Windows 8

Microsoft has recently pulled the curtains off its next operating system code name “Windows 8” at the D9 conference last week, I watched the video on what it can do and my initial reaction was “Ehh, No comment!”.

Let’s face it Microsoft is playing catch up and according to a respectable friend of mine, they always have ever since DOS, Xenix, Windows, Sybase SQL Server, Zune, Xbox e.t.c. I am guessing tablet PCs and Smart Phones is the first thing they really pioneered in during the days of Microsoft 1.0 led by Bill Gates but their failure to innovate and their attempt to shrink the popular desktop Windows OS into tablets and “pocket PCs” and basically replaced the mouse with a stylus and this did not fare well with the customers and lost the market to Apple and Android. Consequently Windows 8 (and Windows Phone 7) represents an attempt to get back to get back into the tablet game and they have really done a great job at it and the following are aspects of it that stood out for me and comments on them.

1.    For those who don’t know yet – they utilized the Metro design as done in Windows Phone – which I like; I am of the opinion that the Tiles are a better approach to displaying information than iOS icons or Android widgets especially as done in “Mango”.

2.    The use of HTML5 and JS for Windows 8 app building virtually enables millions of HTML + JS developers to just up their existing skills to HTML5 and have skills useful for developing applications for Windows 8. This is a double edged sword judging by the reactions of traditional windows developers who use XAML and C# who see it as a betrayal by Microsoft of .NET for this new way of writing applications. Will the current set of developers embrace it without question or will it happen that they will make the kind of noise that followed the news that Microsoft was abandoning classic Visual basic during the birth of .NET? How does this affect the dream of having the same application running on both Windows Phone and Windows 8? It will really be useful to have 21K applications written (at the time of going to press) for Windows phone 7 available for Windows 8 off the bat rather than rebuilding them.

3.    The other is that they have enabled multitasking and the ability to run and use multiple applications simultaneously – this is huge, since both Android and iOS do not the later functionality. This is a great step and is in my opinion similar to the deep linking of apps to search results in “Mango”. Something that both Android and iOS don’t have as of now.

4.    Many pundits point are quick to point out that Window 8 provides backward compatibility with x86-x64 applications even though it is built to be run on ARM (for those computer scientist out there - you know how difficult/impossible it is to support code compiled for CISC on RISC. Both x86 and x64 are CISC instruction sets yet ARM is a RISC instruction set and thus having an application compiled for a CISC architecture running on RISC may not be easy but Microsoft claims to have pulled it off). My question is – what benefit is this on the tablet? Most of the older x86-x64 applications are not as touch friendly for tablets. I think this is an over kill but users do not need to use it if they don’t want it.

5.    The dream to have Windows 8 run on Tablets, Desktops and Servers seems a bit ambitious, I must admit having “One OS to rule them all, One OS to run them, One OS to bridge them all, And with the touch interface bind them'' Seems nice but an unnecessary effort as I don’t want to use my visual studio instance with touch. Hardware Keyboards and Mice are actually good and accurate peripherals useful for a workstation setup. I would hate to run SQL Server on Windows 8 as it was shown. I suspect that it may not sell well at an enterprise level.

Something worth noting is that Windows 8 presents the first “windowless” design for an operating system by Microsoft for desktops and tablets – whether it will succeed in both is a different matter. Hopefully Microsoft will listen to the community and release a better version during BUILD later this year in my humble opinion, they should release 3 versions of Windows 8 one for Tablets, one for Desktops and one for servers while having the latter 2 having a different user interface or “shell” else this is a bigger gamble that what Ballmer thought it was. What’s your take?