Official: Windows 8 Release Preview Available First Week of June 2012
|They say a picture is worth a thousand words, right?
It reads “Announcement, Release Preview, First Week of June 2012” This was provided from the Building Windows 8 twitter handle showing an image from Japan’s Windows 8 Dev Days. So if you were using the consumer preview you can now circle a new date on your calendar.
As a reminder, the Release Candidate of Windows 7 was released on April 24, 2009 and released to manufacturing on July 13, 2009 and available to partners starting August 16, 2009 and in volume on September 1 with a consumer release on October 22, 2009. Windows 8 is a larger step than getting to Windows 7 and there’s less time left for them to complete it to make their release schedule (which is timed with the holidays) so let’s hope they have some extra Red Bulls on hand…
My personal opinion on windows 8 has not changed at all. I still think its a horrid interface slapped on top of an ugly version of windows 7. There are plenty of great under the hood improvements, but none of which will convince me to deal with the metro nonsense, the incredibly poor mouse and keyboard experience while using said nonsense, or sacrificing what is actually a fairly productive workflow environment for the ridiculous mess they’ve come up with this time.
So I started asking around. I travel around the country for a living and work with people in many different organizations and from many companies. All of whom work on windows day in and day out.
Not a single person I’ve talked with about windows 8 has had any positive things to say about it aside from “it boots fast”. And that comment came from a Microsoft employee two days ago. He followed that up with “the interface is horrible”. Most people I’ve talke with say they don’t like the metro interface. Most people also talk about how the start button being removed is a bad call, and they also hate the side panels that are designed for the touch interface but required in the desktop version as well.
All in all, not a single person I’ve spoken with over the past few months – all of whom are either MCSE, CISSP, Sec+ or Net+ certified, all of whom work on windows day in and day out – is in the least bit interested in bringing windows 8 into their personal life, OR trying to integrate it into their professional life. No one is interested in it.
My take from this? Windows 8 is going to have the same adoption issues (or worse) that windows vista did in corporate and government environments.