How Microsoft Could Do Windows 8 Right

Microsoft’s next operating system is due out in less than a year, but many are already signing it off as dead-on-arrival. Some feel this way because of its focus on mobile platforms over the traditional PC, while others feel that its simply an unnecessary upgrade from an already solid Windows 7 experience. Well Microsoft, if you’re listening (which I doubt), here’s how you could blow people’s minds away with the next best thing you’ve ever created!

Microsoft’s Ongoing Stagnation

There’s a lot of debate going on about Microsoft as a corporation these days. They rarely pay anything out to their shareholders, and despite jumping into every market under the heavens, they’ve only had reasonable success in few ventures beyond their original two (the operating system and office suite). Yet still, Microsoft has enough cash in the bank to payroll entire countries should they decide to do so. Not a bad position to be in if you have someone at the helm smart enough to take advantage of it.

Everything from phones to web services have thus far been lackluster accomplishments at best. Rumors constantly abound about what company Microsoft may buy next and send to an early grave. Remember Hotmail? Yahoo may be next. Nokia is now looking suspiciously bought-out, though Windows based phones have yet to take off despite them being, in my opinion, a decent platform with good hardware backing it up.

Why is this happening to Microsoft? Simple, because they’re no longer a leader in a bright, new world of innovation and technology. Rather than creating new technologies, they’re busy watching and buying (picking) off the stragglers who are already losing. Microsoft no longer jumps ahead by taking risks, but prefers to stand in wait while others take chances and either pay the price or stumble into the next great thing. Some might even say that this is the way Microsoft has always been. They “borrowed” the idea of a graphical user interface from Apple (who borrowed it from Xerox). They “borrowed” the idea of an office suite from companies like WordPerfect. However, in both of those cases, their borrowed ideas brought about software products that people chose to buy. The products were available at the right time, on the right platforms, and had the right features.

Now, to succeed, they just need to do it again.

The Start of a Solution

One of the few ventures where Microsoft was able to beat the odds and is now doing well is in the game console market. They lost a lot of money in order to get there, but if you walk into any video game store these days, you can’t deny their success. My last venture to a local GameStop was riddled in green walls painted with the Xbox 360 logo, pushing the Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii back into their own small corners.

The Xbox 360 was never my console of choice. I much preferred the Wii with its amazing motion controllers that let you experience games in whole new way. So did a lot of other people, as the Wii was, in the beginning, the number one selling console of the new generation. Everyone loved it except for Microsoft and Sony who were both green with envy. Sony tried to mimic the Wii motion controllers with its own incarnation of a glowing bubble on a stick, while Microsoft, in consistent fashion, purchased technology from an Israeli company to help solve the issue. That technology, combined with in house research, brought about the Kinect; a camera based system that detects body movements and gestures without the need for any sort of handheld device. Something that Microsoft expected to bring the Xbox up to speed with the Wii, instead blew light years past it, and they’ve been trying to recover and steer straight ever since.

 

People Want What People Want

The Kinect was a hit, and it still is. Companies had lost sight of the dream of controllerless gaming, and were too focused on duplicating the middle step taken by the Wii motion controllers. Microsoft, whether by design or possibly by accident, reached the end goal far sooner than anyone ever expected to.

Science fiction authors have long pondered about the future means of interfacing with technology. Even in a somewhat recent movie entitled Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character needed to don a special glove in order to communicate via gestures with his holographic display. Are you aware that we are now past that? In a single stroke, Microsoft made the future obsolete (though I still want a flying car).

The Kinect is able to follow your hands, your body, gestures, and soon, even your facial expressions. Several popular games on the Xbox 360 can now judge your dancing and sporting positions without so much as a single touch to the device. Even the multimedia experience on the Xbox is getting an overhaul to use the Kinect system in order to allow full control over watching movies and television shows via nothing more than voice and gestures (even Star Trek didn’t handle gestures until the Holodeck in The Next Generation).

Lets Bring It Together

Microsoft took nearly a decade after Windows XP to create a version of their operating system that consumers trusted enough to start upgrading their computers; that was Windows 7, released in late 2009. Soon, only three years later, Microsoft is hoping to to give users another reason to pull out their credit cards and deal with another upgrade headache in the form of Windows 8.

Slated for a possible release in late 2012, Windows 8 thus far looks like a complete overhaul to the user experience. Replacing the age old start menu with a more tablet like application screen, and moving toward a ubiquitous interface for both desktop and mobile users alike, Microsoft is hoping to simplify computers the world over.

Initial impressions of the developer preview have been mixed though. Many have complained that the new touch-based menus don’t translate well to mouse and keyboard commands, thus presenting a major hurdle that Microsoft needs to overcome if they’re to please the majority of PC users. Overcome it they can though, and here’s how:

Step 1: Make a version of the Kinect available for PCs and price it below $70.

A beta SDK (software development kit) for Kinect on Windows has already been released, showing that Microsoft is at least headed in the right direction. Users have been begging for this already, and even though it’s only been released for developers and select technical groups, it’s not too late for Microsoft to change their minds.

Furthermore, by dropping the price down below $70, the Kinect becomes another peripheral like the mouse and keyboard; something that users are willing to drop money on without considering it a big investment. If enough users purchase it (and at that price, I believe they will), Microsoft can become the market leader in camera-gesture-based input on computers, giving them the opportunity to custom design the software libraries to their liking, and thus aiming developers towards their platform.

Step 2: Create a translation interface between Kinect gestures and touch screen input.

What’s the biggest annoyance with using a tablet or other touch-screen device? Fingerprints! Let me say it again… fingerprints! Despite manufacturers’ attempts to come up with oleophobic screen coatings that repel those nasty little blotches of oil, they’ve only succeeded in delaying the inevitable.

Imagine now, a computing experience where you don’t need to actually touch the screen: you merely wave your hand from left to right or up and down to change the page or scroll through content. Keep using your mouse and keyboard where applicable, but feel free to wave your hands instead. This will allow a smooth and intuitive blending of input controls, much in the same way the mouse was added to the keyboard on general computing devices in the 1980s.

So much of this is, or soon will be, available on the Xbox 360. Why not move it to Windows 8 as well? There’s a strong possibility that Microsoft is already planning on doing some, or all of this. If they are, they’ll have a hit on their hands that will revolutionize computer use for the next decade. If not, it’ll show that Microsoft is so far disconnected from the end user that their death knell is wholly expected. Come on Microsoft, show us that you can create what users want!