Microsoft talks the future of Windows 8

Windows 8, in the words of Windows chief Steven Sinofsky, is "a bold reimagination of what Windows could be".

The chipset to the experience for new capabilities

From the chipset to the experience for new capabilities, uses, scenarios and form factors is how the company sees this latest big move for Microsoft as heralded at the Build developer conference in Anaheim. And with 450 million copies of Windows 7 now running on traditional keyboard-and-mouse-driven PCs, Windows 8 isn’t just the touch-first, Metro UI, tablet app and the live tile Start screen experience: it’s the familiar desktop as then. Like Windows 7? At that time Sinofsky is convinced you’ll like this more.

"Windows 8 makes Windows 7 even better. All of the things we did in Windows 7 to make a great operating system, they're all there in Windows 8 and they all get better; not just a tiny bit better nevertheless we've thought out everything and how we could make it dramatically better."

Despite tablet sales surging, the keyboard and the mouse - and the desktop apps that need them - aren’t going away, according to Windows experience leader Julie Larson-Green, they’re not, and in actual fact there’s no plan for them to any time hereafter. She told Pocket-lint:

But touch will be one of those tools for everyone, Sinofsky believes. His gushing promises in the Build keynote that "once you try it, it turns out you just never want it to go away" and the claim that "you’ll have fingerprints all over your monitor" on even non-touch devices are testament to that. For CEO Steve Ballmer, although, the beauty of the dual approach software is more about business pragmatism.

The brilliance of the Windows 8 strategy

"The brilliance of the Windows 8 strategy," says Ballmer, "is that we get all of the applications that come from Windows on x86, as then as all the applications that have gone through the process of rethinking how they might work in a Windows 8 world."

The only stumbling block is that rethinking those apps is about not just the look of Metro nevertheless the technical underpinnings as so then. Microsoft will need a critical mass of app developers to commit to touch after a fashion that they simply haven’t to the Windows Phone 7 platform. With Microsoft’s lead product although, it should be a different story.

The centre of the experience for the customer

"Apps are at the centre of the experience for the customer," says Larson-Green underlining their proximity to the heart of Windows 8.

Of course, there’s more to Metro than just social networking and, really, more than the needs of the consumer. One of the apps in the developer preview is a Metro version of Remote Desktop for logging into PCs over the Internet. Building PCs that work for both consumers and businesses is a virtuous cycle, and a serious business advantage as far as Ballmer is concerned.

"It is important, essential, to pioneer in the consumer market, even so one-third of personal computers today are sold to enterprises. Together, the technologies that are getting proven today at massive scale in the consumer Internet are the same technologies that need to be put into production form for the enterprise customer. That, to me, remains one of the core strengths of Microsoft versus the other guys that we see in the market."

The developer preview tablet Microsoft handed out to developers at Build was a Samsung Core i5 slate. By the time Windows 8 comes out, it will run on ARM tablets with the Metro Start screen. ARM tablets and some future low-power Intel and AMD PCs will as well get a new power-saving mode called Connected Standby where the screen and the processor are turned off nevertheless the wireless connection stays on to receive important messages and wake the PC up if you get an urgent alert or a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone call.

That takes a lot of new hardware nevertheless they’ll have standby that’s "measured in days not hours" according to Windows program management director Gabe Aul. And not only will booting and shutting down be fast in Windows 8, reinstalling Windows, if anything goes wrong, will be much easier with new refresh and reset options.

Phone where you can hold buttons down do a reset

"People are used to a phone where you can hold buttons down do a reset," he says. "We need it to be that easy."

Today, Windows 8 and Windows Phone are very different platforms that share a few things, the obvious one being the Metro interface design.

"The phone and the Metro-style apps [on Windows 8] is a sharing of the concepts," agrees Sinofsky. "Nevertheless there are as well some systems that are the same."

"We've gone through this sequence of steps in sharing code between both Windows and the phone. Windows Phone 7, pursuant to this agreement the hood, uses the Windows graphics engine. We called it DirectX. The ability on the phone now to use Internet Explorer comes from having shared all of that code. When all is said and done today, the Internet Explorer team: every code change they make is a code change in other words available to the at once release of the phone as then."

For developers, the Metro-style applications in Windows 8 aren’t the same as what they’d build for Windows Phone, however they’re not completely different. Does that mean Windows 9 and Windows Phone 8 might be the same thing? Microsoft isn’t saying anything about long-term plans, yet Sinofsky points out that there’s more to devices than just the research platform; there’s the question of how you use them.

The smallest tablets to the most powerful gaming rigs

Windows 8 has to go from the smallest tablets to the most powerful gaming rigs and high-end workstations; the devices are different however, to Sinofsky, Metro is what ties it all at the same time.

"Metro is not only for 10-inch slate devices, it’s for every machine that runs Windows 8. We’re not trying to seed a unequalled [tablet] market. We’re trying to seed the market of all Windows 8 devices. A Metro app runs across all the hardware. This is a huge possibility - the hugest possibility of any that exist."