WinBlu-Now all the self-proclaimed experts are saying MS is killing the Desktop

[roaspiras]

Okay, I have seen some few Windows Blue demo leaks in Youtube and have read some articles from Computerworld and WinSupersite and most of them think that MS is trying to kill the desktop because of the new settings accessible via the Start/Modern UI. This is crap. How can they think of such thing? Nobody though that MS is just making it easy for tablet users to change settings mimicking the display option in the desktop.

I really don't know why a lot of people hate the modern UI when its really useful once you get the hang of it. I did try a program called Start8 which is good but I uninstalled it after 2 weeks because I really did not miss the start menu.

At first I had to admit Win8 bugs me of occasional crashes but once I figured out what's causing it (its actually a faulty driver deterministic network enhancer driver which I updated DNE Support - Deterministic Networks. Now My old Toshiba Portege runs Windows 8 smoothly.

What do you think?

 

[spaulagain]

I'm glad they are moving all the settings menus etc into Metro UI. Those settings should all be easily accessible for touch devices and should not be scattered all over the OS. One of my biggest gripes with W8 is how disjointed things are.

The multi-window Desktop UI will be here for sometime. But most of the OS features don't need to be stuck in that old UI.

Also, I hope they unify things like right mouse or hold click menus because currently they look different between desktop and "metro" UI pages. They should look the same, pure white, same 2px border and padding, same font style, etc.

 

[ninjaap]

Ive been saying it since the release of Windows RT. I think Windows Pro is just stop gap to get people used to Modern UI.

 

[theefman]

If Microsoft want to go out of business they can kill the desktop and watch enterprise and everyone else doing anything productive with Windows move to Linux.

 

[gsquared]

Desktop computing will be around for a very long time to come. The only reason for the recent uproar is businesses as a collective have put desktop refreshes on hold the last few years. That left only the consumer market where desktops are in decline. Thats understandable though. Desktop hardware has reached a point where constant upgrades are not necessary. Even the gaming rig side is declining as the harware has, or is about to reach the point of diminishing returns.

Anyway, once businesses reach the point where they have to refresh their equipment you will see a pickup in desktop/laptop sales. You will also see headlines such as "The Desktop Lives!" / "Return of the Desktop"...... etc!

 

[dukrem]

The desktop will continue to exist for mouse and keyboard hardware. Hardware sales may have slowed for this form factor, but as was pointed out above that is largely due to the decreased need for hardware upgrades. There are still the same massive number of desktop and laptop PCs out there, most of those that have been buying tablets for the last 2 years still have and use a desktop, and almost every one of those is a potential sale for future windows products. On top of that there is the massive enterprise market, a large portion of which are still using the soon to be put to rest windows XP. They will need something to upgrade to, and there is no chance that they will buy something without a desktop.

Microsoft has no financial incentive for killing the desktop unless the alternative is so good that it increases sales (it will not be). Some people think Microsoft plans for app store to win them more profits, but looking at every single app store with the same 30% margin on paid apps (apple and google included) it becomes evident that it couldn't replace even a small portion of lost windows sales. That 30% barely pays for the running costs of the app store (servers, app certification, paying for these things for the free apps).

Instead I think we will see better integration of the 2 interfaces. We could see complete interchangeability of the interfaces: depending on what screen you are using at the time you can choose desktop or metro and the apps you have open will just go to that interface, allowing you to run metro apps windowed in desktop mode, or full screen in metro mode, with all your data instantly moving between the 2 interfaces. A really cool extension of this would be being able to come home with your tablet, then start up your desktop and have all the stuff you had open on your tablet in metro instantly come up on your desktop in windowed desktop mode.