Is Windows 8 doomed to fail?

Recently I had a quick play with the new Microsoft Windows 8 operating system and was disappointed. The reasons why I felt disappointed are as follows:

• Without a touch screen to scroll to the left or right there is a naff scrollbar, it would have looked a lot better if they had to large buttons on each side like in Google Chrome.
• Some of the live tiles look annoying with constant movement.
• You cannot see more than 2 applications at the same time, this is clearly designed for tablets, but what about users with large monitors.
• The 2 application view does not allow a 50/50 split, there is always 1 application larger than the other.
• The old style Windows 7 option, seems to run a virtual machine, but is not as good as Windows 7 and the integration with the main operating system is clunky.  

Overall I got the impression this OS has been designed with the tablet in mind and I think if you are going to run it on a PC stick with Windows 7. The history of Microsoft OS seems to hint it is not going to be a good OS, see my list of OS and what I think of them below, hopefully Windows 9 will be the next good OS.

Windows history showing a trend.

• Windows 3.2 - Good OS
• Windows 95 - Not bad, but not great and seemed a bit buggy
• Windows 98 - Great OS and worked very well
• Windows ME - Rubbish
• Windows XP - Very Good OS
• Windows Vista - Dreadful, problems starting up and shutting down.
• Windows 7 - Good OS and runs really well 
• Windows 8 - So far, not good.

Sysbase Advantage Database - Using triggers to keep a history

I recently wrote an article about how to use triggers to keep a history of changes made to database records. This is very useful is you want to keep a trail of record changes for example I have used this to keep a trial of stock and where stock has moved from and to, also keeping a history of what has happened to a customer's order. I think most commercial databases would benefit from doing this and because it is done at  the database end it means that once it is done it will always keep a history rather than writing logging into software applications. Click here to go to the article.