Post date: Oct 28, 2012 4:36:05 AM
It's here! The new version of Microsoft Windows. Windows 8. It's got tons of new features, and it's fast enough and flexible enough to run on tablets. Or so they say.
Unfortunately, reality is far from the truth. Windows 8 is the most hacked together, haphazard, Windows yet. But with Windows 7 being so good, how did it happen? It finally seemed that Microsoft had found their stride, and now, we're left wondering what happened. There will be plenty of complaints about Windows 8, I'm sure, but here I want to talk about how I think Microsoft can keep Vista from happening a third time by pointing out what I think is their biggest mistake.
In order to understand how Windows 8 so breaks from Microsoft’s traditional OS, you have to know some of their history.
From the beginning, even the days of Windows 3.x and below which ran on DOS, Windows could run on almost any hardware, and has such iconic concepts as windows with their own menu bar, the task bar, the "Start" menu, and control panel. When new processor architectures made their appearance, Microsoft invested in the Windows NT kernel which could run on a variety of architectures. Some people, like me, even remember the ill-fated HP Jornada which ran a wonderfully slim (about 20 megabyte) version of Windows CE on a 206Mhz ARM processor. Despite this, it was still Windows, complete with dialogs, a start menu, and a surprisingly full featured version of Microsoft Office. You could even use the tiny palm-top to give a presentation using a PCMCIA VGA adapter.
The idea of bringing Microsoft technology to more platforms began to become a reality with the introduction of thre .NET framework. For those of you who don't remember the origin of the name, .NET was originally supposed to be a family of technologies that would not only allow developers to write Windows apps in a varietyof languages, but also to seamlessly communicate information between themselves, regardless of where they were running or on what platform. The .NET virtual machine would be highly portable, allowing a .NET application to run on any platform with the .NET framework available. In fact, if Microsoft could decouple that pesky Win32 API, .NET could operate on any platform that the NT kernel could run on including Intel IA-32, MIPS R3000/R4000, Alpha, PowerPC, Itanium, AMD64 and ARM.
Some time after the release of Windows 2000, Microsoft began work on the next generation Windows, code named Neptune. On top of all this, Neptune was to be truly Net ready. Internet explorer was going to be the rendering engine powering the Windows UI. In the one beta that was released, Windows Explorer could use HTML templates to completely style the way that a folder was displayed, and this included overhauls of the Control Panel and other system dialogs so that they were easily styled and displayed in a rich, web-ready way. Web pages could be embedded in the desktop, appearing as customizable tiles that could be resized, moved, locked and unlocked, and so on. Interacting with a tile would open your web browser of choice. Although officially Neptune then disappeared and Windows XP was released instead, many concepts returned in the form of Windows Longhorn. I remember booting up Longhorn on my computer with 384 megabytes of RAM. To my surprise, the .NET based OS was actually pretty snappy. It had its rough spots, but I was hardly going to be sad to see Windows move to the next generation.
Then, something happened. Microsoft forgot what they had been working towards all those years since they acquired the NT kernel. Longhorn, which had been making exciting progress under Bill Gates, was abandoned, and Gates taken off the project. Then Vista happened. Microsoft backpedaled into the stone age. Vista was an operating system that ran on a limited number of platforms and required such high specifications to perform well that it was by and far the least accessible version of Windows they had ever released. Microsoft's improvements didn't make the Windows toolkit better, just shinier. The search functionality relied on the same old indexing service that had been around since Windows 2000, and not the metadata driven WinFS that had been in development for Longhorn. The start bar and task bar were barely touched otherwise, and a heavy, slow, bastardized version of the Longhorn sidebar was all that made it to the sluggish Vista desktop.
With Windows 7, Microsoft finally went back to their roots, improving the things that made Windows, well, Windows. The task bar got a handy overhaul, the sidebar was gone, replaced with the much lighter Gadgets which leveraged portable platform independent technology, and a lot of polish went in to the control panel and other applications that were staples of the Windows experience, including Word Pad and Paint.
But what about Windows 8? All the work that Microsoft put in to make Windows 7 the best Windows yet, is hidden behind a strange, blocky UI that works poorly without a touchscreen. In fact, the windows themselves are relegated to second-hand and-also applications running in a “legacy” desktop “app”. Gone is the start button. The keyboard shortcut everyone forgets about (press the Window key to open the start menu) is now one way to get to the tiles, or using a hot corner, of which there is no indication for whatsoever. The very thing that gave Windows its name is now apparently not important enough to rate a significant upgrade. Instead of pushing .NET to create better desktop applications, they are pushing it to create the kinds of apps best suited for smart phones and perhaps tablets. Worst of all, you can’t turn it off. There is no “going back” to the way that we are used to Windows working.
To top it all off, ancient technologies like COM (which was supposed to be eventually replaced with .NET) are making a comeback, and while the kernel can run on ARM, only a part of the .NET framework has been ported, making Windows RT able to run less Windows software than the open source Wine project (which has about 70% Windows compatibility). Then, Microsoft further restricts what parts of even the ARM architecture applications can take advantage of, meaning that even things that could normally run on ARM, such as Firefox, Chrome, and Java based apps can not be ported to Windows RT.
So let me break it down for Microsoft. Windows users aren’t complicated. They want better security, to be able to play any reasonably modern game directly, or, if the game is too old, at least through some kind of emulator (like the XP VM that is part of Windows 7 Professional), an over-all less buggy experience, and better hardware support. Microsoft could improve Windows with a .NET application store, better multi-monitor support, making it more themeable, getting all Windows apps to use the same toolkit so that Paint, IE, and Windows Media player actually look like they belong on the same computer, and adding new, actually valuable applications to the Windows experience like bringing back Works as a first-class citizen, improving the image viewer with PDF support, and getting Windows Explorer back in the game as a truly premium file manager.
Instead, we got Windows 8.