If you pander to people who are scared of change you will move forward so slowly you might as well stop. I feel that Microsoft haven't pushed hard enough for change.
I'm tired of all the people complaining about change. I love Unity on Ubuntu. It took a little getting used to but it didn't stop my computer from being functional. I could do everything I could before just in a slightly different way.
Change is awesome and all you bitches need to stop tripping on some old bullshit.
You in the minority of people who actually give a shit about the thing that sits in front of them in the office and find it interesting.
The rest of the planet just want it to work just how it always did and piss off at the end of the day so they can go home, cook dinner, dig holes in the garden, watch television, build LEGO with their kids and play golf.
Our job as software engineers is to SERVE those people unconditionally, make their lives less laborious and to reduce the burden of their jobs. After all what else is technology for?
Marketing driven change does nothing but enslave people further and demand more attention. Incremental changes and improvements are much more useful as they allow people to adapt slowly without having to deal with life-changing events every few years.
To hell with everyone who doesn't see it this way - you are doing a disservice to humanity.
That way there would no progress at all. When Windows 95 came out, there was a huge bunch of folks that wanted to stick to Windows 3.11 because Windows 95 was a big change. There was even an animation at boot-up that pointed to the Start button saying 'Click Here'. If we listened to those folks, we would not even have a task bar that no wants to switch from now.
Also, see the below:
The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things. -- John Dvorak
That depends on how you define progress. If you are talking about efficiency of getting things done, then I would say the move to GUI/mouse based interfaces as the standard is a step in the wrong direction. As is the to a composting window manager. I'm not saying there are not uses where these systems are more efficient, but for most cases they are less efficient.
However, these are examples of improved usability for inexperienced users. For example, typing "cp -r important /mnt/thumbdrive" is more efficient than opening the file explorer, copying 'important', navigating to 'thumbdrive' and pasting (especially with tab completion), however it is far easier for a new user.
In the same way, it looks like Microsoft is again trading productivity for usability. Unfourtuantly, it is very difficult to avoid the trade-off, because productivity comes from the interface making commands as short as possible, and making the feedback contain as little non-content information as possible. Where as usability comes from making the input verbose/forgiving (which requires repetition) and the output needs to provide information on how to use the interface, which takes away from the ability to output content.
For example, vim is a highly productive editor, there is 1 line at the bottom for non-content information, and the input is short and (necessarily) cryptic. You also have gedit, another plain-text editor, however, instead of the cryptic key bindings, it has a slow and easy interface. So "ESC /foo/bar/g" becomes "(hand to mouse) Search>>Replace (hand to keyboard) foo (hand to mouse) (mouse move, click)(hand to keyboard) bar (hand to mouse) (mouse move, click) (mouse move, click)"
Or, if you are good with key commands, geddit has "^H, foo TAB TAB bar TAB*7 enter ALT+F4", still slower then vim, and it takes up more precious space.
The difference with Unity on Ubuntu is that they still made it easy to use Gnome2. For that matter, they made it easy to use Awesome, and I can almost guarantee a tiling window manager will never become the default window manager. The other benefit to this system, besides user choice, is that while the current system is in widespread use, people can still improve the old/different system, and the systems can steal ideas from each other, and everyone ends up with a better product.
