Microsoft has seen the future of Windows and it’s touching. Well, touching the screen to be specific.
The new Windows 8 interface is all about smearing a perfectly fine LCD monitor with your greasy fingers. Touch-this. Touch-that. Everything is touch! It’s like Apple did all that research on phone and tablet interfaces and Microsoft suddenly noticed and said, “YES!”
Something like that.
The current Windows desktop, the one everyone has disliked since Windows 95 came out in 1996, is now merely an app.
Yeah, they’re using “app” instead of “program.” Wonder where that came from?
Like I’ve written before, a computer is a computer. It’s designed for information management, files and folders, programs, gathering and manipulating data, sort-and-report — in a word, productivity.
Tablets, on the other hand, are designed for drive-by computing. They’re ideal for the casual user, the blurker, the watcher, the game-player, the browser, the music-listener, or anyone who considers typing a two-sentence email reply or a “me too” post on a blog as their worthy and vital contribution to the wealth of knowledge of mankind.
Microsoft has obviously confused the two devices, believing that people who want to be casual users also want that from their desktops.
Hardly.
In the future, phones and tablets will suit a majority of the population. They won’t even buy desktop computers. But the people who do, they will want a real operating system with a traditional interface. From looking at what Microsoft is doing with Windows 8, that’s not the case here.
My guess: Windows 8 sells well, and even if it doesn’t Microsoft’s absurd licensing agreement with PC manufacturers mandates that it will. But people in professional offices will shun it. They will beg for Windows 7 or even the dreadful Windows Vista. Updates will lag.
It should be an interesting time, at least for wags like myself.
It really does amaze me how huge companies like Microsoft can get it so wrong.. maybe it’s because it has too much power and has lost sight of what people need and want. One thing is for sure I will wait a bit before buying this one unlike Windows 7 which I got straight away, I have seen a few videos on youtube of windows 8 now sure it’s fast ect. But as you said a desktop does not run apps it runs programs.
Comment by chiefnoobie — September 16, 2011 @ 6:43 am
Microsoft has a terrible bureaucracy problem. At least when I knew people there, the various divisions and even compartments within the divisions were all fighting with each other. The politics was thick. Because most creative people are bad at politics, invention took a back seat.
There’s a story somewhere about a tablet/laptop font technology developed at Microsoft. It was superior to anything out there, but the project leader was squashed by another project leader who had more clout and connections. So the technology died. Until Microsoft gets rid of Ballmer, or gets split up into several tiny companies, that kind of nonsense won’t go away.
Comment by admin — September 16, 2011 @ 6:53 am
That’s true they must have some of the best designers in the world working for them they just never get chance to let their ideas make it through all the politics
Comment by chiefnoobie — September 16, 2011 @ 7:12 am