Microsoft unveils multi-touch Windows 7. World says “meh.”
Last night at the “All Things D” conference, Microsoft made a special announcement that they would be giving a sneak-preview of the “all new” Windows 7 UI. Like many others in the blogosphere, my interest was piqued. What had Microsoft cooked up? Would it pull them out of the rut they were in with Vista? Would it be mind-blowingly awesome?
The answer was a resounding no. At least to me. Here’s a video from the conference:
I’ll be honest. I didn’t want to say that. In fact I decided not to go with my gut instinct and to sleep on it before I gave my opinions. Unfortunately, there isn’t much positive I can say. It looks as if rumors are stating that Microsoft has dropped support of it’s new kernel in Windows 7 in favor of keeping the same architecture as Vista, and what they’ve added instead is a version of the Apple Dock, and some of the multi-touch functionality from Microsoft Surface.
Now, on the surface (pardon the pun), this seems pretty cool. I appreciate the fact that Microsoft is finally pushing the multi-touch technology into the mainstream OS. It opens up a lot of opportunity for some really neat software. Unfortunately, something tells me that most of the stuff they showed will end up being either marginalized or removed completely before Windows 7 ships, the same way that Vista shed features like a cat in summer. Microsoft will more than likely state that consumer PCs are not yet multi-touch capable in sufficient numbers, and remove most of the features out of the version of the OS that most OEMs will ship while they will split Windows 7 into any number of confusing and expensive SKUs ala Vista.
Imagine if you will “Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium for Multi Touch Tablet PCs”.
Yeah.
Not to say that the new UI isn’t interesting. Crunchgear leaked a bunch of screenshots prior to the conference which actually seemed pretty neat, if not a little too busy. Unfortunately, the UI layout in those screenshots was all over the place, they all seemed to be from different iterations of the OS. Microsoft admitted that these were early renderings and were not what you should expect to see come release time.
Time will tell how Microsoft manages to thread the needle between people who are used to the Windows UI, and people who are looking for something new and different. So far it’s a decent but unremarkable start. Sounds perfectly like Microsoft to me.