Monday, December 10, 2012

Microsoft Windows 8 is Bombing

So one of the magazines I read regularly is Ad Age, and according to Ad Age, Microsoft Ads Are Everywhere, But They're Not Selling Windows. Having been in Advertising for 20 years I can give you a brief insight as to why. Microsoft having long been known for it's business machines has sort of the corner on the business market. Businesses love to have things that work. Windows Vista which I use, but the rest of the market hated, had its share of issues in terms of the requirements for running it on already existing machines. Furthermore when integrating it with some of the networks already in place there were huge security risks. IT departments did not embrace it and it bombed.

Microsoft quickly followed suit with Windows 7. I myself did not upgrade, but did purchase a new Laptop that came with the software loaded. Quite a few of my corporate clients currently run Windows 7. About 5 Windows Updates in, my machine started exhibiting the "Black Screen of Death" which was basically a failed Windows Update. It took about 25 minutes, but eventually my brand new quad core laptop would finally come on. After a reboot, be prepared to wait another 25 minutes. After a short investigation online I noticed that there was no fix available, but you could fix the issue by setting up a new user profile. So I took it upon myself to save my beloved laptop. In the end I went into the start up items in the registry for my profile and deleted the new Windows Update item that had already been installed which was crashing the machine on start up. This saved my machine and my bloated already well-used profile.

In looms Windows 8
I received a phone call a few months ago from a client that said "The website interface you created isn't working in Windows 8." Windows 8 hadn't been released yet, so he must have been running the Beta pre-release version of the software. A quick search and I had found a copy. Rather than hosing any of my working production machines I setup a new profile in Parallels and installed the software on one of my Mac workstations. I was shocked.

1. Just because you make something doesn't mean people will buy it.
On initial load the software was hideous. Some sort of mix between post modernism / minimalism and the 80s. Then I noticed something... once I was inside of Internet Explorer I couldn't get out unles I used the old shortcut Alt-F4 to quit the application. New users won't know that. I couldn't get back to where I was. I've been using Windows since there was a Windows and this is bad. I mean really bad. If I can't get out, then you're doomed.

2. If people have the chance to demo the Windows 8 at a store before using it, they will likely not like it... especially if there are other machines around.
Windows 8 is not intuitive. The very first rule about creating a user interface whether it be for a website, a program, or a mobile device, is that it HAS TO BE INTUITIVE. After spending about 30 minutes trying to find my way around and figure out where everything had gone I was able to finally turn on the desktop that I was used to. There was no "Start Menu" like what has existed in Windows since Windows '95. No normal top screen menus either.

3. If a customer can't use it at home, why would they try to replace their workstation with it?
In these increasing resource depleted work environments of the modern age, people do not experiment with new things. If you create an operating system that has a learning curve similar to most production programs for the masses (Word, Excel, etc) you will not have good results. People need to be productive and saying "I can't figure out this new version of Windows" is not an option.

4. If I had a problem with it, then who are you really targeting?
I have a high-end video editing design station that runs Windows Vista 64-bit. I did not upgrade for fear of the Black Screen of Death and because of some of the new processor licensing issues. (My machine has 12 cores and 64gb of RAM). I was looking forward to Windows 8. I have a Wacom tablet, so I can probably navigate the OS similar to a touch screen and the new touch mice make it so I could probably get one of those and use it as well. I don't want to have to upgrade everything just to run some new non-backward compliant OS. I have thousands of dollars of software licenses for all sorts of high-end production apps from 3D to Video Editing to the Adobe Creative Suite and if they don't play well with the new interface on Windows I am not upgrading.

Having Sherlock Holmes use it on the TV show Elementary was a bad idea. He's smarter than that. He's not going to be on the bleeding edge of any OS install, and if he's the hacker they're trying to make him out to be, then he's not going to be using Windows Anything as his primary machine. I'm sort of sick of the Windows product placement overall. It's a hideous interface, it reminds me of my bad experience, and it's too ubiquitous. It's like the ads during the election, I want them to end.

Another thing to consider is that because I'm one of the more technically saavy Windows supporters I'm usually the guy someone calls when they've messed something up. If I can't figure out the OS, then it's going to be a bomb for your branding. I'm going to tell people to buy a Mac. Not because I think that Apple is better, or because I think Apple has a better company. I hate Apple and their business model, but if I have to try and figure out Windows 8 on someone's machine just out of the kindness of my heart, I'm going to probably be the driving force in steering their next machine purchase immediately and I'm going to tell them if they buy a Windows machine they're on their own. I don't have the time to deal with it. I wonder what kind of machine they would buy? It's probably not going to have Windows on it... AND it will be more secure (for now).

That last statement is a little joke. Security is in the eye of the beholder. You can read more about security in my other blog at: Observation - the-analytical.blogspot.com

So in short, there's your answer. It's not the advertising, it's the branding. It's a crappy OS and word of mouth spreads faster than product placement. The more people you associate with it the worse it's going to be. Just change the interface to something people are used to and you're golden. Run a couple of press releases after the fact and they'll be much better spent than the Jonestown approach of "just drink the Kool-aid."

