Why is it that all the fun stuff always happens in the news while I’m out of town? I’m on vacation in Hawaii staying at an “eco-friendly” Bed and Breakfast just when all this exciting XBOX ONE and Microsoft Windows 8.1 news is breaking with a crappy Internet connection. The B&B operators must think I’m crazy because I have an Orange Humvee parked out front of their “eco-lodge” and six computers networked on their hand made dining table. I just bought a printer and set that up as well. I’m trying to install the Windows 8.1 pre-release from my MSDN subscription so I can write about it and can’t get it downloaded over this primitive network. So please excuse my temporary content outage but I’m on “vacation”. Fortunately a complete lack of access to information and facts does not stop me from having opinions! So let’s talk about what I’m expecting to find when I finally do get Windows 8.1 installed and what I anticipate thinking of it in the meantime…
I think this may be a first for Microsoft, a major OS release for which the killer feature that will drive sales is that it stopped sucking. This is essentially what Windows 7 was to Windows VISTA but Microsoft has learned to recover from these disasters in only 12 months instead of six years which is a huge improvement for them. The next leap for them would be to learn to get major product releases right the first time. Maybe they’ll have cleaned up the XBOX ONE story before they actually ship it this year. I maintain that Windows 7 is the best OS Microsoft has ever shipped and hope that once the horrible UI experience in Windows 8 is out of the way the quality of the underlying OS may be able to shine through. That said, I really hate the new app UI look they keep touting. They really want to sell us on it but trying to make highly responsive interactive desktop UI’s look and feel more like web pages is a major step backwards. I’m hoping the trend will die quietly once people can use their desktops again.
Another interesting feature of Windows 8.1 is WebGL support which Microsoft had previously refused to support because of “security concerns”. I had assumed that this was a strategic position because Microsoft did a GREAT job of exposing access to DirectX 11.1 in their app platform for Windows 8. If Microsoft is really supporting WebGL, I’m going to have to take another look at it. It’s been many years since Kate Seekings, the first Direct3D evangelist and former President of Rendermorphics had VRML support added to Internet Explorer 4.0. VRML was a flop… for many good reasons but Kate was always passionate about 3D on the web and I agreed with her that it had tremendous potential. I have a great story about Microsoft’s early efforts to support 3D in the browser for another blog.
The cynic in me wants to observe that Microsoft’s support for WebGL in Windows 8.1 may also be a tacit acknowledgement that their own app market platform has not been the wild success that they had hoped, causing them to be more receptive to embracing open standards that they might otherwise have hoped to displace. I won’t have an opinion about whether or not this is a good thing until I have had a closer look at WebGL since Direct3D support from a web application is pretty damn nice to have and the vision behind WebGL had been pretty crappy in its earlier formulations. It’s also possible that Microsoft is content that now that WebGL is “secure” it is also sufficiently slow and limiting to not be competitive with Direct3D for web application design. I’m reserving judgment…
I am also hoping to see some advance in C++ AMP, Microsoft’s GPU accelerated computing API’s. I was really excited to see these in Windows 8 and had no trouble using them in one of my programs to get tremendous performance increases BUT I found the functionality too limiting for the kinds of applications I wanted to write and moved my work over to NVidia’s proprietary CUDA API’s which had the capabilities I needed. None-the-less, I would love to see AMP become as functional as CUDA across all GPU’s.
Overall I expect to like Windows 8.1. It SOUNDS as though Microsoft has addressed the issues that were INCREDIBLY irritating about it and rendered it unusable for professional computing. My impression of Windows 8 was that it might have been a nice improvement over Windows 7 if it were not for the unusable new desktop UI paradigm. I will be shocked if I discover something new to love about it, but remain… hopeful…
Gotta go, the B&B owners are giving me a funny look sitting out here by the beach puffing on my cigar and banging on my keyboard. Apparently I’m not enjoying their “eco-lodge” correctly…
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