Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it, follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Flame on: Windows Vista
bash
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I have to vent a little bit here. I'm back home for the holidays and helped my grandmother set up her new laptop with Vista on it. This is just venting, if you love Vista that's fine since everyone's got opinions. This is mine.
Vista = usability nightmare
If I was a product manager at Microsoft and someone came to me with Vista and said "we've been working on this for five years!" I would have taken them out back and had them shot. It has got to be the most user hostile environment I have ever come across. I say this having used CDE and Windows 3.11 extensively.
Tooltips - I do not need a tooltip to pop up over everything my cursor happens to rest on for more than a second. You can't just disable tooltips globally with one setting, you have to disable them for half a dozen different situations. Everything has a damned tooltip on it. I cannot think of a reason I would need a tooltip to come up if my cursor is on top of the "Internet" icon in the start menu. Notification balloons are equally inane and useless, unless you disable them Windows wants to let you know whenever it does the simplest of things, oh shit I plugged in a USB stick! Really? I wouldn't have ever remember that I performed that action a second prior without the friendly reminder.
Control Panel - It seems Microsoft rearranged the items in the control panel to be categorized in the least intuitive ways possible. Even the classic view of the control panel is oddly reorganized. Where's Add/Remove Programs? Oh it's "Programs and Feat...", awesome. I don't want to play a text adventure to find a particular control panel. If a control panel brings up a dialog box somewhere on screen it ends up being application modal so you can't access other windows without dismissing the dialog which has no physical association with it's calling window.
Wireless - While the wireless setup in Vista is marginally improved over Windows XP, why the hell do I have to go through multiple menus or the "Connect to Network" pane to connect to a wireless network? Give me a dropdown list of networks and let me choose one or type in a non-broadcast network name. Even better is dial-up and ethernet connections are available in the "Connect to Networks" pane. My grandparents are still on dial-up. Setting up the laptop at my parent's house with WiFi and getting the laptop to not break at my grandparents house was a chore. The actual DUN setup in Vista has not changed since the Windows 2000 days. That is to say it's needlessly complex and you have to click through multiple tabs and/or properties windows to set up multiple phone numbers.
Start menu - I've never been a fan of the start menu, it's just a hierarchal folder view with a bunch of submenus for subfolders. Not only is this a completely broken UI concept it is maddeningly unfriendly. Trying to show my grandmother how to launch Spider Solitaire was great fun. Click the Windows bauble, then click "Programs", then click "Games" (why did the menu change?), then click Spider Solitaire. I ended up making a shortcut on the desktop because the start menu is ridiculously complicated anymore.
UI ugliness - I can't understand why windows supposedly filled with text to be helpful have ten different font sizes with different background colors. It makes it supremely difficult to figure out which text in a window is important and which isn't. It's also difficult for an older person with less than perfect vision to figure out what is going on. That text has a beige background, it must be a warn...no it's just a general warning message that in no way pertains to the current situation.
Text selection - I'll admit I'm used to the Mac way of selecting text (single click in an inactive text field sets the cursor at the end of the line) but the Microsoft way has to be the dumbest I've seen in a long time. Selecting an inactive text box selects the whole text box. Pressing the ← key (left arrow) puts the cursor at the right end of the text. This makes no sense at all. It should put the cursor at the beginning on the line of text.
There's a bunch of other little issues I won't bother putting in bullet points. A lot of these issues can be fixed by tweaking settings in various controls panels and property panes but finding these is a chore and completely non-obvious to novice users like my grandparents. When they place the cursor over things and shit pops up under them they think they did something wrong because that sort of behavior is unintuitive and non-obvious. Out of the box I found my grandmother's laptop bordering on unusable. Without my help she would have never got her dial-up working or any of the trialware off the machine. I know a lot of people here might scoff at some of my complaints but really sit back and think about the amount of time it takes to make Windows just not suck. Wizards on top of convoluted interfaces does not fix the core issue of the interface being overly complicated.
Vista has its redeeming qualities. It's reasonably more capable and secure than previous incarnations of Windows but it has a hostile interface. I'm extremely glad that I do not have to use it on a daily basis and I feel sorry for those that do. I think a lot of the backlash against Vista is its interface sucks so damned much. Glossy translucent windows and soft focus animations during file copies don't make the system any more user friendly. They're just special effects on top of a movie with bad acting.
Rant over for now.
