The biggest division between the Windows 8 supporters and those who despise it seems to be that anyone who does a lot of work on their machine abhors Windows 8, while those who mostly use 2-3 applications and do little else seem to like it.

To further complain about optimizing everything for phones and tablets, I attempted once again to use Office 2013 today, specifically the Outlook 2013 portion of it. Holy crap what a terrible interface. Everything is too large in a half-hearted attempt to optimize it for touch I presume. And all of the colors and visual cues are gone to eliminate graphical elements to make it faster on a tablet. There are no delineating features to indicate what is a read mail, what to click on, or any indicators at all telling you what you should be doing. It basically violates every design guideline known to humanity, and in addition has large SCREAMING all-caps everywhere.

All of the colors (if there are any at all) are muted. Most of the fonts are gray or light gray, further adding to the absolute uselessness of the interface. I read very quickly, but on Outlook 2013 I often had to go back and read things several times as my eyes just could not process the terrible fonts. (This can be changed, but I am talking about the defaults that most users will never touch.)

In Outlook 2013 which I gutted out using for six hours today, it took me 3-4 times longer to deal with the same volume of email. Since I get several hundred emails a day that I have to respond to, this is a real problem.

Also the taskbar icons for all of the Office applications look identical so it is impossible to distinguish them. Is that Lync or Outlook? Who knows? Furthermore they both are shit, so who really cares?

What an absolute fucking failure of design. It’s so terrible that even regular users have to notice this. I do everything quickly, so visual cues are very important to me; it’s why a terrible interface and bad fonts slow me down so much. But this interface disaster is so egregious that I can’t imagine anyone not noticing it.