Microsoft demonstrates Windows 8 with HTML5 apps - Page 2

Why is it good for MS to have shown this so soon? This is just another MS concept video tossed out before another real Apple product. Remember the Courier? Everyone always trots out a bunch of half-baked crap before a big Apple announcement. That is part of the reason why this stuff pales in comparison to the Apple experience. Look at Amazon and Google. They both just announce music storage services. So desperate were they that they didn't even bother to secure proper licenses. They just vomited something up to get something out there before Apple announced their cloud service. Notice how Apple didn't announce anything before it was ready. This move by MS just shows how desperate and behind they are, and are about to be.

I have to agree, it does look good. But we are looking at a late 2012, 2013 release date for this and MS makes a habit of showing cool tech and never delivering. As they say, competition is good

1) Yes, this does look like MS trying to get a jump on Apple's WWDC demo of iOS 5.0 or iPad and Mac OS X Lion, but remember that YouTube video came out the same day as MS' presentation at D9.

2) No, the YouTube and D9 videos are not CGI concept videos.

Completely agree! I'm not saying the this is CGI, or that W8 will not come out in some form. But this is very early interface concepts stuff. They are nowhere near ready to be talking about what the actual shipping product will look like or how it will perform. The are not shipping betas to devs. There is no reason to even show this stuff except to try and stay relevant in the onslaught of what they know is about to happen at WWDC.

The only real difference between this and the Courier is that they actually intend to develop and ship this at some point.

Ok no saw this coming so soon, when Ballmar had particularly announced the new version at a conference. I think you have not been watching news lately. Also with Apple's announcements next week, you may see that Apple further ahead of windows then you think. Using word schooled is very strong, since this is video of initial product and have a while to wait for the finished item. Lets not get too excited and wait for it to be finished.

Everything since Microsoft still has to ship something. Then we just have to wait for some Apps...

Really! What did you see? An HTML5 demo, most likely a complete mockup. At this stage most demos are just that. All you saw most likely was IE9 in fullscreen mode running a mockup...

In the beginning of the video when the guys says that we're in their design room where they get inspired the camera didn't pan far enough to the left. When he pointed out what inspires them the camera just fell short of the design teams' iMac, iPhone, and iPad. Wow MS, doing an App Store too now? Hmm, wonder where they got that idea from?

Soon? like in a year or two? that's "soon"? or is it actually vaporware, hypeware, promiseware, or whatever you call something that doesn't really exist yet? along with all its non-existant apps. oh yeah, a demo.

bullsh*t might be more accurate.

and after Jobs mops the floor with MS next week, it will be patheticware.

Probably called a demo, an announcement, or maybe a paper launch (though that term is usually limited to the nVidia / ATi fan fights)

Vaporware refers to an announced product that never gets released, usually in hindsight. So that term wouldn't technically be correct in this usage. Ironically, it was Microsoft who first used this term.

Likes:

- "Thumbs" keyboard. I hope Apple does something like this for the iPad. Its unpleasant to use the existing soft keyboard on the iPad. I prefer the iPhone keyboard over the iPad due to the ergonomic issue.
- New touch oriented apps sound cool.
- Nice vivid demo

Unsure:
-. Live tiles seems useful. However, I'm concerned about battery life of having too much "live" updates. Is this really practical and a worthwhile battery life trade off?
- Is there a style guide for the new touch oriented app SDK? Or will it just be the wild wild west free for all?
- Multitasking. Not sure how average consumers will actually want more then one apps on the screen at the same time. I only really do this for cut-n-paste operations personally. As long as the task switching is efficient and cut and paste work well, I dot really need to have more then one app visible at the same time. Battery life concerns of turning multiple apps at the same time.

Dislike:
- I don't think running legacy Windows apps designed for use with a high resolution pointer such as a mouse via touch interface is appropriate. I guess this would be similar to having the desire to run my Mac OS X apps on my iPad via an agent like Ignition. I don't really have any desire as this would be exhausting, IMHO. The app has to be DESIGNED for touch from the very beginning.
As a result, would a buy a tablet form factor to run my legacy desktop apps? probably not. Same reason all Windows tablet have failed thus far.

Recommendation to MS. Stop trying to make Windows Legacy Apps run on Tablets. You are better off just extending Windows Phone 7 to the tablet with its own set of touch oriented apps.

Microsoft product users are a fairly uncritical lot when it comes to usability, so the poor, beaten down masses will glom onto this like a pitbull on peanut butter.

You've gotta be kidding. Apple can't make its products fast enough to meet demand, and you think Jobs cares about a MS product that doesn't even exist? Get real.

Look at the video starting at 38 seconds.
The far right of the screen has a bunch of blurred out stuff hanging on the wall.
Must be photos/notes of Apple products for them to copy.

When will Microsoft learn? Tiling wasn't popular with Windows 1.0 either.

