For any who were following the Steve Sinofsky technical preview of what’s coming in Windows 8, you may have noticed a trend emerging. Microsoft has been shifting their products and services to the Metro paradigm for a few years, but until now, the interface made famous by Zune and more recently Windows Phone never made it to Microsoft’s flagship product–Windows.
At the AllThings D9 conference earlier today, Steve Sinofsky had the unfortunate detriment to sit down with known anti-Microsoft “journalist” Walt Mossberg. I put journalist in quotes because it’s a slap in the face to real journalist out there to be labeled the same as Mr. Mossberg. His snarky comments and inappropriate questions not just today, but over the past few years is both insulting and disrespectful to the Microsoft guys who are just doing their jobs, but i digress…
Sinofsky traversed through the interview with Mossberg to give us a glimpse of where Windows is heading and it’s very similar to what you may see on your Windows Phone everyday. A live-tiled interface will act as the start screen for Windows 8 and lends itself nicely to tablet and other handheld computing devices. As you can see from the picture below, Windows 8’s tablet interface uses grids of live tiles to bring to the forefront the things most users really care about. And for those of you that may be worried, the classic Windows Desktop is still underneath all of that, so you can just as easily switch between the two if or when it may be necessary.
I don’t usually cover much by way of Windows desktop computing here at Windows Phone Metro, but I figured that it’s worth seeing where Microsoft is heading regarding the future of handheld computing and how the Windows desktop OS may eventually effect Windows Phone. If you’d like to read more about the future of Windows and even see a brief, but interesting, demo of Windows 8 in action, click here.
Windows Phone Metro 