Windows 8 Metro And The End Of Multi-Tasking

The Register’s Trevor Pott recently spent a week tinkering with the Windows 8 consumer preview, and says that for power users who have had the menu + toolbar system burned into our muscle memory, Windows 8’s Ribbon is less than optimal, and that the Ribbon’s proliferation of the into many next-generation Microsoft software products illustrates that those of us who dislike it are being thrown under the bus, although alternatives and workarounds do exist. He observes that the takeaway message with Windows 8 Metro is that the people who find themselves unenchanted are simply afraid of change, their numbers small enough to constitute a rounding error that Microsoft won’t lose sleep over.

Having spent the past two decades of his life honing and refining his ability to multitask beyond skill, beyond experience, and into instinct, Pott observes that Metro’s “one thing at a time” approach is ruinous. I can make similar observations about the iOS and creeping iOSsification of Mac OS X. I join Pott in the impression that with Windows 8, Microsoft is demonstrating belief, as Apple has done with iOS and post-Snow Leopard OS X, that we’re on the cusp of a paradigm shift in computing, and that if that indeed be the case, many of us will find that it’s one we’re unable to adapt to.

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