Guest blogger Zuhair of MrTechz writes:
It is a well-known fact that Microsoft has struggled to make a mark in the tablet market. Unfortunately for Microsoft, consumer interest in Windows-based tablets has gradually declined as a result of a string of failed attempts by Microsoft to enter this market. This may all be about to change though; initial impressions of the upcoming Windows 8 operating system on tablets in action are quite positive.
Windows 8 is being developed to run on both x86 and ARM devices so that users get a consistent computing experience across a wide range of devices. The simple, yet effective interface provides a user-friendly experience that is replicated on both touch mobile devices and traditional desktop computers. The consumer edition of Windows 8 indicates that Microsoft has spent a great deal of time optimizing the operating system for mobile devices while also ensuring that the interface is compatible for desktop computing. There are a few reasons why I think that Windows 8 tablets will succeed. Here are a few.
Windows 8 will provide a consistent experience among devices.
Microsoft has a clear advantage when it comes to providing a unified computing experience across devices. Windows 8 will be powered by Windows Live SkyDrive, which enables all data and settings to be synchronized on all Windows 8 devices connected to a particular Microsoft account. Google fails to compete in this regard as it does not extend into a desktop environment and Apple’s iOS and OS X provide anything but a unified experience at this stage. Although iCloud is attempting to provide a consistent experience among iOS devices, what sets Microsoft above the competition is that Windows 8 can provide a consistent computing experience between laptops, desktop computers, and tablets.
The introduction of an operating system that can unify the computing experience between mobile and desktop computing will certainly be appreciated by consumers as this is something that Apple and Android have not been able to provide. All Windows 8 tablet apps will be HTML 5 based; this enables Metro apps to work on both x86 and ARM devices, thus providing a unique and consistent Windows environment on all Microsoft-powered devices. Mobile computing has grown in importance as it has become more advanced and the need for an operating system that is consistent across various devices has been growing. If Microsoft is successful in implementing a unified experience among all Windows 8 devices, then it will be well ahead of its competition.
Windows 8 has a simple and elegant tablet-optimized interface.
Windows 8 introduces a tablet-optimized interface that is refreshing and uncluttered. In contrast to iOS and Android devices, Microsoft has eliminated menu bars, task bars, or really anything that is locked onto the display. Access to settings and connectivity buttons is a simple swipe away; this is known as the Charms menu. The Charms menu isn’t revolutionary, but it does provide a more user-friendly experience and enables users to enjoy a less cluttered interface without being distracted by unnecessary buttons locked onto the display.
Windows 8 app icons are consistently shaped and positioned, providing a well-organized experience to the user. The app icons in Windows 8 are live tiles that provide real-time updates; users can arrange the tiles in any order they please, thus giving users firm control over how they want to personalize their devices. Windows 8 provides the perfect balance between the personalization capabilities of iOS and Android devices; Microsoft has extracted the tidiness aspect of iOS and the freedom that the Android home screen provides to produce a well-balanced user interface in Windows 8.
Microsoft has learned from mistakes made by Apple and Google.
Microsoft has been trying to break into the tablet market for nearly a decade now and it is fair to say that it has been largely unsuccessful. This can all change as Microsoft is better prepared this time around and has seen how Apple and Google have gone about producing successful tablet devices. Microsoft has an advantage in that it has seen the mistakes made by Apple and Google; while this places expectations on Microsoft to produce a flawless tablet computing experience, it also gives Microsoft an edge over its competitors.
We can already see that Microsoft has learned from Google’s mistake in trying to kill off the iPad; it has developed a tablet that is similarly specced but will likely draw more attention as it takes advantage of the large Windows user base. Further, by providing a single Metro user interface that is consistent across multiple devices, Microsoft may have just set up its own success in the tablet market as this is something that even Apple has not been able to fully accomplish.
Windows 8 tablets are specced to compete.
When Intel recently revealed the specifications for Windows 8 tablets, it was instantly clear that Microsoft wants to match, if not exceed, the specifications of the iPad. Intel has suggested two designs for its Windows tablet: a standard 10-inch one and an 11-inch model that comes with a physical, slide-out keyboard. The tablet will be powered by an Atom Z2760 Clover Trail chip, which is a dual core CPU that features hyper-threading technology. Other features include a nine-hour battery life and 3G/4G connectivity.
Some may argue that Microsoft is envisioning an iPad that runs on Windows with its Windows 8 tablets, however, this is not the case. While Microsoft would be aware of the fact that competitors who have produced iPad replicas have not been successful, it also realizes that the only to make an impact is to competitively spec the Windows 8 tablets. The important thing now for Microsoft is to provide a unique tablet computing experience that consumers have not already seen in current tablet devices. From what we have seen so far from Windows 8, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Windows 8 tablets succeed in the market.