Vista = usability nightmare
If I was a product manager at Microsoft and someone came to me with Vista and said "we've been working on this for five years!" I would have taken them out back and had them shot. It has got to be the most user hostile environment I have ever come across. I say this having used CDE and Windows 3.11 extensively.
Tooltips - I do not need a tooltip to pop up over everything my cursor happens to rest on for more than a second. You can't just disable tooltips globally with one setting, you have to disable them for half a dozen different situations. Everything has a damned tooltip on it. I cannot think of a reason I would need a tooltip to come up if my cursor is on top of the "Internet" icon in the start menu. Notification balloons are equally inane and useless, unless you disable them Windows wants to let you know whenever it does the simplest of things, oh shit I plugged in a USB stick! Really? I wouldn't have ever remember that I performed that action a second prior without the friendly reminder.
Control Panel - It seems Microsoft rearranged the items in the control panel to be categorized in the least intuitive ways possible. Even the classic view of the control panel is oddly reorganized. Where's Add/Remove Programs? Oh it's "Programs and Feat...", awesome. I don't want to play a text adventure to find a particular control panel. If a control panel brings up a dialog box somewhere on screen it ends up being application modal so you can't access other windows without dismissing the dialog which has no physical association with it's calling window.
Wireless - While the wireless setup in Vista is marginally improved over Windows XP, why the hell do I have to go through multiple menus or the "Connect to Network" pane to connect to a wireless network? Give me a dropdown list of networks and let me choose one or type in a non-broadcast network name. Even better is dial-up and ethernet connections are available in the "Connect to Networks" pane. My grandparents are still on dial-up. Setting up the laptop at my parent's house with WiFi and getting the laptop to not break at my grandparents house was a chore. The actual DUN setup in Vista has not changed since the Windows 2000 days. That is to say it's needlessly complex and you have to click through multiple tabs and/or properties windows to set up multiple phone numbers.
Start menu - I've never been a fan of the start menu, it's just a hierarchal folder view with a bunch of submenus for subfolders. Not only is this a completely broken UI concept it is maddeningly unfriendly. Trying to show my grandmother how to launch Spider Solitaire was great fun. Click the Windows bauble, then click "Programs", then click "Games" (why did the menu change?), then click Spider Solitaire. I ended up making a shortcut on the desktop because the start menu is ridiculously complicated anymore.
UI ugliness - I can't understand why windows supposedly filled with text to be helpful have ten different font sizes with different background colors. It makes it supremely difficult to figure out which text in a window is important and which isn't. It's also difficult for an older person with less than perfect vision to figure out what is going on. That text has a beige background, it must be a warn...no it's just a general warning message that in no way pertains to the current situation.
Text selection - I'll admit I'm used to the Mac way of selecting text (single click in an inactive text field sets the cursor at the end of the line) but the Microsoft way has to be the dumbest I've seen in a long time. Selecting an inactive text box selects the whole text box. Pressing the ← key (left arrow) puts the cursor at the right end of the text. This makes no sense at all. It should put the cursor at the beginning on the line of text.
There's a bunch of other little issues I won't bother putting in bullet points. A lot of these issues can be fixed by tweaking settings in various controls panels and property panes but finding these is a chore and completely non-obvious to novice users like my grandparents. When they place the cursor over things and shit pops up under them they think they did something wrong because that sort of behavior is unintuitive and non-obvious. Out of the box I found my grandmother's laptop bordering on unusable. Without my help she would have never got her dial-up working or any of the trialware off the machine. I know a lot of people here might scoff at some of my complaints but really sit back and think about the amount of time it takes to make Windows just not suck. Wizards on top of convoluted interfaces does not fix the core issue of the interface being overly complicated.
Vista has its redeeming qualities. It's reasonably more capable and secure than previous incarnations of Windows but it has a hostile interface. I'm extremely glad that I do not have to use it on a daily basis and I feel sorry for those that do. I think a lot of the backlash against Vista is its interface sucks so damned much. Glossy translucent windows and soft focus animations during file copies don't make the system any more user friendly. They're just special effects on top of a movie with bad acting.
Rant over for now.
bash on
Posts
Telling your grandma to go into synaptic and search for perl 5 if something requires it, then getting her to install it, is not easier than finding it on the internet.
