They got people to start paying for Xbox Live back in what, 2005? 2006? Back then there wasn't a lot of competition and they had a strong offering.

On a new system, asking people to pay Microsoft a toll so they can then pay Netflix to use Netflix is almost as a big of a joke as asking people to pay to play multiplayer games. Sure some people will keep going along with it, but I expect it'll be a much tougher sell this time around given the competition has caught up (and in the case of indie games, blown way past).

What's the real price going to be? You know, the one after you factor in whatever they're charging for Xbox Live this time around, in order to do what every other system on the planet lets you do for free. If they expect me to pay them for multiplayer gaming this time around, they're living in a fantasy land.

This unveiling was so vague and missing information that it's truly impressive. It's like Microsoft knows their answers are going to piss people off, so they're just avoiding giving details at all.

TBH the entire presentation was highly unimpressive. The people listening were core gamers, and Microsoft totally ignored them in favor of "hey look at Kinect moving the TV window around and bringing up a browser!"

1. How much stuff is going to require paying for Xbox Live to work? I'm not keen on the current "pay Microsoft to gain the ability to pay Netflix to use Netflix" model that the 360 uses, and have very little interest in more of that. If the answer is that it's free once you buy the hardware, my interest goes up significantly.

2. How many of the media features will work in Canada? Typically the answer is "very few". Maybe Microsoft can do better.

It's only going to be left alone if it can make giant piles of money and Yahoo management doesn't think they can boost some other property by linking them together.

Given that Tumblr is currently not profitable and Yahoo management most definitely thinks they can use it to boost their other properties, a promise that it'll be left alone isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

Oh? Never noticed. I wasn't the only one in my circles to comment on it when the new UI went live either.

Maybe the amount of stuff being shown at once was so much smaller before that it just wasn't as big a deal.

How many of them are actually *using* it?

Google's been shoving creating a g+ account down people's throats in order to use other Google services, so it's not surprising there's more accounts. But are any of them active?

So does Microsoft. They gave us Windows 8. How's that working out for them? (Considering they're now backtracking and putting boot to desktop and the start menu back in because the market isn't a big fan of what their UI design experts put out.)

I'm not really sure how it's an "uninformed criticism", when I'm using it. It's entirely informed. They moved the new things that I haven't seen and want to see off the screen, and kept old stuff that I've already seen and don't want to see again at the top. That's useful to me... why?

But yes, I'm sure that since a Ph.D came up with it, surely it's awesome and we should all bow down to it's greatness. So what if I have to scroll through old stuff to find new stuff, or have the alternative view of a metric fuckton of empty whitespace with a tiny list of content in the middle. I'm sure I'm just not seeing why that's actually a good thing because I'm not smart enough.

That about covers it. We get this nonsense in the government too. Senior management does their "lean six sigma strategic planning" for the year, and comes up with a giant poster on the wall of the department priority plan.

It's got lots of lovely sounding buzzphrases and fuzzy things, but absolutely nothing that anybody who does any of the real work can actually do. So it's totally useless. Business goes on as usual, and we kind of nod politely when they're in the room and wait for them to leave so we can get back to work.

If you want to get by as a "leader" these days, the goal seems to be to offer no actual leadership, no firm plans, and no position on anything.

I use g+ regularly (I know, insert joke about being the only person on the net to do that here). I've liked it, for the most part.

But yesterday? Man. That new interface went live and how I have three tiny columns of posts. Which itself might be okay, except they're in no discernible order whatsoever. New stuff I haven't seen yet is buried off the screen, but there's six things from two days ago still hanging around at the top. Sometimes new things appear in a visible spot, sometimes they don't. I don't know why I need three columns when each one is so small that it's barely telling me anything, and looks like it was designed for a mobile screen. (The iPad app has a similar layout but has much saner ordering and uses 1 or 2 columns depending on the size of the item. It works far better.)

There's an option to turn it back to a single column, but the column stays the same size and now 2/3 of the screen is totally empty while I have to click to expand everything to see more than 30 words and scroll down like crazy. At least in that mode it seems to be ordered correctly.

The main reaction in my g+ circles to the update was confusion. It wasn't even the usual "change is bad" reaction. People were just lost in how they were supposed to read this new layout and find the new stuff in a simple way.

It's funny because g+ started off with a simpler, easier to use page than Facebook had. That's gone and reversed itself now. I really don't get what Google's thinking. As of right now, I'd actually rank the usability of Facebook more highly.

Can't find talented technical folks to join the team, or can't find talented technical folks to join the team for well below market wages?

Usually when people say one, they really mean the other.

Skyrim doesn't require Admin, and it happens to be the most recent of the games listed here.

In fact, I'm pretty sure this claim is total bullshit.

If you have web software that requires IE on Windows to work, the problem is on your end.

Vista did suck when it came out for quite a lot of people, but the core problem wasn't Vista. The problem was that the driver model changed and there was a lot of immature drivers out there. But for your average home user, all they understand is that the computer has Vista and isn't working as well as their older XP one did.

Windows 7 didn't share that problem because by time it came out the drivers had matured.

Windows 8's problem is that it's two UIs that don't play nice together in the same place, and people who know how to use Windows 7 (or XP) don't want to learn the new one and figure out when they're going to switch back and forth. It's a blunder on Microsoft's part that the two don't play together more nicely.

That, and what moron thought moving the "shut down" button into such an obscure location was a good idea? Yes, people do in fact turn PCs off fairly regularly.

Yep, nothing says "innovation" like confusing the hell out of your users and removing the ability to have multiple programs on screen at once.

Because nobody who uses Windows multitasks, right?

They don't need to backtrack very much. Add a button during initial user setup that lets you enable boot to desktop if you want it. When that's on, boot to desktop and show a start button. At a bare minimum that button could just bring up the Metro Start Screen, which as long as it had a clear way to close it (like an X at the top right when on a PC) would mollify a lot of the complaining.

Bringing back the full start menu would solve more of it, but I'm not convinced that's entirely necessary. In my experience most users actually start programs by clicking icons on the desktop and don't use the start menu much at all anyway. What they really need is just a more familiar way to do what they need to do.

For the more serious people that really want a full start menu back, there's stuff like Start8.