Eight: Ahead of its Time and Gone too Soon

Wow. It's seriously been six months since I have written a review?! This changes now! When I started school at Brigham Young University-Idaho about two months ago, my sister-in-law loaned me her laptop on the grounds that I keep up with my assignments and get good grades in all of my classes that add up to a total of twelve credit hours (C's or better).

Windows 8's controversial "Metro" or Start Screen that replaced the Desktop and Start Menu by Default. Oh if people only realized of the transition from Windows 3.1 to 95!

Now that I am in the second half of the semester, and I have one class under my belt, with two weeks down in another class for the second block period, I have finally had a moment to sit down and write this review. Windows 8.1 was/is a very good concept for an operating system. The problem was that it tried to do too much at once. 

Microsoft's plan was to have "one operating system for every device in your life." The problem was, at the same time that 8 was being developed, Microsoft was also experimenting with the ARM processor architecture. 

This platform being different from the x86/Intel platform, one would think that Microsoft would have learned this lesson from the fiasco of porting Windows NT to PowerPC and other less-dominant platforms of its era. However, since the company has changed hands multiple times in the past twenty years, these lessons get lost with time, much like the key to the City of Ember was lost as it was passed down through each mayor until it ended up in the hands of the descendants of a previous mayor.

But anyway, back to the review. Between the change of interface on its users, and the lack of support from software developers, much like (Windows Media Center), Windows 8 was doomed from launch day. Numerous reviews talked about the confusion between Windows 8 and Windows RT, including the fact that the latter did not have backwards compatibility with older Windows software. Various critics cited failed marketing tactic as the main reason for Windows 8 being the biggest failure since Windows Vista.

And that's another thing: mobile applications from the Windows Store (apps) on Windows 8 are/were forced to run in full-screen mode. On a smartphone, like the HTC One M8, or tablet, like the Microsoft Surface, this is just fine, but in a corporate/desktop environment, where the average user doesn't have a touch screen in their standard office (and upper management is too stingy to pay for upgrades), this kind of interface this kind of interface is, to be quite honest, a step backwards, especially if you are the type of experienced computer user like myself that remembers the good old days of MS-DOS, where every application ran one at a time, in full-screen (Real) mode. At least Windows 8 didn't revert THAT far back (although if it had, the Paris Airport could have upgraded from Windows 3.1 with no hardware costs whatsoever).

Classic Shell for Windows 8.1. This is an add-on that not too many people whom use the OS are familiar with. Had it been advertised more, it might have saved Microsoft's bacon.

Another part of the problem with slow adoption of Windows 8, was that nobody except the technologically gifted was aware of the software extensions that gave Windows 8 the familiarity of its predecessors. Sure, there were articles on websites such as CNet for applications such as Stardock's "Start8" that restored functionality of the start menu, but these cost money, and weren't guaranteed to be friendly with the operating system, but these had the potential to hose your registry if something went horribly wrong. 

Around the same time as the introduction to these third-party applications, Microsoft introduced their own extension known as "Classic Shell." Unlike third-party applications, Classic Shell works more efficiently on the Windows platform, since it is designed in-house by Microsoft itself. Having this programming benefit means that the interface works more seamlessly with the OS and isn't prone to adware that traditionally asks the user to pay for upgrades or other products from the company (although I hear that the Windows 10 version of Solitaire does this--but that's another review).