Paul Allen on Windows 8: elegant, innovative and perplexing

A few days ago, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen quietly published a detailed review of Windows 8 . In this review, Allen - who left Microsoft's board of directors in 2000, but is still a consultant to the company - calls Windows 8 “a significant evolutionary step in the development of Windows.” However, his praises mainly focus on tablets. According to him, on the Windows 8 tablet is “bright and innovative,” and unlike many critics, he is “impressed” with the “smart combination of a biomodal interface with the ability to use both a PC and a tablet on the same operating system”. Despite this, he calls some aspects of Windows 8 “puzzling.”



“I’ve run into some puzzling aspects of Windows 8.”



The first thing that annoys Allen is that some applications, including Internet Explorer, come in two versions - Metro and PC. These different applications do not necessarily communicate with each other and, as Allen notes, “they are different applications with the same name and can be used for the same purpose.”

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Another stunning Allen (and almost all outside of Microsoft) feature is that when working with Windows 8 you cannot choose to have a PC-like desktop displayed by default instead of a Metro style start menu design. The goal must have been to encourage people to instantly acclimatize to the style of Windows 8. In the near future there will undoubtedly be third-party workarounds to get around this problem.



Allen also notes that Windows 8 Charms are additional options that appear when you scroll through the screen on the tablet from left to right, or put the mouse in the upper right corner of the screen when working on a stationary computer, it’s hard to detect, “since there are no visual clues like you you can display them on the screen. ”



Here are some more points in Windows 8 that Allen finds difficult:

• Difficulties when working with multiple monitors at once (including the inability to constantly display the start screen on one display)
• “Silo effect” - lack of communication and system approach between the style of the desktop and the style of Windows 8
• Inadvertent mode switching
• The inability to build a hierarchy on the start screen
• Difficulties with scrolling in Desktop mode on the tablet
• No clock on the start screen
• On-Screen Keyboard Does Not Appear Automatically in Desktop Mode

Despite all this, Allen believes that desktop users “using minor tweaks and settings” will be able to figure out pretty quickly. He also thinks that most of the shortcomings that he pointed out in his review will be corrected in the next release. Although, by and large, he seems to be in a joyful wait for the release of the future Windows 8 on tablets. He calls the tablet interface “elegant” and “responsive” - which he couldn't say about the Windows 8 interface for desktops.



Microsoft obviously also believes that touch control is the path to the future and Windows 8 shows the company's readiness to move in this direction even despite the fact that then most of their business users will not want to upgrade their computers to Windows 8 anytime soon.