Bill Gates: the Traditional PC Is Changing

Billly Gates writes "Bill Gates, in an interview with Charlie Rose last night, defended the move to Metro-ize Windows 8 and focus solely on the tablet experience (here's the video — tablet talk starts around 28 minutes in). When asked how traditional PC users will react, he explained that the world is moving into tablets, and a new PC needs to have both experiences integrated together. Also, he defended the move to build the Surface while charging his competitors a bundle for Windows 8. He says users have access to both experiences, whether it is a signature Microsoft one, or from an OEM. Is the a sign the desktop is dead or dying?" Gates stopped short of saying the traditional PC is dead, but dodged direct questions about its future. This is a big change to the stance he has advocated in years past.

Comments

Le sigh.

[girlintraining]

Mobile computing is the future -- just ignore the battery life.

Re:Winning!

[PPH]

Yeah, but ....

Asking Bill Gates about Microsoft's platform direction is like asking Mikhail Gorbachev about the future of Russia.

Re:Win8 is problematic however you slice it....

[Junta]

Not having a touch device, can't comment on how the interface changes, however:

of course it defaults to apps, since the Start Screen is all about listing and launching apps.

What I referred to was how I, in Win 7, will type a string in the 'search' and it will highlight "applications", "Files", and "control panel settings" (and probably other things) and present all results it finds, space allowing. In Win8, I wanted to do an update, I typed 'update' to search for windows update. It said no results. I stumbled over that, since "Windows Update" has always shown up there (in fact before Win 8 it showed up as an 'Application'). It took me a minute to realize I needed to click the "Settings Category" to get more results. When I pondered that a bit too long, the side bar even giving me the hint that 'Settings had 9 results' auto-hid, leaving the entirety of my screen real estate dedicated to the task of telling me it found nothing, and hiding the dozen or so hits it got out of site.