Tablets are trash. How are you supposed to program on that touchy-pokey doucheinterface.
You're not. The whole idea is to
keep you from unauthorized activities like programming by giving you one controlled source for all your software. Tinkerers are dangerous!
Microsoft's problem is that older windows variants are still perfectly usable.
Something tells me Win8 will not be that great a success and that WinXP, Vista, and Win7 will be around for quite awhile longer.
This is exactly it - they've been struggling to keep people upgrading ever since XP, the only real architectural improvement 7/Vista has to offer is better integration of 64-bit mode, AFAIK. Everything else they could just as easily release as XP service packs.
Windows 8 is like Windows 1 - you can either have a bunch of small panes tiled together, or a full-screen.
Remember how popular Windows 1 was?
Not really. We had it on the shelf for sale.
Psst, the answer is "was laughed out of the market." The difference, of course, is that the Microsoft of 1985
knew it was stupid, and only disabled free placement of windows because Apple was going around suing everybody, whereas whatever idiot design students they've got on the Metro team probably think they're being "elegant."
That aside, the market for desktops is dismal, it hasn't gone anywhere in years. The GROWTH is in mobile devices.
HP doesn't seem to think so, they decided to keep manufacturing PCs after toying with the idea of quitting, but they didn't feel the need to keep their tablet business alive...
Touch interfaces are here to stay, at least until direct neural input is possible. On the desktop we'll see traditional keyboards and trackpads/mice augmented by touch. Nobody wants to do database entry on a touch screen, but what about occasionally touching to get a photo in the right angle? Or on a browser? Or in iTunes?
Why would I want an interface that requires me to lift my hand up to the screen when I can just as easily (if not
more easily) point and click by moving my hand over six inches to the mouse (if it isn't there already?) Touchscreens at least make some kind of sense on smartphones, where the screen is small enough to be easily covered by finger and wrist motion - on desktop screen sizes (and desktop screen positions) they just make no damn sense.