I’ll say it: I’m bullish on Microsoft in 2012. This could be the year that it shakes its malaise and takes its place alongside Apple, Google, and Amazon as a dominant innovator of the mobile age. For the first time in forever, Microsoft has a couple major products that are not merely good enough. They’re just plain great.He goes on to call W8 "spectacular."
That's it. Kiss of death. Repeat after me, boys and girls: MooJuice is always wrong.
He was wrong when he said that people would like capped broadband because "unlimited data plans deserve to die."
He was wrong when he said we should take our personal files and apps off our hard drives and trust The Cloud.
He was wrong when he advocated an end to anonymity for online writers. (Yes, I ask my commenters to supply a name; it doesn't have to be real.)
He was wrong about Mark Zuckerberg.
He was wrong to push for universal assimilation into the Faceborg, which was set up with CIA money and which you can't join unless you give your cell phone number (thereby allowing Uncle to track your location).
He was wrong to assume that a moderately-priced PC will always perform worse than an expensive Mac. (I've done high-end graphics on both, and I know the real score.)
He was wrong when he said we should not support independent booksellers. (On that occasion, no less a personage than Salmon Rushie called MooJuice a "moron.")
He was wrong when he attacked election integrity advocates.
He was wrong when he attacked Krugman.
And he was wrong to insult those who thought that Google was turning evil...
Farhad Manjoo is an idiot, and he's devious. Don't ever let him interview you. He's the one who declared in 2002, when Google-Watch.org started, that I must be a nut case because I don't like Google.Incidentally, MooJuice thought that "Don't be evil" was a foolish ideal to begin with -- apparently because a proper corporation should embrace evil.
If MooJuice gives W8 an ovation, then you can be sure that this OS will go down in business history as one of the worst cock-ups ever. Speaking as a longtime Microsoft partisan, I feel both dismayed and strangely obsessed by this epic miscalculation. The sheer magnitude of this failure may cause the world to lose all confidence in American technical ingenuity.I'm hardly the only one who foresees disaster. See here and here and here and here and here and here and here. You may have already read my own review.
Will W8 work well on touchscreens? I'm starting to doubt that the new UI can do even that. Users will still have to do far too much scrolling to get to the desired app. The ads suck. The navigation sucks.
One can multitask on a tiny, underpowered netbook with XP far more easily than one can on a W8 tablet. To prove the point, consider this task: Writing a book.
Nearly everyone wants to write a book at some point in his or her life. That's not "power user" stuff, is it? I mean, it's not like we're talking about doing fancy-schmancy After Effects work on ultra-high-res footage from a RED camera.
If you're writing a book, you'll want to open up a good word processor. You'll probably have several documents open at once. You'll need a pdf reader (because some of your research materials are on pdfs). You'll need an epub reader (because other research materials are in that format). You'll need an internet browser (because lots of research material is on the net). You may want to consult videos that have information or interviews helpful to your research. And you'll probably want to play music while you're writing -- and you'll want to adjust the playlist, volume and equalizer "on the fly," as whim takes you.
Can you do all of that with the Metro interface, which doesn't let you run more than two apps at once? Can you do it easily, with all your apps right there on screen, within sight and within reach? Will you be able to hit all the buttons you need to hit by moving a mouse just an inch or two (no scrolling and scrolling)?
My ladyfriend's underpowered netbook with XP can do that kind of multi-tasking, albeit with some sluggishness. But you can't use Metro to achieve that workflow, at least not easily and conveniently. Not even if you have W8 installed on a powerful machine. Metro just won't work: You'll have to move into the desktop, which is just the same as the W7 desktop, only worse.
Yet MooJuice thinks W8 is "spectacular." Seriously -- is that guy for sale, or is he just a fool?
(Okay, so he was right about the single-space-after-the-period thing. Big deal.)
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