Wow. That got high-friction fast. Before I start making my own replies, I just want to say I'm not looking for aggro or to annoy anyone or say what someone else should like or dislike! Doesn't mean I'm not going to disagree with people, but that's just me disagreeing. It's not me saying I know all and anyone I disagree with is Mr. Wrong McWrong of Wrongborough, Scotland.
Okay, disclaimer done! Hopefully my comments below are taken as friendly!
I see several comments talking about what a waste Win8 is or bloat, etc. I just want to observe that the install size of Win8 is actually the same as Win7. I've compared the two installs and Win8 is actually slighly smaller in the Release Preview. Even if you allow an extra GB for a Service Pack and updates (and without looking, I'm fairly sure SPs are a lot smaller than that once installed), it still comes in at the same as Win7 looks like. So yes, compared to my Debian and Gentoo installs, it's big. But it doesn't make sense to me to call Win8 bloated unless you are also unhappy with Win7. And in how it runs, I have to agree with others that so far, it actually seems to run lighter. At least it does on my old AMD Turion II laptop (that's a dual-core 2.3GHz).
I'm an old UNIX programmer (device drivers, telecomms) so I appreciate being close to the metal and can condem bloat as much as anyone else. One thing I actually
like in Win8 is that they are bringing in new APIs and attempting to deprecated some of the older real bloat. For example, as someone angrily posted earlier, MS have removed the commercial Desktop APIs from the free version of VS. Of course 99% of "real" programmers will have spent £300 on the paid version or use something else in the first place, but it is sending out the message that MS are making things more streamlined for third-party developers and will be taking away a lot of the cruft. Win8 is a necessary step on that road and I mostly like that. If you read through the blog post I linked to earlier about screen resolution handling in Win8, you can see maybe application development for Windows is actually getting lighter. And certainly it feels more responsive to me as others have said also.
the CPU still does the same thing and calculates the same way. A spreadsheet program does not need to be bloated crap as it is today
With respect, this is a good example to look at. If you take the archetypal spreadsheet, Excel, it doesn't calculate things the same way that it used to. For a start, Office 2007 changed the way Excel propagated all its updates to take advantage of multi-cores. Previous versions weren't designed for parallelism and did most of it sequentially. This is quite a radical change as anyone who has had to re-engineer existing code base for parallelism can tell you. You say something about "yeah, you get the new popups" as if that were the sum total of changes. But the current Excel is not just "doing the same thing" as you say above. Some of it may not be relevant to the small home user but you now have things like support for high-performance computing on clusters (quite a bit thing for some larger customers), collaborative working tools (very useful once you've gotten used to them), more sophisticated statistical tools, maths plug-ins, etc. You might say you don't care about them personally, but they're not bloat because a heck of a lot of people
do care about these things. Basically the point I'm making is that in the example that you chose, spreadsheets, they neither just do the same thing nor do it in the same way. And the same holds for a lot of other software.
Anyway, getting back to more direct comments on Win8:
I tested windows 8 and Its not good for business environments. its more for "PLAY". why did they think this will salve the solution from tablet/desktop. why cant they just keep it separated. Windows mobile 7 is a failure so why keep going with it? they might want to try a more like OSX look.
I'm going to ask here what specifically makes it unsuitable for business environments. I'm asking because I had the same initial reaction as your post above. The screen opened up, I saw large, over-friendly text and then a panel of bright colours and I immediately thought: they've designed this for children, not for professionals.
But once I ignored the colours and the highly easy to read text, there's really very little or nothing that makes it less suitable for business than Win7. You still have the desktop, you still position your program windows around as you could in Win7. The same things are supported. Basically the difference as I see it is that if you hit the Windows key (or move the mouse to the bottom left and click), you get a full panel selection thing, rather than a Start menu. Is that worse for business users? It was jarring to me, but actually it's about the same number of clicks to get anything. Given that I normally just hit the windows key and start typing what I want (e.g. press 'i' for Internet Explorer, 'e' for Excel, etc.) it makes no difference. It actually seems to launch quicker although I have less running on Win8 than I do on my Win7 box, so time will tell.
