In 2009, J.J. Abrams rebooted the fictional Star Trek chronology and franchise. In 2011, DC Comics did the same with its superheroes. But now Microsoft is about to reboot the very real Windows operating system, and it will forever change how we use computers.
Windows 8 is Microsoft's answer to the question of how to integrate mobile and desktop computing. For the most part, it succeeds, but it's an ambitious answer that will be best understood only when many people to stop thinking of desktop and mobile as discrete entities.
Touch will drive Windows 8's buzz, but it's so much more. The biggest change in Windows 8 is that it is designed for touch screens, but that doesn't mean that the keyboard and mouse are dead. In fact, to see that the opposite is true you have to look no further than the iPad. Apple's dominating and innovative tablet owns its market, but it drives a booming business in third-party keyboard solutions.
Windows 8 kills chrome. No doubt that Internet Explorer 10 is the best version of that much-maligned browser so far, but we're not talking about Google Chrome competitors. Lowercase "chrome" refers to an app's interface, the static visual elements that anchor an app's features. Microsoft's default apps hide most of an app's chrome, and other app developers already are taking their cues from Redmond's guidelines and lead.
Basically, Windows 8 apps do a great job of getting out of the way of the content they're meant to show you. From one edge of the screen to the other, all you see is content because the chrome has been hidden under the four edges of the screen.
Windows' lessons from the edges go beyond app chrome. The steepest part of the Windows 8 learning curve will be figuring out which app and operating system controls are hidden under which edges. The rule of thumb is that the left and right edges belong to Windows 8, while the top and bottom edges belong to apps, although this isn't strictly true.
Windows 8 kills your icons, too. For the entirety of its existence, the icon has been a static, stale program identifier. It's occasionally gotten little pop-up indicators, but basically it's been small and unchanging. Windows 8's tiles create a unique and innovative method to reveal real-time content on screen, without forcing you to dive into the world of the app.
Windows 8 introduces the lapdesktabbooktop. Whatever you want to call it, Windows 8 makes desktop computing portable by unifying the operating system across devices. Not much is known about the coming shape, style, and price of Windows 8 hardware, but we've already seen some touch screen laptops (mostly at Computex) that come close to the thinness of a tablet.
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