2012 Prediction: Prowess
Windows 8, Not So Fast
It’s fun to speculate about Windows 8. We have something early to touch and it is fun to think about the technical possibilities on a new platform. What we know is that there is a new Windows desktop that works differently than Windows has before. I predict we’ll see general availability of Windows 8 in 2012; however I predict it is going to be late in the year and could even slip into 2013. From there it is going to be a very long slow rise to maturity.
How Windows 8 is received by customers is going to depend largely on how the platform is captured and embraced by devices and software. The overwhelming majority of us rely on these two important and largely independent ecosystems functioning at full speed to provide us the seamless environment we rely on to do our work. Out of the chute, these two ecosystems will not work optimally on a new, very different platform. With a change as big as Windows 8, it is going to take time for hardware and software to catch up. You have to expect that the first devices are going to have problems, bugs and slow customer learning. If software takes advantage of the Metro desktop, it probably won’t do it well initially.
The end-state and the differentiator offered by Windows 8 - a fluid computing experience that allows you to move seamlessly from the information consumption-oriented touch experience to the high productivity, conventional PC input keyboard-and-mouse experience. This is a great thing for people like me who have to switch devices to access a file or the applications to get people what they need, or even just be able to type faster. This assumes that hardware will be elegant enough to allow the tablet form factor to be light and mobile and for the full PC experience to be powerful.
This deficiency will keep organizations from deploying it in the immediate term. Most mid-size and larger businesses lack the political will to accept the risks with this big jump. But once Windows 8 is available, Windows 7 will not, and I expect downgrade rights to be limited or non-existent. So we’ll face the scenario of sales happening around Windows 8 with a lot of internal downgrade to Windows 7, or shoehorning Windows 8 to look and act like Windows 7.
This brings to light a final prediction for 2012: heterogeneous environments rule. There will be more Macs in the enterprise. There will be more versions of Windows running concurrently within organizations than ever before. There will be a wider diversity of devices, and more ways to run different operating systems on all of them. IT is left with the onerous task of controlling this, rationalizing this, and policing this. While I don’t think there will be a prevailing solution or toolset, I think we will see more attention paid to IT policy and security standards.
