Stop fiddling with that unhappy boring stuff, and come online and throw nukes around with us!

Good one, Draginol. Intellectual ownership has always been a rather vague boundary for the big corporations.  Steve Jobs touring PARC back in 1979, and getting a Smalltalk demo complete with the brand new, utterly secret GUI by the suits over the protests of the engineers...?  Then that GUI shows up almost immediately in Jobs' own work.  And nothing had been patented.

But you're right: at its height, Microsoft was the King of Assimilation.  It borrowed ideas everywhere.  It even tried to get companies to lend them their private code, as in the case of Stacker; and when that failed, Microsoft used one of its subsidiaries to copy part of the code and issue the result as DoubleSpace.  Stac Electronics actually showed samples of both codes on the screen that year at COMDEX.  They also won big in the courts, which didn't often happen against Microsoft's well-oiled attorney machine.

Ah, memories.

Not a bit.

Why? With Windows 8, history has repeated itself:

Humor aside, I understand you, because of MS's W8 weirdness and unusability I don't understand how Jeff and the skinners can possibly 'fix that'.

But I would soooo enjoy being surprised! Start 8 was a welcome and good beginning.

In truth, Windows 8 will be the first MS OS I won't migrate to, unless SD comes up with more apps to make it a heck of a lot better.

While I don't share the conlusions MS made, this is an interesting read :

MSDN Blog

Thanks for posting that link, Carl, it was an interesting read.  While I currently do not like Win 8, I do understand it better after reading the blog, and perhaps, just maybe, sometime in the future, I may revisit Win 8 and see how I feel about it then. It seems as if MS has put some thought into the better use of hardware and seamless/fluid operation with Win 8, so it may be the emergence of OS of the future, who knows.

In the meantime, however, and probably for quite some time to come, I am more than happy with Win 7 and will stick with it.

Looks like Neil has his work cut out for him. And that I'm probably wasting my time updating my skin(s).  

I still can't imagine Win 8 in a corporate environment. I wonder MS thoughts about that.

I'm remembering when I was assistant to the network guru at a large paper mill. My job was to phase people over from old computers to new (same OS) I had to make sure that all the personal files and task specific apps were moved/reinstalled/whatever. Some of the scientific ones were copied directly, databases and all. There was no install. Some of them were still DOS based and installed as such.  Now I think of spending almost an hour to put just one link of the opening page of Win 8 and still not get it working. Even when I was actually making a custom link it wouldn't show it to me. Some of them when I had something to click on there was nothing else to do to finish the process. I'm no dummy, but I couldn't figure it out. Then I think of roll out of a new machine and learning the script to install the OS and remove all those things that bosses don't want. And there are sure a lot of things that would be considered non-productive. That and put all those custom apps needed by a science based workplace.  Definitely NOT a workplace OS.

Not at all, Daiwa. No excuses, now. Get busy.

From other posts, I gather not many folks are much interested in W8 at this point, so it wouldn't be a wasted effort at all.

Hopefully MS will copy from the latest WindowBlinds, then I won't have to look at that ugly Windows 8

What interested me was the video. I see news shows do this all the time, manipulating the screen by touching it in certain places. Win 8 would fit that profile exactly. But! and this is a big one. My impression is that MS is using Win 8 like a test platform, to see what kind of new technologies work. IMO

Good read, but i see 2 problems off the bat

1. Mice still suck for data intensive work and a good GUI with properly alligned tabs works my opinion better and faster than most.

2. I don't know about you guys, but in my house files still rule, tell the 10 terabytes of data that - I don't care about slow guis and pretty pictures when I need a file I want to be able to hit a button and search for it and get it instantly.  Google Desktop search is one of the most used  programs on all of my computers

I see windows 8 as something i would consider for my media machine, or as an extra machine like i do with ubuntu, but as my primary win 7 does the job I need it to do and it's stable.

Win7 has quite a few accessibility options for grabbing files. Aside from the tradition of just putting them on the desktop, you can bind up files in a slew of ways. I have all my shortcuts in the taskbar, which disappears so I have a blank screen. Move to the bottom, taskbar pops up, right click my Word icon and the pop-up menu give me the last bunch of things I worked on. Click and go. Even with more complex programs, like M2:TW which I have an enhanced AI program for. M2:TW pinned to taskbar and AI pinned on top of that shortcut. Right click M2:TW, pop-up menu to click AI start, then click M2:TW icon. Three clicks is all. So while Win8 may give a better touch template that works for quick access here and there, I don't see its other showy, and eye-sore, features improving the experience enough to make it worth replacing Win7. At this point, I'm going to acquire a couple cheap backups of Win7 so I can blank slate new computers I later buy. I won't at all argue with the efficiency of a desktop search program. Always nice to have the extra tools just in case.

I see what you mean about the mouse, but touch screens still aren't terribly cost effective or durable IMO and I can't properly do detail work on Photoshop without a mouse or pad of some type.