For those of you who know me and who follow me on Facebook especially, you might know that up until now I’ve been far from the biggest and most loyal supporter of Windows 8. I have found this difficult at times being a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) awardee for two years now in the Windows category. MVPs are independent experts but we’re always watched carefully by Microsoft, well I am anyway, and they take an interest in what we say and write.
Until now I’ve been a big supporter of Microsoft’s products. After the unveiling of the Windows 7 beta just over three years ago I’ve felt that the company had got its mojo back, and was finally headed in the right direction. The quality of the products they have released the last three years including the Live Essentials Suite, SkyDrive, Kinect, Windows Server 2008 and especially Windows Phone gave me confidence that they had put years of stale development behind them.
I completely understood when the company unveiled a tablet interface for Windows 8 and also understood why they talked about this and nothing else. Alter all, in order for this new Metro platform to succeed at all it has to be popular straight off the bat with huge volumes of high-quality apps and hardware manufacturers all across the world throwing their weight behind it. So when Microsoft chose not to talk about the desktop or features for IT Pros and businesses I wasn’t concerned.
This doesn’t mean that IT Pros and businesses haven’t had their own concerns and my mailbag has been consistently full of queries and requests to give talks on the subject. All I’ve been able to say is “it’s not finished” and “there’s still a lot more to come”. Well it’s now here and initially I was terribly disappointed. There was no Group Policy setting to set the desktop as the default UI, it was seemingly difficult to find and access some of the administration tools and then the company announced that those tools were being left out of the ARM edition completely. With my head in my hands I wondered if the bad old days were back and if Microsoft wasn’t shooting itself in the foot.
Now I’ve spent some time living and working with Windows 8 and it’s really won me over. What’s more it’s done it entirely on its own merits. So what is it that has won me over and why? Well I want to start from the basic premise that it isn’t perfect, but neither was Windows 7, which I really love. Windows 7 was a half-way house for me and neither part was done properly. The old Start Menu still existed but it was now alongside a new way to launch programs, the Taskbar. Why did we need both methods, it made little sense to me. What was really needed was an expansion of jumplists to hold software buckets, with the Taskbar icon itself being the containing folder for a program in the same way folders exist in the Start Menu, and for the jumplist to contain recently accessed files alongside the other sub-programs that appear, and for the Taskbar icon to be programmable to launch one of those programs (ie, the main one). This always struck me as a far more sensible way to move forward. With this in place the Start Menu could be removed completely.
Unfortunately software developers didn’t agree and you still don’t find software with a “Pin to Taskbar” option when you install it. They still all still offer the old “Pin to Quick Launch Area” option though when there is no reason in Windows 7 to use the Quick Launch area at all. With Windows 8 I wasn’t expecting these concerns to be addressed but I was very pleased when the Start Menu was removed. What really annoyed me though was that there was no real alternative in place to it. No expanded Jumplists, no way auto-pinning of installed desktop software to the Taskbar, no joined-up thinking.
Coupled with the new Start Screen being locked as the default UI and I was beginning to lose hope. Having actually used Windows 8 for a while now though I can confirm that it really is much easier to stay and work on the desktop than you might think. In a computing session there really is no need to go to the Start Screen and, when you do if you’re not the type of user who would want to use Metro apps, there’s no real incentive to stay there. Currently I am using my Start Screen as a series of desktop widgets, rather like the widget view on the Mac desktop, to just give me live and up to date information on a wide range of things at the push of a single button. Again that single button-push gets me back to where I need to be. Used this way the Start Screen is really rather elegant.
Metro itself is an excellent way forward and for consumer users for the coming years I’m not really going to criticise it much. Sure it’s not perfect but Windows 7 wasn’t perfect either (in fact I’d challenge you to ever point to any operating system on any platform that was). It’s easy to see where some things can and will be improved over time, or where there is scope to do so. Full-screen apps being the default is one area where we might see significant change for example and the expansion of menus and the inclusion of the Ribbon interface are others.
Once you get past the fact that Windows 8 isn’t perfect you try to find a way to use it that best suits you. I rather like the widget approach and can see it being very useful to me in the future. My concerns about getting to the administrative tools have been completely allayed and I’m being every bit as productive in the OS and on the desktop as I am in Windows 7.
So the time has come for me to admit not that I was wrong, but that I judged Windows 8 far too harshly. It is every bit as good as Microsoft could make it given the time available. It’s not perfect but nothing else is either, and while it might not be for everybody, I can certainly find a place for it in my world.
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