Why Windows 8 Is Fundamentally Flawed as a Response to the iPad

A pro-Apple, anti-Microsoft article from Gruber? I'm shocked.

However, even though this is yet another iteration of his "Why <insert Microsoft technology here> sucks compared to <insert Apple technology here>" theme, I tend to agree with him this time.

I cannot imagine the iOS devices finding success if they were actually just Macs with a new category of touch apps strapped on. This only leads to market and developer confusion. If it's just one platform, what is my target device as a developer? If I develop to touch-driven HTML5+JS, why would anyone want to use it with a mouse? If I develop to WPF, why would anyone want to use it with multi-touch? Whatever they call it, it's two platforms, crammed together, and they just don't fit well. As a developer, you still have to make a choice, and it is the device itself that determines what development path you will take.

Then there is the hardware requirements. Windows 7 made great strides in this direction, but I just cannot imagine Windows 8 running as efficiently on an ARM-based device as iOS does today. I hope to be surprised here.

Attacking Gruber because he says Apple's approach is better than Microsoft's isn't addressing the arguments he raises so let's address them:

"Microsoft’s demo video shows Excel — the full version of Excel for Windows — running alongside new touch-based apps. They can make buttons more “touch friendly” all they want, but they’ll never make Excel for Windows feel right on a touchscreen UI."

No one said Excel for Win 8 would be just a touch friendly version. Gruber's argument assumes that Microsoft won't attempt to think through the use-case of touch on Office products. Given that Office is one of their top pilars of profitability, you can bet that they'll at least attempt to create Office 2012 (or whatever) to fit in naturally with how people will want to and need to use it.

"The iPad succeeds because it has eliminated complexity, not because it has covered up the complexity of the Mac with a touch-based “shell”. "

You definitely have a point with that but a particular quote comes to mind "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein. You can't do real work on the iPad version of iWorks. Making Excel simpler just for simplicities sake would be a mistake for Microsoft. Exposing the right amount of simplicity for the various tasks is what they should be aiming for.

"Apple’s radical notion is that touchscreen personal computers should make severely different tradeoffs than traditional computers — that you can’t design one system that does it all."

You can't until you can. iOS is built on the same technology of OSX. IF they wanted, they could make iOS able to run OSX apps and be able to do many of the things that OSX can do. They've simply elected not to.

Most of the tradeoffs that Apple has made has less to do with what is possible and more to do with training their developers. If I remember correctly, Apple elected not to allow a 2 button mouse for a long time earlier in their history because they wanted to force developers to build apps that worked just fine with 1 button... to force them to create a different type of experience for users.

Microsoft's goals are actually the opposite. They don't want to create a completely different experience. Their corporate clients will buy the next version of Windows because it is an evolution, not a revolution. Creating a revolutionary product may actually be counter to their interests.

I think Gruber is actually missing something pretty important here. Something everyone has traditionally understood, but its been forgetten (and honestly, largely irrelevent nowadays):

Microsoft sells a boatload of copies of Windows.

They don't sell a lot of MP3 devices. Or tablets. Or phones. But they sell a lot of copies of Windows. And a very strong OEM partnership market.

With Windows 8 expect on the low-end they ship 200M copies its first year. On the high-end, think 450M. (they did 350M for Win7). This will be the default UI for all tablets and probably laptops (maybe desktops, but desktops are increasingly niche devices).

You're going to have a huge market of people now getting touch devices because the default touch experience is actually really good. Sure there's the other experience, but people will be able to largely stay in the default touch experience while doing consumption. They only pop out when doing creation. And those are the times on the iPad that you would typically go get your laptop anyways.

And in terms of the appstore... when there are 50M machines using this OS the first month -- there will be apps. Non-Apple devs will love to have an app store ecosystem of this size.

To put it another way, Gruber would be absolutely right if they had tried this with Windows Mobile. WP7 would be held back due to it, and WinMo had no marketshare to speak of. But for Windows proper this is actually the right move. It actually harkens back to them shipping IE with Windows and catching and passing Netscape. This is old fashioned MS leveraging their huge market position. It's something they frankly can rarely do anymore, but I think it will actually work for them this time -- maybe the last time.

And lastly, note that the legacy experience is really only there for Intel based processors. For ARM there will probably be very few legacy experience apps. I'm thinking Office and maybe one or two others. In a typical world, think Honeycomb, those tablets never build an app ecosystem. But in this world they get the huge installed user base of the Intel platform for app devs to target. So in one generation you may well have a solid app eco system completely sitting outside the legacy experience. They solved the chicken vs egg problem.

