Gartner Analyst Retracts "Windows 8 Is Bad" Claim

nk497 writes "A Gartner analyst made headlines after describing Windows 8 desktop as: 'in a word: bad.' After web reaction, including one story asking why anyone bothers to listen to the consultancy firm anymore, Gunnar Berger has now yanked the offending sentence from his blog post, saying it was taken out of context and only applied to using the desktop with a mouse and keyboard, and that overall Windows 8 is a good thing. 'If you look at my blog, I've gotten rid of it,' he said. 'It's upsetting me that it's being taken completely out of context.'"

Re:Was it taken out of context?

[bigstrat2003]

I thought exactly the same thing. He has nothing to apologize for, Windows 8 is bad. It has one of the worst UI designs I've ever seen.

Re:Was it taken out of context?

[kdogg73]

In the shadow of my main Mac tower (desktop publishing), I have an old Dell XPS B866 in my office running Win2k as my lowest common denominator, so I can test .doc, .xls and .ppt files in Office 2003. But talking about Windows UI? It was no frills, quick and to the point interface. I still think it was Microsoft's best OS. All it needs is some protocol updates and other under the hood stuff, it could last longer. Unfortunately, 12 years old, even Firefox developers wont throw it a bone.

Re:Was it taken out of context?

[cpu6502]

>>>What's wrong with OS X? It's GUI is so sparse,

Try running it on a 400 MHz Mac sometime. It's not sparse at all..... in fact it's slow as heck (you can actually see OS X draw the window). WinXP's desktop runs better at 400 MHz than OS X's desktop.

Pretty much

[Sycraft-fu]

I have to say I actually agree with him both ways, that it is bad, but not completely.

So from a technical standpoint Windows 8 is great. It is fast, stable, and efficient. Cakewalk tested Sonar X1 on it and found an across the board performance improvement. They didn't recompile for it or anything, just used the current one, and in all tests 8 did better. They really seem to have done a solid job improving the technical aspects of the OS which is great, but 7 is already quite good.

The problem is the UI. Not only is it ugly, which maybe shouldn't matter to people but does, but it is not well designed for mouse+keyboard. They are trying to whack a tablet UI on to a desktop and for some reason they think that won't piss people off. So it isn't as pleasing to look at, and is less efficient to use than Windows 7.

So over all I think it is a "bad" OS in that people are going to hate it, and it is going to create this situation of "Windows 7 is the last good OS EVAR!" and it'll be harder to get people to upgrade than it normally is. However it is only bad because they are trying to use it to flog their tablets, the technical aspects are quite good.

For personal use I don't care, I'll just replace its UI with something else, but it annoys the hell out of me for work since it is going to make life more difficult. Users are going to hate it (they hate any change but they'll really make hell about this one) and then decide they never want to move off of 7.

Re:Was it taken out of context?

[cpu6502]

>>>Why would anyone bother running modern software on 12 year old hardware?

8 years old.
Same reason I climbed Mt. Everest. ;-) Also it's "green" to continue using hardware rather than throw it in a landfill. Plus I was mainly proving a point: That OSX 10.5's desktop runs slower than XP-SP3's desktop. OSX is not "sparse" at all.

Re:Was it taken out of context?

[Anonymous Coward]

8 years old? You bought a brand new 400MHz system in 2004? Not likely, since even the 12" iBooks had 800MHz PowerPC G4 processors as of the beginning of 2004 (with 1.07GHz processors released in April of that year). The PowerBooks of the same time period had 1+GHz processors, and the PowerMacs came in north of 1.5GHz with the G5 processor. The most recent Mac I can find that had a 400MHz processor was the FireWire iBook, released in September of 2000. It came with a 366 or 466MHz G3 processor.

And, congratulations, even if any of what you said *had* been true, you're claiming that a fully-patched OS that was released in late 2001 runs better on hardware of it's day than an OS released in 2007, roughly a year after Vista, which won't even run on hardware of that era.

Re:Was it taken out of context?

[Aenoxi]

Sigh. This old canard again? Every mouse and trackpad sold by Apple since the mighty mouse and the glass trackpad has had right-button functionality built-in. OSX has supported right mouse clicks since forever.

Of course modern Apple pointing hardware only has one microswitch and relies on capacitance multi-touch technology to identify if the user is clicking on the right hand or left hand side of the device.

Being charitable i'll assume that's what you meant by one button. Why not try using the hardware to discover its actual functional capabilities? You never know, you might like it. I did despite my initial prejudices (as a dremel-wielding, cryo-cooling, case-modding hardcore PC fan).

Re:Was it taken out of context?

[cpu6502]

>>>an OS released in 2007 which won't even run on hardware of that era.

I never bought any Mac new. They are usually handed to me for free, or cheap. So I was going by wikipedia which my G4 was last made in 2004. And YES you can run OS 10.5 on a 400 MHz Mac. I'm sorry you got all offended because I said OS X's desktop is "less speedy" than XP-SP3 on a 400 MHz processor. Maybe you shouldn't put your personal selfworth into a damn piece of plastic & metal if you are so easy to anger.