Build Windows 8 Keynote Quick Hits

So after the initial Sinofsky, et al keynote what do we know and do we like it?

New info:

No release date yet, build quality not date driven.

Developer preview available for download tonight at 8:00 pm PT at dev.windows.com.

Quick thoughts:

.Net and Silverlight are now legacy technologies.

It really is the biggest change since Windows 95. Bigger if you consider the money at stake.

MS is putting consumer sales ahead of business sales.

It will take a long time for businesses to upgrade due to the learning curve. Businesses will need to budget for users learning a second interface since ERP apps will not be redone.

Microsoft is betting the farm on Windows 8.

Please Don't Use Download.com to Download Our Software

We've just found out that Cnet's download.com is now wrapping downloads with their own installer. Their installer by default add's a new toolbar to the user's browser, changes the user's search engine, and changes the user's home page.

We use download.com as a means of distributing our free "Simple Warehouse Mapper" product. We find their actions obviously disappointing and against our best interests.

We have asked CBS Interactive, which owns Cnet, to remove our product from all of their websites.

If you are looking to download "Simple Warehouse Mapper" please do not download it from Cnet's download.com website or from any other third party. Please download it from the product's home website: simplewarehousemapper.com.

Thanks

Best New Hardware Requirement Possible For Windows 8

A solid state drive.

For desktops and laptops a solid state drive would be a line in the sand between previous versions of Windows and W8. The user experience would be enhanced tremendously with the following capabilities:

• Instant On / Off
• Faster pre-load of common application components such as .NET and Office
• Quick launch of VM's wrapping legacy applications

What about additional cost? Increased cost would not be a negative. The change in performance would be so pervasive throughout the product that users would pay the higher price for the added usability. The added price would help in motivating consumers to upgrade by bringing a sense of cachet back to the Windows platform and halting the race to the bottom by manufacturers.

What about reliability? Right now consumer targeted solid state drives have a much higher rate of failure than standard hard disks. By making an early call on requiring solid state drives Microsoft would bring economies of scale into play to increase the reliability via redundant components and faster iteration of designs.

A solid stated drive would allow a Windows 8 computer to truly differentiate itself.

The Impact of Solid State Drives

I've been thinking about the impact of SSD's in three areas: databases, frameworks, and virtual machines.

I've always been one who is willing to drop down to an ISAM/hash datastore when the application had stringent speed requirements. I can see that becoming a waste of time if average data read/write time is reduced by 95-99%. Higher level data access methods (that I've sneered at in the past) will become the only economically competitive methods for creating applications.

For frameworks the impact looks similar. The startup penalties for frameworks like .Net and Java disappear with SSD's. The use of native code compilers, which until now have justified longer development times with better performance, become impossible to justify economically.

There will be minimal speed penalties for working in a virtual machine. With virtual machines the question becomes why commit yourself to a particular OS? We will no longer be tightly coupled to the OS running on top of the hardware.

I expect that by Christmas 2011 the machines for sale in Best Buy will have SSD storage instead of magnetic hard drives.

Its time to move away from the metal.

Its All About The Design

The thing classic and web business application developers must know about Silverlight and other RIA applications is that the applications will be judged by a different set of standards than current and legacy applications. They must first of all be beautiful. Beauty is the first step to immersion. Beauty for business applications moves beyond the classic grid and tabular displays to people interfaces. User interfaces are dying. If we want to coral the current information overload, if we want to move from providing data to providing almost intelligence than we must move from user interfaces to People Interfaces.

People Interfaces will be more expensive to create than past generation applications, especially with the first generations of design tools. They will be more difficult to manage the development of so they will initially have a lower on-time, on-budget delivery rate. Until these projects truly move beyond user interfaces they will be limited to playthings with no delivered value for the additional cost.

People Interfaces are going to be hard. We have yet to master the personal part of the IT / Business interface when dealing with data and now we will be trying to pre-process data into something with a deeper meaning. We can't do that unless we understand the meaning being sought.

Starting RIA's are the first steps on a very long road. We may not even take that road just yet. Which will the market favor more: mobility or richness?