Jaehyoung Kim: Essay 3

Windows 8, Windows without Windows?

     Nowadays, computer technology became one of the essential parts of our life. We write our essays with word processors, read eBooks, watch movies, and even communicate with computers. And recently, smartphones and tablets allowed us to bring and use computers whenever, wherever we are. But despite of the rise of smartphone and tablet, personal computers are still dominating most of our electronic gadgets.
     In general, a computer consists of hardware and software, and software is commonly divided into two parts: the operating system (a collection of software that manages computer hardware resources and provides common services for computer programs) and the program which runs on the operating system. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are the most popular examples of operating systems, and more than 70% of personal computers are using Windows as their operating system.
     Windows was first introduced in 1985. And with its graphical user interface (GUI) based on mouse input, Microsoft successfully dominated operating system market. The main difference of Windows and MS-DOS (the previous version of Windows with command-line interface) was that Windows had ‘Windows’. With the ‘Windows’, Windows was able to offer people much efficient multi-tasking environment compare to MS-DOS, by which people could switch programs with unimaginable speed they’ve ever experience before. And throughout the new versions of Windows such as Windows XP and Windows 7, Windows succeeded to maintain its popularity.

     But Last October, Microsoft released Windows 8 and removed the Start button from the taskbar and replaced the ‘Windows’ UI with their new UI, formerly known as ‘Metro’. (It’s not ‘Metro’ anymore due to a patent infringement with a subway company Metro AG) The problem is that it’s absolutely not appropriate for the traditional keyboard and mouse input but only optimized for touchscreen environments like tablets.
     Though it’s possible to switch to the old ‘Windows’ UI with the ‘Desktop’ button, eliminating the ‘Start Orb’ extremely decreased user convenience and efficiency, which is the reason for some users calling it ‘the crippled interface’. And compare to the old ‘Windows’ environment which allowed user to have unlimited numbers of ‘Windows’ in a screen, the new Windows 8 environment only allows us to run two programs in a screen.

      At first, in the Developer Preview version of Windows 8, it was possible to disable Metro UI and have Start Orb via some registry tricks. But since the Consumer Preview of Windows 8, this trick was disabled and users of Windows 8 began to develop alternative programs to have a Start Orb. With the efforts of many people, fortunately, it’s now possible to have our Start Orb again, though it’s not perfect yet. The examples like this clearly shows us that Windows without Start Orb is unusable.
      I have no doubt that Windows 8 is a perfect operating system for smartphones and tablets. It seems very nice to have Windows programs such as Microsoft Office running in tablets. But I think Microsoft had a mistake. They shouldn’t have done replacing whole interface. Even though mobile device market is growing bigger and bigger, the personal computers are still dominating most of electronic device market. And it is obvious that there are some unapproachable benefits of personal computer’s mouse and keyboard input.
      Microsoft missed a big point here. They shouldn’t have done mixing touchscreen UI with the ordinary UIs of portable computers without touchscreen. Their new ‘Metro’ UI is useless, unless there’s a touchscreen. If the UI of Windows 8 was configurable, it would be much better. I hope Microsoft fixes this in Windows 9, and if they don’t, that's why we have Mac and Linux.