Watch out, Apple: Windows 8 could trump the iPad

Earlier this week, I outlined Microsoft’s apparent tablet strategy and the issues that could help it succeed or fail. Now that Microsoft has revealed its plans, I can better gauge its chances. My conclusion: Microsoft may win after all. The folks at Redmond seem to have bought the design philosophy on which Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, and the rest of the Apple team have based their remarkable iPad, iPhone, and Mac OS X resurrection: simplicity, intentionality, delight, and clarity of purpose. And they’ve taken it to heart in Windows 8 and its “touch first” approach to computing across PCs and tablets.

Demos of course are almost never as good as reality, but even with that in mind, I was blown away by what Microsoft has shown this week at its Build conference. And I have one serious caveat: Although Microsoft is giving developers touch-enabled Samsung Windows 8 tablets for testing, it is not letting the press borrow or use them, except (according to one PR staffer) for a few favored writers — that’s often what a tech company does when it has something to hide. So my enthusiasm may be misplaced. (We’ll know only when Windows 8 ships, likely in mid to late 2012.)

But if Windows 8 is nearly as good as the demos look, Microsoft could very well win the mobile wars, despite years of failures in Windows tablets and mediocre smartphone efforts. If Hewlett-Packard CEO Léo Apotheker had seen a preview of Windows 8 tablets, that would explain why he suddenly killed the WebOS-based TouchPad tablet last month. Windows 8 is very likely to squeeze Google Android out of second place in the tablet market — after all, Android is largely an iOS imitation, and I don’t see how Google will stand out if Microsoft joins Apple in offering compelling, differentiated innovation. In fact, for the first time in a long time, Microsoft may challenge Apple on the design and innovation fronts, and it could even relegate the iPad to runner-up status after a couple years unless Apple more fully merges Mac OS X and iOS in the interim, as Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5 have begun to do, to blunt Windows 8’s apparent pan-device advantage.

Windows 8 looks to be that good, at least in demos.

Microsoft’s strategy is to have a unified OS run across PCs and Intel x86-based tablets, along with the same apps and services. (ARM-based tablets will run only the new Metro-style apps, so they’ll have the same iOS/Mac OS X split Apple now has.) Through cloud-based state storage, apps will keep their settings and current work updated across all of a user’s devices connected to the same Windows Live account for fluid computing across the hardware. They can also be secured and managed using the same back-end tools.

That strategy could really give Apple a run for its money. Apple’s plan rests on a common OS and, accordingly, a single app and services library across its iPhone smartphone, iPod Touch PDA, and iPad tablet; the iCloud service will further unify them. Plus, Apple is drawing Mac OS X and iOS much closer together. Developers are using the same Xcode tools and many common libraries to create apps, and Apple is integrating capabilities across the two OSes, as the recent Mac OS X Lion and forthcoming iCloud both demonstrate.

But Microsoft’s use of Live takes what iCloud is doing to a new level: All native (Metro) Windows 8 apps will have space at Microsoft’s Live servers to save state and current work products. By contrast, iCloud syncs only those documents whose apps adopt the iCloud storage API. In other words, iCloud is optional and limited to document syncing, whereas Live is assumed and focused on letting an app’s state roll across all devices a user has.

Apple’s strategy has all mobile devices using the same OS (iOS), while PCs run a separate one (Mac OS X). Microsoft has PCs and tablets — if they use x86 chips, anyhow — running a common OS (Windows 8), and smartphones will have their own (Windows Phone). As Xcode is a common denominator for iOS and Mac OS developers, Visual Studio and its enhanced WinRT APIs and related tools are a common denominator for x86-based Windows 8 and — for Metro apps — ARM-based Windows 8 and Windows Phone developers.

I believe Apple broke iOS out of Mac OS X so that its mobile devices would not be perceived as portable Macs — a strategy that proved brilliant, as iOS devices have gained much more market share than Macs ever did, and indeed seem to be pulling Macs out of their decades-long ghettos.

For Microsoft, Windows’ near-universal presence is a strength to be leveraged, so it makes sense to reinvent Windows, making it a no-brainer for Windows 8 users to get a “compatible” tablet option. (I would do the same for smartphones, but Microsoft apparently believes that x86 just won’t cut it for smartphones, so can’t use the heavier, full Windows 8  OS on them.)

The key here is “compatible.” Microsoft’s many previous attempts to gain a presence in the tablet market — it’s been trying for a decade longer than the iPad has existed — have failed because its Windows OSes weren’t designed for the context. Slapping a pen- or touch-based interface onto an OS designed fundamentally for mouse and keyboard input didn’t work. Apps, common libraries, and OS services all assumed those input devices, and what they presented users onscreen was simply unsuited for pen or gesture control. A few industries created special tablet apps that were pen-oriented, but in essence that reduced Windows tablets to dedicated app devices, keeping it out of broad-based adoption. By contrast, Apple designed iOS for gesture-based input, and people took to it easily — and developers had to think in the mind-set to even be able to deliver apps.