And honestly, if something breaks in linux, it's gonna freak them out a lot more than if something breaks in windows. 99% of the time in linux if something breaks, you have to do at least something in the command line to fix it, and again, telling grandma to download and run an anti-spyware program is a lot faster than telling her to sudo apt-get install program x while ignoring dependencies. Or telling her to go click here to change a setting in windows rather than going into the CLI and opening a .conf file in Vi. Yes, I know that there are gui options for a lot of things in inux now, but I'm talking about when shit breaks, and when shit breaks in linux, for some reason the GUI is one of the first things to go.
This! This rings true. Though I'd say "made Vista for a vague mass of everyone" rather than themselves.
In my experience, this is the biggest problem Microsoft has is listening to customers without a goal or oversight between groups. This goes beyond "too many cooks", to the level that one team, product group, or unit will act completely unilaterally, often to the benefit of only their customers.
There is no one in the company empowered to say "You are listening to a customer. That customer is wrong and stupid, because of X quantifiable thing". No one does this on a large scale. Thus you end up with things like Sharepoint; an amazing set of products, that has a completely unique licensing model you have to research to figure out, Vista's schizophorenic UI, Vista's shitty, shitty marketing (that ignores all the actual good parts), and no oversight on where and how OEMs install Vista (Vista Basic olol).
Some groups, when they focus on customer segment, do better. Just watch; when Server 2008 hits full release, it will drive IT guys nuts with excitement. Windows Core, built in hypervisor support, and a million other focused benefits; and it's the same codebase of much-maligned Vista.
Windows desktop tries to be a consumer, entry-level, advanced, tech, small-business, enterprise, and whatever else product. As many of these are mutually exclusive, it manages to fail at many of each segment's requirements.
I was shocked at how very similar it was to WinXP. I thought it was going to be this radical departure. Other than adding compositing/transparencies and the sidebar (which, looking at the task manager, eats ram for breakfast) it's almost identical to XP.
There are the driver issues, and the fact that you need a DX10 card to get the transparencies (MS is allergic to OpenGL I guess). I don't know, it just seems like a waste of time/money.
Transparencies and stuff only require a DX9 card.
I'm looking forward to Windows 7 though. They put the guy who did Office 2007 in charge of Windows though, so that should be good news (I love Office 2007 and I think it's one of the best updates to Office ever).
20MB for an OS device is a bit much. I don't care how cheap ram is, software should use LESS ram over time through optmization, not more (apple is guilty of this too.)
By "improved indexing" are you talking about the indexing service? Because I always turn that off. How often does anyone use search? And how often is that search time-sensitive?
850*77.1=100,000
I'll give you that it is different.
If you don't like the normal file/edit/view interface that is used in every single other Win32 app in the world, then I can see why you would be impressed with it. I just found it highly confusing. And somewhat humorously Appleesque in it's basic aesthetics. Not the UI, though. I'm not sure what they were smoking when they came up with the UI. It may just take time to get used to, but seeing as how I am only ever in front of it at school, on the XP boxes (that is to say, when all the Macs are being used), I don't exactly have the opprotunity to learn the in's and out's.
As it is, I use Openoffice, because it's essentially Office 2000, but without that whole costing money issue. But I'm poor, so I might be somewhat biased.
And not all Win32 applications are the same. For many applications, the File-Menu stuff is just fine. But Office apps just have too many features that tend to get buried in menus. I feel the same way about Adobe Photoshop and other complex apps. A Ribbon-like interface just makes sense. If the interface is confusing initially, you get used to it quickly and I believe the vast majority of people find it an improvement, unless they're drastically opposed to change. I really hope they apply some of the r&d they got from making the Ribbon to the Windows 7 interface.
And OpenOffice is a steaming pile of shit, so I might be biased.
citation tools?
I'm afraid you've gone a bit over my head.
I have a screenshot of '07 that I took when I first used it.
Example: It took me several minutes to figure out how to print a file. The round icon on the upper left looks like embellishment, not like an actual menu. It has no text at all to explain it's function.
The styles thing takes up WAY too much real estate for something I have never used. I imagine/hope you could adjust that (but since I only use '07 at school there's no point since it all settings revert when you log off).
View, which is very important, was moved way off to the right. Why?
The tabs are nice, though. I generally approve of tabs.
Conversely, it took me a while to get rid of old Word habits, which slowed me down at first.