CC licensed Flickr photo shared by Filip Skakun
I think their best shot is the healthcare industry. Tech in front of the patient is about to EXPLODE and most hospitals if not all are windows based already. Think they will stay asleep or jump on it? I vote… sleep.
I’m not an IT guy, so I’ll leave discussion about “kernals” and such to those who are. What I am is a corporate trainer who travels with an extensive compilation of Word docs, Power Point presentations, and video files that I use extensively.
My employer provides a nice laptop, but if I can get acceptable performance out of a tablet, count me in. I’ve tried the iPad and found it sorely lacking for my needs. It is a great toy and fun to play with, but falls short in the world of business.
I won’t lie – I really hope to be a complete Win 8 tablet fanboy, once it proves itself. If Microsoft can make Win 8 on a tablet as fun and accessible as iOS on the iPad, AND as practical at work as my laptop, they’ll have found a market worth having.
Android eAtz Windows for Breakfast!!!!!! NUM NUM NUM
haha. It really doesn’t
It doesn’t dude. I’m an on the road business executive, and Windows, sometimes Linux, is best. Apple is for at home computers, sitting in your living room. Personally, I wouldn’t even recommend that.
I haven’t used Windows 8 yet, I’ve been too busy mucking about in lion to boot my Windows/Linux machine, but I think it’s ridiculous to expect a full fledged windows operating system to succeed on a tablet for the simple reason that when you do that you start to compete with yourself with much better spec’ed laptops, and it’s fair to say that market has done quite well for itself. Once you add the slide out physical keyboard what you really have is a laptop with a broken hinge. Apple has been very smart about enforcing a different computing experience in iOS and is able to control that with it’s app approval process and Human Interface Guidelines.
“app approval process and Human Interface Guidelines.”
Windows 8 has both of these. I don’t see how you think having a fully fledged OS on a tablet is a bad thing? Really. think about what you are saying. Why would I want a tablet that isn’t completely cross compatible with my desktop? I want things i do on my laptop, to transfer to my Desktop when I’m at home, i expect the same from my tablets. Typed a document up on my tablet? copy and paste to desktop (without a stupid 3rd party app/converter). Making some beats on the go on my tablet? want to transfer the session files STRAIGHT to my desktop (without having to convert to midi and import to a different DAW). I’m sorry, but your claim that cross-compatibility and east of use is “ridiculous” makes no sense to me.
I’d have to agree. I think windows 8 has the potential to be successful on tablets simply because a unified computing experience is something the average consumer would love to have. Although, like Chris mentioned in the video the tablets would have to be competitively priced to offer any competition to the likes of the iPad and Android tablets.
In saying that, though, there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with the different computing experience iOS provides – it’s really just a matter of opinion and what your needs are.
I never mentioned anything about a lack of cross compatibility being a good thing, or a relevant thing considering iOS has file support for apps without any need for third party software. There are also many alternatives in iOS including sound cloud, drop box, FTP, SSH, VNC, RDC, Ubuntu One Files, iCloud, Google Cloud, Amazon Cloud, SkyDrive (not that anyone uses it.), photo bucket, bluetooth file transfer, and pretty much whatever app developers see fit to include, including what ever file formats they choose to support.
I tend to agree. I run my own stuff exclusively on win8 and it is a joy, the best OS since Windows 3.11.
I’m a bit of a fan of Windows 8 as well. Still working on Windows 7 though but I do have a Windows 8 VM which I have explored well. I just love that MS is trying something different! The desktop UI is going through many changes and with things like GNOME 3 out there MS would risk being left behind if they don’t innovate as well. Kudos to them!
Since you use Windows 8 exclusively, how do you find support for multiple monitors? It isn’t something I have explored at all.
Interesting that you think that 3.11 was that great. I knew it very very well at one point, having worked in setting it up at University labs for hundreds and hundreds of users. I loved its simplicity! I cannot pretend to remember how it all worked, but I did script something that allowed users to download their settings over the network no matter where they logged in, including the right drivers for the right machine. Sadly the rather strict sys admin at University didn’t appreciate this as he reckoned it created a little too much network traffic
For my stuff, win8. Have partitions and machines in many flavors to match what I deal with out there. Only one flat screen these days, perhaps when my ship comes in (I fear a typhoon got it!), I will have multi screens again…
There’s also the category of people that want a stylus. The popularity of tools like OneNote and Evernote are undeniable and even running on Windows 7 have carved out a strong niche market Windows 7′s shortcomings as a touch UI. Windows 8 may also help push this category beyond niche status. I read an article somewhere that said something like “a dual function OS (touch and desktop) on dual function device (ie: like the LEnovo Yoga). And I was like wait a minute – it should be a triple function OS and device. I use a Fujitsu T901 and with Windows 8 I feel like I have 3 devices in one – a full fledged laptop, a touch tablet and a stylus pad. No doubt I paid top dollar but I have a very robust machine and I’m probably within only a few hundred dollars of a friend of mine who bought ipad 1, 2 and 3!!!
