It has turned into a profitable week for publically traded technology companies. This is not to say that the earnings potential, real efficiency, wage standards, or even earnings per share have anything to do with the quality of a product or service. But what it will do, most certainly, is create buzz. And, if you are savvy enough what I am talking about, Andrea, I am specifically referencing the Facebook IPO and the transition of the business into a publicly traded entity.
I am reminded by the term \'Facebook\', that you should not judge a book by its cover, as the story goes, and the same can be said for an unfinished Windows 8. I do believe, Andrea, that you are now just fabricating facts to fit your argument, and this is unfortunate. As you claimed, quite some time ago, you did watch some early preview videos that I had made on the Windows 8 Developer Preview and came to a conclusion, based on my first-time, hands-on experience of the operating system, that it would be a horrendous monstrosity. However, it also appears that you came to a noxious conclusion that there is no Start menu whatsoever. This is not true. While the videos I posted at
Windows 8 Forums, did at the time, note a hint of frustration at the fact that this was my first time ever really using the operating system and its new features, what you have failed to mention is what I have pointed out: The build that was released at the BUILD Conference, including the Developer Preview, were designed to showcase the touchscreen capability of Metro UI and its experimental features.
I would like you to imagine a world several years from now, when, in all likelihood, every new laptop holds the ability of supporting touch screen technology. These new monitors, much like the small touch screens found on Samsung mobile cellphones (with SUPER AMOLED Plus or something better), will be extremely resilient, scratch resistant, capable of responding only to the human touch, and high definition. Your fingers will hardly ever create a smudge on the screen, and over time, as the technology is perfected, more and more people will endorse these monitors on laptops, netbooks, televisions, and stand-alone units. I take that into serious consideration, because this technology already exists. Emergency service units here in New York were using NVIDIA Quadro cards with four stacked touch screen monitors to answer 911 EMS calls. These devices were being assembled in the event that if one went down, the others could pick up the slack. And these monitors were capable of saving lives by bypassing the keyboard. The operating system? Microsoft Windows XP with an extremely important application running over it. You see, if someone could touch the screen as fast as possible, instead of pointing and clicking, those few seconds would at least have a small chance to save someone who was going into cardiac arrest or whose home was on fire.
I would like you to imagine that world, because it is a reality today. While in use by certain segments of the population, just like WiFi AIR cards, these devices are becoming high in supply, cheap to produce, and low in demand. That creates a recipe for lower prices, consumer commercialization, and what is needed more than anything else is an operating system with extensive, native support for this technology.
One of the driving innovations towards that vision has been a company that you know very well, and it is not Microsoft. I am talking about IBM. For decades, IBM has researched and pioneered some of the most important technological breakthroughs in human interface devices. These advancements in research and development have led to life changing technology for the disabled, aerospace applications, and other uses. In fact, IBM sold their hardware division to the largely state-run corporation Lenovo, in order to continue their research in the areas of the superconductor, micro-processors, and human interface devices (HIDs), and even quantum computing (the application of quantum physics into computer science).
I bring this up because today, we enjoy and take for granted many of the devices, most of which are powered by USB or radio band technology, that allow us to navigate our computers. Because IBM-PC’s were notoriously reverse engineered, copied, and made compatible by other vendors, and because of advancements in modular computing by Intel with the ATX form factor, the technology involved in initial consumer computer offerings are a good bargain. So when a keyboard or mouse breaks, we may worry briefly about a buggy USB controller, but not the entire system.
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And so what I am trying to say to you, likely more than anything else, is that times will change, whether we are prepared or not. I am sure that you were ill-prepared for Windows 7. Yet as time went on, you made it a point to learn this new system, and came to appreciate some of its nuances. And I have watched some of your videos, where you insist on going back to an ancient version of Windows Media Player, or want to completely eliminate a certain aspect of the operating system, I cringe. But I am sure that you have your reasons, and those lie in personal preference. From a professional perspective, however, Windows has been a work in progress since NT 4. The core operating system is based on a kernel that has undergone hundreds of thousands of stability enhancements, performance improvements, fixes, and code rewrites. If you understand how the OS is developed, than you must understand the development team went out of their way to improve performance with Windows 7: going so far as to run it through a simulation of every possible interaction over and over again looking for it to crash and then finding out why.
In many cases, people on these forums and elsewhere have difficulty with Windows due to, admittedly, inexperience, as well as problems with third party device drivers. Unlike Apple, Microsoft does not enforce the strictest possible driver signing requirements on third party developers. This has allowed businesses who specialize in third party peripherals and accessories to flourish greatly, but at the expense of some reliability. While Microsoft has gotten better in this area over the years, it is a well-established precedent, that the more stuff that you install on your system, without properly QA tested drivers, the more danger there is to stability. This is one reason that, even in the server realm, and outside of Windows altogether, backups are a regular occurrence.
I suspect that over time, you will come to realize that Windows 8 is not the monstrosity you believe it to be. But even if it is, you will be able to pass up the opportunity and wait for a new version of Windows. If you don’t want to do that, you can stay with the one you have, or migrate to a different operating system. There is no limitation to how you use your computer but your own mind and technical knowledge. I suspect that just as you learned much about Windows 7, that you would also pick up on Windows 8. But, in order to grasp the bigger picture, of what kind of territory that the Metro UI is headed for, I would like you to think of a unified platform. Microsoft has been known to develop software solutions for point of sale transactions at retail outlets using additional software and, in some cases, a custom operating system. With a unified client architecture, and a unified server architecture, it becomes easier to meet the needs of all sorts of different users. This can include people who are disabled. I mentioned IBM before, because their research has led to the type of technology Microsoft is developing to allow you to navigate Windows with hand gestures and body motions. In Japan, there is technology that is available, for a high price, which can read your thoughts and allow you to control the computer system by thinking of an action. For individuals with severe disabilities, this technology can enrich their lives.
In the future, you will very well be able to use a version of Windows on a surface display found at a restaurant to place your order. You will be able to control these things with your eyes and your hands. I believe that it has occurred to me and others that the mouse and keyboard are in the early stages of becoming obsolete. The voice recognition technology in the new Apple iPhone is a great example of next generation human interface. Disable it in a few, quick easy steps, and the Metro UI will disappear from site. But why it is being developed is exactly the one thing that Microsoft has been known to do not that bad in: force their competitors and partners to further innovate their own products. That means types of computers we can only imagine that will utilize this technology in the future.