The Styles thing is fucking amazing. It will make your document look much much much much nicer. Seriously, it is fucking amazing. Styles needs to be there. More people need to use it. I realize I'm much more anal about how good my document looks than most people, but fuck me, Styles are awesome and people need to care more about how good their documents look. It's the easiest way to make your document look professional, without spending hours and hours learning Latex or some shit.
I don't really see why view is more important. I think most people just view (if they use it at all - I don't) once they're mostly done with the document and just want to see an overview of it. Also, most of the functionality of view is available in the little strip at the bottom of the window.
Add/Remove Programs is a frontend to aptitude/apt-get, and if something requires Perl 5 then it would automatically be installed.
99% of the time if you manage to break anything that requires you to do something in the terminal to fix it, you were fucking around with something in the terminal to break it.
Unless you're someone who upgrades the second a new release comes out (give it a week or two) or are participating in the pre-release process of testing the next version of Ubuntu, it is highly unlikely that a user is going to have to do any arcane voodoo. Ever.
I've been using Ubuntu since Breezy and have never had my desktop environment go boom. I think there has been one such occurrence during that timeframe that involved an update being pushed with one dependency not being uploaded at the same time, but I think that was during a late testing phase and not on the live distros.
I wouldn't say nothing ever happens as it is always possible that some hardware issue could crop up that I wouldn't be affected by, but I think you're generalizing too much on "Linux" (which is just a kernel) and your experience with various distributions and sticking them onto Ubuntu.
I hardly think multiplying wrong counts as a minor bug. In a spreadsheet app, especially. Considering spreadsheets have been around since the 70's.
But it's just a joke. The chances of someone actually hitting that bug is fairly small, but you have to admit it's pretty hilarious.
Although, in the case of this error, the calculations were performed correctly, it's just that it didn't display the right number.
Also, footnotes and citations are different.
Dont' tell me I'm generalizing Linux/Ubuntu. I've been using linux at least part time since Fedora Core 1. I've used Fedora, SUSE, I've also tried slackware, and Gentoo. I've been running ubuntu on my laptop for 2 years now, going back to 5.10. I think that I have a very broad view of what linux distrobutions can, and cannot do. And I am saying flat out, that I would not give an ubuntu install to my Grandmother. I do agree that Ubuntu, and all distros in general have made absolutely massive strides in usability, and that they get better all the time, but they are by no means ready for joe consumer to use yet.
The main reason I say that is there is no *official* support for a lot of peripherals. yes, I know that you can use your iPod, printer, scanner and camera and whatnot in a linux distro most of the time, but the drivers/software is written/developed/maintained by a community of people who do it because they want to. That, in my opinion, is not sustainable in the mass market. As sad as it sounds, until you can Run iTunes officially(again, not in Wine or anything) in Linux, or be able to install a program like quicken, or have offical support for all web plugins like activeX, Desktop linux will never, ever be ready for the mainstream. As shitty as a lot of bundled software is with things like cameras/scanners, guess what, 95% of people use them, and dont' want to give them up. That, is a fact, and one that will not change.
That is why Desktop linux will never hit mainstream.
Re: Office 2007. We've switched to it in our company, and after about 2 day of of grumbling most people ended up liking it, and I've had more than a few comments about how much easier it is to use. Honestly, I think office 07 is the best version of office since office 97, because MS was not afraid to throw out all the things that were staples in previous versions to make Office better. It's like the Jump from OS9 to OS X. There was a lot of resistance to it at first, but now, can you imagine going back to OS 9 on a regular basis? Office will be the same way.
Yes. A citation is a footnote which contains a reference to some other work. Like a book or something.
And that seems like cheating. Isn't the whole point of english class to learn what is and is not supposed to go in a paper like that?
But, yeh. I can see how that could be useful if you write a lot of academic papers.
After looking for a few seconds it looks like OO has a Bibliography Database. Seems to be essentially the same thing.
I think it is obvious you've never used MacOS 7 or Windows 3.x. In Windows 3.0 there was the Program Manager, it was a very nice launcher that only contained shortcuts to executable files and displayed those as a 16x16 icon. When a program was installed it would add an item to a group (Accessories or Games or something) and would be available from then on in Program Manager. Most installers didn't bother adding anything to the Program Manager besides an item for the executable itself. System 7 had the Launcher which just provided buttons for every item dragged into the window. Like the Program Manager it was pretty simple but effective. Instead of properly extending these concepts the start menu ended up being a bad clone of the System 7 Apple Menu. Stop harping about the fucking search box already. Search is a nice feature to have in Vista but it is not 100% reliable nor is it something my grandparents should have to rely on. The general application launcher ought to look like the "Games" folder rather than a list of nested folders with tiny icons.
