US Edition Since the launch of Windows 3.1, two decades ago, Microsoft has been the company that made the software that was inflicted on every PC user around the world: functional, sometimes frustrating and seldom chosen voluntarily, it defined generations of computing. This week in New York, the firm tried to reinvent itself for a new era, hoping that now users who have bought iPads or Google phones will instead choose to use its Windows 8 software.
That may sound like a tall order, but the company could just achieve it. Windows 8 comes with flagship hardware, called the Surface tablet, and combines many of the popular features of the Xbox gaming console with a new Microsoft Office, maps and even clever cloud storage and integration with social networks. The software has been tested by 16million eager pre-release downloaders, for 1.24billion hours in total.
It looks, for once, rather lovely, too. Windows 8 revolves around a new ‘Start screen’ rather than the traditional start menu, and on that screen ‘live tiles’ display snippets of the apps they represent. So your most recent emails, photographs from Facebook and what’s trending online are all instantly visible at a glance. Swipe from the right of the screen to bring up basic menu options that let you, say, search your PC, or swipe from the left to cycle through your open applications.
And all that swiping is key to understanding Windows 8. It is built for touchscreen computers and tablet PCs, and aims, as Chief Executive Steve Ballmer put it, to make computing fun again. Even working can feel elegant, he implied. As Michael Gartenberg, a Gartner analyst, put it, “Surface is a new category of device and one that will make sense for many consumers.”
At the heart of this new approach is both a conundrum and an opportunity: Microsoft has been forced to adapt to a world that has been defined by computers where it has no real expertise. Tablets and mobile phones have offered new ways of working, but have been dominated by Google and Apple. Microsoft knows that it must thoroughly adapt if it is to survive. Where it used to account for around 90 per cent of all computer operating systems, now it accounts for just a third of all ‘smart devices’ sold. Mobile phones and tablets have decimated its dominance.
While it is Apple that has shaped this new landscape, however, many analysts feel the iPad- maker is now taking on the role more usually associated with Microsoft: it has become the giant player, dominating but, if its two most recent launches are anything to go by, now struggling to innovate at the pace it once mustered. The iPhone 5 has been lauded as an excellent iPhone, and the iPad Mini is a well regarded tablet. But neither of these two devices has surprised users or critics with unexpected features. Samsung does that instead.
Windows 8, however, has garnered praise for being a system that is, in promise at least, designed with far more flair than is usually associated with Microsoft. The Surface tablet has been praised for exceptional design and caused more excitement than any other product this year. And on Monday Microsoft will finally unveil the phones that complement it. So there’s an outside chance that Microsoft, now in many ways the underdog, may yet take on Apple at its own game. The standards on both sides have never been higher, and the competition can only benefit consumers.