I work on the Windows team and was front row at the big Win8 planning meeting. It was good fun with Steve Ballmer shouting right in front of me (I'd never experienced that before... he's amazing at getting a crowd going).<p>I can't say much... but these slides are laughable (and <i>if</i> real, designed for some other company's execs/marketers) I joined Microsoft this past September having never been a Windows person. I've done most of my professional development on linux, and you can pry my macbook pro from my cold dead hands.<p>With that in mind, Win8 is looking awesome and it's something that I want to use right now. Microsoft is really getting their shit together. Win8, if it's even a fraction of what is planned, is going to change things permanently. This is a good thing considering Steve Jobs seems to have given up on the desktop as of this most recent WWDC.
It's so telling that a slide like this is needed somewhere at MSFT: <a href="http://msftkitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/All-Eyes-on-Apple.png" rel="nofollow">http://msftkitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/All-Eyes-o...</a>
According to one of these slides, "humans" is short for "mainstream consumers".<p><a href="http://msftkitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Windows-8-Consumer-Target-Audiences.png" rel="nofollow">http://msftkitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Windows-8-...</a>
I wonder if they will call it Windows 8, given that Windows 7 is a homophone for "Windows Heaven" and Windows 8 is thisclose to "Windows Hate".<p>Just my personal tinfoil hat marketing conspiracy theory.<p>edit: removed unnecessary potshot.
I thought it was telling that many of the slides are full of the same kind of meaningless waffle you see in management or sales/marketing presentations at other big companies. I'm actually a little surprised at that. For all its past transgressions, Microsoft does have a reputation for hiring smart technical people, and in recent years a lot of the technology it has produced has been respectable again. I somehow assumed the people running the show would be of the same calibre, with clear ideas and well structured plans for realising them, but that doesn't appear to be the case if whoever wrote the presentation(s) used here is representative.