Windows 8: When Lucky 7 Needs to Be Broken

[Lemur]

I'm unenthusiastic, verging on worried. I'm ... huh. Does this really need to happen?



Some details.

[T]he interface is different: so much so that it's almost unrecognizable from the standard Windows we all know so well. The taskbar is gone, the desktop is gone, and in their place is a very Windows Phone 7-style system of tiles. [...]

The fact that Microsoft is planning to make the Start Screen your center of operations when using your computer highlights the fact that they feel that Live Tiles and the Metro UI is the way to go. They're minimizing the traditional desktop-with-icons interface, and in the video, the desktop is only referred to for use with legacy applications. Microsoft seems to think that if they leave the desktop behind, no one will miss it. The rest of us aren't convinced. If the bet doesn't pay off, all of Microsoft's new features will amount to something users turn off or find a 3rd party utility to disable so they can get back to work. In the worst case, it's so integrated in the OS and people dislike it so much that they'll stick to Windows 7, and Microsoft has another Windows Me on their hands.

[CBR]

I think it can be turned off for those who need the good old desktop. IMO the tiles are important for MS as they want familiarity between phones, tablets and notebook/desktop. And I guess Xbox too, based on screenshots I have seen (not a console owner, so what do I know)

Statistically Windows 8 will suck but maybe Microsoft can break the curse with this one.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Realistically, Windows will probably suck. And that isn't just me disliking Windows, that is MS deciding to do a whole new architecture, a whole new UI, and cater towards underpowered hardware all in go. This from the company which took the better part of a decade or so to build Vista.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Bah. I don't want a phone OS on my desktop.

I like icons. Because I don't have to drill down through tiles and shift them about to see the whole expanse of programs. It's like a children's OS.

I mean, you have to swipe through each 'app' between the one you're looking at and the one you want to look at.

The desktop offers a huge expanse of space. Use it, for crying out loud.

CR

[Husar]

It's like they put MediaCenter on Autostart.

The way it looks in the video, there is still a "normal" windows running behind it and the guy only mentioned Multimedia features and the short look at Office, where it looked more like a "normal" Windows.

What I disagree with is that the touch interface can be just as easily used with a mouse, touch interfaces usually have bigger buttons, which is good for fingers but bad when you have to drag your mouse across the whole screen where it was usually only a small distance between two buttons.

What they should do, is allow the use of two mice, one in the left and one in the right hand, with a blue and red mouse pointer.

[Beskar]

It's like they put MediaCenter on Autostart.

The way it looks in the video, there is still a "normal" windows running behind it and the guy only mentioned Multimedia features and the short look at Office, where it looked more like a "normal" Windows.

What I disagree with is that the touch interface can be just as easily used with a mouse, touch interfaces usually have bigger buttons, which is good for fingers but bad when you have to drag your mouse across the whole screen where it was usually only a small distance between two buttons.

What they should do, is allow the use of two mice, one in the left and one in the right hand, with a blue and red mouse pointer.

Nah, have the gloves from Minority Report with accurate voice-to-text software built in.

[Lemur]

Looking like Windows Me/Vista all over again: Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

Windows developers have invested a lot of time, effort, and money into the platform. Over the years, they've learned Win32, COM, MFC, ATL, Visual Basic 6, .NET, WinForms, Silverlight, WPF. All of these technologies were, at one time or another, instrumental in creating desktop applications on Windows. With the exception of Visual Basic 6, all of them are still more or less supported on Windows today, and none of them can do it all; all except Visual Basic 6 and WinForms have a role to play in modern Windows development.

Hearing that Windows 8 would use HTML5 and JavaScript for its new immersive applications was, therefore, more than a little disturbing to Windows developers. Such a switch means discarding two decades of knowledge and expertise of Windows development—and countless hours spent learning Microsoft's latest-and-greatest technology—and perhaps just as importantly, it means discarding rich, capable frameworks and the powerful, enormously popular Visual Studio development environment, in favor of a far more primitive, rudimentary system with substantially inferior tools. [...]

As crazy and destructive as this policy appears, it has the feeling of consistency. Internet Explorer 9 and the downplaying of Silverlight were the first step down this path; immersive applications requiring use of HTML5 are the next.

