Earlier this week all the tech blogs were ablaze with news about Microsoft Windows 8. I personally read about 6 – 7 articles about their new operating system. Before you get too excited, it’s not ready yet and will not be ready until some time next year (and I suspect later next year). Yesterday Microsoft released a developer preview for software engineers to download and start playing around with. By far the best article, and the one I agree with the most was entitled “Sorry Apple, Windows 8 ushers in the post-pc era“. The author captured my exact feelings about the current state of tablets right now. Good for certain tasks, not for others.
Good for Inspection Software
The current generation of tablets are great for tasks that are intended to be conducted in the field as well as casual computing and note taking. Job site audits are a great example of a task that works great on a tablet device. In general, inspections and quality assurance tasks are something that works very well with tablets. That being said, wouldn’t it be great if you were using your tablet to run your safety inspection software and then you could have full PC functionality to work on that whitepaper or proposal?
Bad for Writing Essays
Have you ever tried to write a long document on a tablet computer such as the iPad? It just isn’t that suitable for that type of task (in my opinion). Sure, some people will argue that you can get a keyboard for it and some sort of app for Word documents, but it’s not ideal for power computing. Let’s assume you could squeeze out a simple Word document. How about running Photoshop? Not happening.
What Windows 8 could (hopefully) represent is 1 platform to rule them all. A great tablet user interface and a form factor that would allow me to run all of my full featured applications is something I would pay for in a heart beat. It may be just what Microsoft needs to get back in the tablet game.
