely companies will migrate to Windows 8 because of the robustness of Windows 7 and their recent move to it.

Of course, that’s not what Microsoft is saying. At a tech conference in late November, Microsoft veep Tami Reller claimed that the company had sold more than 40 million Windows 8 licenses and “is outpacing Windows 7 in terms of upgrades.”

The question is, sold to whom? OEMs building systems they hope consumers might eventually buy? Microsoft has yet to break down the numbers into OEM, retail sales, or upgrades. And when it does, expect them to be served with a healthy helping of fudge, writes InfoWorld’s Woody Leonhard.

Blogger Paul Thurrott, who is generally pretty gung-ho when it comes to Redmond products, reports that the company has not met its internal sales projections. He offers a few guesses as to why:

Microsoft’s new whatever-the-F-it-is operating system is a confusing, Frankenstein’s monster mix of old and new that hides a great desktop upgrade under a crazy Metro front-end. It’s touch-first, as Microsoft says, but really it’s touch whether you want it or not (or have it or not), and the firm’s inability to give its own customers the choice to pick which UI they want is what really makes Windows 8 confounding to users.

The fact that Microsoft released two largely incompatible versions of Windows 8 at the same time and decided to compete directly with its OEM partners for customers has not helped, Thurrott adds.

Leonhard, who is not by any stretch of the imagination a fan of Windows 8, sees a few possible silver linings for Microsoft. One is the commercial availability of true Windows 8 (not RT) Surface tablets later this month, which may give Microsoft a fighting chance in enterprises that crave and fear the Apple iPad in equal measure. Another is the fact that most of the Win8 users haven’t yet tried the Metro interface, which could work in Microsoft’s favor. He writes:

If Microsoft can come up with a compelling reason for everyday consumers to actually use Metro — yes, that’s a big “if” — there’s certainly a lot of room for increased sales. Coming up with an app that everybody wants is one whole heckuvalot easier than coming up with a new Windows, and it looks like very few people have even dipped their toes in the Metro gene pool.

Then there’s the whole “bring the Start menu back to Windows 8” movement, which doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. So maybe there’s hope yet for Microsoft — and for frustrated users like my friend Dave.

Are you now or do you plan to ever become a user of Windows 8? Confess your unsavory affiliations below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “The great Windows 8 debate,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.