I'm probably a power user. I counted up twenty applications that I commonly use. That's everything from Virtualbox to Penguinet. It came to about twenty programs. The screen on my laptop is 1366x768 (hardly large) and defaults to showing four rows of five tiles in Metro. That's my twenty icons right there. But half of those are actually double-width ones so I can get thirty icons in my quick-pick page very easily. That's enough for me. When I want ones outside of this, I just click on the enlarge tab at the bottom right that gives me all of the installs. This is actually less clicks than with the Start menu where I would, for example, click on the Start button, hover over All Programs, click on Office to expand it, and then click on Excel under that (as an example).
So yes, a bit jarring at first, but I can see most business users actually preferring it. It's going to be simpler for a lot of people, I'm increasingly sure of that. Also, I posted a link earlier about the new tools for Win8 in the Enterprise. There're are several good things in there for making secure integration between your network and users that bring their own laptop / tablet or take their business one travelling.
Finally, I have to ask you how you can say that your Windows 7 phone is "a failure". (Note, you called it Windows Mobile 7, btw. There's actually no such thing. Windows Mobile is a different O/S that is now retired). I have a Lumia 710 with WP7.5 and it's an excellent little device (imo). Integrates with multiple email accounts, calendars neatly, et al. And it's pretty responsive as well. The only problem I've had with it is MS's billing department who have managed to screw up my purchase of MS points for Zune somehow. But the device itself has been great. Do or don't like it is fine. But it's not a "failure". And the last thing (speaking personally) that I would like to see is for them to change the interface to be like iOS or Android. WP7 is better than both, imo.
well look at it this way, microsoft OS is over $120, OSX is well $29. its a shame we live in this world of over priced under developed (cant think outside the box) engineering crap. can i do better? well yeah i can in fact, but they need to hire me first but that wont happen because my resume will be on the bottom of 5000 sheets. And im sure most you guys on here can make a better OS for microsoft to
You personally may or may not have experience writing an O/S (i.e. you could be one of the Linux kernel developers for all I know), but I am confident in saying that the statement most of us on here could make a better OS is rubbish. It completely misrepresents how large and complex a task developing an OS is. It's complete hyperbole. I suggest anyone who thinks they could do better at writing an OS, go
http://kernel.org/, grab the source for the Linux kernel, spend half an hour getting completely lost in the (from a quick `find ./ | wc -l`) 39,107 source and header files. And then once completely lost in there, contemplate that this is "just" the Linux kernel and that GUI is a whole additional project on top of that.
Regarding the prices of the software:
well look at it this way, microsoft OS is over $120, OSX is well $29. its a shame we live in this world of over priced under developed (cant think outside the box) engineering crap...
Keep in mind that Apple sell hardware. To a significant extent, the OS they sell you is a necessary accompaniment to the rather substantially more expensive hardware you run it on. MS are selling the OS as their product. Also, the price you quote for OSX is the price you get for an upgrade to Snow Leopard from (non-Snow) Leopard. So it's not actually buying the OS. It's more you buying a service pack. (Leopard came out in 2007, Snow Leopard in 2009). Looking at the feature list it is mostly generic terms such as "better, faster, easier" and "wake from sleep faster than ever before". In terms of actual functionality additions the main things that I can see on
their page are "64-bit support" and "support for Microsoft Exchange." Okay the latter one I can see as something to pay for. The 64-bit OS I've had in Linux forever (and I think XP had it when it came out). Whereas with MS, the Service packs have delivered security refinements, performance improvements for new CPUs that have come out since), etc. all free. Am I saying that the MS business model is better? Not definitely. Depends whether you want to pay for incremental upgrades in small (<$30) or get them free as part of your initial purchase when they become available (e.g. MS's Service Packs, updates to Office, etc.). What I am saying is that because Apple are selling you hardware and selling you upgrades, and MS are selling an OS, you can't just point at the the upgrade cost between two iterations of OSX and the cost of a new OS product from MS and draw the conclusions you did. They are different things.
Anyway, these are my thoughts. For clarification (and people can see my earlier posts on this elsewhere), I initially really didn't like Win8. Now, having read the design blogs and had a third go at this, I'm actually feeling fairly positive toward it.
Don't like it, don't buy it. Win7 is good enough for me and I will be getting Win8 as and when I buy one of the AMD ultra thin laptops later in the year. But to compare it on cost to OSX is not comparing like to like. Different business models.
humor. 
