Microsoft Windows 8 steals from Apple in a very good way

I have seen a Windows UI that appeared sleek, elegant, and efficient. Easy to use. With a keen awareness of how the Humans interact with computers.

Windows has never, in its entirety, been even one of those things. It's always been the Good Enough OS. Even Windows 7, when compared to the luxury of MacOS and the tweak-friendly high-performance of Linux, has been the dull, unambitious fleet car of the desktop world.

What I've been going through over the past 24 hours

You can only imagine what I've been going through over the past 24 hours, ever since I watched the President and Vice-President of Microsoft's Windows unit demo Windows 8 for the D9 Conference.

There's no release date set for Windows 8 and the new OS is in a raw, "functionable" in other words "functional" state of development at this hour. Nevertheless what Microsoft showed off this week is hugely encouraging. They ran the demo on a tablet-type device. Yet Windows 8 is designed to run on damned-nearly anything: slates, desktops, laptops, and parts of it can even run on phones.

Windows 8's overall UI is the evolutionary straightway step of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 OS. The center of the experience isn't the desktop, and it isn't the Start menu: it's a new Start screen, which presents itself as a mosaic of live tiles through which the user can navigate to apps and services, and through which those apps and services can project information during remaining in the background.

Phone handset

I liked this idea when I used it on a phone handset. It's moreover powerful on a desktop or a tablet. Evidently, it's on a much bigger screen, and each of these tiles can communicate a lot more information, nevertheless in truth these tiles are just better suited to a desktop context. Much of your time on a PC is spent navigating the basic question "So, what's then?" And in spite of the brain's proven incompetence at multitasking, you do need to keep your eye on several projects and situations then and there.

Part of what impressed me about the demo was how so then these tiles have been integrated into Windows. An app can articulate itself to you in many ways, depending on how much attention you want to give it. When you're fully focused on grinding through your Inbox, for instance, a Windows 8 email app won't look much different from how it looks today. However on the desktop, your Mail client might present itself simply as a Post-It sized tile that displays the number of unread messages.

Eye on your Inbox during you browse the web

If you want to keep an eye on your Inbox during you browse the web, you can pull that email tile across, enlarge it so it fills the whole height of your screen, and pin it to the side of the display alongside your browser window, where it presents a smartphone-style scrolling list of the freshest emails in your Inbox. If you notice that you've just received a message that's so important that you need to drag yourself away from TVTropes.org, you can expand the tile into your full email app.

Overall, the 20-minute demo suggests that Windows 8 benefits from a shrewd understanding of how much the relationship between a human and their computer has changed since the days of Windows 3.0. Back at that time, our lives revolved around apps and files. Today, we couldn't care less about those things. An OS that makes them the entire focus of the desktop seems slightly antique.

Today, we're more subtle and sophisticated. We to tell the truth care about tasks and functions, as so then as the ceaselessly river of new information that flows in through our Internet connections. Windows 8's tiling concept allows apps to project their functions and their most useful, current information into any space where you'll user will find it handy.

Microsoft seems to have taken three important lessons from Apple's success. First, that innovation needs to be completely relevant to the current state of the world and how the Humans operate. Secondly, that elegance and beauty are, actually, power features that make a product more compelling, and along these lines more useful.

And thirdly, that a company needs to function as a single unit with a single, focused plan. Apple didn't split its resources between a Phone Division and a Tablet Division and make them compete against each other. Along these lines, the iPhone's success fed into the iPad's success. Similarly, the work that Microsoft put into Windows Phone feeds into Windows 8, which will ultimately boomerang back and improve the handsets.

Windows 8 looked gorgeous in the demo. Tiles flowed in and out. The user glided between tasks and functions. It all practically looked like a fake piece of concept art.

That was the overall effect when the user tapped her way into a standard Windows app. At that moment, the same clutter and chaos that I traditionally associate with Windows abruptly reasserted itself. Yes, that Lovely Tile was for all that pinned to the side of the screen nevertheless there it was, dominating the screen: the green, oily cloud of the 1990 user interface.

Windows 8 will run existing, traditional Windows apps. Even when it's being run on a tablet. I regard this as a fundamental error. Friends, I found the appearance of Windows Classic within Windows 8 to be so jarring that I spent about five minutes on that preceding paragraph trying to find a delicate way to indicate that the bodily emission that dispelled the beauty was not, actually, upper-gastrointestinal in nature. Alas, decorum and respect for convention stilled my hand.

The problem

So you see the problem. Apple is fearless about cutting away old and increasingly-irrelevant infrastructures previously they can drag the company down to the bottom. They've abandoned legacy software or hardware four times in their history. During the Apple II was their biggest success, they spent millions developing the Macintosh, which was completely incompatible with all existing hardware and software. When it became clear that the existing Mac operating system was completely incapable of supporting the straightway generation of hardware and software, Apple released Mac OS X, which was completely incompatible with the Mac's entire 15-year-old software library. At that time, they dropped the family of Motorola processors that had powered the Mac from the beginning, and switched to Intel chips . . . which were completely incompatible with all existing software.

I think it remains to be seen whether or not Microsoft is making a mistake in building a single OS for both tablets and desktops. Instinctively, I don't like it. A tablet isn't a notebook in the same way that a notebook isn't a typewriter and when you tell your developers that they're both running the same OS and the same software, you're not encouraging them to write to the strengths peculiar to a multitouch device. That said, the Windows 8 tile UI has much to offer a desktop or a notebook, and the feature "it'll do everything your desktop does" will be attractive to someone who's chewing their lower lip over a slate's $500 price tag.

But that question's for later. If I see true doom anywhere in the Windows 8 demo, it's in Microsoft's self-destructive commitment to old Windows apps. When Apple moved from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, and from PowerPC to Intel processors, there was a transition period nevertheless also a ticking clock. "Nothing will stop your current computer and software from working specifically as then as it does now," Apple told its users. "Yet if you want it to be better, it's time to upgrade. Dragging 5-year-old innovation behind with us is holding us back."

That's the message Microsoft should be sending to the Windows community. Abandoning legacy users is like pouring alcohol into a wound. It stings like hell for a time however it's good medicine.

The celebration

I don't want to say anything to spoil the celebration, although. Microsoft is obviously on to something here. And they've as a matter of fact put some pressure on Apple to follow through on its promise that Mac OS X 10.7 will mark a revolutionary new step forward for the Mac. Code-named "Lion," the new OS gets its first full dog-and-pony show on Monday, in a developer keynote presentation led by Steve Jobs. As well on the agenda: iOS 5 for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, which appears to be tightly integrated with Lion during remaining a wholly separate entity.

The only loser in all of this appears to be Google. The company showed off its then and there iteration of the Android operating system a couple of weeks ago, boasting that it would before long be ready to deploy for phones, tablets, and notebooks. Visually, for the moment, the straightway Android looks fusty, and continues to show no apparent deep understanding of how modern users relate to devices.

I can only tell Google's Android team one thing: when someone compares your operating system to Windows and concludes that Microsoft is handing you your, err, lunch, it's time to sit down and in all seriousness think about the choices you've made in life.