Microsoft’s Task Manager Fetish
- Microsoft showed off Windows 8 at Build last year. Their keynote presentation was pretty awkward, but the pinnacle of awkwardness was when they demoed the new Task Manager.
- A few weeks ago, Microsoft put up a blog post about how Windows 8 has better support for mobile broadband (WWAN) cards and dongles. They also showed off a screenshot of two new columns in the Task Manager which shows off the amount of data being consumed by background tasks.
- Today, Microsoft put up a blog post about how Windows on ARM is essentially just Windows, on ARM. Then for shits and giggles, they showed off a picture of a phone running the (desktop UI!?) Task Manager.
Microsoft, did it never occur to you that the Task Manager is the boner killer in your blog posts and presentations?
It’s like Microsoft sees people out in the wild using the Task Manager at work every day and said “huh, this is a heavily used feature, we should improve it” instead of saying “huh, Windows crashes a lot and our third-party developers make buggy software, maybe we should look into making our stuff more stable”.
I understand the need for the Task Manager when stuff goes wrong, and there is useful information for developers in there, which is why I let it slide during the Build keynote, but goddamn, when just about everything awesome and new to get posted about Windows 8 has the Task Manager with its “HI MOM” sign in the background, it makes you question Microsoft’s priorities.