I good quote about the way Apple innovates. "Good artists know how to copy, Great artists know what to steal".

I was good to see Microsoft finally thinking about "stealing concepts" from non-computer oriented domains, thinking about humanities and ergonomics. A step in the right direction IMHO,

However, to make this viable as a tablet platform, they have to give up this idea of running all of the legacy apps and supporting legacy design assumptions. File System Browsers and management, On screen multitasking, etc. Get over it guys... open your minds a bit more.

Windows 7 numbers *alone* are greater than iOS and Mac devices put together.

One question: Did Balmer post his resume yet?

http://www.dailytech.com/Influential...ticle21736.htm

@snova,

I like the thoroughness and balance of your posts. Welcome to the forum.

Looking good? Oookay - screenshots of win doze running on arm. It's a good first start, but looks a few years away from being a polished cohesive interface.

I think honeycomb is garbage, but it's much better than windows 8!

While looking at the current market share is definitely meaningful, looking at business trends and and momentum are even more so. Things can change quickly in this industry. Simply ask Apple, Nokia, and RIM.

You can be sure, Microsoft is taking the iPad threat very seriously.

I stopped watching that video as soon as I saw Excel running, like trying to cram a horse carriage into a Ferrari.

Surprisingly, TouchMS-DOS was not demonstrated.

It poses two immediate concerns. One, this means that a huge bunch of Windows OS junk is ported to ARM, and the tablet has to power the OS as well as a layer of "apps" on top. Two, this suggests that Windows on ARM will have to provide legacy support for x86 Windows apps... which people were saying Microsoft was never going to do.

The worst case scenario? Windows 8 on ARM has no legacy support for x86 Windows apps, is just a rubbish cobbled-together "Windows OS" running on ARM with another patchwork of "apps" running on top of it. In other words, failing like Microsoft has never failed before.

By Deus, how much lower can Microsoft and Ballmer sink? I suppose when you are falling down the abyss there's only one direction you can go.

I have some meds I take that I'd be happy to share with you.

The UI looks nice. Ever since I saw WP7, I have always felt that it is highly underrated. But what we've seen so far is a graphical overlay. Until Microsoft demonstrates Windows 8 on an actual piece of hardware in person, Windows 8 is nothing more than vaporware.

Frankly, I don't get why companies announce/preview a product when they have no intention of releasing it in the next couple of months or so. Actually, scratch that, I do understand why. Companies can use this preview/announcement as a way to discourage people from buying competitors' products. I know quite a few who have been holding out for a Windows tablet but they don't want to pay a premium for a Windows 7 tablet when they get a better experience with a Windows 7 laptop.

Steve should be calculating a counter-move. But getting "pissed," I don't think so. Not over vaporware.

I know there are some very smart engineers at Microsoft who feel frustrated with the lack of creative vision from management. Replacing Ballmer is on many people's wish lists. I think past Nokia management and Microsoft management have a lot in common. Patting themselves on their backs about how many units they sell and market share. Whats needed here are new engineering driven Microsoft projects that are revolutionary and innovate.. not products which evolve and are driven by risk management.

solipsism. thanks for the kind words. not sure how often I will check in. Just had an evening to kill some time tonight.

If you don't think it's an abstracted UI layer on top of Windows then you don't understand OS Design.

Wow, MS came up with the brilliant idea of making their Desktop OS and Mobile OS more similar.

They are so innovative.

I think you are right. Apple did Back to Mac. However, Microsoft seems to be attempt to do both a Back to Windows Desktop AND Back to Tablet (Desktop Apps to Tablet).

Back to Mac.. is this significant. I think it could be. The iOS ecosystem is very popular and has lots of nice apps. I love apps which access data in the Cloud and present it to me using a slick native UI vs using a general purpose Web browser and its Webkit widgets. It would be very cool if someday, I could run these iOS Apps on my Mac for free. Either via an ARM VM or native.

Back to Windows? is this significant. I think it could be as well. However, the Windows Phone ecosystem has a lot of ground to make up compared to iOS.

Back to Windows Tablet. Do we really want to do try this again. Why will this work this time compared to the last few tries? I for one have no interest in attempting to run Legacy Windows Apps using a touch screen interface. "Windows Air" laptop is a better route for MS, IMHO.

This is garbage. MS is flailing at this point. Feeble attempts at announcing something more than a year and a half away...the UI makes no damn sense. Its confusing, does not blend with the Windows 7 UI at all, and what's worse they are trying to convince people "apps" are just web sites. If you have to tell me "this blends well with Windows desktop" and show the ACTUAL Windows desktop ONCE in the whole damn demonstration; you're flatly lying to me and everyone else.

There's nothing of use in this whole damn OS beyond legacy software. If flipping through a bunch of idiotic tiles is useful then the "ribbon" fits in well w/ this blunder as class A 1 great crap.

