Windows 8 is Microsoft’s bet on the future

At their devel­op­ers’ con­fer­ence, Microsoft unveiled Win­dows 8 and Metro, a new inter­face for the oper­at­ing sys­tem mark­ing the 3rd major change in the way win­dows has run over its his­tory. The changes pre­sented will prob­a­bly be as sig­nif­i­cant as the move from Win­dows 3.1 to Win­dows 95.

Desk­top and the Web as one

Much has been writ­ten already about how Microsoft is try­ing to be all things to all peo­ple by offer­ing a sin­gle oper­at­ing sys­tem for both tablets and com­put­ers. The com­pany announced an oper­at­ing sys­tem that mar­ries a lot of the tablet expe­ri­ence as pre­sented by the likes of the suc­cess­ful iPad, and the many other con­tenders for the crown cur­rently on the mar­ket, with what has more tra­di­tion­ally been known as a win­dows PC.

Along the way, Microsoft has intro­duced Metro, a new way to inter­act with Win­dows that brings much of the tile-based expe­ri­ence they first unveiled with their Win­dows Phone 7 oper­at­ing sys­tem. Like them or not, tiles are Microsoft’s attempt at get­ting a spot at the mobile table and they are now tak­ing this mode of inter­ac­tion from the phone to tablets and PCs. The Metro UI is prob­a­bly the sin­gle largest change in the way Win­dows has looked since Microsoft unveiled Win­dows 1995, an oper­at­ing sys­tem that was a sig­nif­i­cant user-interface depar­ture from its predecessor.

Lost in the com­men­tary has been the fact that tiles are pro­gram­ma­ble using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, three core tech­nolo­gies used by mil­lions of devel­op­ers around the world. With this, Microsoft is basi­cally say­ing that the lan­guages that power most of the user inter­faces for the web should be the lan­guages that power most of the user inter­faces for Win­dows. This is both a rad­i­cal depar­ture from main­stream think­ing (although Palm tried to go down that route with WebOS) and a return to the source for Microsoft.

Look­ing back, look­ing forward

In 1997, I had the priv­i­lege of being among the peo­ple selected as launch part­ners for Inter­net Explorer 4. As such, I was able to see the prod­uct evolve from idea to release, see­ing along the way many false starts and ideas that did not make it into the prod­uct. One of the most intrigu­ing idea at the time was that of replac­ing the UI shell with a web browser one, essen­tially allow­ing for HTML  wid­gets to run directly on a user’s desktop.

I was smit­ten by the fea­ture and heart­bro­ken when I learned that it would not ship for rea­son that went beyond the tech­ni­cal. Around the same time, Microsoft was in a major war with Netscape and rumors of an anti-trust law­suit being launched against the com­pany were swirling. At hand was the idea that Microsoft’s abil­ity to tie the web expe­ri­ence to its near-monopoly on oper­at­ing sys­tems gave it an unfair advan­tage in the marketplace.

While it is true that Microsoft had the lead­ing posi­tion in the oper­at­ing sys­tem, there was lit­tle evi­dence of the suc­cess that resulted from it tying other com­po­nents to it: its web browser offer­ing were poor and had made lit­tle head­way in the mar­ket­place, where the Netscape browser held a sig­nif­i­cant lead. So there was lit­tle evi­dence that just tying two prod­ucts would help lift both. It wasn’t until Microsoft started match­ing fea­tures with other suc­cess­ful browser that their offer­ing started gain­ing traction.

But none of this mat­tered in the fall of 1997 and the idea of inte­grat­ing a user’s desk­top with the web was either too ahead of its time or seen as too risky by the legal depart­ments at Microsoft. The net result was that when Inter­net Explorer 4.0 came out, the fea­ture to con­nect web and desk­top had been reduced to a way to push con­tent to the browser and poten­tially use it on screen­saver, an offer­ing that fell far short of the promise.

Mov­ing for­ward almost 15 years, Microsoft is no longer seen as a threat on the tech­nol­ogy mar­ket. The antitrust law­suit has made the com­pany ten­ta­tive in its offer­ing, often stay­ing as far away from con­tro­versy as it can. The new dar­lings of the tech­nol­ogy world have taken over most of the mind­share that was held by the Red­mond giant and only a few faith­ful fol­low what the com­pany is about. It is not a sig­nif­i­cant player in the mobile phone mar­ket at this time (this title is split between Apple, with its iPhone line, and Google, with its Android ecosys­tem) and many see the tablet mar­ket as one that is mak­ing the per­sonal com­puter, the very arena where Microsoft is king, irrelevant.

So the house that Bill built had to do some­thing dra­matic to regain atten­tion. It had to offer an oper­at­ing sys­tem that would meet today’s users’ needs, an oper­at­ing sys­tem that could com­pete, in terms of set­ting the agenda, with the much smaller iOS and OSX pro­duced by Apple.

Along the way, I sus­pect that some­where in Red­mond, some of the peo­ple who had tied the web and the desk­top in 1997 started talk­ing about how this could be their time…

… and the result is the Metro UI:

OSX Xerox­ing or not?

Many of the Apple zealots have pointed to the Metro UI and the fact that Microsoft can still run a more tra­di­tional Win­dows look in par­al­lel as a show­case of why the com­pany will “fail” in the mar­ket. They present this as a exam­ple of Microsoft being unable to make the tough deci­sion of sep­a­rate offer­ings for sep­a­rate com­put­ing devices. They high­light that Apple is much smarter in its approach because it has decided to cre­ate two oper­at­ing sys­tems: OSX for tra­di­tional com­put­ers, iOS for every­thing else.

So I think it’s fair to assume that no one can say that Microsoft is look­ing to copy Apple here. I think it’s OK to point out that Apple fans have basi­cally said that the idea of mar­ry­ing a mobile expe­ri­ence with a PC expe­ri­ence is not ter­ri­bly smart.

That being said, it’s also inter­est­ing that Microsoft and Apple seem to be shar­ing a view of the future. And that view seems to say that smaller, sin­gle pur­pose appli­ca­tions bought from an online store will take over your whole screen, scrap­ing away any piece of the vis­i­ble inter­face. For Apple, this is best man­i­fested with the ver­sion of OSX they most recently released (Lion) which offers the expe­ri­ence I described above and tries to marry some of what the com­pany has learned from iOS with what has tra­di­tion­ally been seen as their com­puter oper­at­ing system.

So the idea of an App store is def­i­nitely some­thing where Microsoft is fol­low­ing Apple; the idea of run­ning apps in full screen with no ven­dor inter­face is also some­thing where Apple had the lead; the idea of bring­ing tablet and phone-like behav­ior to an oper­at­ing sys­tem is some­thing Apple has claimed as its own.

So the only ques­tion remain­ing is really: should we have sep­a­rate oper­at­ing sys­tems for sep­a­rate devices or should we have a sin­gle oper­at­ing sys­tem that can be used for mul­ti­ple devices. For Microsoft, the answer is now the lat­ter; for Apple, the answer to date has been that OSX is for com­put­ers and iOS is for every­thing else. My ques­tion to Cuper­tino might be about how long it will be before they decide that one OS is suf­fi­cient for both com­put­ers and all other devices.