Yesterday we had Steven Sinofsky demonstrating Windows 8 during the BUILD conference keynote. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch it here (beware, it’s a 2:20 hour video). It looks pretty much like the version shown a few months ago at D9 (which is cool), but with some added features (which is even cooler). I won’t repeat here all the comments from my previous Windows 8 post, so you can read them here before proceeding.
So, as I said before, convergence is important. But there’s a caveat: they are repeating the same mistake from 10 years ago on the tablet. I was expecting to see a special flavor of Windows for tablets. Instead, it seems Windows tablets will run the same Windows as we’ll run on desktops. This is the problem of Microsoft — they think that all devices should be general purpose, all-in-one devices. Apple already showed us (and Google and others followed) that we need focus in order to succeed on tablets, in both software and hardware capabilities, and also content. Using a full-blown version of Windows on a tablet will be “distracting”, plus it will require heavy, cumbersome tablets with (probably) a low battery life. So this part of their strategy is not looking brilliantly.
Microsoft has a business reason for this, obviously. It’s easier (and more convenient) to them to try to bring the mobile world into the Windows ecosystem (which is a very successful business) than trying to bring itself into the mobile world (where it isn’t going so well — for now). I’m a bit skeptical about this and I believe this won’t really work (at least not to the point of beating Apple in this market). I wonder if they’ll try to make Windows Phone 7 just Windows 8 in the future… To summarize, I believe in the desktop-mobile convergence, but it looks like that Microsoft hasn’t got the rules of this game yet.
The touchscreen UI paradigm adopted is also a bit ambiguous. It obviously is the way to go on tablets, but on desktop/laptop PCs, it will not work. It isn’t natural from a human-machine-interface standpoint for these form-factors, period. If they introduce something like the Apple multitouch trackpads, then will be onto something.
We also got a glimpse on how Windows 8 Server is going to look like. And it’s clearly aimed to private clouds and massive virtualization (it will include Hyper-V R3). The system management UI is also Metro-based.
Hyper-V R3 is the most important part here. It greatly increases capabilities from Hyper-V R2. Host machines can have up to 160 (logical) processors and 2TB of RAM. VMs are upgraded to up to 32 cores, 512GB of RAM and 16TB disks each, and are NUMA-aware. There are also enhanced fault-tolerance features and memory/storage deduplication. It looks like a good competitor against VMWare.
For now, that’s it on Windows 8. Let’s see if anything interesting comes up throughout the conference. Oh, and Visual Studio looks great, btw.