Most of the comments are focusing on the installation. That was not the point of the post. In fact, the installation was simple enough that a a 13 year old did it without any help whatsoever.

It's a usability issue. The paradigm shift is great enough that most everyone is talking about sitting in front of W8 absolutely dumbfounded.

I agree that it looks like a nice interface for a tablet or phone. I don't have a Metro-interface-equipped phone or tablet but concede that the interface seems nice for type of a device.

So far, I simply don't see it for a classic desktop computer. I'll put more time into it, but my first impression is that people will hate it during that critical "open the box" experience.

This is very similar to what happened in the transition from Office 2003 to, say, Office 2007. If you were a capable user of '03 you found yourself slowing down to a crawl to figure out how to do things in '07. Could you do exactly the same things? Absolutely. Yes. And more. Was the pain, aggravation and productivity loss worth the new look and feel? Absolutely not. I'll argue that there are zero incremental gains from forcing users to switch from the '03 to the '07 interface. In fact, one could very well argue that there was a net loss due to the fact that users had to invest a sometimes not trivial amount of time to figure things out. And all of this to do exactly the same work they were doing before the transition to Office '07. The interface did not magically turn them into productivity masters, it actually damaged productivity.

So far I see the Windows 8 paradigm as a step in that direction. Frankly, In my opinion, it has been going downhill since Vista. XP was good. And, yes, it could have been improved, but there really wasn't anything fundamentally horrible about the XP experience and UI. I don't personally care about bling-bling. I work with my computer, it's not a toy. Maybe that's not a typical consumer use case scenario where bling-bling might be a requirement.

I feel very strongly that MS should have taken the approach of incrementally improving upon XP rather than going off in these ridiculous tangents. For example, it would have been nice to have really intelligent copying of files. You know, where if you are copying 500 files and file number 23 fails the copy routine would log it and keep going rather than killing the entire run? And there's more.

But, you look at Vista and some of the decisions made and you really have to wonder what they are thinking. Sorting of folders in Windows explorer is but one example.

With W8 I see a transition that is going to be jolting for most people. Take anyone who's been using XP, Vista or 7 and plant them in front of a W8 machine (that was the point of using my 13-year-old as a test subject) and they grind to an absolute halt.

Keep in mind that they will be trying to do what they were doing just minutes before on the older OS. Except that, this time around, they'll be utterly confused as to how to do it. Sure, eventually they'll figure it out. It might take a couple of weeks to get comfortable, maybe more for some, less for others.

The argument here is very simple: The time required to learn to use the new W8 paradigm to, in the end, accomplish nothing more and derive no productivity gains is completely wasted. If you had a business with, say, 50 or more employees you'd be nuts to switch to W8. The office would grind to a halt virtually overnight and it would take weeks to get back to where it was before. In the end, not one person in this hypothetical business would be more efficient at their job due to W8.

BTW, just in case readers think that I might be an Apple fan-boy, know that we own about 25 Windows-based workstations, several Linux and three Macs. Definitely not a Mac shop here. The only reason we moved some of our machines to Vista is to move to a 64 bit OS as required by some of our Finite Element Analysis software, other than that, I've seen no point whatsoever in moving beyond XP. If an XP+ was available with true incremental enhancements I'd jump on it, but we are not here to play games and I really don't have time for the latest consumer bling-bling experiment in UI.