Billions of dollars are being wasted on this company, and its angering me. The money could be used to do so much more like building a gold house for Ballmer, curing cancer, making a giant Master Chief statue made of silly putty. But no, alas, here we are watching some pasty bald dude from the last decade talk about a "collage" of ideas. Yeah, the talent has left the company like D.E.D. stated.

Fun idea: stop trying to mimic your enemies with crap ass catch up and half-assed touch UIs. Develop what you got and stop trying "unify" the damn planet. How about making your mobile platform stand up on its own two legs first before cramming it into "big boy shoes" like some bad parent?

Either way; no one will remember this garbage after next week.

In closing: too much crap.

+1

It does look nice and maybe informative to most but what use of it if it is going to be behind the running app all the time. Plus this is just on top of normal (read old, correction, ancient) windows. Can't see much use with mouse and keyboard but touch only which brings us to them following Apple in the first place (good in a way but they do it wrong!). From my standpoint ATM the way I use Windows PC, they are unnecessary. But I do like to be able to see system stats on my desktop much like built in widgets.

Nailed it! Ha ha ha,.. Apple got "schooled" by showing a Lion pre-view with the "Back to Mac" event and a year later Microsoft really schooled them so bad with a Windows 8 pre-view a month before Lion is released.. with a "year" of updates before an actual Windows 8 launch.. ha ha ha ha ha.

I'm going with Lion, iOS 5 & iCloud integration is going to be pretty big with the changes coming to iTunes. I think the current MobileMe sync services (contact, calendar, & email) will be free and all the new goodness with file storage / sync, iTunes iCloud licenses, etc will have a similar price tag as MobileMe was $99/year or $150/year for family (family price may be a little higher). Just the ability to re-download my iTunes music is something I've been waiting forever to see.. and the "Sync partial songs" system with iCloud will be awesome! I can sync my entire music library in a fraction of the space on my iPhone and seamlessly stream all of it with out buffering.

Microsoft needs to realize that along with UI changes there needs to be actual improvements to the underlying OS. Oh Snap.. I forgot about Snap.. Oh wait that was a Windows 7 feature that was still all UI.. and they made it less useful in Windows 8. Lol Bring a functional Auto-save, Versions, & auto-resume like Lion will and then you might have something.. A Lion Zune

A strategically timed shot over the bough maybe, but considering that new features in Lion having already demo'd (over a year ago?), the merging of iOS and Mac OS in Lion (and we're on the eve of it's release), and though it doesn't "look" like OS X, MS is clearly (again) taking its cue from Apple's iOS/Mac OS integration effort, I'd hardly call this "schooled".

Interesting idea, but I don't think it's original at this point, and if it takes them two years to deliver, we may be looking at 10.8 at that point.


This one is on the mark and always kills me. Every release of windows has had subtle, but confusing for the users, changes. No doubt this will come out in full bloom with W8. How many times has MS released some great next idea that as a result of its shallow thinking and poor delivery just...wasn't?

The coming years should be interesting

Oh... I agree with both predictions... I just don't think that W8 will be out any time soon... which will give plenty of time for Apple to show its direction in its own fashion.

M$ plays its cards in a totally different way from Apple. Microsoft wants everyone to know that they are actually moving forward and shows everyone what the future will bring. Apple tends most often to show the product when it's finished or close to being finished and quietly works on the next update.

If you can run desktop apps on a tablet, you're doing it wrong. It's like running iPhone apps on an iPad, theoretically possible, but it looks so atrocious that anyone with a sense of style would rather shoot themselves that do it.

Agreed, Apple has a significantly more clear path to potentially having a "universal" app that will scale from iPhone to the Mac. iOS is OSX... with some underlying innovations that needed to be done to handle the unexpected phone call in the middle of doing something. This led Apple to a very functional auto-save, auto-resume system as a foundational part of iOS. This is one of the big changes that is being brought back to the Mac that will really change the way we think about a "desktop" OS. Same can be said about Versions. Less dealing with managing my file system and running app's.. and more just using them. Having said that, Lion & iOS 5 will be brought back closer together and it would be conceivable that at some point there will be a merging of the Mac App Store and the iOS App Store and like the iPad, there will be Mac only app's, iPad only apps, iOS only app's, and Universal app's that will scale to any platform. For example AngryBirds... they could have 1 version for $5.99 that will use a mouse and keyboard larger interface for the Mac, and the same code can simply have a different UI adjusted for the iPad form factor, and a 3rd UI for the iPhone/iPod Touch form factor.

Windows Longhorn!

I think Microsoft is intentionally trying to confuse us by using the word "optimized".

The layperson thinks it means that Microsoft will have the best touch interface of anyone.

For Microsoft, it just means that it works the best they can figure out how to make it work. Until somebody else, like say, Apple, comes up with something new, that's all she wrote.

And to say it remains optimized for mouse and keyboard by just including the existing Win7 UI is the height of hubris.

But this is SOP for Microsoft. Promise the moon and ship customers a rock.