I completely agree that Vista was designed for Microsoft rather than home users or even institutional buyers like schools and businesses. For every useful feature they added they seemed to have added another wizard to the OS. I do not think that a task based OS is friendly to anyone. Wizards are text adventures that change system settings, the only really ask you questions and don't suggest useful options to you. The OS should just have sane defaults and do as much for you as possible.
The firewall in Windows XP was extremely difficult to use for anyone not versed in the ways of Windows. In SP2 they made it a Control Panel item with a much improved interface, you could turn it on and off in the primary tab and added options were available in the other tabs. Right on the front tab it links to some documentation about the firewall. This is a great model for a lot of other services on Windows. The first interface should be as simple as possible and make a bunch of assumptions, turn something on or off and tell you why you might want to do that. Extra options can be accessed through other widgets in that control panel. This is a far better route than adding wizards all over the place to hide confusing or outright hidden dialog boxes.
This is one of the biggest areas I think Vista was screwed up. Wizards only hide existing dialogs and controls rather than replacing them with sane less confusing versions. The firewall in XP didn't really change between SP1 and SP2 but the controlling interface did and made it much more useful. I don't need to see all of the wireless networks signal strengths by default, I just want to see if my wireless network is available and connect to it. Some of these UI faux pas might be fixed in SP1 on Vista but probably not. There's a culture at Microsoft that allows bad UI decisions to be made and then flourish. The UIs that make it through various developer/marketing committees don't get vetted by some central UI czar and can usually make it into shipping products.
Another benefit of leadership from Office coming to the Windows division is that hopefully things will actually happen according to schedule. Office 2007 came out on time (I think?) and they even released Office 2007 SP1 early.
Hopefully Steven Sinofsky (the Office 2007 guy who is now in control of Windows) can bring at least some of the same discipline to Windows. Actually, there are rumours out there that all the features for Windows 7 have been 'locked down' already (as much as can be), so maybe they really are going to be more disciplined about it than in Windows Vista development.
All the windows firewall does is give me one more thing I have to turn off in a fresh XP install.
That's weird because I found out about it by opening OO and looking in the menu, and it is right there.
Considering it's free I'm surprised they can even keep up with MS.
That page must be out of date, it is in OO 2.3
And what is wrong with copying? You just said it was a good feature.
And I think the interface thing just comes down to personal preference.
You see, I was totally expecting, from the general vibe of the internet, to be horribly disgusted with it, but after actually poking at it, I am simply neutral. Essentially I see nothing that would warrant the effort of reinstalling, but if I had to reinstall, and i had a copy of it lying around, and I had 2Gb of ram... sure. Why not. It doesn't seem any worse than XP, maybe a bit slower, but nothing like how XP hit the brakes compared to 2000.
This I can mostly agree with, especially the hardware support. That said, there is nothing wrong with drivers and software being "written/developed/maintained" by the community. The problem is that the community isn't getting support from the manufacturers, particularly with regards to documentation/specifications for the hardware.
Some companies like Intel (surprisingly enough) are doing pretty good, especially with regards to their video and wireless drivers. Ralink provides open source drivers for their chipsets, and the community is almost to the point where their implementation of those drivers can be submitted for inclusion with the mainline kernel. It is the peripheral companies that are largely useless.
I don't agree with the need for ActiveX controls. Plugins exist with non-ActiveX versions for Mozilla/Firefox users, but they don't work under Linux for other reasons. ActiveX is just another name for [OLE] Automation, and is a Microsoft standard for IPC.
Honestly, other than Flash I'm not sure how many plugins are really needed for your browser. I know there are exceptional exceptions such as some country whose name I can't remember that had to develop a plugin for online bank transactions because of cryptography export restrictions, but still...the Totem/Mplayer plugins will play virtually every file format out there and basically usurps the functionality of QuickTime/WMP. Unless you play the free version of Bewjeweled or something I can't think of a reason for someone to install something other than Flash or maybe Java (applets are retarded, and online shit is more likely to use WebStart). Everything else is most likely malware.
With regards to bundled software...well, I think they are mostly shit and should die. I'm not talking about the people who already used to the crap and don't want to change (which a lot of people don't like), but for people who already have a computer than came with Ubuntu (since Dell sells them) it shouldn't be necessary. A good scanner/printer/camera interface that comes standard would be perfect.
