Valve founder Gabe Newell has chastised Windows 8 once again in a recent interview, following previous remarks in which he called Windows 8 "a catastrophe" and said Microsoft"s new operating system will make people "rage quit computing."
Those prior statements were made before Windows 8 launched in October. Since then, nearly seven percent of all users of Valve"s Steam service have adopted Windows 8 – a substantial percentage more than its Linux and Mac users and just behind the market share of the seven-year-old Windows Vista.
Despite the figures, Newell still isn"t happy with Microsoft"s latest operating system. In an interview with The Verge at CES 2013, Newell called Windows 8 "this giant sadness" and claims the adoption of the operating system shows a lack of consumer interest. He states:
The thing about Windows 8 wasn’t just [Microsoft"s] distribution. As somebody who participates in the overall PC ecosystem, it’s totally great when faster wireless networks and standards come out, or when graphics get faster. Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business. Rather than everybody being all excited to go buy a new PC, buying new software to run on it, we’ve had a 20+ percent decline in PC sales -- it’s like "holy cow that’s not what the new generation of the operating system is supposed to do." There’s supposed to be a 40 percent uptake, not a 20 percent decline, so that’s what really scares me. When I started using it I was like "oh my god..." I find [Windows 8] unusable.
Newell also talks in detail about Valve"s hardware plans, including their own "Steam Box" PC plans, but states Valve"s version of the computer won"t be running Windows – instead, Newell said, "That’ll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can." He also envisions a time where the Steam Box will be more of a server than a normal gaming PC, saying eventually one PC could connect to "eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody [would be getting] great performance out of it."
All of that sounds good, and Newell seems convinced that Valve can go after the game console business that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo currently compete in. Much of the hypothetical success of a Steam Box device would come down to whether or not the internet accepts it, he said.
"If you do something that is cool, that"s actually worth people"s time, then they"ll adopt it," Newell told The Verge. "If you do something that"s not cool and sucks, you can spend as many marketing dollars as you want, [they] just won"t."
Source: The Verge | Image via Valve