The Windows 8 ecosystem: 5 best and 5 worst features - daviswallard1976
Windows 8 hasn't just arrived—it has arrived in full force, with an armada of ancillary products. Microsoft's deployment of the other Windows political platform crossways desktops, laptops, tablets, hybrids, and smartphones constitutes a major push to make Windows 8 your defining computing experience regardless of your hardware suasion. Depending on your point of view, this can be a fortunate thing or a very, very regretful thing.
Or maybe it's both.
Rent's take a walk through with some of the triumphs and failings of Microsoft's sprawl Windows 8 ecosystem. Like information technology or not, this is the environment that all new-PC users (and some PC upgraders) wish be working with for the next few days.
The ripe
The great unification
Although Windows 8 stumbles in its attempts to push a touch-centric operating system onto desktops and laptops lacking finger-friendly screens, I'm nonetheless impressed by Microsoft's writ of execution in delivering a unified experience crossways all of its major consumer platforms. Windows 8 on x86-based tablets is the one Windows 8 that you can breakthrough on laptops and desktops, and this provides a tight degree of union that's missing from Apple's product lineup, which is disunited between Mack Atomic number 76 and iOS.
The linchpin is the new Microsoft Account sign-in (once Live ID). Through a single username and password, your Microsoft Explanation taps into the cloud and establishes familiar preferences among all the Windows-founded hardware and services you whitethorn use (though regional barriers are still a problem; more about that below). So kudos to Microsoft for acknowledging that our computers, tablets, smartphones, and game consoles should be connected, sharing a common, drug user-peculiar experience.
From SkyDrive to SmartGlass to the ability to contemporize settings across environments quickly and easily, the new Windows 8 platform provides the essential core connections for all your software and geared wheel.
Forcing a touchy issue
Since touch is the basis of Windows 8—regardless of whether you actually have a touch-susceptible display on your elect device—Microsoft is pushing third-political party developers to take the adjacent big step in app creation. Simply position: Touch cannot be ignored. This mandate is an issue for masses without trace-enabled hardware. And it's bad news for people who have tried touch control but hate it. Yet Microsoft's parvenue "the touch way operating theater the highway" philosophy shows sight and innovation, and affirms the public's overwhelming support for touch gestures along computing hardware.
Sure, several developers will never get on the touch bandwagon, either because they wear't have an interest in advancing their users' experience, or because their software can't benefit from touch in any way (after each, any utilities are soh simple, linear, or keyboard-dependent that an investiture in touch development wouldn't make sense). Nonetheless, you can expect to see many more apps that tightly and creatively leveraging touch support. These are the apps that will acquit Microsoft forward.
And these are the apps that will ensure a unchanging, countertenor-quality exploiter live, regardless of which hardware you use to tap into the new Windows regime.
Directional by (hardware) example
Microsoft isn't just reinventing its Windows platform. It's also doubling down on a hardware strategy premeditated to lead away example, showing tablet manufacturers that tablet-laptop computer hybrids are the future of Microcomputer computing.
Yes, I bon: Coupling touch-based tablets with keyboards isn't a new idea. Other parties get cooked it before, with Asus being the most effective. But Microsoft's elegant execution of Surface RT, with its keyboard-underwrite accessories, sets a dominating bar for what a Windows 8 pad of paper-laptop loanblend should be. What's more, because Surface RT is Microsoft's first raid computer manufacturing, the ship's company will now compete with its hardware partners, and this might lower prices and boost the creation of better, more interesting, more innovative computers across the smooth Windows 8 ecosystem.
In burden: Consumers get more choice, and better products to pick from. Microsoft, meanwhile, achieves quicker market-share gains for Windows 8. The new Surface tablet isn't just the premier hardware component in the new Windows ecosystem—it's actually a catalyst for greater ecosystem success.
Fearing giants promotes innovation
Now that Microsoft has committed to the brave new world of touch—and smartphones and tablets—it has to deliver the goods. It's now competing directly with the iPad and iPhone. It's now competing with scads of Android devices. This isn't necessarily an enviable put down given Microsoft's uphill climb, but it testament definitely drive innovation, and that bodes well for the Windows ecosystem as a entirely.
In short, Microsoft has to get very originative, very quickly. Ultimately this challenge will benefit consumers the most. Microsoft will have to driving new features throughout its platform, especially unweathered ways for complete of the hardware components to interact with one another. And this is an opportunity that neither Apple nor Google genuinely gets to explore, since Apple splits its ecosystem betwixt Mackintosh OS and iOS, and Google doesn't even make a computer OS.
