Looking ahead to Windows 8: five big questions for Microsoft
Microsoft released the Windows 8 Developer Preview in mid-September of last year. Within three months, the full OS—a very large file—had been downloaded more than 3 million times.
That’s an awful lot of interest in an unfinished operating system. As a point of reference, that number is larger than the total number of downloads for the feature-complete Windows 7 beta in January 2009.
Within the next few weeks (“late February” is the official target), Microsoft will unveil the next Windows 8 milestone. Technically, it’s a beta, but it will probably be called a Consumer Preview edition.
In contrast to the incomplete Developer Preview, it has been designed for use by a broad audience, and it will undoubtedly be downloaded far more than 3 million times. More than 10 million? I wouldn’t be surprised, given the level of interest I’ve seen so far.
The Windows 8 Developer Preview isn’t really suitable for full-time use: Although you could try, it’s missing some big pieces and has few real apps. The coming beta release should be nearly feature-complete, with full implementations of features that have only been demoed so far.
Expectations will be high for this release. So what’s keeping managers in Redmond awake at night? Here are my top five questions.
Will customers adjust to the “reimagined” Windows 8 UI?
Microsoft has received plenty of feedback about the biggest change in Windows 8, the new Metro style Start screen and search box. Those features and changes that are a direct result of feedback, have been outlined thoroughly on the Building Windows 8 blog. The four separate blog posts on the topic have garnered 2,108 comments so far.
The discussion over file management was equally spirited, with some 2,200 comments to date. I love this picture showing how the results were tallied, although an Excel product manager is probably in tears over the thought of hand tallies.
In the demos I saw at CES, using relatively recent builds, the behavior of the Start and search screens had been changed in subtle but significant ways. It’s probably not enough to silence the grumbling and occasional outright yelling over the changes.
I suspect there’s a hard core of Windows fundamentalists who will never accept Metro style, or will resist it for some period of time. They’ll just have to deal with it, because I’m told the final release will not include a “classic” option with the Windows 7-style Start menu and search behavior.
When will ARM devices arrive? How much will they cost? What will they do?
OK, that’s three questions, but we’ll count it as one.
Last year at the D9 conference Steven Sinofsky and Julie Larson-Green showed off Windows 8 for the first time. One thing Sinofsky said during that interview has stuck with me. Interviewer Walt Mossberg began asking a question: “And every program that runs in desktop Windows will run on …”
And Sinofsky interrupted him to say: “It’s Windows.”
That’s a theme I’ve heard repeatedly from others on the Windows team. The ARM edition is being developed on the same track as the x86/x64 versions. It will ship at the same time, and it will look and act just like its cousins on other chipsets.
What’s different is that the code is hardware-dependent, and there isn’t any Windows 8-ready ARM hardware available here in the outside world yet. That adds to the mystery around these exotic devices, and more questions that won’t be answered until that hardware finally shows up in the wild.
