Be Excellent To Each Other

So, erm, Microsoft posted this video showing bits of their Windows 8 ideas and an all-new interface.



Have a gander. I'm too tired to have a proper look yet.

That's a great looking tablet interface. I'm not at all convinced that a converged tablet/PC OS is entirely feasible or worthwhile, though.

The challenge for Microsoft with their next OS is going to be not only making it work well with tablets and (probably) phones, and making it easy for devs to design software that works with all form factors, but also making it worth well with all the old software. No easy task.

That isn't what I would want my desktop PC to look like. I'm also probably not going to be using a touchscreen on my desktop any time soon.

I do think Win7 is the best OS they have ever made though.

A couple of minutes in he switches it from the tiles view to a more recognisable desktop.

Aye, although it's not clear if that is just for compatibility or if Windows 8 apps will be able to run like that.

It looks like he is just showing the tablet/touchscreen interface for most of the video.

Well yeah - because Microsoft have a multi-million selling desktop productivity OS already, and don't have a usable tablet OS.

I think they've made fairly clear elsewhere that the tiles interface is just that - an interface skin - and that the core OS will be easily recognisable as a Windows OS.

Aye, I think you're right.

Although I suspect they'll be pushing touchscreen for desktops pretty heavily too.

Like the simple tabletness of the twitter app, combined with image selector

I am tempted to disagree with you there LP, although MS work closely with hardware manufactures (Dell, HP etc). I can't see touch screen desktops or laptops taking off very soon. I don't think there is a demand for them in the corp world. In fact the old thin client v thick client is doing the rounds again.

I personally think MS are producing a platform, that will work across HW types, (phone, tablet, laptop & desktop)

Touch screen desktops are an egonomic disaster! Hold your hand out in front of you and make small, precise motions for five minutes if you don't believe me.

I think an OS can be touch or pointer based, but not both at once. So normal Word runs on a touch-optimised Win8 on a tablet. Whoop-de-do. Unless it has a deeply different UI, it'll be bloody hard to use via touch. MS are still crippled by the "everything must run Windows" mentality.

What real alternatives are there?

Hang on, don't MS now have a halfway decent touch based OS in Windows Phone 7? Why not use that on tablets and leave windows to the mouse brigade?

I haven't watched the video.

Watch the vid...

It looks to bring the phone stuff, with the desktop stuff... to have the 'one' look of interface.

Edit:Apple doesn't do this does it? The i(phone, pad, pod) is not like the Mac OS is it?

It shows.

Nah.

Don't then...

Unless you plug a mouse and a keyboard into said tablet, of course.

I do agree, however, that eons of backward-compatibility is bad for Windows. XP stuff can be dropped by now.

Yes, that is true, we are finally trying to stop out customer from using 16bit apps through to 32bit legacy apps. On the converse side is when these apps support peripherals which are very expensive to replace.

So they stay with XP. MS have been far too good to these kind of people, IMO. I don't think they should go for the Apple OSX (was it Tiger? Dunno) approach of "Everything we've made before now is redundant", but it can let go of some things.

That is hard as we need all the users on one platform currently win xp, soon to be win 7. As it is easier to support (patch, update, relaease apps) as there are less variants namely one .

This is part of my job to look at bringing old stuff (by making it work or replacing it) to work on one platform.

It's not hard - if you need it, keep it. But it's going to be ten years old in August, so I think MS can safely stop shoe-horning compatibility into the newer versions now.

Agreed MS should stop with the compatibility, we will have been through Vista and 7 by then.

It is hard, as you really don't want to have different OSs about. As that means dual running back end stuff. it is cleaner to have one system.

Win 8 is still available in standard desktop form. It's basically Win7, but the default background is some gaudy fish thing.

Conversely, by forcing users to move to new software, you may be forcing them to invest in new hardware at the same time. That may be an expense that some can't absorb.

True, but the cost of new 'tin' is a relatively low expense compared to datacentres and servers etc.

Plus as Grim said xp is 10 years old now, the support for it from MS must be running out soon.

I thought MS stopped supporting XP last year, or so.

Corps can get an extension for support.