Shocker, Gruber thinks that if you're not approaching something the way Apple does, you're not going to succeed. That's really all there is to this article. Let's wait and see what they produce, considering that there's over a year before this will hit the shelves, shall we?

Yes, yes, Gruber's pro apple, let's agree on that point and save the bytes.

He makes a very valid point about trying to run regular windows alongside this beautiful interface. MS just couldn't resist the temptation to make it fully backwards compatible with their old software. I can almost guarantee it was some outside, higher C-level person (Balmer?) that "loved the new interface, but could we get it to run windows too?"

If MS knows what it's doing, it will make custom mobile versions of its office apps like Apple did and never try to shoehorn an interface designed for a mouse and keyboard into their mobile operating system again. But, alas, they lack the discipline to do it.

Not sure he gets it. One of the big selling points of windows is its pursuit of backwards compatibility. As a windows dev and user I was close to having a heart attack until I saw "normal Windows" alongside. Sure, maybe they can't "pull it off" but in all frankness I'm more of a fan of utility than "usability". I want all my old apps to work as they worked in the original OS and working as well on the new OS.

I don't necessarily buy the idea that iOS's lack of complexity and compatibility is the reason for its success. You can already see complexity and compatibility problems 4 years in with iOS. Things like the undiscoverable double click method to call up the app drawer and the weird double pixel support for iPhone apps on the iPad are already here. iCloud seems to be poised to basically become the filesystem for iOS devices (if my prediction is right). Even Gruber says that iOS will eventually consume Mac OS X in this article. So if iOS is going to continue growing in complexity and trying to maintain compatibility over the years while also trying to remain user friendly, why is attacking the same goal with Windows from the opposite direction any worse?

Let's wait and see.

As someone who's been very critical of Microsoft's consumer products, I was quite impressed with the Windows 8 demo at D9. [1]

Windows 8 looks nothing like Windows. It looks much better.

Good job, Microsoft. Make it great and ship it.

But building a great product won't be enough. You'll also have to build a great ecosystem.

[1] http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=20D08FE8-3928-43F3-AFE...

Ok seems to me that a lot of people are missing the point entirely here... <insert zzzzzoooooooommmmmmm flying hand over the head motion here>

Microsoft has always worked hard to make Windows as flexible as possible, hardware wise, functionality, etc. Some consider this a credit, some a detriment, but no matter what I consider it to be a huge technical challenge. Several people seem to be taking this from the perspective of an iPad attack which is a very narrow minded view of the possibilities here.

What MS is doing here (and very wisely I think... IF they can pull it off) is to produce one OS that works cross hardware environment. Win 8 it seems to me CAN run like classic Win 7 (and earlier) supporting the plethora of existing Windows apps. This is a MUST for MS. But originally MS tried to make the old Windows UI touch friendly, which is a very bad approach. The existing Windows UI grew up around a mouse and keyboard and MS has finally realized it. You can't make it work for touch effectively, and so they are wisely separating the two.

To solve the problem they are wrapping Windows in an OPTIONAL alternate touch designed UI for systems where that is the preferred interaction method. They have developed a new class of touch apps and a new way to manage the overall UI. But most importantly they have blended the two forms of personal computer interaction. This is BRILLIANT to me. You can now have one device, let's say a tablet, that you can use like a touch device. But you can ALSO sit it in a dock, with a keyboard and mouse and use it to replace your desktop PC including all those legacy apps and Office programs that are the standard. When done you undock and flip back to the touch UI to take it with you, but you still have access to all your documents. Microsoft has for the first time realized that the ultimate device will function in BOTH modes and to be efficient the OS on that device also needs two distinct methods of interaction. And this I think is what is brilliant.

You'll never see an iPad as the primary device on an office desk in its current form and UI. Your accountant or DB admin or whatever will always be more productive with a keyboard and mouse when it comes to heavy "business" style applications. This is what the existing touch UI's can't provide. But a device that can run no compromise Office style apps, business apps, the millions of existing Windows apps in general... and then pick up and go with a nice touchscreen keyboard, touch UI, web browsing, etc... I know I've used the word a couple times but it's brilliant. I just hope their execution is up to their vision.

