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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quiksilvr - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
It makes no sense TO* have itGuspaz - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Well, you can hit Win+D and get the traditional Windows UI... And that illusion of the familiar will last right up until you try to use the start menu to launch something, and get dumped back into Metro. It looks like there's no escaping it.My work machine has two 1280x1024 monitors. 23-point text on these things is going to be enormously huge, it's silly...
alent1234 - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
because most servers have very few applications on them and it's dumb to hide them in the start menu. with the annoying mouse control of KVM switches this may make things a lot easier by using the wasted desktop spaceHMTK - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
I'm pretty sure they'll include it as a Feature on Windows 8 Server for one very good reason: RDS/Citrix.damianrobertjones - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
The users in work will absolutely LOVE this as they prefer things to be EASY TO USERatman6161 - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
At work, for our end users, it is all about the 2 or 3 business applications they use. Go from XP=>Vista=>7=>8 and those couple of apps have not changed. What is so hard about clicking the icon to start the program that they need a big box on their desktop to click on instead of the old style icon. What is to be gained? How is this more EASY TO USE for this group of people?UMADBRO - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
How is it not?Wraith404 - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Users at work won't ever see it, any self respecting system administrator will disable this Metro garbage in group policies.robinthakur - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Agreed, Windows 7 phone could have been a contender, but everyone MS shopped it to at my old work (who already had iPhones) said it looked far too consumery and passed on the purchase. This is ironic because it integrated perfectly with our SharePoint architecture. They need to have a more corporate version...although I greatly suspect that it's too litle too late.cldudley - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
They all have iPhones, and THIS is too consumer-y?