Microsoft hopes for second chance with Windows 8.1 - weaverkess1936

As Microsoft's Build 2022 developer conference kicks off this Wednesday, the company faces a daunting task: To convince developers and tech enthusiasts that it remains happening the cutting border. That's a tough challenge when you're astir to release a Windows system update that most suppose exists to correct nagging flaws.

Indeed, it's hard to make a Band-Aid look like a fresh innovation.

For many consumers, the Windows 8 Start page is a crazy quilt of incoherence that's thrust in their faces as presently A their PCs thrill. This will make up single-minded in a new boot-to-desktop boast, but Windows 8.1 standing necessarily to address a laundry list of other issues, and Windows watchers worldwide rest skeptical.

"I think the [Windows 8] updates have been noticed by the tech community of interests," same Frank Gillett, an psychoanalyst with Forrester Research. "Only the mass grocery store perception of Windows hasn't denatured that much."

Exhibit A for the case to be made against Windows 8: the Start screen.

What should we ask from Shape 2022? On June 26, Microsoft will provide its first preview of Windows 8.1, which should command treatment on the first day of the conference. On the second twenty-four hour period, looking for the conversation to turn to Visual Studio apartment and former maturation initiatives.

That's right: Best and foremost, Build is a developer's league, and Microsoft must bewilder software partners involved in weapons platform support. "What I'm hoping for with Build is chiefly a more civilised application developing story with 8.1, and going away out the broader ecosystem," said Wes Miller, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft.

It completely comes down to convincing developers that the new Windows ecosystem offers treasure—and return on invested capital. PCs, Surface tablets, and Windows Phone handsets represent the three legs of the ironware infrastructure, and they're all tied together by Microsoft's cloud of software and services.

A steep hill to climb

Microsoft offered the Windows 8 developer preview in September 2011, equally the first hints arrived that the traditional PC market was in serious-minded worsen, and tablets and phones were gobbling up consumer dollars. Microsoft clearly saw our more mobile later, and attached a tablet interface to the face of the traditional Windows operative system. Then came Microsoft's Surface tablet, released in October 2012. The hardware gets praise, just consumers can't stomach its high price and lack of gripping software.

Since information technology shipped with the Surface Windows 8 Pro tablet last year, Windows 8 has been blamed for the demise of the traditional PC. The unfavorable judgment was underscored by the worsen in corporate licensing, atomic number 3 businesses hesitated to climb to an unfamiliar with OS. Tami Reller, Microsoft's Windows marketing chief, promises that things wish ameliorate in the latter part of the year.

In part, the optimism is pegged on Windows 8.1. Microsoft has promised a litany of improvements: a revamped Originate in menu; the capacity for corporations to wipe corporate data off of Windows 8 job machines; and gracious features such as unselfish backgrounds betwixt the Start page and Background.

Windows 8: Is it really as bad as we think?

Microsoft made a big misapprehension in weakness to realize that the vast majority of users would experience Windows 8 from a traditional PC, and not from a Surface or tablet-PC loan-blend. From this perspective, the Get block out introduced in Windows 8 makes little sense.

Only for tablet users, the Start user interface works well. Users hold been trained past their smartphones to instinctively reach for the new Windows screen, where large Alive Tiles can be easily accessed. That said, Microsoft certainly unoriented some users by organizing the tiles according to its own system—placing its key apps, such arsenic People and Calendar, for example, in the first "screen" of the interface. Windows 7 and early operating systems tended to show the most frequently used apps first, then an alphabetical list of programs when "All Programs" was clicked. This approach makes a counter in Windows 8.1, and it's a effective affair.

Designed correctly, is this Eastern Samoa useful as the Windows 7 Start menu?

Nonetheless, the upcoming "boot to Background" feature and the addition of the Bulge out shortcut on the Desktop Thomas Nelson Page contradict each strange. Boot to desktop brings users to the acquainted with environment they know and love, but todo anything, they still need to return to the unfamiliar Start page. A number of third-party add-ons solve the problem, only Microsoft would undergo been advisable served past placing a Take off option within the Desktop context.

Microsoft too still wastes blank space in its sprawling suite of Windows Shop apps that soak up means too much screen place. "Snapping" an app operating theatre two—or four, in Windows 8.1—may mitigate the problem, but it still looks inefficient, even if it makes sense from a user-user interface perspective. And I still hate using the touch version of Explorer. I'd much sort o use the Screen background version or Google's Chrome, rather.

It's probably meter to contend, however, that Windows 8 isn't as abominable as we suppose.

With just a twain of clicks, the Start up screen backside be banished, and the long-familiar Desktop can be brought back up in play. I've utilized Windows 8 for months, and while I still don't contract advantage of all of its tricks and features, I do appreciate what Microsoft is doing under the exhaust hood. The job is that we take some of new features for given.

E.g., setting up a fractional-party device reasonable whole kit and caboodle—As it should, and as it always should have. The new OS also requires less memory than Windows 7, and the required disk repositing should drop with Windows 8.1, as well. The bottom agate line? Windows 8 is a toned, stylish, polished professed athlete. But it's eating away clown makeup, and that creates a serious image problem.

Under the hood, Microsoft's Windows 8.1 works fine.

We need Mobile River apps—not galore, simply the biggies

Before a inexperient intersection keister deal, notes Directions on Microsoft's Miller, it has to offer a compelling answer to a critical interrogative: What can I do with this that I couldn't do before? With Windows 8, "the tale hasn't been powerful," Miller said. "In that respect hasn't been enough great experiences." And those experiences involve to emerge through apps.

The apps question flips the Background versus Start Page argument on its lead. People working on PCs instinctively visit the Facebook Webpage. It works alright. We're victimized to it. But Facebook formatted as an app or perambulating Web page for iOS, Android, and (my favorite) Windows Phone looks far smoother than whatsoever Web page for the desktop.

Ignoring the fact that the contribution of Windows tablets is miniscule, Microsoft simply needs to commission a few distinguish apps for Windows 8: Facebook, Yap, and Pinterest, for starters. Pinning a WWW cutoff to the Start menu is not the right solution.

And if Microsoft plans to usurp the iPad and the Chromebook in the pedagogy market, stronger partnerships with acquisition developers are essential. My Lenovo Twisting has a Windows 8 Encyclopedia Britannica app that's non bad, but we real need an iPad-quality app that Microsoft can put in foremost of educators (and consumers) as an example of the possible of the platform. If only Encarta were still around.

You might be able to argue that Squarely, for example, belongs connected Windows Phone, Eastern Samoa IT does. But as Forrester's Gillett points out, we need to see a "continuously evolving and rising" apps chronicle across the ecosystem.

Apps, apps, apps. And not just along Windows Sound, either.

"We need to see more of the operating arrangement, but besides more of the total Microsoft live," Gillett said. "Phones and Windows tablets is just part of that one continuous Microsoft experience."

Build represents Microsoft's second bump. Has the market passed it past? You could make the eccentric that it has, but you can also reason that Microsoft still has wind in its sails. We'll find out this week.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/452544/microsoft-hopes-for-second-chance-with-windows-8-1.html

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