Ghosts of Microsoft Past
With Windows 8, Microsoft is running headfirst into a product launch disaster.
In the tech world, there has been a lot of positive advanced press about the previews of Windows 8. Yet most of these fail to acknowledge a fundamental Achilles’ heel in Microsoft’s core strategy for its future flag ship product. And Microsoft’s failure to fully acknowledge this problem threatens to undo everything that is good about its new OS.
Windows 8 is being touted as a fundamental shift in user interface versus other editions of Windows, and it’s Metro UI borrows heavily from Window Phone 7, which itself is partly inspired by (or is at least a reaction to) Apple’s iOS, the OS that powers iPads and iPhones. MS has touted tablets running Windows years before the iPad came on the scene, but as most people who have used these devices know, the experience has been sluggish and entirely non-intuitive. Not a chance that these devices could have ever pulled off the kind of mass consumer adoption that has happened with the iPad.
Enter Windows 8: with its sleek, light-weight, and touch-friendly Metro UI, MS has a chance to redeem itself. At last, a version of windows that will run equally well on both the desktop and on tablets. The early press has been incredibly positive, with tech journalists / bloggers gushing about how MS has finally made the sort of fundamental shift in thinking required to level the playing field with Apple. These tech writers point out that the UI has the right stuff to compete with the iPad in terms of user experience. They then point out the killer feature that gives MS the edge over other platforms (Android, Blackberry) when it comes to competing with and potentially unseating the incumbent Apple: legacy Windows app support. Why would you buy an iPad – the thinking goes – when you can have an iPad-like device that you can also run your traditional desktop apps on? Just plug-in a keyboard and you no longer need 2 devices (an iPad and a laptop or PC) – finally the best of both worlds in one sleek device.
But it doesn’t stop there: Windows 8 is the first version of Windows to support the same ARM CPU / processor architecture that is used in low powered devices such as virtually all smartphones (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc), the iPad, and all Android tablets. Further, all evidence suggests that the new Windows 8 UI runs very well on this hardware, providing a beautiful user experience and fantastic performance while offering the same small form-factor and long battery life that consumers have come to expect from modern tablets. Microsoft looks to have a real winner on its hands!
But there is one problem and tech journalist have either failed to understand this or failed to understand the ramifications: you can’t run legacy Windows apps on ARM based processors. So the only Windows 8 tablet hardware platform that can compete with the iPad in terms of size, battery life, and performance, won’t run legacy Windows apps. That means that these devices won’t run any of the latest Windows 7 apps you have on your PC, or any of the 10+ year old Windows 9x or Windows NT based apps either. None of it. Nada.
‘But’ – say the more tech-knowledgeable Windows fans – ‘x86 based tablets running Windows 8 will be able to run legacy apps’. Yes they will….and there is NO IMPROVEMENT in Windows 8 for running these apps on x86 tablets versus running them on tablets with Windows 7. In other words: any tablet running Windows 8 AND supporting legacy apps will have the same compromise between performance and battery life / size that all current Windows 7 tablets have. They won’t be iPad killers.
And most Windows users won’t want to run the Metro-UI on their desktops or laptops, despite Microsoft’s decision to make it the default user experience for Windows 8. It’s too touch-oriented and takes more clicks to get things done compared to the current desktop paradigm when using keyboard and mouse. Metro shines on tablets….but can only really compete hardware-wise with the iPad when it ditches legacy apps. But at that point, why would anybody buy a Windows 8 tablet with relatively no apps versus an iPad?
I’m a Windows user and I’m looking forward to trying out Windows 8….but I see a major public-relations disaster in the making. Already amongst the more tech-literate readers of the aforementioned tech blogs and websites, reader response suggests that most people have failed to understand that this OS limitation even exists. And this is because most of the fawning journalists – distracted by Microsoft’s pre-product launch theatre – are themselves failing to understand and point out the ‘Windows 8 on tablets’ reality.
To sum it up: Windows 8 can only compete against iPad hardware when it can’t run Windows apps, at which point its only real advantage is lost.