[Tellos Athenaios]

So, then what? What are those developers going to do who've got all manner of MS tech shoved painfully into them? Jump ship, stay with 7? Microsoft holds all the cards here: they don't need more than a handful of apps to be developed for the Metro thing to be declared a success if it can woo customers into upgrading even if it does turn out to be god awful.

[edyzmedieval]

So far Vista, even after 3 years and a half of work, is a reliable OS. So I will be switching to Windows 7 and probably staying with that for the next 5 years when Microsoft will release an OS that will not clog up my desktop.

[Lemur]

PC World makes a spirited argument that desktop virtualization will save Windows 8.

Hyper-V is Microsoft's Type 1 hypervisor -- that is, a virtualization layer that runs on bare metal instead of as a guest of the operating system. Until now, Hyper-V has been available only as part of Windows Server. Making it the foundation underneath the next desktop version of Windows changes everything.

Why? Because that could yield the best possible solution for desktop virtualization. [...] A client hypervisor, which is what we think Hyper-V's role may be in Windows 8, runs a virtual Windows desktop on the client rather than the server. This would give you the ability to run without a connection to the server, so users can take their Windows virtual machines with them on a laptop or tablet, and IT still enjoys all the manageability and security benefits of VDI. [...]

Client computers could have multiple virtual machine personalities with little performance penalty, thanks to the thin Type 1 hypervisor. One basic division would be between a "business virtual machine" and a "personal virtual machine" running on the same client. The business virtual machine would be a supersecure environment without any of the personal stuff users download or run; changes to that business virtual machine would be synced to the server when users were online. If the client hardware was lost or stolen or the user's relationship with the company ended, the virtual machine could be killed by admins remotely.

In this multi-VM scenario, users could also run multiple Windows versions to support legacy applications, Linux versions supported by Hyper-V, or, as Peter Bruzzese speculates, even Windows Phone 7 apps. Users could even bring their Macs to work and, Apple willing, Hyper-V could slip right under Mac OS X, allowing the company's Windows virtual machine to run alongside.

One big advantage to IT is that it would no longer need to manage end-user hardware, just the business virtual machine downloaded to it.

[Xiahou]

PC World makes a spirited argument that desktop virtualization will save Windows 8.

...

VMWare already does that. And aren't they basically saying that Windows8 will be saved by allowing people not to run it?

Bah. I don't want a phone OS on my desktop.

Agreed. There seems to be an OS trend out there going towards tablet/phone interfaces.... I don't like it.

[Tellos Athenaios]

PC World makes a spirited argument that desktop virtualization will save Windows 8.

It's not a very coherent argument though:

Hyper-V is Microsoft's Type 1 hypervisor -- that is, a virtualization layer that runs on bare metal instead of as a guest of the operating system. Until now, Hyper-V has been available only as part of Windows Server. Making it the foundation underneath the next desktop version of Windows changes everything.

No it won't. It will not be the foundation of Windows 8 desktop for obvious reasons, and it will not change “everything” either....

Why? Because that could yield the best possible solution for desktop virtualization. [...] A client hypervisor, which is what we think Hyper-V's role may be in Windows 8, runs a virtual Windows desktop on the client rather than the server. This would give you the ability to run without a connection to the server, so users can take their Windows virtual machines with them on a laptop or tablet, and IT still enjoys all the manageability and security benefits of VDI. [...]

Because this is in need of a load of . The whole reason IT benefits from VDI is because it brings O(n) configurations down to O(1). You are not automagically secure because you run your applications in some virtual desktop... The nice thing about virtualisation is how it lets you work as if it is your local machine. Security vulnerabilities and all.

Now, once a VPN and and a tightly controlled and monitored configuration sit in between you and your applications there is maybe something to that security pitch. But then, that is almost exactly the opposite of what the article is gibbering on about.

[Xiahou]

Because this is in need of a load of . The whole reason IT benefits from VDI is because it brings O(n) configurations down to O(1). You are not automagically secure because you run your applications in some virtual desktop... The nice thing about virtualisation is how it lets you work as if it is your local machine. Security vulnerabilities and all.

If this is like the competing VMWare counterpart (I'm assuming it is), you can run a virtual machine that's hosted in your datacenter on a client. In addition, the client can also "check out" the VM and run it for a time locally on the client. Once it's back on the corporate network, it would resynchronize with the backend.

I still don't see this as any sort of panacea though.

[Lemur]

No, wait, it's all about SMS support.