I’m excited by Windows 8. There I said it. Cue a chorus of Apple addicts, “Hi Jeremy”.
Ingrained in the Apple ecosphere as I am, it is refreshing to be excited by a company that has long been associated with clunky interface design and poor cross-compatibility of its products. What Microsoft are trying to do with their latest effort is to tie its key products together and bring a unified and simple interface to its user base. This interface is called Metro.
Metro is quite simply a set of ‘live tiles’ that aggregate your content at a top level so that you have instant access to all the data that you need. Whereas Apple asks you to open any one of your swath of apps, Microsoft suggests you would rather have this data accessible via a more standardized set of boxes. Tweets get merged with status updates. Check-ins on FourSquare are shown along-side Facebook places. We will start to care less where this data comes from, the hypothesis suggests. And my first impressions of this system are great. It makes a lot of sense.
Microsoft’s most successful product of late is arguably the Xbox and it is here where the Metro interface really shines. Using Kinect to navigate through a sideways set of these Metro panels is completely intuitive and reaching out and touching one seems natural. I’m loving using the voice control especially and you can easily see the demise of the remote control using this system.
Seeing the Metro interface working on the latest Nokia Lumia was also as exciting. With haptic touch response and a lovely bright screen, this interface feels fresh. A truly different mobile product in a market saturated with iPhone wannabes. Navigating through these panels on a phone feels sort of like using Flipboard. It’s a left-right scroll which feels right as we become more and more used to the swiping motion. Panels roll in elegantly in an animated sequence and the corporate Segoe font gives it a considered feel.
With Windows 8 for desktop Microsoft is attempting to bring it all together with an interface that sits on top of their more traditional Windows environment. We’ve seen Apple attempt to do the same with Lion but most have rejected this iPhone inspired interface and abandoned it for the regular OSX environment. But with the rise of tablets in the family home, I am convinced that people are more interested in simple computing. Less to think about and a system that allows them to access their content easily. And with the release of a version of Kinect for Windows on Feb 1st people will soon be able to browse their desktops with gesture control.
For Microsoft this is a big deal. It’s a conscious effort, from a traditionally splintered company, to tie everything together and unify its products. It’s a brave step akin to Apple’s move from OS9 to OSX back in 2001. The time to reinvent our computing navigation does seem to be now and Microsoft is in a great place to do this.
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