Windows 8 - From Consumer Perspectives

It was an exciting week. Bangladesh cricket team reached the final of the Asia Cup 2012 one-day international (ODI) cricket championship. We enjoyed an exhilarating performances from the boys against some of the best cricket teams in the world. They beat the both finalists of the last ODI world cup and narrowly lost the final to another former world champion Pakistan just by 2 runs. So much enthusiasm was rarely seen in this country in the recent days.

Let's go back to my Windows 8 experience again. In my previous post Windows 8 - Was it the right way?, I tried to figure out if the Windows 8 was the right answer for Microsoft against iPad or Android based tablets.  Since it's still in alpha stage, a lot of changes are expected to appear in the final version. I am concentrating on what I have in my tablet at this moment. I am going to briefly write on the usability of the operating system from the perspectives of different type of users, more specifically end-users and developers.

End-users
The end-users accomplishes usual daily tasks and entertainments.They expect comfortable user interface with stunning graphics. The frequently used programs must be easily locatable and under their fingertips. The Window 8 UI would be an attractive medium if you are already a smartphone user.

Windows 8 presents a very slick user interfaces. The links to the available and frequently usable programs are nicely wrapped all around your screen as large and colorful blocks.  You don't need to click the small Start button at the corner of the screen to run a program. Microsoft has done some really good jobs to tweak the application resolution adjusted to your monitor.
  
The user interface is in reality designed for touch screen. Since now-a-days, many consumers are very much accustomed to smart phone, they might feel comfortable with this interface. If you don't have a touch screen, it's probably better to switch to the classic mode where you have familiar Windows 7 interface.

• All applications run in full screen mode. So you have no concept of maximizing or minimizing the application. MS is somehow backtracking to simpler and neater user experience removing all distracting elements from your sight so that you can concentrate to your real work.
• Only one application is active at a certain period of time. Starting another application will switch the current application to suspended mode where it will use almost no CPU cycles. When there are so many applications in running and suspended modes that the system memory can no more accommodate, older applications are shut down. That said there are some special mechanisms if you have some long running jobs like checking emails or copying large files to a network folder. 

There are only few applications available in the current preview version. All of your favorite applications are still running in classic mode. How many of them appear as metro-style applications is yet to be known. One annoying thing in Metro is that if you start a non-metro application, it will switch back to the classic view.

It is clear that Microsoft has used iPad as example and extended the features in order to streamline the user experience. MS is proud of the Metro and has done a brave job restructuring typical OS interface into smartphone style user interface and introducing this interface in the desktop PCs. The smartphone enthusiasts will definitely welcome that. But from other end-user perspectives, the following questions need to be answered:

• Is Touch the future of  interaction? Will there be an emergence of other interaction/input mechanism? Microsoft has focused exclusively on touch screen influenced by the widespread success of iPhone and Android-based products. But which interaction/input technology should evolve as the dominating medium is the consumers to decide.
• Is only a single application at once is the best approach? Many users run multiple applications simultaneously and drag information from one application to another.
• Is MS delaying the release of Windows 8 as they did with Windows Vista? The competitor is seizing the market rapidly. Apple released the new iPad (previously known as iPad3) on March 7, 2012 and   New iPad tops 3 millions sales only in 3 days - a staggering figure. MS must find a good slot in this year before the market is already saturated with iPad and android-based tablet.

Developers

Those who develop applications for the Windows operating systems belong to this group. Many of the developers also belong to the end-users category as well since they also use their development computer to accomplish day-to-day tasks. Microsoft has done some exciting staff in Windows 8 and Microsoft Visual Studio 11 (VS11) for application development. The most admirable staff is releasing the beta of VS11 and Windows 8 developer preview so that the developers can start with application development. The success of an operating system depends on the number of quality applications available on that system. The public availability of prerelease versions of  them enabled the programmers to develop and deploy their own applications.


The metro style application development has been integrated into the VS11. The most exciting news is that JavaScript is now considered as a first class citizen for metro application software development. You can build applications similar to familiar web programming using JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3 thanks to the Windows Library for JavaScript (WinJS) built on top of Windows Runtime (WinRT), a native API built into the operating system and accessible from C++, VB, C#, JavaScript. 


A lot of enhancements have been made to C++ compiler to comply with the C++11 standard as much as they could. Concurrency is now an integral part of the language. You can access a lot of user interface elements using WinRT which are tedious to program in C++. Microsoft has introduced automatic garbage collection for WinRT objects through several Microsoft-specific C++ extensions.

These are the positive parts of Windows 8 and VS 11 for the developers. The "single application" feature will negatively affect the productivity of the developers most. In this multitasking world, everyone wants to do multiple tasks at the same time. Developers starts C++ compilation, browse the Internet for reference, check email or edit icons all at the same time.  If they need to switch here and there for doing these tasks, frustration will be certain.

As already mentioned, a lot of changes are expected in the final release of Windows 8 and there will definitely be a gigantic marketing efforts in the coming months. MS will compel the OEMs to support their plan and eventually force the consumers to move to the new OS.

Windows 8 - Was it the right way?

So Microsoft has decided to roll out next version of its flagship Windows operating system called Windows 8. The company has reimagined(?) the desktop experience and the result is that the desktops should be looked and used like tablets or smart phones. Since the introduction of Windows 8 Consumer Preview in the last year's build event, I attended several of the conferences, TechTalks, InfoDays organized by Microsoft and partners. In every event one question was frequently asked if the strategy to push all the desktop users to tablets was right.

Apple and Google are snatching up consumer market share from Microsoft and they needed a quick and solid response. For many years Microsoft led the innovation in the desktop PCs and notebooks domains and I was expecting such innovative responses. But what we see in Window 8 consumer preview is what the market already experienced in iPad, Andriod Tabs and in its own Windows Phone.

Once Microsoft was at the forefront of innovation in the IT industry. They made the desktop PC popular and revolutionized the computer industry. But now I felt a huge lack of innovation in MS's offerings like Windows 8. The Tile-Style user interface that Windows 8 has embraced is already in tablet PCs like iPad and Android Tabs. The same interface is already available in Linux based operating system Chrome OS  that Google introduced on July 08, 2009 to the Internet community and later in November 19, 2009 announced the availability of the open sourced Chromium OS. Even the Ubuntu's Unity desktop, first implemented in the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10, had tile-style gadgets and application icons.

As a long-term developer of Microsoft's system, I know how aggressively it will push the new OS to the consumers. The company will go in an all-out attack to force the OEM vendors, channel providers, developers, and above all the consumers to buy its products. We provide Windows based-systems to our clients, and know MS will stop the support for the older OS to push their new OS. So called Vendor lock-in forced us once to ship systems equipped with Windows Vista when the OS was not matured enough. That was a terrible experience for us. The complete overhaul of the Windows OS definitely poses a risk for my company to falling into the same trap.

I received my Samsung Series 7 11.6" Slate only last week. My evaluation for the Windows 8 is still under way. This post is just a hint of the psychological adjustments for the developers and end users who were so much accustomed to the desktop pc for so many years.