Don't let demos of Windows 8's new touchscreen interface scare you -- you'll be able to revert back to a UI that looks and works much like Windows 7's
Windows 7
Admit it. You're getting used to Windows 7 -- if not the features, at least the inevitability of it -- and the last thing you want to think about is moving your organization to Windows 8.Well, I have some good news and some bad news.The bad news is that Win8 has a completely revamped touch-friendly phonelike live tile interface that you're going to have to support.The good news is that you can (and probably will) fall back on a Windows 7-clone desktop that looks and acts a lot like the Win7 you've come to know and love.If you haven't yet seen Julie Larson-Green's demo at the All Things Digital's D9 conference -- the one with Steve Sinofsky adroitly playing straight man -- hop over to the official AllThingsD site and take a gander. Wallow in the eye candy, if you can call it that.Before you hit the roof or run screaming out of the room, keep a few things in mind.First and foremost: It's a demo. The final product will look different from what you see here. The sequences Larson-Green showed so adeptly have been scripted and run a hundred million times, to make sure they don't crash the system. Windows 8 isn't anywhere near as fully baked as the demo would have you believe. Interface design specs have been locked down for ages, but some of it will change before you and I see a working version of Windows 8.Second, the focus is on generating buzz for the new operating system. You're seeing the sizzle, not the steak, and it's well-tread sizzle. If Larson-Green had popped up Word and started writing a letter to Mom, we all would've started snoring. So if your immediate reaction is, "I don't need to slide and snap a video of a parasailer next to the local weather," realize that Microsoft's trying very, very hard to be hip.
Third, the technology behind a lot of what you see in the demo has been in Windows for years. Microsoft's just emphasizing things differently and building a lot of glitz around the technology to show it off. Touchscreens in Windows are nothing new. The floating taskbar on the right and Alt+Tab style app switching on the left merely rearrange old features.If you're wondering how this is going to play on your corporate desktops, take a close look at the 8:30 mark into the clip. Larson-Green punches a Word icon -- er, floating tile -- and Word appears, sitting on top of a Windows 7 desktop. That desktop works exactly the same way as the desktop you're using right now. You can open and close apps, stick things on the taskbar, and so on. The desktop behaves as if it's a separate application, one among equals in the Windows Phone-like tiled interface.More importantly for you and me, the fancy new eye candy seems to work great with a touch interface. But the staid old Windows 7 desktop looks like it was designed for a mouse and keyboard -- which isn't too surprising because it was designed for a mouse and keyboard. I get the impression that the Windows 7-like desktop works as a compatibility box for older applications, including Office.Now that the initial shock has worn off, take a look at Long Zheng's detailed run through the presentation slides on his Istartedsomething blog.Of course there are many open questions. Here are a few that have struck me.It appears as if Internet Explorer 9 will work in the desktop "Win7 compatibility box" (for lack of a better term), and IE10 will work outside the box, as one of the tiled applications. The demo showed IE10 working at a higher level -- on the same tier as the Windows desktop itself. Does that mean IE9 (and, presumably, other browsers) are banished to the desktop?Microsoft swears it won't ship two different versions of Win8, but I can't imagine how it'll avoid it. The part of Win8 that we saw living outside the Win7 compatibility box appears to be highly dependent on touch. The part inside the Win7 compatibility box (once again, that's my terminology, not Microsoft's!) is touch-enabled in a very traditional way. The live tiles outside the box and the touch-to-click windows inside the box come from very different gene pools. Do office workers really want or need the live tile part outside the box? Do Windows Phone users expect to do anything relevant inside the box?For that matter, is the Win7 compatibility box implemented as some sort of virtualized system, running in the live tile world? Microsoft is starting to hype HTML5 and JavaScript as tools for building apps in the live tile environment. Current Win7 apps need to run on Win8, but could they be relegated to a virtualized Win7 machine inside the HTML5/JavaScript tiled world? That raises all sorts of interesting possibilities.Watch Walt Mossberg fiddle with the no-touch laptop around 15:15 into the demo. Is he trying to grab the edge of the screen -- a simple process with a touchscreen -- using the mousepad? If so, his repeated swipes speak volumes for the difficulty of using a mouse in a live tile world.Windows 8 will run on ARM tablets, and Microsoft has already advised there won't be any application compatibility guarantees -- older Windows applications won't necessarily run on Win8 ARM tablets. Fair enough. But will any Win7 apps run on Tablet Win8?Lots of questions -- and I don't expect to get any definitive answers until PDC, er, Build, on Sept. 13 in Anaheim.