Edit... my mind is running with the further possibilities... they will definitely cross up development between Win Phone and Win 8... so now Windows developers can target the mobile market and the largest desktop market with one app. I still don't see the future of Win Phone turning around but who knows, this could be a very smart move on MS's part to leverage their Windows developer base and established market.

Microsoft Windows was a response to Apple's Macintosh, how many? Twenty five, thirty years ago?

It was an inferior interface that let you run your old DOS programs even though they weren't as good. It did well for MS.

I don't know if MS can succeed this way again. But it seems a bit much to say that this strategy is automatically bad.

I was an intern on the windows user experience team last summer, so I saw a lot of this new ui. While I will never personally enjoy it (emacs is my ui), I'm proud of them for it and I think it will do well.

The first thing to remember is that you have seen very little of the os as a whole. You saw a "desktop" and some sample apps. There is a lot to come, and a big part of the experience will be determined by third-party developers, so try not to judge too harshly just yet.

Also, it is absolutely gorgeous. iOS looks like rocks after this. Big sharp clunky rocks. Sure, you can pinch and zoom and rotate with some fingers, but that's all at the app level in iOS. In windows 8 (from the video at least, I didn't play with it in such a mature form during my stint), everything is fluid and responsive, transitioning smoothly between actions, rather than closing one before opening the other. Where iOS enforces conformity between apps' ui and puts clear separation between them, windows 8 seems to let each app define itself, yet still be somewhat symbiotic with the os itself, and with other apps.

Why all the complaints about excel? Microsoft can't alienate enterprise, and I think we all know how much enterprise hates even UI changes. You aren't going to do real excel work on a tablet anyway (the most you'll do is scroll around and look at the figures someone emailed you), so why do you care if the ui sucks for tablet?

Most importantly, though, I'd like to examine one of Gruber's points:

The iPad succeeds because it has eliminated complexity, not because it has covered up the complexity of the Mac with a touch-based “shell”.

The iPad does eliminate complexity: this gives it an opportunity to break current notions of computing, and this helps users recontextualize the tablet and reintroduce themselves to it. In a way, it's a My First Post-PC Computer, designed to re-teach us about computers, as infants, to clear the way for better things to come.

Windows 8 might be that better thing, or at least the first real instantiation. I find that it seems extremely futuristic, in the sci-fi movie sense. It seems like the type of interface we've seen in movies about future societies where computers are embedded in everything, and they all interoperate seamlessly.

Notice the emphasis on home networking, and imagine your desktop, with all your pictures and movies, serving them through your house to your TV, your tablets, your kids' tablets, your picture frames. Your kitchen table runs the same browser as your desktop, and can access everything on your desktop, so you can pull up recipes that you bookmarked earlier that day. It also lets you know when you have to finish dinner so you can make the movie you scheduled. Your fridge knows what's stocked (and what's expired), and can send a message to your spouse's car asking them to pick up the ingredients you're missing for dinner tonight. Of course, when they get to the store, the cart recognizes them and loads up the list too.

Of course I've gone a little bit crazy there, but I'm sure you can see what I'm doing. Right now, we have (or, in about a year I guess we will have) two devices that interact in a way something like this. The only thing left to do then, is to scale up from 2 to 100. That's easy, the step from 1 to 2 is the hard part.

The point is that windows 8 looks to me like the first real step toward this goal, and the progress is happening exactly in the fact that it does not eliminate complexity, it does not segregate the tablet and the pc.

Why do you need to plug your iPad in to your Mac in order to do stuff with it (if this is not the case, sorry, I don't own one and my memory of being told this may be fabricated)? Because iOS doesn't have all the stuff in OS X that it needs to do things on its own. Your windows 8 tablet will have all that, so it can function on its own, but it also speaks exactly the same language as your windows 8 pc, so communication and cooperation between devices is trivial, even natural.

Of course, I still don't like microsoft, but I have to give them this one. They are absolutely killing it.

It's worth remembering that Windows tends to alternate hit-and-miss (eg. Win95, Win2000, WinXP, Vista, Win7), which in some cases indicates experimentation with something new that didn't work out at first.

Also, MS will really want to work on ARM. It's easy to port the OS, but legacy software (MS's key strength) is not. However, much recent software is written for their VM (.Net) and can be ported. It will be great for MS to make this leap - and every organization that is dependent on such software will be rooting for them. One would think the same would be true for Java...

