Windows 8 Impression

The big news this week was the unveiling of Windows 8. There is plenty of coverage of features and the video that shows the new GUI. Here is coverage from the site that I use for my hardware news: http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/01/microsoft-unveils-windows-8-tablet-prototypes/

Here is my take on Windows 8:

The new GUI is fantastic and is borrowing heavily from the great work that was put in place by Windows Phone 7 team. I like that interface because it's elegant, minimalistic and it actually doesn't require heavy 3rd resources so that those can be used for processes that actually need them.

I also love the fact that OS supports HTML5 and JavaScript. I think Microsoft finally learned from WPF and other proprietary frameworks - people don't like them. HTML and JavaScript are adopted by millions of developers and it is going to be an easy adoption curve.

What I don't like is that the new GUI seems like it just sits on top of the old desktop. I suppose it makes a lot of business sense and Microsoft did do that with Windows 3.1 when it was sitting on top of DOS. What I'd prefer is that if they actually switched the whole thing around. The native OS would be using Metro and HTML interfaces and a Virtual Machine would pop up to run your legacy applications if you ever needed those.

A couple of things that I didn't see but I was hoping to see:
1) an application store that had curated Windows8 applications
2) a cloud integration where OS heavily relies on Live services. Synchronization and data sharing should be built directly into the new OS and work between my XBox, WP7 and W8.

Those features might still be coming but something and I am keeping my fingers crossed.