The Windows 8 experience may be consistent across different devices, but that doesn’t make it good. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who remembers Joe Pirillo’s first go at Windows 8 on a desktop computer.
Unless Microsoft comes up with something very different by the time I need a new computer, I am strongly considering going with OS X, or a Linux distribution; most likely Ubuntu.
Ubuntu, to date, is the most optimized, most user friendly OS, I’ve ever used. They have, an attractive UI, and the most important part, an operating system, optimized for performance. Windows has been made, apparently, for little kids, that want the shiny UI,
ROTFLMFAO!!!! Yeah right. Tell me another one.
Who gives a shit what Pirillo has to say? The guy is a schizophrenic, ADHD tool. He also happens to be a blind Apple fanboy. He’s a nobody. Nobody gives a shit about his opinion.
If you mean to say that nobody sees value in what Chris provides…the number of people who follow him on social media appears to indicate otherwise. Yes, he gets quite intense every now and again, but apart from that…
You posted your comment as a reply to mine, but I don’t see why. The reason being that I don’t see any agreement or disagreement with my comment.
Personally I’m looking to replace my macbook with a W8 tablet, but I’m very disappointed by the hardware. I want to replace a laptop with a tablet, not a movie watcher or an iPad. IMHO I’m not interested until quad core i7 2.4Ghz are out, I want to play my Crysis 2 and Skyrim like other gaming laptops.
I don’t think we are quite at the stage of being able to replace Laptops with Tablets IMO. As for gaming on tablets I think that is even further away… by gaming I don’t mean casual games, I’m referring to games like Crysis and Skyrim like you said.
ideapad yoga for you !!!!
which windows 8 tablets?? x86 or windows 8 RT??
problem with windows 8 x86 tabets is that they are gonna cost atleast
$1000 (check out the prices of windows 7 tabs) and you can get a higher specced laptop for less than
that..windows 8 Rt on the other hand will sure cost as much as the iPad
or android tabs but they are not the same as x86 tablets..windows RT is
just another version of android OS with a different UI and a smaller
app library..
Thoughtful review, although I can’t entirely agree with the conclusions.
I s’pose Win8 is OK… Not the disaster it could have been. (eg Vista).
But I’m about as excited about it as, say, our vintage copy of XP Tablet Edition that still gets occasional use at home. It’s on an ancient P3 tablet by Research Machines. XP tablet was pretty darn similar to the XP desktop and worked/works just fine for us. Can you see where I’m going with this? A ‘consistent experience’ 10 years ago was not a roaring success.
Don’t tell me Win8 will run well on a P3 – it won’t. That makes it fatter & slower than XP.
But it has a workable interface, sorta. I don’t like it, but then I might get used to it eventually – would get used to anything if I had to at work, but I’m retired now.
I’ll probably stick to Linux with one of the many desktops on offer that can be easily tailored to suit my needs and those of friends and family. We’ve a fair-sized posse now.
Because with all this concentration on the glossy face of Windows I’m pretty certain they can’t have fixed all the dumb stuff underneath.
It’s MS WIndows, so it’ll still be a honeypot for malware of all sorts, and will require slug-like aftermarket protection if you want to connect to the internet. Even without anti-malware it’s still a bloated monster in our terms – but if your PC can live happily with Vista, Win7 or even XP you might not see that. Good luck.
Our mostly ancient/cheap/low spec/ARM hardware does notice it, so we’re running Bodhi Linux. The ‘Enlightenment’ desktop is highly configurable as well as fast on our old/cheap hardware, which mostly won’t lift Win7/8 effectively.
Bloat and Malware vulnerability are still Windows worst enemies.
Think I’m going to pass on this one.
You raise some valid points. Even though XP may have provided a relatively consistent experience among devices the XP tablets were plagued with problems which really hindered the progress of XP on tablets. I do believe that Windows 8 (or RT as they are now calling it) has the potential to provide a truly consistent experience to its users.
You raise some valid points. Even though XP may have provided a relatively consistent experience among devices the XP tablets were plagued with problems which really hindered the progress of XP on tablets. I do believe that Windows 8 (or RT as they are now calling it) has the potential to provide a truly consistent experience to its users.
I’m setting up one of my laptops to run Windows 8 exclusively. I’ll post a formal review of it soon. From everything I’ve seen, what I’ve read and tinkered with slightly on a virtual machine it shows progress, but Microsoft needs to allow a full-on ‘classic’ mode. If you can agree not everyone is a fan of tiles, and I am not quite sure whats wrong with the desktop. Being a minimalist myself I tend to use the search menu or pin what I need the most to the taskbar or dock.
