What BUILD should have been
Disappointed and confused. Those were my main reactions to the BUILD conference last month.
Disappointed: there was quite a bit of secrecy around the event, but in classic Microsoft style, they announce a product that isn't going to ship for 9-12 months. Are you kidding me! Microsoft's main play into the tablet space is going to be towards the end of 2012, by which time we'll no doubt have seen the third generation iPad, and no doubt countless Android tablets. And one of these Android devices might even get some traction. Not forgetting Amazon's recent foray with its Kindle Fire.
Confused: Metro rocks. It's on the WinPhone7. But nobody uses the WinPhone7. In my opinion, one big reason is too little too late. There's not a compelling enough reason to switch from an iPhone/Android to the WinPhone7.
I would have gone the Apple/Google route and used the WinPhone7 OS as the OS for the tablet. There's already the app store, developers, tools to have a real go at the market, but I fear by the end of 2012, we'll be seeing Win8 tablets come out and say too little too late: a repeat of the phone story. This was an opportunity to build both products into something compelling. My prediction is now WinPhone7 will go the way of the Zune. And Kin. And maybe Win8 on tablets will follow this course.
NIH
The other odd choice is the Metro / XAML stack and WinRT; the new chunks of Win8. Metro is already alive on the WinPhone7 where developers use either XAML with a Silverlight-like framework or XNA (typically for game development) but clearly the Windows team didn't want to take that, they'll re-implement it themselves: they just decided to do some sort of COM-like offering with WinRT with a seemingly rewritten XAML stack. Jeez, those guys sure know how to put themselves behind the eight-ball rather than leveraging existing work - by other teams within Microsoft no less.
Desktop Mode
As already mentioned above, I would have used the WinPhone7 OS for tablet devices. It just seems to make more sense to me. It's written for touch input and smaller form factors. I've downloaded the Win8 developer preview onto my PC and, yes, the Metro UI works.
But works well? NO!
It just doesn't feel natural. Maybe it's just me. It's clearly there are two modes: Metro and desktop, and when you jump, or are pushed, between the two its jarring. Disturbingly so in my experience. I think if I had a tablet that I was controlling with my fingers, I'd never want to see the desktop mode.
So it goes without saying that I believe Microsoft should have gone the whole hog and said the tablet OS is Metro only.
Wrong
I could obviously be seriously wrong and concede there is an argument for trying to merge the two worlds. Perhaps it will be great to be able to jump to desktop mode to run some non-Metro application on your tablet. If it works well, this may give us that best of both worlds. Or it'll be the worst of both. Time will ultimately tell.
Come all ye web devs
A big ado seems to have been made about appealing to these "HTML and JS" developers. However, learning Objective-C doesn't appear to have held back the iPhone! If the market is there then developers will want to write for your platform. Given that the Javascript you'll be writing for Metro apps will be for Win8 only, this isn't an open standards/multi-platform kind of a deal. It's as if Microsoft said, "hey, all the cool kids are writing HTML and Javascript these days, let's let them write apps for Win8 in HTML/JS". OK, it's neat to be able to re-use skills, but just because you can doesn't mean you will get those guys to come to your platform.
Shipping is a feature
Bottom line: to be blown away, I'd have liked to see a tablet shipping in at least a month or two. That would have got my attention. Just compare it to the recent Apple and Amazon events: one announces the iPhone4S the other the next range of Kindles all shipping within a short period of time in relation to the event.
What if Microsoft had shown a really polished tablet device with some nice hardware and the Metro UI coming out within a month or so of the BUILD conference?
Now that would have been an awesome event.