None of my family members has found Canon's software (Zoombrowser) to be terribly usable. In fact, they just use the SD card slot on their PC and copy pictures off of it that way instead of using it. And there is Picasa for everything else.
That said, I'm letting this die here since it is offtopic.
I didn't think XP was slower than 2000, but I had a sufficient amount of RAM back then. If you had at least 512 MB it probably wouldn't be noticeable unless you had a bunch of software open or a memory hog like Photoshop. I had first used XP through a MSDN subscription, but I can't remember the version number. The boot logo still said "Whistler" on it, though.
The only machines I've [momentarily] used Vista on had 512 MB and 1 GB of memory in them. They both felt somewhat sluggish, but the 512 was outright irritating to use.
At least RAM is a lot cheaper these days.
I ran XP on 128mb for way too long.
But that's because the computer I was using at the time came with ME.
Dear god the horror.
ya, that's pretty much your problem right there. I would not run Vista on less than 2GB. 1GB would be the abolute minimum. just like with XP, when 512 woudl be the absolute minimum I would run it on, and 1GB is preferred for smooth operation.
Oh, I'm not saying it was on my PCs. These didn't belong to me. I could understand someone thinking that Vista ran like ass if it were installed it on OEM machines that were manufactured prior to the Vista Capable stickers came about, and even those "Vista Capable" machines frequently had half a gig of RAM in them.
It is like how I frequently consider "recommended specifications" on games to be the true minimum specs if you don't want it to run/look like shit. Vista Capable machines are only required to have 512 MB, but the Premium Ready (the recommended specs) are 1 GB.
ya, "capable" doesn't really mean it'll run well. Vista "capable" pretty much means that Vista will install and boot, it doesn't specify how good it will be.
When my RAM died about 2 months ago, I threw an old 512 Stick of ram I had into my system. And Vista was pretty much unusable. Even with 1GB, it was not fun to run Vista for the week while I waited for my RMA to come in.
I love it VERY hard. It's the best word processor ever. I tried OO, and ran away disgusted with its 1995 interface. I like software with pretty AND useful interfaces. I have to look at them the whole day.
BTW, the new office interface is actually a lot SMALLER than the previous one, because it stays HIDDEN 99% of the tima, and is one click away the remaining 1%.
As far as Vista goes, so far, I haven't encountered any big problems with it, although I should mention I turned off a lot of the features like Aero and Gadgets, so from my point of view, I'm basically just using XP. There are a few things that I don't like, as some basic tasks seem to be more difficult to do. In particular, I'm referring to the ability to have the signal from the line-in input played in the speakers, which is pretty easy to do in XP, but apparently requires changing obscure registry settings in Vista. And I say apparently because I still haven't gotten it to work yet. But in the grand scheme of things, this is a fairly small problem, so I'm not really too concerned yet.
It's also worth mentioning that Vista does a lot of new stuff with memory. It'll use a lot more RAM than your XP machine does when you're not running games, but once you do boot up a game or some other application that requires the RAM, it can release a lot of that RAM from the stuff it's using it on. The Aero interface and Sidebar both can essentially disable themselves whenever you boot up an application that's going to use that video and system RAM.
It's still a little bit behind XP in usage (I think many estimates put it at around 3-5% slower), but hopefully they'll optimize it even more so that users running system straining software aren't forced to disable/close most of their background operations just to keep a game stable. It's the first step of a long jump towards way better system resource usage.
At any rate, you can't just open up the task manager and see 100MB of RAM used and say "oh man this is horribly inefficient" anymore. It doesn't work like that anymore.
If you think that requiring users to make use of a text based Search function in order to find the program they want to load is good UI design you need to stop posting on the Internet because you're fucking dumbing it up.
I'm not even kidding. Seriously. Just fucking stop while you're behind.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
What kind of work do you do
Because it's a fucking nightmare for me. At least it's not as terrifying as Excel 2007 or Access 2007.
The only one that came out better or at least as usable was probably Project 2007.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
EDIT: Oh yeah "Ribbon" in Office 2007 needs to go die in a fire and then be eaten by hungry wolves. Jesus fucking christ - I have never uninstalled a product so fast.
You could argue that as a requirement for a GUI the concept is outdated but for a user interface it works just fine.