Microsoft BUILD: Windows 8, A Pre-Beta Preview
by Brian Klug & Ryan Smith on September 13, 2011 12:05 PM EST- Posted in
- BUILD
- Windows
- Microsoft
- Windows 8
- Trade Shows
First Thoughts
With under a day to see, play with, and write about the Windows 8 pre-beta it’s hard to fully digest what we’ve seen and to come up with a meaningful opinion. With Microsoft it’s a safe bet that there’s more to be seen when they’re still this far away from shipping the final product.
For a tablet-focused event I don’t think you will find much disagreement that Microsoft has hit the mark with Metro. Metro feels like it belongs when used with a tablet – it’s smooth, it’s easy to use, it’s gesture-driven, and it’s finger-friendly. Virtually everything Windows Phone 7 did well as a touch screen OS has been ported over to Metro and it shows.
The converse of that is that Metro feels awkward and out of place when used with a mouse and keyboard as a laptop/desktop. It fails to take advantage of the precision of the mouse or the fact that not everything needs to be in size 28 font when sitting down to use a computer. At this moment it feels like trying to use a tablet with a mouse and keyboard, which isn’t far off from what it really is in the first place.
The underpinnings look interesting, but there’s still a great deal left to see such as DirectX 11.1 and WDDM 1.2. I believe that in the long run the class driver additions will help further simplify using Windows, and integrating Microsoft Security Essentials into the OS is a long overdue change. At the same time if nothing else Metro will go even farther to improve security thanks to the fine grained permissions system.
Ultimately this is just the beginning, in fact it’s the beginning of a beginning. Windows 8 is still at least a year off – Microsoft isn’t even close to committing to a date – and the pre-beta is pre-beta in every sense of the word. The real fight starts today when Microsoft pitches it to developers. Because so much rides on Metro, Microsoft needs to convince developers to start writing Metro applications, otherwise most of the work Microsoft has put into Windows 8 will languish. Microsoft looks to have the tools their developers need, but will it be enough? Perhaps this is what BUILD is meant to find out.
Stay tuned as we’ll have more from BUILD this week, including coverage of today’s opening keynote.
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theangryintern - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
"It's proven itself in the phone form factor"Yeah, cuz WP7 phones are just flying off the shelves. /sarcasm (in case you couldn't tell)
Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
I like big buttons, I cannot lie. I have big icons I my desktop so as to facilitate remote usage.augiem - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Tell them what you think with your wallet. Pull a Vista on them. Do not buy Windows 8. Simple as that. Win 7 will be supported for probably 10 years. I for one am not going to screw productivity by installing this. When MS's revenues fall through the floor, they'll get the message.This is NOT the future of computing. As much as we'd all love to have Star Trek's computer where it just does everything for you, that's never going to happen.
jvillaro - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
You are as a consumer, in your right to just not buy it or use it. And MS is in their right to offer new things, change things up, take a risk and either fail or succeed.Garbage, idiotic, etc are your opinions... which many of us could think of you. That's the way it goes, maybe you could wait till it's released to make a real judgement.
Gimfred - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Why do the icons have to stay static? Like the look but think it will get in my way or my way will get in its way. If there are animated [informative] icons now, no reason they can't be improved on.
taltamir - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
You are confusing windows and linux.Windows has near 0 backwards compatibility. If you want to run an app or game that was made for windows 95, 98, or 2k you need to run it in linux under Wine because windows 7 will fail to run it.
@Metro: I hate it, its horrible. It looks neat on a tablet but how am I supposed to use it with a mouse and keyboard on my desktop or laptop?
mlambert890 - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
This post has to either be a joke or you are incredibly out of touch.Windows has 0 backwards compat? I run *DOS* apps in Windows 7. WTF are you talking about?
And if you didnt notice, Windows 7 has "XP compat" mode. A free instance of XP to run in a VM on a free desktop type 2 hypervisor.
Did you miss the compatibility tab and the "Run as ...." option that goes all the way back to W95?
Show me the app you can get to run in WINE that someone competent cant get to run under Windows. Maybe you ran into some outlier case, but thats like the guy who smokes 10 packs a day and lives until 90. Idiotic to try to pretend its the rule.
MSFT has suffered *mightily* for backwards compat unlike Apple and, yes, mighty Linux also. There are *plenty* of stranded apps that require recoding to work with newer libraries and newer kernel revs on Linux.
Wraith404 - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
How much time do you spend looking at your desktop? I do actual work, so I see mine about once a week. Live tiles are a gimmick derived from Android widgets, and are pretty much only useful on a fondleslab, and even then the usefulness is limited.damianrobertjones - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
I'm used to using Windows Media Center so it won't be much of a change for me and as for that Fisher price thing.... People are BUYING ipads so you can see where everything is heading!fcx56 - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Exactly, I'm surprised no one has seen this coming. This interface began in 2005 with XP Media Centre Edition and with subsequent updates through Vista and 7, all they had to add were the tiles implemented in WP7 and here we are, a tablet interface to accompany ARM support.