Apps such Eastern Samoa Xbox SmartGlass, and services so much A the SkyDrive cloud political program and Xbox Music cyclosis, are great starts. But what else can Microsoft do to sway users to forsake their existing devices and ecosystems, and leap head-first-year into Windows 8? More important, how fast can Microsoft pull that off? These are scary questions for Microsoft, only I think permanent in place doing nothing is an even scarier option.
Joining the app-store masses
Apple had extraordinary get-go. Then Google got one. Right away, finally, Microsoft has one too: a software salt away. It's non for your Windows Phone 8 device, but for Windows itself. And the spic-and-span Windows Store is the only set you can download "Windows 8 apps," the Start cover-centrical programs previously titled Metro apps.
Although the move has frustrated developers who make software that Microsoft doesn't want—either a result of a especial app falling shortened of Microsoft's guidelines, or the fact that Microsoft ISN't opening the Windows Store to the full purchase of desktop applications—it's notwithstandin a potent driver in devising Microsoft's ecosystem Thomas More accessible, more convenient, and much secure for users.
The Windows Store is a great step forward; but systematic to recognize its benefits, you can't expect at it through the eyes of a power substance abuser. Project, instead, the typical subject area neophyte who wants access to online shopping, streaming movies, financial entropy, games, rudimentary media editing, and completely the other simple services that computers earn possible. Passim their computing lives, these novices have been tempted many times: A Web AD has asked them to instal something they shouldn't. Or they've installed software upon the recommendation of a booster, but that software isn't compatible with their system. Operating room, even sadder, these newbies mightiness non even know how to find and download new programs for their PCs.
The Windows Store gives such users a simple and secure accounting entry point for downloading apps that have passed stringent certification from Microsoft itself. Certain, an app might ultimately stink, but at least users now have strong assurance that the software won't bobble their systems. To wit: Apple's App Stock went more than five years before succumbing to its first firearm of malware, and the company quickly expunged the app so that no bran-new user could download it of all time again.
The Stinking
Friendly compromises that were never made
To construct a user experience that works evenhandedly seamlessly crosswise desktops, tablets, and smartphones, Microsoft had to make approximately compromises, and these trade-offs are affecting desktop users the most. Although it's relatively easy to operate a touchscreen-oriented interface on a device with an actual touchscreen, it's non and so easy to translate touch gestures to the world of mice and keyboards. Power users aren't happy with Microsoft's new Windows 8 mouse gestures, so you tail only imagine how well they'll be received away the enterprise food market, and past all of our grandparents.
In some cases Microsoft didn't even have to make compromises, but still opted to restrict the user's ability to pilot Windows in a familiar, matey way. The company had big chance to move over users choice and exemption in its structure of Windows 8, only decided non to.
Want a Start menu? We won't show it past default, but you john enable it if you in truth need to. Father't like the Start screen? That's altogether composed. We'll make it so that you can nonetheless admittance it, but we South Korean won't force you to deal with it up advanced each time you start the OS. Don't need a lock concealment since you'Ra connected a desktop computer instead of a pad? Great. We won't force you to "expose" your password straightaway. Operating theater at to the lowest degree, we North Korean won't bury the option that lets you eliminate this.
That's how Microsoft's internal dialogue could have measured. Only in the real world, Microsoft chose otherwise. In creating a common ecosystem for Windows 8, Microsoft has shifted portions of its new interface into places where they don't ask to be.
Common port, red-carpet apps
The scariest part with of the Windows 8 ecosystem is the fact that Microsoft has put a good lump of the potential success of its OS—across PCs, tablets, and smartphones—in the hands of third-party developers. Even though it's immature to declare Windows 8 a complete dud in price of available apps, we have to be concerned about the critical dearth of apps that one would otherwise expect to feel on a major new platform. Windows 8 has no official Facebook app, no formal Chitter app, and zero Instagram. And those are just three of the most obvious omissions.
The app situation could fine transfer in a few months, so I won't quibble about specifics. After totally, Microsoft execs wealthy person explicit that they hope to suffer 100,000 apps in the Windows Store inside 90 days of the Windows 8 establish.
What's worse for Microsoft is the way that it has decided to treat the Windows Stores happening smartphones, tablets, and desktops, walling them off in separate silos instead of unifying all of the environments. How cool would it be to buy a copy of Microsoft Office, and receive a version geared for your Windows 8 smartphone and for your Windows 8 desktop operating theater tablet? Or, for that matter, wouldn't it be nice to purchase rights to run your favorite Windows 8 smartphone biz happening your tablet?
But, no, that's not happening.
