A Smart, Sleek, and Innovative Tablet… From Microsoft?

Tonight Microsoft dropped a bomb on the tech world. Their new Windows 8/RT tablets look amazing. The design is fresh and for once Microsoft seems to have gotten the marketing right too. I’m very excited about the announcement because it means Microsoft has a decent shot at gaining back a lot of the mind share they lost to Apple and Google over the last few years. The announcement is great but there are a few things that worry me about the future of windows tablets.


Windows 8 vs. Windows RT
As much as I believe fragmentation can often be overstated, I doubt it is a particularly good idea to fork a new platform at the start. The next OS from Microsoft will have two versions, Windows 8 for desktops and tablets, and Windows RT for… tablets. Windows 8 is designed to run on Intel based processors while Windows RT will run on arm based processors. The major difference though is the type of applications each of these systems will run. RT will only run metro based programs, while the Intel machines will be able to run traditional Windows programs as well as metro apps. The hope is developers will shift to the metro platform but there is some doubt whether the restrictions placed on metro apps won’t turn them off.

It’s all about the ecosystem

I love my Transformer Prime, It has the portability and speed that I want as well as the versatility I need. Unfortunately the one gripe I had with it back when I wrote up my review of it still exists; there just aren’t enough programs available for it. Note I said programs not apps, there are plenty of apps on android that allow you to do a lot of simple tasks. What Android tablets really need are some deep immersive programs. I write most of my posts on my tablet but before I post it I almost always have to transfer it to a windows computer fire up office and fix formatting. The same situation is true for photo editing apps and probably true for video. You can do about 70% of what you want to do with the current generations of apps, but for real detail and polish you’re really going to have to go back to a regular computer. This is what is so exciting about Windows 8 on a tablet; you will have access to those deep level programs like Photoshop and Office and really be able to finish projects on a tablet.  Windows RT on the other hand is a much tougher sell, Metro is a brand new environment and developers will have to learn how to optimize for it. The tablets will be available by Christmas which is really not a lot of time to develop programs of that caliber. Sure developers have had access to metro since the developers preview a few months back, but no one really had a good idea what Microsoft was planning till now.

It’s Windows Vista all over again

Vista was almost universally reviled; this is unfortunate because it wasn’t really a bad operating system. Vista was a major shift for the OS that changed much of the inner workings of windows. The issue was many manufacturers didn’t adapt quickly enough and driver incompatibilities made the system seem buggy. Nvidia was infamously responsible for over 30% of the crashes on vista due to bad drivers. I think Microsoft learned from this experience, and the hardware shouldn’t have nearly as many issues. Still the next version represents a major paradigm shift, moving away from the traditional desktop will be a very hard transition for everyone. I ultimately think it shows a lot of promise, but there will be a lot of growing pains.