Vista Y U NO WORK?
Seriously though lets hope Windows 8 does not end up becoming the next Vista. Good ideas are great but this is a 360 into a new direction.
Couldn’t disagree more.
“Windows 8 will provide a consistent experience among devices.”
If people were looking for this, we would already see it in the Mac world. This is a guess. A bet that people even want it. My bet is that they don’t. A tablet is a tablet. A phone is a phone. A desktop is a desktop. Until there is a cross-platform application base, there is no need for a cross-platform experience. Chicken and egg, perhaps, but still.
“Windows 8 has a simple and elegant tablet-optimized interface.”
Subjective. I personally dislike Metro. Again, a big bet that this radical departure will be intuitive to new users while at the same time not pissing off existing ones. There is a lot of evidence already that this bet is already bad.
“Microsoft has learned from mistakes made by Apple and Google.”
… but not mistakes made by itself, it seems. I would argue that they haven’t even learned from Google or Apple. A bloated, inefficient, “there will always be enough clock cycles and disk space” mindset might work when you want to sell gramma 8 cores to surf the web, but it won’t fly in phones and tablets where both clock cycles and disk space are at a premium.
“Windows 8 tablets are specced to compete.”
Compete with what? Ipad3? No way. Besides, the consumer is not ready for a >$1,000 tablet which is “specced to compete” anyway.
In short, they fail on lateness-to-game, they fail on “we’ve succeeded here in the past before”, they fail on “we decided try a radically different user experience that the consumer will probably like” they fail on “we’re willing to accept a loss right now so that we can compete on price” and they fail on “our kernel fits inside an 8GB disk partition.” They even fail on “our tablets will work with the IT products that we make.”
Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail.
Honestly, all these points are subjective. Plus if you have it against Microsoft then you’re going to see everything they do in a negative light.
For example, you see Microsoft’s late entrance into the tablet market as a ‘fail’. I would argue that since they are making a late entrance they have a chance to think differently and introduce a new product that may or may not be a success. Only time will tell.
Additionally, Microsoft hasn’t given much of an indication as to the pricing of their tablets. I highly doubt they will price them $1000 and above to be honest though as obviously they would be aware that no one would buy their tablets unless they competitively price them.
All I’m saying is that don’t be so close minded. Microsoft just might surprise you.
What’s subjective about at least two past failures in this market? What about a ~1.5% penetration of their best mobile product (WP7)? The pricing *will not* compete with IPad… too many fingers in the pie for that. Or, last but not least, the fact that Windows 8 will not work as needed in the IT department? No domain joins or micro-management… How about “our kernel is f**king massive”? none of these things are subjective.
Microsoft has brought desktop thinking to a mobile space. Stick into nuclear war. At last, we might very well see the morbidly obese die at the slurpee trough.
My bias… well, yes. That is subjective. MS has been taking a sh*t on my computer for decades. it will be nice to see them get their comeuppance.
I think you’re not looking at the big picture. Microsoft, has something, that no one else has. They control a majority of the operating systems market. When they make a change, ie Metro, the trends change. You may not agree, but I think, the Metro UI, is gonna be the new UI, to which all others will have to live up to. Don’t get me wrong, since XP, Microsoft has produced barely anything, of minuscule quality. I’m a technician, and I know, trust me. But, with Windows 8, they’re trying to change the game. Whether they will, or won’t succeed, is yet to be seen.
chriss…. i have dummy question but please answer correctly. windows 8 and rt are bigger than 7 (about ram and vga consuming), same, or smaller? thankyou.
GET A JOB AND MOVE OUT OF MOMMYS BASEMENT FTARD.
WINDOWS 8 IS THE OS VER. OF YOU STUPID,UGLY USELESS.
windows 8 is amazing, i’ve currently got it running on my desktop.
But i have met a few problems on my journey to satisfaction. UK cannot access the xbox companion
You have been taking a shit in this comments with your ignorant remarks. So do everyone a favor and shut the fuck up. Your numbers for Windows Phone are also wrong. You might want to do a bit of research you ignorant swine. I’m not going to do it for you.
As for pricing, you don’t have a damn clue. You truly are astonishingly stupid and ignorant, and your posts give me a damn headache.
“It is a well-known fact that Microsoft has struggled to make a mark in the tablet market.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, consumer interest in Windows-based tablets
has gradually declined as a result of a string of failed attempts by
Microsoft to enter this market.”
What attempts? Microsoft hasn’t even attempted to make a mark in the tablet world. No, slapping a desktop OS onto a tablet is not a meaningful attempt.
Ooh, we found him. Ever comment string has a lost 6 year old, not doing his homework.