Windows 8 Consumer Preview:What’s next?

Windows 8 Consumer Preview: a fresh start for Microsoft

What’s next?

This is a major milestone, but it’s not the end of the road.

As I said at the beginning of this review, Windows 8 is designed to enable entire experiences. It’s an important building block, but it’s not enough on its own. So what’s still missing?

For starters, there are the apps. Although the 18 Metro style apps included with the Consumer Preview are generally polished and useful, they’re far from complete. Microsoft refers to them as App Previews—with a bright gold label at the top of some apps, like this snippet of the SkyDrive app shown here.

With many of the App Previews, I found myself slightly frustrated and occasionally annoyed by missing or incomplete features.

In Calendar, for example, I discovered that Windows Live had cluttered up the display almost beyond redemption by adding 400+ birthdays from my Windows Live and Facebook friends and followers. The only way to unclutter things was to visit Windows Live on the web to remove the Birthdays calendar. The Settings tab showed me which accounts were connected but didn’t let me adjust them in any way.

The Music app is visually glorious, but navigation was slow—probably because my very large collection (nearly 30,000 tunes) is located on a network server and not on a local disk. The app insists on mixing content from the Microsoft music store with my local collection. There really should be an option to show one or the other.

Some apps don’t scale well as they move to larger screens. Both the Weather and Finance apps do a great job of using the entire screen, with more content a swipe away. Others, like the People app, are practically a sea of white space, especially on a large desktop monitor. Someone really needs to figure out how to increase the information density of that app.

The good news is that those problems can be solved easily, and the availability of an app store makes it possible to push updates in the background, without disrupting the user’s experience.

You can see hints in the Consumer Preview that Microsoft is trying to simplify its often-confusing branding, with the Windows Live and Zune brands receding quietly into the background. When you tap About in the Settings pane for the Music or Video app, for example, you’re directed to Xbox.com. There’s a bundled Xbox Companion app as well, which includes a Play to Xbox option for music and videos:

The combination of a Windows 8–powered slate and an Xbox console is a potent competitor to Apple’s AirPlay. It’s about time Microsoft began leveraging the Xbox platform and brand.

And then there’s the hardware. Samsung’s slate is a good reference design, and the current crop of Ultrabooks should be superb performers with Windows 8. But there’s a whole next generation of hardware—including ARM-based devices—that will really allow Windows 8 to shine.

For now, the biggest surprise for me is how well Windows 8 works on a conventional desktop, using my familiar assortment of desktop apps in combination with a handful of new Metro apps. In part, that combination works because of the ability of Metro style apps to snap into a pane along the side of the display, leaving the bulk of the display for another app or the desktop. Here, for example, I have a Gmail inbox snapped into place on the left while I work with a Word document in the Windows desktop on the right:

On a widescreen display, that combination is even more effective.

After a week of continuous use, I’m finding more and more to like in Windows 8, and I’m eager to begin using it as my full-time working environment. And I’m even more interested in hearing about your experiences.