Review: Windows 8 a big misstep for Microsoft

   
The venerable PC is at a crossroads. Sales growth has slowed to a crawl. And consumers and developers are increasingly turning their time and attention to smartphones and tablets.
 
Pressured by that trend, Microsoft is updating Windows to make PCs work more like smartphones and to bring Windows to a whole new class of devices: iPad-like touch-screen tablets. Last month, the company launched what it calls a "consumer preview" of Windows 8, the next version of its flagship operating system. The preview is not a final version - that isn't expected until at least this fall - but it's close.
I've been playing around with the Windows 8 preview for several weeks. I loaded it onto a several-year old Dell laptop, in part because that's what I had available and in part to see what users of traditional PCs can expect from the new software. I hope to eventually test out the software on a tablet.
My conclusion: For PC users, Windows 8 is a major misstep.
Perhaps its biggest problem is that it has two separate and largely incompatible parts. It feels like Microsoft took a nice dress and attached it to an equally fine pantsuit and tried to pass it off as one garment. It just doesn't work.
The two pieces are a new interface called "Metro" and the old, traditional desktop inherited from past versions of the software.
The desktop interface looks and works much as it did in Windows 7, except that you won't find a Start button or Start menu, both of which have been core features of the software since Windows 95 debuted about 17 years ago. And you no longer see the desktop when you start up Windows.
Instead, you see the new Metro interface, which Microsoft developed originally for its Windows Phone 7 smartphone operating system. The interface is composed of a series of application squares or "tiles" arrayed on a flat background. The app tiles are more than just static program icons; they can display snippets of updated information, such as your next appointment or the current temperature.