This week, Microsoft explicitly admitted its old “finger as mouse” approach to touch was a bad idea. From what Microsoft has shown this week, it’s clear that Windows 8’s Metro UI is designed at the core for gesture-based input. Unlike Windows XP, Vista, and 7, its UI is not the standard Windows interface with touch technology slapped on. Microsoft may well have finally removed one of the key barriers to successful Windows tablets — assuming developers can create “big” apps like Office and Photoshop in Metro; if not, it will be hard to say Windows 8 tablets are any better than iPads.

Microsoft also risks breaking the experience on the desktop, where the vast majority of people still compute. (Although I believe we are moving into a post-PC world in which mobile devices will become dominant, that won’t happen overnight, and there will still be a place for old-style PCs as specialty workstations.) “Legacy” Win32s apps from Windows 7 and earlier won’t get the Windows 8 Metro UI goodness unless they are at least partially revised; even then, they’ll be limited.

Users will find that touch, syncing, and interapplication sharing won’t always work. (A big change in Windows 8 is the use of contracts, which provide a common template for sharing. Any apps that use the same contract can share information or state automatically. Thus, apps can work together without having been designed explicitly to.) Imagine picking up your Windows 8 tablet and launching an app that doesn’t support touch. Whoops! That can’t happen on an iPad precisely because it doesn’t run Mac OS X apps.

Microsoft’s pitiful touch-based version of Windows 7 showed how touchscreen PCs can be unnatural to use — for starters, the screen is in the wrong place. Yet Windows 8 assumes that all screens will be touchscreens by 2015. Microsoft says the Metro UI is designed for such vertical touching; see where it places the app bar for application functions and the charm bar for systemwide resources, as well as its use of a floating keyboard that, like the forthcoming iOS 5, has a split-display option for thumb typing. The idea is to keep people’s hands away from the center from the screen unless they are manipulating an object in that spot.

Microsoft says that approach works for both vertical monitors, such as on PCs, and horizontal ones, such as on tablets. Apple chairman Steve Jobs says vertical touchscreens are senseless, so Mac OS X encourages the use of touchpads. I can’t say for sure until I test Windows 8 both ways, but it does seem as if Microsoft has thought through this issue.

Still, Microsoft’s support for legacy applications on Intel x86-based systems and for two different types of touchscreens (flat and vertical) could confuse and turn off users. It’s fine if the UI differs between tablets and PCs; they are used differently and thus should have variations. Apple has shown that beautifully in iOS and Mac OS X, which share UI approaches but remain distinct where it makes sense. Microsoft has to reach similarly smart decisions. At first blush, it seems to have done so for Windows 8 and for Metro apps but Mixrosoft also showed almost no legacy apps, so it’s hard to tell what the real user experience is like when switching among application generations and across devices with different hardware capabilities.

If you remember the days when PCs were moving from DOS to Windows, you’ll recall the many apps whose Windows versions were just prettier than those on DOS — and these apps failed miserably, as anyone who used to use Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect can tell you. (It’s no accident that Excel was a Mac application first or that Windows Word shared almost nothing with DOS Word other than file format.) Microsoft’s apparent strategy creates that risk for today’s developers. But it introduces a liability for Microsoft: A substantial set of poor Windows 8 apps could make the whole Windows 8 platform look bad, leaving the momentum with the iPad for tablet apps and, ironically, with legacy Windows apps for the desktop.

Similarly, Windows 8 can deal with the sensor-heavy capabilities of tablets: accelerometers, gyroscopes, location detectors, orientation detectors, cameras, light sensors, and microphones. That’s great when you’re using a tablet, but developers need to be sure that their apps are not crippled when run on a PC without these sensors. Apple’s separation of the desktop OS from the mobile OS naturally avoids this issue, whereas Microsoft’s use of one OS across PCs and tablets introduces this new risk, posing a challenge that desktop developers are not familiar with.

Then there’s a market issue: Businesses have only recently begun deploying Windows 7 in significant numbers. Realistically, it’ll be years before they’re ready to deploy Windows 8; if it’s really different, it’ll make cautious IT organizations even warier. Maybe Windows 8 on tablets will be attractive enough — especially to the many in IT who dislike Apple and wish there was something else users wanted than iPads — to gain meaningful adoption and pull Windows 8 desktops along with it.

Or maybe developers will focus on consumer apps for Windows 8 tablets to reach the hundreds of millions of Windows users, making them less attractive to IT — and giving the iPad that much more time to solidify its existing business hold. Like it or not, the iPad is now considered as much a business tool as a consumer one, whereas Microsoft’s mobile efforts (the Kin, then Windows Phone) have been decidedly consumer-focused, with critical business security and management capabilities missing. Using Windows 8 for both desktop and tablet devices should solve the security and management issue on those devices.

Ironically, these adoption issues have more to do with developers than Microsoft. Sloppy developers could thwart Microsoft’s seeming reinvention of Windows from taking root. Or, as happened with Apple’s iOS, developers could wholeheartedly adopt the Windows 8 model and deliver an amazing portfolio of apps that pulls in users and drags IT behind them.

Microsoft’s different OS boundaries than Apple’s across PCs, tablets, and smartphones could give it a great advantage, but also be its Achilles’ heel. At this point, I think it’ll be a big advantage. If Microsoft delivers, of course.

This article, “Watch out, Apple: Windows 8 could trump the iPad,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.