I think Microsoft is simply [Much?] less Windows-centric, at the same time the world is becoming less centered on desktop PCs. PCs are by nature Jack-of-all-trades affairs, used for everything from typing text in Notepad to web browsing to extremely sophisticated & powerful rendering 3D, but if what you want to do is centered on Facebook they can be overkill in the extreme. They're tops for gaming until the next console comes out, then they slip a bit for a few years until that console starts falling behind again. At any rate MS is expanding everything Xbox; trying, hoping to capture a big portion of the cell phone & tablet markets; trying to create an App Store to rival Apple; trying to revive, push their software as a service models [i.e. the cloud etc.]; continuing to spend huge resources on Bing.
Somewhere in all that is win8 with its Start Menu gone AWOL & touch screen interface [Metro], giving the impression that maybe its got some sort of dual personality disorder. IN all truth the Start Menu was/is getting a little old & unwieldy, especially if you have a lot of apps -- according to MS, Jump Lists are much more popular. Metro however gives us an alternative -- not a replacement. If you like casual games I think Metro *should* be great, because right now those games waste a ton of your PC's resources while often requiring D3D hardware... with Metro ideally your PC will run cell phone/tablet versions. Hopefully that'll mean Metro games won't have high or strict hardware requirements, will cost less, & will be more plentiful. You'll just have to get beyond an obviously touch screen interface, which I think with a mouse just tends to *look & feel* more wrong than it actually is. For more serious stuff Metro just goes away with a single key press or mouse click, & you're back in essentially an improved win7.
... said Win 8 will boot up in 7 seconds if installed to an SSD ... when I first installed win 7 to what was then my new SSD. It took 24 seconds ... Thats from a cold start. Doing a restart takes a little loner at 45 seconds...
Win8 basically has better memory management, so less is loaded & less is kept in memory. Beyond that however win8 doesn't dramatically re-engineer the way Windows starts -- instead it's designed so you don't always have to, or want to shut down in the 1st place. Win8 is better than 7 when it comes to suspending everything, storing the Windows state & powering most everything off, & then when you press the power button you simply wake it up, restore that Windows' state much like in the past with Hybrid Sleep &/or Hibernation. If your PC has a recent Intel chipset on the motherboard there's a good chance you can come close to that win8 startup performance right now by installing/using Intel's Rapid Start. And you *might* get the same low start times, or close to it without Windows installed to a SSD but on a Hybrid or regular drive, using a SSD to store the system state -- using Intel's Smart Response [caching often used files & data on a small SSD] *might* boost things further. Note that when working with or discussing SSDs, write times tend towards slow, with fast read times -- new controllers may improve or even fix that, but if you dig enough you'll usually find I think that the write specs advertised depend on using certain benchmarking software & are not what you'll see real-world using a SSD as a hard drive replacement. You would expect Windows to work well on a SSD because once it's loaded, Windows itself doesn't write that much to disk, but it doesn't read that much from disk either, so the main benefit might well be just those faster start times [depending on available RAM etc.]. Long story short, I'd expect Windows installed to a SATA III hybrid drive [*maybe* to a non-hybrid drive], with the system state stored on SSD, to be as fast or faster on waking [starting Windows from a non-powered off state] with a good chance it'd be faster overall as well.
I'm quite happy to re learn a new OS. That said, I wonder if Win 8 will go the way of Win ME and Vista; both of which were flops and quickly superceeded.
For me Win 7 has so far been the best operating system I've ever used.
*IF* you're into all the added extras that MS packed into win7, win8 might be a disappointment -- initially it might even feel like a step back without Aero. OTOH if win8's better memory management means your software &/or games run faster/better, stuff like that might not matter... if there's enough of a performance boost, shouldn't matter to anyone whether win8 is a popular success or failure. :)
ME introduced stuff that showed up in XP. Vista pioneered most of what win7's got under the hood. Fair or not both got dissed, that made them unpopular to run/use, that meant less of a demand &/or market for software, drivers, & fixes, & without those 3 they were harder to use -- a sort of self-fulfilling circle. If instead of Vista Microsoft jumped straight to 7, you'd have still had the same hardware/driver/software incompatibilities that made new Vista users cringe -- instead the companies making hard & software had years to adapt while old XP hardware wore out & so on. Win8 builds on 7 which built on Vista so those sorts of problems shouldn't occur. Instead MS is facing a week economy with probably lower new PC/laptop sales, & has to convince existing win7 users it's worth the upgrade. For most win7 users who don't need Metro, I expect the state of the economy this fall & next year will be the deciding factor.