Illustrator CS6 still not ready for prime time.

I've been using all of the Adobe products since they came out (or before they were owned by Adobe), allowing me to be one of the fortunate few who has the ability to notice the changes with every new release. Some of the newer releases have created a few changes that actually aren't for the better at all. Since the future of everything related to marketing communications will ultimately involve some sort of digital medium I was shocked at some of the major oversight on Adobe's part in regard to the treatment of pixels in one of their popular illustration programs, Adobe Illustrator. Furthermore the Save for Web feature in Adobe Illustrator no longer has the option to save HTML files for you. It kind of makes me wonder who's driving the agendas at Adobe. If they're willing to sacrifice a few things to save their productivity but tank the productivity of the end users is it really worth supporting Adobe anymore at all? I would say no. Now is the time competition... step up!

Since I'm a long-time user of Adobe Illustrator I almost always use it to generate layouts for the web for websites, email marketing pieces, and sometimes for animations for the web. I was a little shocked when one of my agency clients sent me a file for an email marketing piece (we call them mail blasts) and I was unable to save the file for web with HTML after painstakingly creating all of the necessary slices. This is a huge setback. Not only did I have to save back to an older version of CS5 that I luckily still had installed, but I also had to make sure that my client didn't use any of the newer features in Illustrator like gradients as strokes that could crash the older version of the program. Luckily this time everything went okay.

The deeper I got into Illustrator trying to Save for the Web I noticed a few other issues that actually showed up in CS5. The pixel placement of the elements in the interface plays a huge part in how those pieces will render when they're saved for the internet. Since Illustrator is a Vector program, all of the lines, points, fills, and shading that your use in the document might be assigned a width in the program, but because they're all relative to the pasteboard might not line up with pixels on-screen. So one of the things I noticed is if you have your artwork start at some odd placement like 102.45 pixels, that .45 pixels actually gets split and you'll end up with either a transparent or slightly discolored pixel depending on the save type. This existed in CS5.

Older versions of the applications are much more robust with dealing with the internet files (web formats) in general. They have the ability to position items exactly and when saved out do not have issues with pixels and borders not lining up.

The newest version of Illustrator (at the time of this writing) CS6 has some other issues that it has been plagued with. One being the measurement system overall. If you play with the strokes and watch the positioning of the boxes you'll see what I mean. The strokes actually take size, similar to what you experience when working with strokes on the web. This means that rather than being just a stroke applied to the size of the box, it's actually altering the shape characteristics of the box itself.

A little test:
New Document Dialogue in Adobe Illustrator
Create a 120px x 120px new document. This creates an art board at 0,0. Be sure to turn on your ruler and set the ruler units to pixels. (Note: When you change the size on the New Document dialog box it will no longer say Web or Print because the size isn't stored as a profile.)

Draw a box inside with a 1-point/pixel black stroke that is 120 pixels wide by 120 pixels tall.

Note in the control palette that the width is 120px by 120px, but the x coordinate for the box isn't at 0,0 like intended or in old versions. It's actually at -.5px x -.5px meaning it's splitting the centered stroke (default for Illustrator) in half.

Example from the control palette.

Stroke Palette
Screenshot of final file.



If I select "align stroke to inside" in my stroke palette (left), now the box is off-centered visually in the interface. When the image of the box is exported with the save for web feature the box saved is offset just like the preview (right). This problem happens in the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Adobe Illustrator for Windows. I've not tested these findings on a Mac but they are more than likely similar.

This brings up the issue though, if the future of everything we're doing from Web to Email to Mobile Devices to Television (movies as well) are all related to the pixel and Adobe didn't think this was a major issue getting this building block of everything under control, then what are we to do? A few of my clients have noticed this issue asked me what to do. They do not have access to the older versions of the software that I have. Furthermore with the nanny-state tactics that Adobe has been doing of late, there may be the possibility at some point in time that I can not use my older software (rightfully licensed) because of some other glitch in their system.

I've been becoming increasingly more and more frustrated with Adobe being on the bleeding edge myself and see no good alternative on the horizon.  Since Adobe was allowed to purchase Macromedia, they've effectively created a monopoly on the industry.

Recently I was apprised of the information that although I paid for the Master Collection of the Adobe Creative Suite, I'm not allowed to have the most recent upgrades to the software because I'm not a member of their costly abomination to the modern licensing world, the Creative Cloud Subscription. I refused to be beheld to a company that can raise the price of the software that I'm using for a living while I'm using it simply so they can make a few extra bucks for their shareholders. Anyone considering the Creative Cloud, at the time of this writing even with the discount for already being an Adobe user, I can tell you that it is way more cost effective to only pay for the software outright and then upgrade when you need to, rather than paying for the cloud services. The drawback is that you do not receive the bleeding edge buggy features (which by my latest experiences) that might render your copy of the program you use for work useless.

Until later, -Chris