You Win Some, You Lose Some
The big question, we suppose, is this; Windows 7 works wonderfully well, so why the need for so much change?
There are a couple of obvious reasons. With the PC market beginning to fade, Microsoft needs an interface that appeals to the touchscreen crowd as well as the traditional desktop user. The app experience on previous Windows releases has been old-fashioned at best, and Microsoft needs a central store that keeps revenue flowing in, developers attracted and consumers entertained. And while previous Windows releases have relied on third-party entertainment experiences; Microsoft now has a cross-platform music, video and gaming hub of its own.
The challenges are huge, but Microsoft's hardware and software portfolio puts Windows 8 in an advantageous position. The design philosophy of the Modern UI extends across multiple devices in an attempt to breed familiarity, the Windows Store is likely to become one of the biggest app repositories in the world, and the Xbox brand is well-established and ideally placed to take on the likes of iTunes.
There are other, more subtle advantages to the Modern UI, too. Each app downloaded from the Windows Store is sandboxed, allowing users to install and uninstall apps at will while being safe in the knowledge that no files will be left behind. The days of rummaging through the registry are coming to a close.
Limitations
For a lot of people, the Modern UI will be a great computing experience. Sure, there's a learning curve involved - a fairly steep one if you're accustomed to doing things the old way - but get to know it and it starts to feel like home.
But there are quite a few provisos, too, particularly where power users are concerned. The Modern UI is clearly designed for touchscreen devices such as tablet PCs, but on a desktop with a keyboard and mouse, it poses a number of limitations that hamper its value.
The obvious oddity is that Windows 8 feels like two operating systems merged into one. The Modern UI might be dubbed a user interface, but in reality it's a complete environment, and it sits alongside a more conventional experience we know as the desktop.
What complicates matters is that the familiar desktop runs on the ubiquitous Win32 runtime, while the Modern UI runs on a new runtime dubbed WinRT (Windows Runtime). This segregation introduces limitations, and it's the reason why apps from the Windows Store can't be run as individual windows on the desktop (wouldn't that be something?).
So why not split the two operating systems and launch the Modern UI as a standalone product? Microsoft had the option, but doing so would have been a huge gamble; Windows will always sell, but tablet devices running a separate Microsost OS? There's no guarantee. Baking the Modern UI into Windows and literally forcing it onto millions of users the world over is Microsoft's best bet, but as we'll find out in the next part of our review, this dual-OS amalgamation can cause confusion in the desktop environment we've become accustomed to.
