After 3 years of development which included an 18 month process unveiling it, 11 months of public evaluation and feedback, Microsoft will once again release a new version of its operating system called Windows 8, the successor to the massively popular Windows 7 operating system. Windows 8 is a significant upgrade in the company’s history and represents a drastic departure from previous generations of the operating system. Deprecating 17 years of user interface technology and investment to nothing more than an app while advancing and investing in new technologies and user experiences to bring the Windows platform forward in a world where users have embraced mobile devices in most facets of their lives. Microsoft describes Windows 8 as Windows ‘reimagined’ along with other descriptions such as ‘fast and fluid’, Windows 8 does indeed live up to those words. The ActiveWin Team has been evaluating the final release over the past month and we have come to some conclusions. Read on to find out if this is a release worth upgrading to, especially from the mighty Windows 7.

The Tablet PC, a device heavily promoted and guided by Microsoft for many years. If you look at the Company’s role in tablet computing, you could pretty much say, it has been a long sought after goal of Microsoft to be successful in the market. Products such as Windows Pen Computing and the Windows XP Tablet PC in more recent times have been the early attempts by Microsoft to move Windows and computing beyond the traditional PC form factor (keyboard and mouse). They have all failed, failed in the sense that they just did not garner the same attention like mainstream devices, even the traditional PC form factor itself continues to be a remarkably popular product after 30 years on the market and it will continue to be strong in its traditional sense of system unit, display, keyboard and mouse. The thing is, the PC is not the center of our lives anymore, people are not stationary, they don’t believe in doing things in one place while the world passes them by. It’s all about real time communication, instantaneous activities from social networking, news, music, videos, meaning today’s society is measured by one thing, an always on, always connected culture. If you are not in it or attempting to be in it from a software developer or hardware manufacturer’s point of view, then you are pretty much irrelevant.

A few months ago I was reading Walter Isaacs biography of the late Steve Jobs and it detailed some of the important milestones around Apple Inc’s massive return to relevance and dominance, from the iPod to the iPhone and now the iPad. The iPhone was particularly the foundation for where we are at in today’s society when it comes to computing and mobility. If you look at what Apple did for the Smart Phone, it pretty much enlightened the entire industry, just like it did many years earlier with the Macintosh and Mac OS. One of the interesting points taken from the novel was Steve Jobs early introduction to Tablet computing from none other than Microsoft.