After years of being pegged as the impotent giant, Microsoft turned heads and changed expectations today with its first public showing of Windows 8. Windows 8 isn’t Windows 7 with a ribbon bar and new lip gloss: it’s jawdroppingly impressive.
Assuming there’s real code behind this demo, Microsoft just kicked PCs as we know them to the curb while confirming something most people get in 5 minutes with an iPad: mobile tablets will rule, and soon.
If you’re reading this on your Windows Vista (insert virtual paper sympathy card) or Windows 7 desktop whatever, you may want to skip clicking through to this video – it will just make you soul ache for an experience that is not going to ship for a while. And if you’re reading this on your iMac or iPad, you can take consolation that Apple will be be announcing iCloud next week – pay no attention to that nagging little voice you hear saying, “that came out of Microsoft!?.”
By the way, the interface, and Windows 8 will be written in HTML5 and Javascript. Glaringly absent: Any mention of .NET.
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Glaringly absent is not .NET, I have no doubt they are used behind the scenes for a lot of the back end functionality, but rather Silverlight and WPF as they are the technologies MS built for client side UI. MS has seemingly dropped them in favour of HTML5 for UI now. It is a bit weird as the similar UI on Windows Phone 7 uses Silverlight.
Not really new. Microsoft is [as usual
] adding another layout, making things more complicated. This looks nice for some apps , and will work for phones quite well. But you can see in the video that for Excel that there’s still a regular Windows 7 behind it.
So customers now actually have TWO user interfaces to learn. Is that progress?
Looking at the details, particularly the glance at office (notice the start button) and the quick look into the file system, what we are seeing here is a new shell that works better on portable devices and touch screens. Presumably we’ll hear much more later about the guts of the operating system.
I won’t drop my .NET just yet. With Microsoft development tools and some back-office systems being written for .NET, as well as the massive investment Microsoft have made in the platform, it doesn’t seem like they’ll be dropping it soon either. It doesn’t surprise me that it isn’t mentioned. It’s not a glaring omission as this isn’t a video targeted at developers.
Realistically, a move to a purely HTML 5 system with JavaScript wouldn’t seem good for Microsoft. It would move them from a closed market of Windows PC users into a much wider market. When many other devices and operating systems can also be based upon these standards, Microsoft loses the lock-in and makes it far too easy for users to go elsewhere. The differentiation at this point would become price and support/service. With the web offering support for most problems for free, we would see a pushing down of prices, perhaps to the point where all operating systems would have to be free at the point of installation.
Very interesting. Thanks for the heads up.
Very interesting, although I can’t help but think that, at this point, it is a lot of smoke-and-mirrors. Can’t say yet whether I’ll like it better than Apple’s UI, but I’m really glad to see that Microsoft is continuing to innovate new UI paradigms (eg: breaking away from traditional keyboard and mouse) unlike most of the others who are simply copying Apple.
With all big software rollouts, the devil is in the details (Remember Google Wave?), and we won’t see those details for a while. Again, assuming this becomes an actual OS, it’s going to be the first serious challenge to the iPad, and given the volume, time for most computer users (except programmers and “heavy metal” users like designers, scientists) to wave bye-bye to desktops.
For years people have asked if I thought “desktops are dead.” This was the obituary notice.
I just hope they cater for mouse users still. I love the accuracy of my mouse. I hate the inaccuracy of my fingers. Until I can sharpen my fingers to points I can’t imagine them ever being as good. I hate my new phone because of crap applications that think I have a stylus when the phone is touch screen only.
I’ve been thinking about Windows 8 and aren’t Microsoft in danager of alienating their core audience – desktop users. Sure the mobile stuff is great to see but aren’t they two different machines? Mobile and desktop users are different surely. I can’t see the business world adopting this too quickly. Google tried to marry Android to phone and tablet and realised they couldn’t so maybe Microsoft know something they don’t or are about to screw up big-time.
There’s certainly a lot of cool-looking UI in there, which could make a Windows 8 tablet quite compelling. However I just hope they don’t force touch-centric UI onto desktop machines – that would really suck. If I have to do some mouse click-drag thing to go through my running applications, I might have to stop using Windows.
Oh, and desktops are far from dead. And in fact won’t die until someone comes up with an ergonomic replacement. Typing on a laptop is painful enough, but having to crane my neck over a tablet that I’m typing on – no thanks, I don’t need to donate more of my money to the health insurance companies.
I’m with you Bryan. Totally agree!