Windows 8 First Impressions

I've downloaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, and have some initial thoughts to share about Win 8 and the new Metro interface. I'll start by saying why it's hard for me, or any one really, to do a decent job of a review, and why we should all be skeptical of any review at this point.  Then I'll move on to trying to ignore my own advice in the previous sentence...

So let's start ...

When you look at a piece of software, you have to envision living with it.  You want to do your work, play your games, surf the net, whatever it is you do with a computer.  And when you have a new, and incomplete, version of software, you can't do that for real.  And so you guess. At least I do.  And odds are I'll guess wrong.  Worse, we all have our biases.  In my case, I was a loyal windows users right up to Windows XP.  After that, we started to switch to Macs at our house.  The last version of Windows we bought was Vista, which was a disaster.  After that, we pretty much are all Mac.

I still use Windows on a daily basis, but it has been demoted to a virtual machine to be summoned for running windows only software.  So, as you can see, I'm not your best windows fanboy to review Metro and Windows 8.

Still, I was excited enough by what I saw to download and install it -- so I'm willing to let it win me over.

So let's have a look at Windows 8...

The key thing about Windows 8 is the Metro UI, as you see it in the first screen shot.  The idea is to move to a more tablet like experience.  And the Metro UI does that, with its large square, easy to hit with a finger icons.  Of course, only a subset of the apps are there, but a right mouse click brings up an icon to see all your applications:

Which leads to:

Not quite the old start menu, but not really far from it.

Metro Apps like to run full screen:

Which is very tablet like.

But you can still run traditional windows (small w) applications as well

Interestingly, the windows desktop is, in some sense, a full screen Metro application.  It is treated like that.  So we you go to switch tasks, the desktop appears as a whole:

Except when you alt-tab, then the desktop programs are distinct:

Looking at it from the viewpoint of a desktop system, there's a couple of things that are interesting.  Both Apple and Microsoft seem enamored of the full screen application.  It's taken from the tablet paradigm for sure.  And, I suppose if you have a smallish laptop display, full screen is useful in situations.

What's amusing (or alarming, you pick) is that this move to an app at a time goes against the entire development history of Microsoft.  MS/DOS was, of course, an app at a time full-screen operating system!  And yet very quickly, as memory capacity grew on PCs, people started trying to find ways to multi-task.  At first there were a variety of add-on multi-taskers to MS/DOS.  Eventually, Microsoft Windows came out, although the first versions were not that good at multi-tasking.

Then, as multi-tasking became more reliable, the holy grail for Microsoft was desktop integration.  You probably don't remember a time when you couldn't copy from Excel and past into Word, but trust me, that was a big deal when it happened.  The idea that you could have a spreadsheet and word processor running at the same time and seamlessly move data back and forth was amazing.  You may want to think that Microsoft's monopolistic tendencies crushed its office competitors like Lotus and Wordperfect, but it was that little trick of integration that made Office dominant.

With Metro, we're not really throwing that away, but it feels like it.  Think about how you would insert a small table you built in Excel into a PowerPoint presentation: you would have two windows open, PowerPoint and Excel.  You'd select the table in Excel, copy it, click on the PowerPoint window, and past.  You do that sort of thing all the time without thinking about it.

But with Metro, assuming you had a Metro Word and Metro Powerpoint, the navigation between applications is more disjoint.  You have to either execute weird mouse moves or alt-tab to get between the applications.  It won't seem smooth.

But, you might ask, what if you aren't really running multiple applications at once? What if you are just logged into Facebook and whiling away the hours?  Well, I admit, Metro is probably great for that.

And that leads to my observation: Metro -- like iOS to be fair -- is designed for the consumption of content, not the creation.  It's like there's two worlds of Windows 8: The creation side (traditional windowing usage) and the consumption side (Metro).  That is a strange dichotomy.

To me, it feels like Microsoft glued two operation systems together -- Windows 8 desktop and Metro tablet, and decided to call it a single operating system.  This is very Microsoft like; when Windows 3.x came out, you had to start MS/DOS and then boot Windows, but you always knew that you had an MS/DOS world (to run your legacy DOS applications) and a Windows world.  It's the same thing, just twenty years later: You have a legacy Windows world and a new Metro world.

If you compare this to how Apple is approaching the integration of iOS and OSX (no longer Mac OSX as of Mountain Lion), there is no separate world of "OSX" apps and "iOS" apps on the desktop.  You can launch and manage the same applications in both the traditional way as well as via the new iOS-like ways.  You can run the same applications in a windowed mode, or in full screen.  The power is in the hands of the user; the transition is up to the user to make or not make at his or her own speed.

I had hoped to find Metro and Windows to my liking.  I had hoped to find something new and useful and a real advance of the desktop paradigm.  I had hoped to find a reason to want to bring Windows back into my daily life beyond just for a few Windows only applications.  But what I find is a forced, awkward, and disconnected experience.  Here's hoping that it improves -- a lot -- by GA.