Microsoft has shown an early look at Windows 8. The upcoming OS is designed to run on any machine, from a tablet to a desktop PC, and while it has some genuinely clever features, it is at heart yet another skinned version of regular old Windows. Here’s a video of it in action. Skip to a minute in if you don’t care to hear about how tired the poor Windows 8 team is after so much work.

The tile-based touch interface makes the iPad look old and dusty. The live info that can be seen at a glance, and the fast switching between apps is very slick. So is the split view, which lets you drag a second app in from the side and — after a pause — the existing app shifts over and makes space. Thus you can run two apps concurrently, which is enough to get most multitasking tasks done.

I’m also impressed by the thumb keyboard, an option which splits the QWERTY keyboard into two parts and shrinks them into the corners of the screen. I wish for this every time I use my iPad while standing up.

But this is, like every other tablet-friendly version of Windows, a skin over a desktop OS. The fancy new “Windows 8 apps” are written in HTML5 and Javascript, but you can also run regular ol’ Windows apps like Excel and Word. You even have access to Explorer and the full file system.

And given that developers can just run their existing apps in normal Windows mode, where will the incentive be to make amazing touch-only versions of applications, like the truly excellent Omni Outliner or GarageBand for the iPad? What we’ll get are a thousand Twitter widgets, turning the innovative tile skin into something akin to OS X’s Dashboard.

This also brings the disk-gobbling size of a desktop OS, along with the complications of running Windows (malware and the general weirdness of any desktop OS) and of course, the battery life of a desktop OS. That’s fine. Many people want a full-featured computer in tablet form. But remember that the iPad is selling in the millions precisely because it is simple, lacks a complicated file system and the like, and doesn’t require a nerd to keep it humming along. People who want all that already have a choice. It’s called a laptop.

Microsoft is almost there, but it needs to lose its obsession with putting Windows on everything. Take this cool, tile-based OS and put it on a tablet, sure. But leave the mouse-based, legacy desktop OS out of it. And for God’s sake, don’t call it Windows.

Previewing Windows 8 [Microsoft]

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