Two different types of devices with two different input paradigms. Why merge them? Why not optimize them for each separate paradigm?
It is much better for everyone, and friendlier to the user, to give them the best, perfect, interface, for the device they are using. Even if that device is a desktop computer.
Look at the Surface Pro. One device, two different input paradigms depending on what you're trying to achieve. I can be sitting at work hacking C code in vim in the desktop paradigm, then switch to the tablet paradigm for watching a video or playing a game on the bus home. Personally I think it sounds great and I'm looking forward to replacing my Macbook Air and iPad with one device that can fill the role of both.
By standardising the interface, you standardise the environment and interactions for apps. Metro apps for a Win 8 phone will also run on Win 8 tablets and laptops.
I think its a pretty brave decision from Microsoft, and it may well pay off massively.
If you deliberately try to use the same interface across each of those interfaces, you're just going to get an unusable mess. It's amazing that some of the same people that understand the idea that "you need a responsive design for your website because no one wants to hunt for 32x32 pixel buttons on a phone" can completely miss that concept when it's applied to anything that doesn't have a touch screen.
Sharing technology and development tools between the platforms makes sense. Tying the tablet and phone experiences closely together makes sense. Adopting a similar visual style across the platforms makes sense. It's still a horrible idea to say "we'll just take our smart phone app, make all the touchable buttons clickable ones, and voila, we have a full-featured desktop app!"
Desktops are inherently oriented towards small items on high resolution displays. If you make menu items too large, both reduce the amount of stuff you can fit on the screen at once and increase the travel the user has to make to select them. More importantly, desktops are inherently oriented towards multitasking, and hiding the entire screen just to open a program is inherently hostile towards that.
I'm usually the last one to complement them, but I'm consistently dumbfounded that Apple seems to be the only of the major (or even minor, if you consider the various Unix DEs) players that understands that tablets are not desktops, even when they have a keyboard plugged into them. Tablets are all about single tasking, desktops are all about multitasking, and you should not attempt to get that peanut butter in that chocolate.
It's still a horrible idea to say "we'll just take our smart phone app, make all the touchable buttons clickable ones, and voila, we have a full-featured desktop app!"
Which is why they haven't just done that. They've put a lot of thought into it and come up with a system that scales through different interfaces.
Tablets are all about single tasking
Except for windows tablets, that encourage multi-tasking.
Meanwhile, it "sounds ridiculous" to me not because it's an untested concept, but because I think tablets are inherently different enough from desktops to justify keeping their interfaces distinctly separate. I don't think it's possible to fit more than one full touch app (or maybe a condensed version of a second one for a few simple use cases) comfortably on a 10" screen (to say nothing of a 7" one). I don't think giant buttons and pleasant whitespace are a good use of a desktop or laptop monitor.
>Which is why they haven't just done that. They've put a lot of thought into it and come up with a system that scales through different interfaces.
Except that they didn't, in the case of the Start Screen. Program and location menus, quick launch buttons, "pinned apps," and lightweight search bars ala Unity Search/Windows Vista and 7 start menu search/dmenu, all of which don't obscure the entire screen while I'm trying to do something, are just some of the desktop workflow-friendly solutions to the "how do I start doing something else" problem that come to mind. The Start Screen doesn't completely break Windows, but it's still a bad idea on the desktop, and at least one instance of Microsoft prioritizing their tablet interface over their desktop interface.
>Except for windows tablets, that encourage multi-tasking.
Being able to prop a condensed view of an app up against an even more condensed view of another app is a far cry from being able to switch between dozens of running programs with a few keypresses and/or a mouse click. I'm not saying that it's not a good option to have available, it's just not in any way comparable to the style of multitasking that desktop interfaces are designed around.
No you don't. And for user interfaces it's the same.
A desktop computer provides a lot more space than a mobile device, so just because mobile devices exist, is no reason to suddenly make a design meant for small screens on the big screen with comfortable input devices.
PC-users and Tablet-users and Phone-users are all huge, mainstream, overlapping markets. I can see there might be some trade offs and problems with unifying experience - which is why I said this is a brave move by Microsoft. But you're basically bringing up one of the trade offs (screen size) and using that to write off the whole initiative.
Incorporating touch into a desktop OS also forces the industry (PC manufacturers, software developers, etc.) to innovate and think outside the box. Perhaps in the future, we no longer position our monitors upright all the time.
Lastly, if you don't like touch-based interface, you don't have to use it.
Monitors not upright? I don't think so. Some things just exist as they are because, of all possibilities, they are the most convenient. You can put monitors on the floor, on the ceiling, horizontal in front of you, or vertical in front of you. The latter turned out to be the most convenient.
Now we have the technology to make small phones with displays and use them. That is very convenient. But will it make me work on that on a desk? No.
Some manufacturers are working on heading in this direction. Exhibit 1, the new Dell XPS One: http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-one-27-2710-aio-t/pd?&~ck=m...