Windows8 Start screen

Last week Microsoft blessed us with the most detailed presentation of Windows 8 in a keynote that was a part of its BUILD developer conference. Attendees were given a free Samsung preview tablet with Windows 8 pre-installed, and everyone else was offered a free download of the Windows 8 Developer Preview from Microsoft Developer Network site.

As many have said, and as is pretty obvious, Windows 8 is a pretty dramatic shift for Windows since it adds an entirely new user interface on top of Windows we’ve become used to. They call this the Metro UI, and it is primarily meant to be used on touch-screen equipped devices and run “Metro style apps”.

While Metro UI can be used with a mouse and keyboard as well, which was one of the points Microsoft specifically demonstrated, the full blown Windows 7 mode is still present. In fact, it is receiving quite some improvements as well. That’s the main point behind Windows 8, and its primary attraction: the ability to run everywhere and be productively used regardless of which device it runs on.

If you are using a tablet the Metro UI will fit nicely, but the full Windows 7-like UI is still there in case you hook your tablet to a mouse and keyboard, or if you want to try your hand at using it through a touch screen. If you are on a notebook or a desktop PC the standard Windows 7-like UI will do just as fine as it does now. This way Microsoft is effectively trying to make the one OS to rule all platforms.

This is certainly an intriguing idea. It means you can run full blown Windows apps on a tablet as long as the tablet is powerful enough, which doesn’t appear to a problem considering the rapidly evolving performance per watt of new mobile processing platforms. Microsoft is effectively promising to bring the entirety of the massive Windows applications library to your tablet on day one of its release.

Some believe that this actually one ups Apple in their own game. Apple is spearheading a “post-PC” era with the iPad, but Microsoft could be delivering the killer app for it. The amount of applications available for Windows probably trumps those on the iOS. This leads to the prediction that Apple will at some point merge iOS and Mac OS X into one OS effectively emulating the Windows 8 strategy.

But let’s step back a little and question this idea for a moment. The advantage here is combining the tablet experience with the power of a PC by offering a single OS to run on both, and the idea is that this offers something that Apple doesn’t.

There are two ways to argue otherwise though.

First, having an OS that packs PC-oriented features together with tablet-oriented features could get a bit messy. PC-oriented features will feel out of place on a tablet, at least when it’s not docked, and the new tablet oriented Metro UI could feel out of place on a PC (and it is already drawing some criticism from those who would rather just skip it).

While the ability to run classic Windows programs on a tablet is appealing, their interface clearly isn’t suited for a tablet, and a tablet isn’t generally meant for this kind of use, so this benefit could come at a cost. For many people Windows 8 may end up being a bloated tablet OS because it comes with stuff that they don’t really want on a tablet.

Second, if the goal is combining the power of a PC with the portability of a tablet then it can easily be argued that the MacBook Air already does this. In fact, it is spearheading an entire new category of notebooks that do this, which Intel calls “ultrabooks”. They don’t have any mechanical parts (hard drive or optical drive), relying solely on solid state storage. They are super-thin and super-light, and the MacBook Air specifically uses a gestures oriented OS with a big multitouch trackpad to use it with (reminding a lot of the iPad). It does seem like a dream come true for someone who wants a kind of a cross between the iPad and the notebook experience.

And then there is the iCloud, and cloud computing in general. Do you really need one OS for all types of devices if you have your data seamlessly synced across all of them? It doesn’t really matter which program you use to edit or consume your data. What matters is that you have access to your data everywhere, and that the app you use is actually easy and intuitive to use.

With Apple having a separate operating system for each type of devices they get to streamline the user experience perfectly for each, and the iCloud offers the link that ties all of them together. Ultimately, the user won’t care what OS is running so long as they can seamlessly do what they want with their data on it. As tablets become more powerful the iOS would follow with more powerful apps, and if this gets to the point of iOS becoming as powerful of a platform as Mac OS X then it will simply cloud OSX, perhaps making it obsolete.

There is, of course, a possibility that the two will be merged at that point, but for Apple to consistently follow this strategy of making an OS fit the device perfectly, this would only make sense if MacBook Air style devices become as good as obsolete. So long as tablets aren’t a de facto replacement form factor for desktop PCs and notebooks, a place for an OS tiered to desktop PCs and notebooks will exist. In other words, so long as there’s a market for Macs, such a merge is very unlikely.

It’s hard to say which of these two approaches is ultimately better, or which will win out, but it’s safe to say that both have their advantages and disadvantages.

With Windows 8 you get a PC sneaked into your tablet and can pretend that the post-PC era has already arrived. With a powerful enough tablet and a dock hooked to a big screen, keyboard and mouse, all you need in your life is a tablet (and a smartphone). No more laptops or desktop PCs.

On the other hand, maybe you like to use “the best tool for the job”, and keep a notebook with a full blown OS for a heavier set of tasks, and a tablet for things that a tablet is best for. In this case you might dislike the idea of lugging the desktop-oriented bloat with you; you’ll never intend to exit the Metro UI, so why have all that Windows 7-like stuff anyway? Equally so you might be irked by the Metro UI on your notebook PC given that you might only be interested in full blown desktop apps.

In that case you might prefer an iOS or Android on your tablet, and old Windows 7 or Mac OS X on your notebook.

And this last sentence illustrates the risk that Microsoft is taking with Windows 8. People who do fall into the second category will find themselves without a home in the Windows world if they are to upgrade, and might be seriously lured by Mac OS X, unless Microsoft offers an easy way to completely disable Metro UI and let people use only the classic interface.

We shall see how things pan out, and it will certainly be interesting to watch. Meanwhile, feel free to share your take on these two approaches in the comments below.