I have to admit, this new Windows 8 approach has one aspect that is surprisingly reminiscent of how I saw the whole Windows CE product up to version 6. That is, trying to cram as much as possible of the Windows desktop into a form factor it was never going to function well in (both due to UI and performance).

Now I could be wrong that this is the reason why Windows CE 6.x and below failed to gain much popularity, but it is why I found it never got my attention no matter how much I wanted it to.

To me this seems very misguided. If Win8 has a tablet-touch mode that is well suited for operation at casual usage and the ability to drill down into a power user full Windows UI, that strikes me as ideal. And from what I'm seeing in these vids, it's pretty well done.

Or to put it another way, this seems to be the proverbial 3.0 version of MS software - if WinCE was 1.0 and TabletXP/Origamiproject was 2.0, this looks like the one that'll get it right. (So far, and from what we see, etc.)

> They can make buttons more “touch friendly” all they want, but they’ll never make Excel for Windows feel right on a touchscreen UI.

I suspect it goes the other way, too: touch friendly apps won't feel right with a mouse. The video reassures us that "of course [the new apps] work great with mouse and keyboard as well, if that's what you have", but the trade-offs and requirements are completely different. Just based on the video:

- For a touchscreen, buttons must be large and spread out, but the result with a mouse would be a lot of unnecessary movement-- jumping all over the screen.

- This also means you can't pack a lot of buttons into a small space (or have a menu bar), which, when done in moderation, is a good way to add flexibility to a mouse UI. A touch UI would seem unnecessarily simplified.

- Scrolling things around is really natural on a touchscreen, but most mice don't even have horizontal scroll wheels. How do you scroll sideways, flick with the mouse? Reach over to the keyboard?

Etc.

Most of the time Gruber's right about stuff like this, in a round-about way. But this feels stressed. Gruber can find simple brilliances in Apple products (rightfully so), but cannot see the brilliance of bringing the concept of a unified OS back from the grave and totally reconceptualizing that idea? Come on.

I don't usually do this (http://xkcd.com/386/), but this is the second article I've read today which shows the author's complete lack of understanding about the subject (like that's never happened before in the tech industry...)

Windows currently comes in 7 different flavours (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7_editions), which have varying numbers of features. Why would anyone with half a brain assume that a full blown Windows 8 complete with touch enabled apps would be used across all form factors? That doesn't make sense on any level and assuming that Microsoft would do something that silly undermines the intelligence of the people working there (granted there is a lot of beaureacracy at MS that hold them back from being truly successful, but their engineers are far from idiots). Already, Windows Phone is a vastly cut down version of the OS (to the point of being annoying as it lacks some much needed features)

From what I've seen and heard so far, Windows 8 is meant to be scalable. Now whether that will work in practice is yet to be seen, but I don't see any reason for them not to be able to have a minimal OS for phones (like Windows Phone 7), a slightly more feature-rich tablet OS and a full blown desktop OS (which itself will probably come in the Home, Pro, IcingOnCake, etc. editions) that can also run on larger touch-screens. Of course, all of this is contingent on whether they can properly modularise the OS so that unwanted bulk can be dropped for lighter versions and also making sure that lighter versions are optimised for their respective form factors in terms of performance and battery life.

From the post:

* "Microsoft is obviously trying to learn from Apple, but they clearly don’t understand why the iPad runs iOS, and not Mac OS X." *

So Back to the Mac as Jobs called it was not an attempt to take some of the GUI from iOS and apply it to the OS X?

I am a mac user (former PC back in the nineties) and wont be switching anytime soon. But let's not throw stones when we live in glasshouses.

So what this looks like to me is that Microsoft took OS X's Dashboard, skinned it with Metro, and moved it to be front and center in the OS's UI.

It definitely looks striking, but seeing as how I wound up not actually using Dashboard -- ever, really -- I'm skeptical about how this will succeed in practice, i.e. in Getting Things Done On A Computer. What is the flow for doing something like working on a Word document, reading/replying to an email, and then switching back to Word?

Insofar as desktops/laptops are concerned, this doesn't appear to help with that flow, and actually appears to interfere with it. That's the point that Gruber is making, I believe.

I think Gruber is wrong to believe that Microsoft truly means to continue their long-suffering approach of putting legacy Windows on touch devices.

The whole time Microsoft was developing WP7, they were touting CE 6.5. A bolt-on veneer for a failed approach. Clearly, Microsoft didn't believe a word of the nonsense they were spouting about 6.5. That's just how they are. They talk up the old platform until the day they kill it.