Admit it. You're getting used to Windows 7 -- if not the features, at least the inevitability of it -- and the last thing you want to think about is moving your organization to Windows 8.
Well, I have some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is that Win8 has a completely revamped touch-friendly phonelike live tile interface that you're going to have to support.
The good news is that you can (and probably will) fall back on a Windows 7-clone desktop that looks and acts a lot like the Win7 you've come to know and love.
If you haven't yet seen Julie Larson-Green's demo at the All Things Digital's D9 conference -- the one with Steve Sinofsky adroitly playing straight man -- hop over to the official AllThingsD site and take a gander. Wallow in the eye candy, if you can call it that.
Before you hit the roof or run screaming out of the room, keep a few things in mind.
First and foremost: It's a demo. The final product will look different from what you see here. The sequences Larson-Green showed so adeptly have been scripted and run a hundred million times, to make sure they don't crash the system. Windows 8 isn't anywhere near as fully baked as the demo would have you believe. Interface design specs have been locked down for ages, but some of it will change before you and I see a working version of Windows 8.
Second, the focus is on generating buzz for the new operating system. You're seeing the sizzle, not the steak, and it's well-tread sizzle. If Larson-Green had popped up Word and started writing a letter to Mom, we all would've started snoring. So if your immediate reaction is, "I don't need to slide and snap a video of a parasailer next to the local weather," realize that Microsoft's trying very, very hard to be hip.
Third, the technology behind a lot of what you see in the demo has been in Windows for years. Microsoft's just emphasizing things differently and building a lot of glitz around the technology to show it off. Touchscreens in Windows are nothing new. The floating taskbar on the right and Alt+Tab style app switching on the left merely rearrange old features.
If you're wondering how this is going to play on your corporate desktops, take a close look at the 8:30 mark into the clip. Larson-Green punches a Word icon -- er, floating tile -- and Word appears, sitting on top of a Windows 7 desktop. That desktop works exactly the same way as the desktop you're using right now. You can open and close apps, stick things on the taskbar, and so on. The desktop behaves as if it's a separate application, one among equals in the Windows Phone-like tiled interface.
More importantly for you and me, the fancy new eye candy seems to work great with a touch interface. But the staid old Windows 7 desktop looks like it was designed for a mouse and keyboard -- which isn't too surprising because it was designed for a mouse and keyboard. I get the impression that the Windows 7-like desktop works as a compatibility box for older applications, including Office.
Now that the initial shock has worn off, take a look at Long Zheng's detailed run through the presentation slides on his Istartedsomething blog.
Of course there are many open questions. Here are a few that have struck me.
It appears as if Internet Explorer 9 will work in the desktop "Win7 compatibility box" (for lack of a better term), and IE10 will work outside the box, as one of the tiled applications. The demo showed IE10 working at a higher level -- on the same tier as the Windows desktop itself. Does that mean IE9 (and, presumably, other browsers) are banished to the desktop?
Microsoft swears it won't ship two different versions of Win8, but I can't imagine how it'll avoid it. The part of Win8 that we saw living outside the Win7 compatibility box appears to be highly dependent on touch. The part inside the Win7 compatibility box (once again, that's my terminology, not Microsoft's!) is touch-enabled in a very traditional way. The live tiles outside the box and the touch-to-click windows inside the box come from very different gene pools. Do office workers really want or need the live tile part outside the box? Do Windows Phone users expect to do anything relevant inside the box?
For that matter, is the Win7 compatibility box implemented as some sort of virtualized system, running in the live tile world? Microsoft is starting to hype HTML5 and JavaScript as tools for building apps in the live tile environment. Current Win7 apps need to run on Win8, but could they be relegated to a virtualized Win7 machine inside the HTML5/JavaScript tiled world? That raises all sorts of interesting possibilities.
Watch Walt Mossberg fiddle with the no-touch laptop around 15:15 into the demo. Is he trying to grab the edge of the screen -- a simple process with a touchscreen -- using the mousepad? If so, his repeated swipes speak volumes for the difficulty of using a mouse in a live tile world.
Windows 8 will run on ARM tablets, and Microsoft has already advised there won't be any application compatibility guarantees -- older Windows applications won't necessarily run on Win8 ARM tablets. Fair enough. But will any Win7 apps run on Tablet Win8?
Lots of questions -- and I don't expect to get any definitive answers until PDC, er, Build, on Sept. 13 in Anaheim.
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