Stefan Mileschin

Software giant Microsoft appears to have finally lost its rag over the large number of critics bashing its flagship Windows 8.

For those who came in late, Microsoft produced a version of its Windows operating system which had an interface designed for smartphones and was surprised that PC users found it inconvenient.

But it seems that the mood at Vole is changing from hurt and surprised to hacked off.

Writing in the company blog, Frank X Shaw, vice president of corporate communications at Microsoft said that he was fed up with extreme knockers.

He said that these days everyone is a publisher and there is a trend to the extreme. The only way to stand out is to opt for sensationalism and hyperbole over nuanced analysis.

"In this world where page views are currency, heat is often more valued than light. Stark black-and-white caricatures are sometimes more valued than shades-of-gray reality," he poetically pointed out.

Normally selling 100 million copies of a product is a good thing and listening to feedback and improving a product is even better.

But for some reason all that goodness has been ignored in favour of "extreme" criticism. Even the Financial Times said the upcoming changes to Windows 8 mark one of the most prominent admissions of failure for a new mass-market consumer product since Coca-Cola's New Coke fiasco nearly 30 years ago, moaned Shaw.

That other tabloid, the Economist, attacked Microsoft when it said "restoring the Start button will not restore Microsoft to its former glory."

At the heart of all this negative criticism is that Microsoft took away the Start button or boot up into desktop mode.

Shaw insists that Windows 8 is a good product and is getting better every day.

"A computer operating system offers different experiences to different customers to meet different needs, while still moving the entire industry toward an exciting future of touch, mobility, and seamless, cross-device experiences," he wrote.

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