Windows 8: Big Upgrade, or Biggest Upgrade Ever?

Some–including Microsoft–have described Windows 8 as the biggest change to Windows since the seminal release of Windows 95 in 1995. And while it’s convenient to make such a claim–every Windows release in the years since has been compared to that milestone–the truth is far more dramatic.

Windows 8 isn’t the biggest Windows release since Windows 95. It’s the biggest release, ever .

To understand why this is so requires an understanding of the history of Windows and of the technologies that have driven each release. Early versions of Windows weren’t even proper operating systems. Instead, they were graphical shells that ran on top of the real OS, called MS‑DOS. MS‑DOS was a product of its era–the early 1980s–which is to say it was an arcane command‑line system that wasn’t user friendly in the least. But since MS‑DOS ran on the most popular computers of the day, many companies, including Microsoft, created user‑friendly shells that hid the complexity of MS‑DOS while retaining the system’s most vital attribute, its compatibility with MS‑DOS applications.

Some of these shells were essentially text‑based, like MS‑DOS itself, while some ran in special graphical modes. Microsoft’s approach, called Windows, used the latter approach because the company had been deeply involved in the creation of the first consumer‑oriented graphical OS, which shipped with the first Apple Macintosh. Sensing that graphical user interfaces, or GUIs, were the future, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates drove his company to create a PC alternative that worked on top of DOS.

Thanks to its shaky MS‑DOS underpinnings, early Windows versions weren’t technically very elegant. They also weren’t very pretty or usable, but by version 3.0 in the early 1990s, Microsoft suddenly had a hit on its hands and the industry began coalescing around this GUI, much as it had embraced plain old MS‑DOS a decade earlier.

Without getting too deep into snooze‑inducing technical arcana, there was a brief moment in the early 1990s when Microsoft was actually backing three desktop PC operating systems. First was MS‑DOS and Windows, a homegrown solution with serious technical limitations. Second was OS/2, a joint project with IBM that would have replaced DOS/Windows on PCs had it been successful. And third was a more obscure project, first called NT, which was a stable and reliable UNIX alternative that had nothing in common with DOS/Windows at all.

But as NT evolved into Windows NT, Microsoft did two things to bring this system closer to its DOS‑based cousin. First, it determined that NT would utilize the same GUI as DOS‑based Windows, starting with the Windows 3.x Program Manager shell in 1993. And second, it created a 32‑bit environment called Win32 that could run DOS‑based Windows (and even some DOS) applications, creating a modicum of compatibility. Over time, the Win32 environment was ported to DOS‑based Windows versions (starting with Windows 95), the driver models were combined, and Microsoft began its efforts to transition completely to the NT codebase, an event that was originally planned for Windows 2000 but had to be put off until Windows XP, in 2001.

Whew.

The point is that during all of this transition and evolution, Microsoft never changed the user experience, the Windows runtime, and the underlying technologies that developers use all at the same time. But with Windows 8, it has done just that.

Windows 8 includes a completely new user experience we call Metro that offers smartphone‑like, full‑screen experiences in lieu of (well, in addition to) the old‑fashioned “windowed” interface provided by the desktop environment from previous Windows versions. And Metro runs on top of a completely new runtime engine, called Windows Runtime, or WinRT, which in turn offers developers a completely new set of native APIs, with new capabilities and a new way of doing things.

That’s a whole lot of new.

NOTE

Though we are calling this new environment Metro, Microsoft–for legal reasons–is not. One alternative style of naming we’ve seen used, in which Metro is called “the Windows 8 UI,” and Metro‑style apps are referred to as “Windows 8 apps,” is, to us, inadequate. Windows 8 provides two user experiences, what we call Metro and the desktop. And both are “Windows 8 UIs” that contains “Windows 8 apps.” So we’re sticking with the Metro name, which has been in use for a couple of years now and which we feel perfectly encapsulates the new environment and the apps that run within it. Yep. We’re rabble‑rousers.

Compare this to Windows 7. In Windows 7, Microsoft provided a refined version of the Aero desktop experiences it previously offered in Windows Vista. And Windows 7 ran on top of the same Explorer runtime engine as all Windows versions dating back to Windows 2000, while offering developers the exact same Win32‑based APIs, with of course a handful of new capabilities.

Put simply, there’s no comparison.