Private pain: Dell layoff bloodbath to hit over 15,000 staffers – insiders

[Xithras]

40. Much of that is limitations based on the input format.

The user interface is clunky and not very intuitive.
The user interface is elegant and easy to use if you have a touchscreen. It sucks otherwise.

Many of the familiar functions are missing or are hard to get to from the home screen.
The home screen is the Start menu. You are limited to accessing Start menu items from that screen because of it. The desktop is one touch away...if you have a touchscreen. It sucks otherwise.

It's program backward comparability is bad.
Only for XP users, who make up a minority of Windows users. Nearly all programs and hardware designed for Vista or 7 work fine on 8. I genuinely can't fault Microsoft for not maintaining compatibility with a 12 year old dinosaur operating system that is now three versions out of date. You have to let go at some point.

It's app based start menu adds unnecessary steps to access programs.
This is an argument that I hear a lot and never quite grasped. If you have the icon on your Start screen, you can click that icon and open the program with a single click. If you don't have it bound, you just click the Apps button to view all the apps, and then click the application to open it. So that method has two clicks. That SAME action on XP generally takes FOUR clicks (Start>Programs>TheApplicationFolder>TheApplicationLink). Opening programs on 8 is actually much faster than previous versions of Windows. This one is even better with a touchscreen, but is still quicker even with a mouse.

It is a hybrid OS that attempts to bridge the gap between tablets and PCs and does neither successfully. It should be one or the other.
Microsoft really made the mistake of believing that all PC's would have touchscreens in no time. It was a dumb thing to assume. Few people are willing to change their screens just to upgrade their operating system, and most new PC purchasers still see touchscreens as a luxury item. Windows 8 actually runs incredibly well on a touch device so Win8 touch users generally like the operating system, but Microsoft assumed that mouse and keyboard users would only comprise a small portion of their legacy users, and included mouse support almost as an afterthought. That decision is really the biggest single failing in Windows 8, and it's one that I don't see them fixing anytime soon. Touchscreen desktop users only comprise a small percentage of Windows 8 users, which means that most Win8 users are struggling with mice and are unhappy with it. In the long term, that may go down as the decision that killed Windows.