New Windows Logo — Yet Another Stupid Idea.

Windows has a new logo for a while, therefore, I need to rant about it.

I am a bit late with it, but that doesn’t matter. This new logo is the worst thing they could’ve come up with. It does not retain ANYTHING from the logo style used for the past twenty-two years. Why does this matter? It is recogenized everywhere, and brand recognition is very important. When I see a Windows logo somewhere, I think “This is compatible with Windows or even running Windows itself.” The color scheme hasn’t been changed since then. The logo was updated a bit in Windows XP and then a bit more in Vista, but it is still recogenizable. Now, if you show the new logo (which can be seen at the very top of this post) to somebody, you would get about 0.1% of recogenition around the world — and the people who would do that are the people who saw it somewhere on the Internet (Google returns over 2560 million results).

That is just the beginning. The logo feels Metro-ish and simple. Too simple.

One more thing. The logo looks really close to the old Windows 1.0 logo. Here it is:

But the old logo looks good, unlike the new one. The 1.0 one feels like one big image, and the 8 one feels like the window and the text are separate. It also shows off the crappiness of Windows 8 itself: it is even less functional than Windows 1.0, which had minimal windowing capabilities.

Let’s finish off with an announcement: I’m going to write a review of Windows 8 Consumer Preview as soon as it comes out, as I’ve upgraded my machine a while ago and it is capable of running it nicely, even in VirtualBox. (for curious people: Athlon II X3 460/GeForce GTS 450/4GB of RAM/500GB of HDD/64-bit Windows 7/64-bit Arch Linux.)

Update @ 2012-02-26T19:45Z: I forgot to mention that it will be released on Wednesday. Yes, this Wednesday, February the 29th. Expect the review to show up in the next two weeks (this may be changed at any given moment. Watch my Twitter feed for more news.)