That's Captain to You!

Where is Windows 8 Coming From?

Yesterday, (September 13, 2011), Microsoft released an early build of Windows 8. So, I jumped right on it. What fun.

Years ago, when I was in high-school I snatched an early beta copy of Vista to see what was up and learn the new UI. Later, I got ahold of the alpha of Windows 7 from my boss who attended PDC. Then I played with the Windows 7 beta when Microsoft pushed their new UI. I love messing with early versions of Windows just to see where they’re going.

This Windows 8 release is new and interesting and, I have to say, rather different from the other pre-release Windows’s I’ve tried. It’s buggier, and far more confusing. Granted, I’ve been trying it out in Oracle VirtualBox. No doubt many bugs I encounter are a result of VirtualBox’s idiosyncrasies.

However, it seems to me, releases like this are primarily to communicate the direction Windows is taking. The goal is not to deliver a stable, finished product. So what can we gather about Windows’ direction from this release.

This is what I think Microsoft wants me to learn from this:

1. It’s fully touch capapble. I don’t care about this. I’m not likely to own a touch computer (or tablet, whatever) for a while. I just couldn’t use one.

   Does Windows 8 succeed here? I guess, probably. …Whatever.

2. It embraces the cloud. This is something Microsoft has to do. It’s a necessity. They want to produce an OS that is viable in the future. Apple and various Linux distros have already made interesting offerings in this space. Microsoft needs to keep up. To all appearances Windows accomplishes this at some level.
3. It’s friendlier. Microsoft still wants to attain the level of usability and friendliness for which Apple’s OSX is already famed. They still want to do this (somehow) without handing over all power to the designers. It’s an uphill battle for them. I don’t know if they’ll ever succeed.

   Microsoft has done much better in this regard than most give them credit for. Windows 7 is relatively nice to look at and use. It doesn’t compare to the aesthetics of modern OSX, but Windows has got to the usability level it has without insulting my intelligence. That was something Apple gave-up on years ago.

4. It’s competing with iOS or the iPad. Windows 8 doesn’t even remotely compete at this level. I dislike iOS as much as the next guy, but I see why it’s good and why it has devotees. Windows 8 isn’t anything like iOS.

   A lot of people are willing to see iPad competition here, but they’re just wrong as can be. Microsoft wants to see themselves as competing with the iPad, but they don’t seem to understand what makes it good. They don’t seem to be willing to make the shift in thinking that made the iPad disruptive.

I have a completely different impression from this Windows 8 build. I don’t see iOS. I see Linux.

There are two things I found interesting in my Windows 8 experimentation.

1. I logged in with a Live.com ID. I didn’t make an account. I didn’t have to change my profile picture or enter my real name. I signed in from Live.com; effectively, I signed in from the cloud.

   Some people may think this is innovative, but I’ve seen this before and I’ve seen this done better.

   Over a year ago I was surprised to get a Google ChromeOS notebook. Here’s how it happened. The delivery man handed me a box. I opened it to find a notebook and a battery. I placed the battery in the notebook and hit power. I was prompted for my Google account. I entered it and suddenly my Chrome browser theme, extensions, settings, auto-fill database, history and everything were right there, in a computer I had only first seen half a minute before.

   That’s the sort of dream experience the cloud is all about. It’s done well very rarely. In Windows 8, Microsoft is doing it, but not nearly so well as Google did it in ChromeOS.

2. The Metro interface; a cloud-ish app layer on-top of a normal computer. This is nothing new either. Where have I seen this exact thing?

   JoliOS. It’s a Linux distro not enough people care about. ChromeOS did some things well, but JoliOS was triumphantly suited for the cloud. It got it right. Yes, I want cloud apps, but I want a computer too. JoliOS was an Ubuntu/Debian branch so I could just switch out of the JoliCloud UI and do all the stuff you do in Linux. (Like install vim and somehow damage the  xorg.config file. Linux stuff.)

   I’m not a big Linux fan, but I appreciate it’s good qualities and I really appreciate the cloud’s good qualities. To me, the Metro UI thing in Windows 8 utterly pales in comparison to JoliCloud, which is free and open-source and more attractive and integrates with Dropbox and easier to use, and has better social tools…

So where is Windows 8 coming from? Not the iPad. It’s coming from Linux.

It’s not competing with the iPad, and it’s not competing with Linux either. It can’t do either of those things. It’s competing with Windows 7.

Not to say that it’s not worthwhile. I love Windows and want it to be as good as it can be. But, let’s not kid ourselves about where these features are coming from.