by Spider » Sun Sep 14, 2014 1:18 pm
What kind of a technophile wants a touchscreen on everything? The landslide majority who do serious work on computers, ie design environments and such, couldn't care less about touchscreens. Too cumbersome, too imprecise. Like eating soup with a fork. Maybe I don't count as a technophile, but I view touchscreens on a PC as a hopeless gimmick. And I don't believe for a minute they thought it would be a better experience. I tend to think the old men sitting around board tables at MS bought into the "post-pc" thing, saw desktops as a dead end, and tried to drag them in the tablet direction. Win8 is clearly a tablet OS with a little bit of desktop DNA glossed on top, as opposed to a desktop OS with some tablet functionality. These people are slaves to the "next big thing" unicorn hunt, not consideration for their customers' desires. They're trying to pull a classic Jobs angle, where people don't know they want it until they see it. Steve Jobs had the gift of pretty much telling people what they wanted to buy. MS doesn't have that. MS needs to listen to what its customers actually say they want.
Its a nasty example of function following form. "We need a tablet OS...but it needs to also work on the desktop. It needs to look like a tablet OS...and we don't care how aggravating it is to actually use...because tablets are the future. Derp."
Meanwhile, tablet sales begin to level out, and PC sales rebound a bit.