Windows 8 vs. FROSTBORN
And now for a completely different topic with a trip down memory lane.
Windows 8!
It’s hard to believe that it’s been ten years since Windows 8 came out, but here we are. There’s a fascinating interview with Steven Sinofsky, the former Microsoft exec in charge of Windows 8 and the original iteration of the Surface, about the impact of Windows 8.
My personal experiences with Windows 8 were quite mixed. I was working in IT support at the time, and when Windows 8 came out, we skipped it and Windows 8.1 entirely. Windows 8 had a variety of enhancements and features that are now common in other platforms, but at the time it was too much, too soon. The user experience changes were too much for the average user to swallow, and introducing regular users to Windows 8 would have been a support nightmare. I very strongly suspect that a lot of institutions held off on upgrading until Windows 10 came along. I wrote the first three FROSTBORN books on a little 13-inch Asus laptop that came with Windows 8. Halfway through THE UNDYING WIZARD, the keyboard died. That particular model had a flaw that caused the keyboard to stop working and would require a new motherboard. Dealing with that problem slowed finishing THE UNDYING WIZARD by about week, and I had an irrational dislike of Windows 8 ever since, even though the operating system was hardly at fault for a bad motherboard connector.
I also tried writing and self-publishing a book about Windows 8. I had thought that Windows 8 would be the Next Big Thing, and I wanted to get a book out to take advantage of it. Clearly, this was not the best judgment on my part. Amazon has a tool that lets you look back at the lifetime sales history of a book you’ve published, and my Windows 8 book sold a grand total of 116 copies since I published it in 2012. To put that in perspective, my book about the Linux command line has sold 30,000 ebook copies and 1,300 print copies in the same span of time.
Of course, as clunky as the original Surface was, it improved quite a bit. Apple mocked the Surface at the time, but then quietly went on to integrate several Surface features into the iPad. I ended up writing the final books of the FROSTBORN series and most of SEVENFOLD SWORD and DRAGONTIARNA on a 4th-generation Surface Pro, which ran Windows 10, not Windows 8.
Anyway, if you’re interested in that period of computing history, the interview is definitely worth a read.
-JM