Microsoft do seem to have a worrying trend in their Windows products:
- Windows 95 was relatively successful
- But Windows 98 was far more successful
- (Won’t mention Windows 2000 because it was only around for a year and was only used by businesses)
- Windows ME wasn’t successful
- Windows XP was Microsoft’s most successful OS
- Windows Vista was a disaster
- Windows 7 has been really successful
- Windows 8?
To put it simply, Microsoft tends to plan out very big releases of Windows by adding hundreds of new ‘exciting’ features, Vista was an example of this. However, these big new features aren’t received well and so Microsoft is left to tidy everything up and release a polished version of what they had been working on before. It’s almost a ‘practice makes perfect’ approach. I do worry that Windows 8 is in the position to not be very successful because Microsoft are throwing up hundreds of new features and basically turning the whole thing upside down and taking the ‘Windows’ out of it and replacing them with ‘Apps’. A nice metaphor for apps is a house; a house with Windows allows the new in, allows you to see and explore the outside world, whereas take the Windows out and replace them with apps and you are blocked off from a whole world of potential.
My major concern about Windows 8 isn’t really that they are messing up the UI completely, but one sentence in the blog post that was posted: ‘compatibility with Windows 7 Logo PCs will continue’. This means that Windows 8 will most likely be compatible not only with Windows 7 machines, but also Windows Vista machines, because the requirements were almost identical. Considering that Windows Vista capable PCs began to be released in 2006, Windows 8 may well be able to run on six year old – potentially 32-bit – PCs. Consider that Windows 8 will need to run on tablets, this sort of makes sense.
Another concern about Windows 8 is that it is being marketed for touch quite a lot – the interface seems to have a lot to do with tablets and it is known that it will be running on ARM chips. However, this isn’t the first version of Windows to have touch support. Every version since Windows XP has marketed itself as being touch-friendly, and I’m getting a little bored of it. Microsoft still hasn’t got touch right in ten years.
From a developer’s point of view, I’m concerned that Windows 8 might be driving away from standard Windows applications towards HTML5 and JavaScript ones. We already know that applications written for Intel chips will have to be recompiled before they can be used on ARM-based tablets, and this suggests that Microsoft might be taking an easy approach and have everything running off of Internet Explorer, it saves them time and resources.
Furthermore, developers won’t actually know how applications should be coded until September with the Build conference. It may well be that everything we have seen so far with Windows 8 has been written entirely in JavaScript – which could be interesting. Internet Explorer is also a concern for Microsoft; they aren’t going to be releasing IE10 until 2012, however odds are that HTML5 will grow a lot before then, so Microsoft is going to have to be constantly updating IE9 to make sure it is up to standard.
Charlie Miller, a security researcher, noticed a bug in iOS a while ago that would allow apps to run unsigned code in apps. All code in apps on the App Store has to be signed or approved by Apple to ensure that it is safe for the device however Miller found a way round this in iOS 4.3 that allowed him to put dangerous code into any app. He even managed to develop an app that would fetch and run unapproved code allowing the app to do things that Apple hadn’t said it could do.