As Grim... says, it really is about time they dropped all the designed-in backwards compatibility - go pure 64bit .NET, with "XP Mode" (or rather, an evolved "7 Mode" which can have specific minimum hardware requirements) being perfect for any desired backwards compatibility, and then start optimising the architecture to that purpose.

I was part of the team that moved Unilever onto Windows NT. I remember we got the PCs from Dell for next to bugger all, but we got the NT discs for 5p each as we wanted so many of them.
Physical copies, too

How long ago was that.

We have just rolled out over 110,000 Desktops and laptops on to my current project...

(I want a proper job)

1997, I think. Maybe 1998. It was around 40,000 client computers in the UK - other people did the servers. The monitors took up a lot of space.

That was about the time I did the HSE in Bootle and UK, we used a gold disk build from our laptops....

I remember when we did the Job Centres, the monitors were massive and had to be fastened down.

Without proper backwards compatibility though, MS risk a new OS being a bigger flop than Vista. Even big corporations baulk at having to replace not just their OS and possibly their hardware, but all their applications too. I was fairly heavily involved in the move from XP to Windows 7 at the last place I worked and the effort to make sure everything would work and was fully tested and everything was an incredible arseache. Half the applications the business was dependent on exhibited peculiar glitches on 7, which the developers of those applications didn't seem in any rush to sort out.

Edit: That said, I have always rather admired the Apple approach of "fuck you customers, we're changing things."

Fuck the corporations — they don't have to upgrade, and time has told us that they generally don't anyway. Stop making the lowest common denominator control the progression of everybody else.

Yeah, and also fuck money! Who needs that shit?

Indeed. It's awkward enough on a handheld device the size of an iPad for any lengthy amount of time.



Aye, and it works both ways: mice have excellent pointing accuracy, but are absolutely rubbish when you implement swiping gestures. A hybrid interface would need to have too many concessions for both input methods it'd be a nightmare to design, maintain and, ultimately, use.

I guess, but when the corporations don't upgrade anyway, what's the point in slowing down each and every version of Windows, adding in 100% backwards compatibility (both architecturally and interface design)?

I dunno. I know nothing about this, but I'm bored of everything Microsoft being held back by legacy shit.

But the Corps / governement do upgrade... and it is big big bucks. I think more than the home market

Yes, but only SP3. We realised this when we noticed we still had some machines on SP2.

Ah explains the SP3 rollout we have just done....

But couple that with a PC compatible Kinect device for holographic keyboards and on screen virtual hands, and you are into all kinds of awesome!

I totally agree. It's a huge pity, because Windows Phone is an ace OS, but Microsoft's holding it back because of Ballmer's bonkers approach to technology. There should have been Windows Phone tablets by now, which could have been the equals of iOS and WebOS devices, but instead MS is trying to shoe-horn classic Windows into everything. Hell, it even made it into the name of Windows Phone, despite Windows Phone having no bloody windows.


Draw a line and start again, perhaps retaining aspects of a shared core if you want to. See: Apple and Mac OS X/iOS. That would take some serious balls and vision from Microsoft though, and I no longer believe the company has either. And while I think the Win 8 videos look great, there's a suspicious amount of 'touch UI over the same old shit' going on. Gruber might be a Mac fan-boy, but he's certainly right about Win 8's response to tablets being flawed. Mac apps are reworked entirely for the iPad/iPhone—they're not made 'touch friendly', because that's not really feasible.

Personally, I really hope Microsoft doesn't fuck this up, because Windows Phone is a great foundation, and I'm hugely interested to see how it will evolve (versus other systems, which, by and large, simply ripped off Apple). In many ways, WP is leagues ahead of what Apple's doing, and it makes Cupertino's output look surprisingly dated. But it's getting no traction because Microsoft itself is afraid to make the leap from old to new.

well maybe the dvision line isn't drawn correctly... osx is getting more and more gesture based with the magic trackpad, and that works quite well...
(and they're now selling their magic traxkpad for iMacs as well.. who would have thought that)

wednesday i posted a message on our Yammer... we're running a ten year old version of outlook, build date may 31st, 2001. That's before 11 september.

I work for local government, and though it was a long time coming, we're finally upgrading. IE8 (yeah, already illicitly downloaded Chrome, so tabbed browsing at work less of a treat for me than most), Win7 and Office 2010!

We're currently on that XP that looks like Windows 98.