Now ever since i first saw screenshots of Microsofts next iteration of its flagship OS i have been cringing. The big flaw is also its biggest selling point, Microsoft has essentially decided to turn your desktop PC or Laptop into a giant Tablet PC. I just dont understand why this would be appealing to a PC user.
Tablet PC's have in recent time become an even bigger source of consumer spending and it is well know that they have begun to eat into the mainstream PC market. What therefore Microsoft were thinking by making their next OS exactly the same experience as it is on a tablet PC and thus essentially nullifying any real reason to buy a PC over a laptop. Tablet OS's have always been different to that of the traditional "Desktop" arrangement and this is due to several factors the largest of which is the lack of space on a tablet screen to accomodate a desktop. This is the reason that you dont boot up Leopard (or whatever the latest Apple OS is called) on your iPhone or iPad. Therefore having a seperate OS and "OS experience" on a tablet or smartphone makes sense and does in fact utilise the hardware to its best and most convienient. But why mess with a tried and tested OS experience as that of the PC OS? This is the question which i have been asking myself for many months and which i am entirely unhappy with the answers given by Microsoft.
The big answer they have been giving
is that of "a shared experience which flows accross multiple platforms allowing you to move seamlessly from phone to tablet to laptop or PC". On the face of it that sounds rather nice, having all of my devices interconnected sounds great, but i still cant get my head around why anyone would want a tablet/smartphone experience on your home computer. I buy a laptop or a PC because it gives me many times more freedom over that of my iphone. This they say could be sorted by switching to a more "traditional" display in the OS settings but this just begs more questions as to why the Tablet display is not more of a side-note or accesory than seemingly the intended view. I just hope that seemingly with 2 different OS's windows 8 could become as power hungry as Vista was. And we all know how that went.
The thing that boggles my mind most in all of this is that i cant understand why at a time when many are hailing the end of the desktop PC Microsoft would want to add another nail to its coffin by building its next PC OS around the idea of a Tablet OS. Why would they make such a radical change when what is needed is a light touch to guide the company through what will undoubtedly be a difficult period in the companies history. For the first time a real
competitor to the PC has come around and if Microsoft arent careful it could soon become the minority in the PC world. This is a time when PC companies need to find a selling point away from ties to tablets, something which sets them apart from its tablet competition in order to keep customers coming back to them instead of heading down the more portable route
My wish if for Microsoft to keep this idea fixed to its portable devices or at least have it as an extra which can be added to the base experience. Maybe even having a range of touchscreen PC's based on that tablet interface would be fine but drastically changing the way the windows experience works will be a sharp shock to the vast majority of Windows users and could spell a serious outflow of business and investment from the company.
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