For screens that do not respond to touch, Microsoft has built in mouse and keyboard equivalents for each tap and swipe. It's the operating system that Microsoft expects us to run on our tens of millions of everyday PCs. It's fresh, efficient and joyous to use-all on a touch-screen tablet.īut this, of course, is not some special touch-screen edition of Windows.
Using a series of fluid, light finger taps and swipes across the screen on a PC running Windows 8, you can open programs, flip between them, navigate, adjust settings and split the screen between apps, among other functions. The gamble was Windows 8, and the direction is touch. It made a billion-dollar gamble that personal computing is taking a new direction. The inspiration for just about every major Microsoft initiative can be traced back to a successful predecessor: Windows (Macintosh), Internet Explorer (Netscape), Bing (Google), Zune (iPod).īut in late 2012 Microsoft broke from the pack. For decades the cynical observer could be forgiven for viewing Microsoft as a giant copying machine.