A Windows 8 tablet or intercrossed is the functional equivalent of a laptop, which shares the same Windows Entrepot as your desktop PC (unless you're functioning a Windows RT-supported lozenge; I'll get into that to a lower place). In contrast, a Windows Earphone device—whose interface inspired Windows 8 and exhibits many of the same behaviors and features of Windows 8—taps into a completely opposite software store. Phone apps share a mutual code with tablet and PC apps, just they can't directly transfer over to your tablets and PCs.
The sins of Windows RT
If you thought the Windows 8 ecosystem was confusing enough in terms of app support, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Windows 8 RT has entered the fray, also. If the Windows 8 ecosystem of desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones were a heavy land mass, past Windows 8 RT would Be an island off the coast. IT's under the mother rural area's protection, and it likely enjoys much of the same mood and vegetation, but it's still isolated enough to be its own dinky, self-contained world.
Microsoft representatives have had trouble explaining the differences 'tween Windows 8 and Windows RT in the months leading up to Windows 8's big plunge. And if they can't get it right, how is an average consumer supposed to sympathize that Windows RT is a stripped-down Oculus sinister version that won't run desktop applications, save the ones that make out preinstalled? In a nutshell, the Windows RT desktop runs a junior edition of Microsoft Office and a motley crew of legacy utilities. That's it, along with providing the basic file-direction functions of any Windows desktop OS.
Microsoft might increase some depth-of-ecosystem advantages away opening Windows 8 to inexpensive (and energy-efficient) ARM processors; in fact, the move to support ARM extends the reach of the new Windows platform. Simply Windows RT also has the potential to create serious confusion for people expecting to jump between all Windows 8 devices without issues.
It's commercial time
Never before has Microsoft been so unapologetic about tying its dealings interests so closely with the raw mechanics of its OS ecosystem. Although you're free to set up your own default applications in Windows 8, or to install other apps to handle the multimedia American Samoa you see equip, there's No question that Microsoft would prefer that you practice its branded, tiled apps to watch surgery listen to content. And, oh, while you're there, maybe you mightiness like to rent or buy up a movie or two from one of the tiles advertised along your screen door.
Information technology's bad, common people. The Music app ISN't such a media thespian as a storefront for Xbox Music. The Games app isn't so much a portal for installed games as a platform for buying Windows 8 games—and even Xbox 360 games. And the same conceit holds true for the Video app. These are sales tools, not user-focused programs, and the sales shift persists throughout the Windows ecosystem.
Android—and even iTunes, less—separates commercialization from content to such a degree that IT's there if you want it, and you get laid how to accomplish it, but it International Relations and Security Network't in your face off, atop a lackluster multimedia histrion (or games web browser). But in the new Windows ecosystem, irrespective what you've paid for your device or for your subscription content, advertising is now a set off of the norm. That's not fun.
Part migration?
Although this issue won't affect the mainstay of Microsoft's Windows 8 exploiter base, one of the problems Microsoft has now created in unifying its ecosystem low a common business relationship—the Microsoft Account—is that transferring your account between regions is about two degrees short of unattainable. Put differently, if you've done a lot with your old Current ID in Europe, for instance, and are about to move to the States, you'rhenium in for a bit of a shock: Your new Microsoft Account will rest tied to the country where you created it.
Alas, at the moment you can't just open a drop-down fare in some options panel and convert over from, say, England to the United States. Without the power to make such a switch, users lose the potentiality to compensate for the rattling services Microsoft offers—apps, Xbox Live points, and the like—in addition to losing access to any region-barred apps, games, services, or subscriptions they've already ponied in the lead for.
What would have been an annoying issue in previous years is even worse now that Microsoft is tying a number of Windows 8's more compelling features to a user's online answer for. Microsoft's standard resolution—create a new Microsoft Account—just now doesn't cut it anymore, not when the goal is to have a respective sign-on for the entirety of the Windows 8 ecosystem.
The real solution is two times. First, Microsoft should give its users the opportunity to switch their billing country without harass. And second, those populate World Health Organization already took Microsoft up on its advice to create octuple accounts need the ability to mix multiple accounts into one.
Microsoft, however, would just prefer that you "hold close" for now.
Note: When you buy out something after clicking links in our articles, we whitethorn earn a small commission. Scan our affiliate unite insurance policy for more details.
Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/455515/the-windows-8-ecosystem-5-best-and-5-worst-features.html
Posted by: daviswallard1976.blogspot.com
0 Response to "The Windows 8 ecosystem: 5 best and 5 worst features - daviswallard1976"
Post a Comment