Thursday, September 15, 2011

Windows 8: First Impressions

Q: "Your first impression? Love or hate?"

Well that's a really good question.

I was always horribly dissapointed with my HP TX2 multitouch laptop, and whislt some of that was about the hardware (rubbish battery life, noisy fan), some of it was just how non-touch capable Windows 7 was to actually use. Windows Media Center achieves many of my 'media center kiosk' wants, but doesn't let me Skype or browse the web without dropping back to the desktop and so forth. Then you've got to go and find the mouse and all that crap. I realised that, like Media Center, a different usage type required a very different UI experience.

So in many ways what I was after was absolutely where Windows 8 is going. And (in the 30 mins I've actually played with it) I love it for that.

That being said, they're going to have to be really careful they don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Ok the desktop's still there for 'traditional' apps, but the Start bar is gone, as is apparently ALT-TAB task switching. And without a touch screen, that metro UI really sucks actually.

It'd be more than a shame if embracing a device/cloud future required ditching 10 years worth of desktop productivity, it'd be a Vista-scale corporate-desktop disaster.

1 comment:

Darren Helsby said...

Just watched the first keynote and was quite impressed with the UI. It does look very much geared for the consumer rather than the enterprise. Maybe the other keynotes show more of the enterprise features.

I can see it being really popular on tablets and maybe once people get used to the UI they'll be more open to trying the Windows Phone.

The Windows Store might create good opportunities for people who can get apps in there early on.

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