Microsoft has been promoting the release of the next version of its operating system, Windows 8, for months, touting it as the OS that can offer a ubiquitous user experience no matter what technology is being used – desktop PC, tablet or smartphone. With the release of said OS being numbered in days and not weeks, the initial reviews and fanfare are demonstrating a less-than-stellar reception, which is exactly not what any company wants, most particularly Microsoft.
To begin with, Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and author of ‘Idea Man,’ wrote in his blog today a fairly in-depth review of the new OS, culled from his own experience with it over the last several months. The review contains praise for the new technology, though coupled somewhat hesitantly, with a noting that Windows 8 can be “not intuitive” and “puzzling.”
Mr. Allen writes in his introduction on the blog post, “I did encounter some puzzling aspects of Windows 8. The bimodal user experience can introduce confusion, especially when two versions of the same application — such as Internet Explorer — can be opened and run simultaneously.”
He continues on, writing about the marriage of Windows 8’s desktop experience and tablet experience, both existing simultaneously, “This makes perfect sense until you realize that Windows doesn’t always share user-defined aspects of the application between these two versions. For example, bookmarks I create in Windows 8 style IE are not available in IE when run from Desktop view. One can hope this will be fixed in a future release.”
And most notably, perhaps, when writing about the configuration of the START screen:
“As they are currently implemented, the tiles on the Start screen can only be arranged in a single flat scrollable ‘layer’. So if I have hundreds of tiles, I may need to perform lots of scrolling to find the tile in question. To get around this, I would prefer to have the option to build hierarchies of related tiles, thereby making it easier to organize the Start screen to my liking and reduce the amount of scrolling required. This would also be especially useful from a tablet to prevent repetitious swipe-scrolling.
“Both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android already offer this functionality on their mobile devices in the form of folders.”
Ouch!
The full content of the blog article can be found here.
Low Demand
In the meantime, California-based Net Applications released, on Tuesday, data pointing to a flaccid reception for the new OS.
According to Net Applications, “With just weeks before the public launch of Windows 8, users are five times less likely to be running the new OS than they were Windows 7 at the same point in its countdown.”
Quantitatively, the numbers look like this: In September of 2012, just before the release of Windows 8, only 0.33% of computers running Windows were sporting the new operating system. At the same time three years ago, with Windows 7 in 2009, the number of PCs running that version of the OS came in at 1.64% — almost five times what the Windows 8 numbers are.
While this doesn’t emphatically point to a dismal launch for the OS, it does seem to point to lukewarm demand come October 26. The last two months of the calendar year of 2012 look to be quite interesting for Microsoft.