I’ve been a life-long loyal Windows user on the PC side, and even stuck with Windows Mobile long after it ceased to be the only smartphone operating system — well, that and Palm — all of which was long before every 11-year-old mall rat and grandmother “discovered,” thanks to Apple, smartphones (which had been around for a decade). Windows 7/8 Phone, with its tiled Metro interface, is a marvelous, fresh, gorgeous phone OS — that arrived too late to the mobile OS party it initially hosted: though not as novel in appearance, the Apple/Android mobile OS is identical to Windows Phone in its functionality, and the market share and developer universe — especially of Android — has killed MS’s attempts to pry its way back into the phone market.
The smartphone universe is the key sector of the consumer tech market. Smartphones are the gateway drug, as it were, to more powerful and expensive computing devices.
Windows 8 was to be MS’ last stand, wherein it would port its Metro interface from the phone to the desktop, thereby radically revolutionizing the look, if not the basic function, of the PC interface. That might’ve been nice! What Windows 8 is turning out to be is an epic fail, in which MS has committed neither to a full implementation of Metro NOR to a continuous improvement of the highly successful Windows 7 interface. Instead, Windows 8 jams both interfaces awkwardly into one machine, each with its own logic and rules, and forces you to hop back and forth between the two. It’s a great example of marketing trumping engineering: force users to use tomorrow’s skin to operate yesterday’s machine. It’s like putting an automatic-transmission lever on the steering wheel of a standard-transmission car: you put the car in Drive with the lever — but then use the stick shift on the floor to change gears.
MS can’t — or couldn’t — afford to lose the smartphone war. But its only remaining beach-head in the technology market was the residual PC market share it still holds there after decades of near-total dominance. Windows 8 was supposed to force those PC users to take a good look at Metro, realize it was a desirable alternative to the Apple/Android smartphone OS, and run out and buy Windows Phones.
But it won’t happen. Windows 8 is a dog, a Frankenstein, an epic fail. Users dislike it and developers don’t want to write for it. Instead of driving the PC base to Windows Phones, it’s going to drive people (and developers) from Windows to the now-very-viable alternative PC OSes: Apple, Android, Linux. It’s being called “another Vista,” but the situation is different this time. Worse. When MS rolled out its New-Coke Vista, it could afford to fail: its PC market dominance was secure and the smartphone/tablet market hadn’t yet fully matured as the new avant garde of the personal-computing market. Both of those factors have changed.
MS’ only hope now is to backpedal. PC users are going to keep Windows 7 like they kept Windows XP, and MS needs to double down on its continued development of 7. In line with that, 8 needs to be an incremental improvement on 7, and Metro, in 8, needs to be relegated to a sandbox where users can mess with it and leave it alone — NOT shoved in their face as an unavoidable obstruction to the Windows-7 OS that Windows 8 actually is.
Here’s what I don’t understand. Instead of forcing developers to write apps “for” Metro, would it have been so difficult for MS to simply force regular apps to conform to Metro-esque functionality? It’s not as if the differences are radical: Metro apps are full-screen (or fixed increments) and have hot control corners. Surely MS could have found a way to rework regular apps on the fly, so that they’d all just “be” Metro apps — and not require new versions. Not to mention two simultaneous operating systems.
But for whatever reason, they didn’t. Instead, they’re pushing a PC OS that says “Hey user: do you want to know what it’d be like if your PC was powered by a lemon with zinc and copper electrodes and had no buttons at all? Great, because we’re going to force you to.” They got the lemon part right.
