I Am Not Confident About Windows 8

Microsoft is primed to release Windows 8 with the Release Preview having been out for quite some time now. Windows 8 has some great new security features and marginal performance improvements. In general, if you’re looking at things that can be ‘measured’ in some way or another (not to say you can measure security, but still) Windows 8 is just better than 7. But I really don’t think it’s going to succeed on the laptop/ desktop market.

Windows 8 features the new Metro UI and whether you like Metro or not there is definitely a significant group of people who absolutely hate it. And whether or not their hate is justified  is entirely irrelevant. If you have hundreds of thousands of people saying “Oh, Windows 8 sucks” you’re going to have a massive crowd spreading this stuff to people who otherwise might consider the OS.

The truth is that, for better or worse, Metro is differentand people just don’t like change. I just can’t imagine people adapting so easily so a radical change. I think this is a big mistake on Microsoft’s part because I hear people saying “Well if I have to relearn Windows I may as well just learn how to use OSX or Ubuntu.” What Microsoft had up until this point is complete backwards compatibility and a consistent experience – they’ve just killed the consistent experience.

The UI experience of Windows XP was similar to that of Windows Vista and that of Windows 7. For over a decade people have been using their systems in a very similar way and Metro breaks that chain.

Yes, that’s how progress works and I advocate progress. But that’s not really the matter at hand – most people don’t actually give a damn about progress, they want their system to ‘just work’ and you can bet that most people simply won’t care to relearn Windows.

So I’m gonna go ahead and say we’ll see some ridiculously long support life for Windows 7 just as we did with XP because I’m confident that Windows 8 will be a flop.