And I think Windows-on-ARM is the giveaway. If Microsoft believed legacy apps were still so important, why would they have so alienated Intel to create a flavor of Windows that will never run those legacy apps? [1]

The iPad's noted deficiency in any attempt to truly replace a PC is the lack of a 'docked' mode. that is: some way to drop it into a keyboard/mouse/display dock to get some desktop-type-work done. The existing keyboard dock just underscores how poorly it handles these things at present. [2]

And now Microsoft is pruning and optimizing Windows for ARM. The apps will all have to be rewritten [3]. But clearly they're thinking about touch and keyboard/mouse. This sounds like an obvious lead-in to encouraging people to write those Windows 8 ARM apps with a native touch interface as well as a 'docked' kb/m interface.

And if they pull that off -- an all-metro Windows 8 touch default and plenty of designed-for-touch apps, but the capability to dock and go kb/m on desktop work -- they'll be on solid footing to fight for their business customers.

And, honestly, if Microsoft could get out of its own way and streamline their media offerings, they could turn 8 into a really great device for consumers too.

[1] The nascent arm-in-the-datacenter market is somewhat plausible, but I don't buy it as a lone justification to so thoroughly piss of Intel. It's not nearly as important as trying to protect the relevance of user-facing Windows in a post-PC era.

[2] Try navigating around an app or the OS with the keyboard. Oh wait, you can't. How many writers don't switch apps constantly during their process to check references/email/etc? And isn't that who the keyboard was for?

[3] CLR apps that run on Windows 8 ARM are going to be about as popular as pixel-doubled iPhone apps on the iPad.

They've shown a couple minutes of software for a product that is atleast a year away. This article is completely pointless and is sensational to attract traffic of fanboys.

Kudos to Microsoft for doing more than trying to create their own copy of iOS. Microsoft's biggest strength is the Windows ecosystem, and if they are able to leverage it in a userfriendly touch-based environment, tablets based on Windows 8 should be a big win for them.

We should be applauding Microsoft for going their own way. With all due respect to Gruber, we already have iOS, WebOS and Android, why do we need yet another implementation of the same stripped-down OS idea?

This is what Microsoft has always done, and afair it's the only company to ever have really succeeded at it: make a piece of software accessible and understandable for novices, yet powerful enough for power users. Office has this. Windows has always had this.

If any company can actually make something that works great on very different devices, it's Microsoft.

I think having dual modes makes a lot of sense. Being able to dock your tablet and then have a keyboard/mouse with full Windows is a superior experience to docking your tablet and still have a touch device. The iPad docking experience is not very good, compared to a computer.

Look MA!.. I dont need to sync my devices.

This is what Win 8 hopes to offer. Its a bold , risky & tough task , but if it does work WIN 8 will blow every other tablet out of the water ( I am saying this while being an Droid Army member :-) ).

> (no explicit saving, no file system, ready to quit at a moment’s notice, no processing in the background, etc.)

These don't seem like necessary tradeoffs for a tablet in the long-term, as processing power increases.

> The ability to run Mac OS X apps on the iPad, with full access to the file system, peripherals, etc., would make the iPad worse, not better.

For iPad users, yes, but not for Windows users.

While it's what I'd expect Gruber to say, it's not realistic to say that nobody else would have made a touchscreen OS for phones and tablets by now if Apple had not.

With Windows 8's Metro interface being a shell on top of the old Windows 7 shell, I can imagine pretty well how HP's Web OS running on Windows is going to work.

Daring Fireball - what a shock.

'If not for the existence and success of iOS, Nokia wouldn’t be in trouble..' If not for Nokia, iOS would never existed, touch screen phones would not have been invented.

If not for the competitiveness and success of Windows, Apple wouldn't have had to redesign itself. And now Windows is redesigning itself to compete. Apple didn't invent this stuff, they re-adapted existing technologies into a pioneering product. And now other companies are doing the same.

Gruber's points do not impact as much with such a thick layer of bias.

My burning question is: will Microsoft finally tighten up their licensing to stop OEMs loading up Windows PCs with crapware?

Oh please.

Gruber fundamentally doesn't want to remember Jobs saying that iPhone runs "real OSX": http://www.tuaw.com/2007/06/04/steve-jobs-iphone-runs-real-o...

He of course suffers from a very severe case of Cupertino Syndrome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome