Windows 8 Beta

For those not aware, Microsoft has made Windows 8 available free of charge as a "customer preview." It's available for download here:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows-8/iso

Is anyone else trying this yet?

So far impressions are mixed over here. The new Start screen feels a bit like a poor imitation of OSX's launchpad, and it feels like it ought to drop the user straight to the desktop on login -- bringing the start screen up right away feels somehow counter-intuitive. I've also noticed that performance is a bit lackluster -- it's a bit laggy on the machine I'm testing on (which, in fairness, is not terribly powerful, but it does easily exceed the listed minimum requirements).

Several of the apps are also not yet complete, billing themselves as well as "customer preview" applications.

More thoughts to come.

 

I haven't tried it.

I'm curious to know what the expected and substantial differences are between Windows 7 vs. Windows 8, as it appears that I will be skipping Windows 7 entirely. I'm thinking mostly of performance and stability.

It is my understanding that the updated interface is more inline with mobile OSes. You know, the full integration with "apps" and touch screens as with most phone systems. I can see why it's going this way now that mobile devices are more ubiquitous than desktop or even laptop machines. But where do you draw the line? Should a desktop be a desktop and a mobile be a mobile?

What will Windows 8 mean for gaming? This is what I use Windows Vista for mostly. When I replace this machine eventually, it will likely be at a time when Windows 8 comes preloaded.

Or will Windows 8 be worth upgrading to sooner rather than later? My current hardware is far more powerful than is required for Windows 8.

 

I really like Win7. It's very stable and the interface works as solidly as XP. Okay I killed that security policy that checks every damned thing and asks for permission...just turn that shit off. I'll wait.

Okay, now about Win8 and the codebase among CPUs mobile and desktop. I see it. I'd like my phone experience to be matched better with my desktop experience. Android suffices in some manner via Chrome. I am assuming that iOS also does that via iCloud as my iPad, iPod touch experience shares all the elements seamlessly. My Outlook stuff? Yeah I have to do shit to make that happen, which is lame.

 

Does everyone else take the time to turn off all the unnecesary "user friendly" services and apps?
I also use HijackThis to remove any unnecessary items.

 

Yes, I haven't run anti-virus at all on my Win7 install.

 

Interestingly, I came across this video today:


View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4boTbv9_nU


For those who can't or don't want to watch, the video depicts the father of a tech blogger (Chris Pirillo). He's been sat down in front of Windows 8 and told to figure it out. He opens Windows Explorer, and then spends four minutes unsuccessfully trying to get back to the home screen before asking if Microsoft is trying do drive him to use a Mac.

It really sums up the issues with the new Metro interface. It is, in a word, unintuitive. It makes assumptions about the user interface that are practical for a mobile device, but it's still marketing itself primarily to desktop users.

There's been a lot of negative feedback so far. I'm wondering if Microsoft will take any of it into consideration. Then again, fixing some of these issues will require a major overhaul of the interface, so I'm not optimistic.

All that said, I asked Magpie what her thoughts were and she said that it was a bit confusing at first but she likes it. She's a lot closer to the type of user Microsoft needs to worry about capturing than I am, so maybe they're onto something after all.

 

Maybe Microsoft is throwing it all in for a "post-PC" society.

Maybe they're geniuses.

Maybe they're idiots.

Who knows?

Why should we care about the new iPad? Because it is the future of computing — CBC

 

There's been a lot of talk about the death of the PC, but so far it all seems to be hype. Even if home users move away from desktop systems en masse (not something I'd be confident predicting, but for the sake of argument), desktop PC's and more specifically Windows PC's are still widespread in the business realm. Arguably this is Microsoft's core market segment for Windows; business users are far less likely to pirate software, and licencing even for small businesses can run thousands of dollars per year.

There are a lot of tasks that a tablet or mobile device is simply not well suited for. Speaking personally, I spend a lot of time working in terminals, and for that I need a proper keyboard and a reasonable display. Graphics artists need a lot of horsepower that's not available in a mobile device (take a look at the high-end Mac Pro workstations to get an idea of the kind of stuff I'm talking about). Even a typical office user does things in day-to-day that aren't particularly suited to mobile devices; anyone who does a lot of work with spreadsheets, or sends and receives large volumes of email, accesses databases regularly, etc. is better served by a traditional mouse-and-keyboard interface.

Mobile devices may one day take over, but even if/when they do I'd predict that we're most likley going to see it in the form of devices that can be dropped into a dock to be converted to something more closely resembling a traditional workstation. For even that to be possible there's going to have to be a big shift in the way we interact with these systems, and a conservative estimate would be that we're 5-10 years away from any such thing.

So far, the post-PC world is a lot of buzz and little else. Rumours of the desktop's death have been greatly exaggerated.

 

I wouldn't call "post-PC" buzz and little else. Though I would call "the death of the PC" extreme.

The fact is, the market is changing: huge growth in tablets, smartphones, and other portable devices, while PC sales growth is slowing. It has slowed from double-digit growth to single-digit.

Post-PC isn't a reference to "not using PCs anymore." No, it's more about other devices taking over as the predominant mode of computing. There is evidence there. It's not just rumours and buzz.

Microsoft may stem the flow with Windows 8 on ultrabooks. Either way, it seems the biggest growth will be in portable devices, rather than desktops.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-03-08/pc-sales-growth-forecast-ipad/53422952/1

 

Right, I think that usage is getting more fragmented. There will be people who will abandon the desktop completely because they didn't really need one. Their usage is accommodated by the office desktop and their smartphone or tablet.

Ultrabooks are just like netbooks. Niche of the niche.

 

So here's the thing about that: Windows currently has about a 2% market share in the mobile device market, and that's been declining for years (Android is the leader, followed by iOS, with Symbian in third). They're building a UI that caters to a market that they don't have any presence in, and alienating their core market in the process. Sales of Windows and Office make up the overwhelming majority of Microsoft's revenue. I'm thinking it's an odd decision to say the least to risk that on a new platform for a market that they're not a player in.

Perhaps Windows 8 signals Microsoft's attempt at a serious break into the mobile device market, but if that's the case they're going to need a compelling feature set to get anywhere. Google did it by creating a platform that's much more open than iOS (which at the time was the standard), as well as integrating their powerful web services (Maps, Gmail, Music, Youtube, etc). Microsoft doesn't have a stable of widely used web apps to sell their device on, and I highly doubt they're about to start open sourcing their codebase after decades of opposing it. Even if they did, that's still not enough -- they need something that sets them apart from the competition, and imitating what's already been done doesn't seem like a good way to do that.

What's their angle?

I understand that the Windows 8 codebase is meant to be highly portable, but that seems like it's of limited usefulness when the source isn't available to the public. Linux (and Unix) thrives on portability, because it gives developers the tools to bring the OS to whatever platform they're using. OS X is built on the Darwin kernel, which is based on BSD (which in turn is based on Unix). Android is built around the Linux kernel. Devices like the Raspberry Pi take advantage of Linux's portability to run a full-featured computer on a small-scale ARM platform. Where does Windows fit in here? Regardless of how portable the kernel is, it's still only available on devices that Microsoft decides are profitable, which means that any of these experimental uses are locked out by definition.

 

I follow Robert Scoble on Google+ he's one of the head guys at Rackspace.