This looks great, but isn't this pretty much what Microsoft always does - they decide that a particular technology or feature is THE feature, and they go way, way too far with it. The thing I am thinking of is when they decided that the internet and XML was it, and decided to make everything XML (ie Avalon). Another thing was .NET and the CLR, when they decided to throw their old VS codebase away and start over simply because now, ALL programs released HAVE to be CLR-based. And this time it's touch.
Microsoft is like a kid with OCD. Touch! Touch is great! I love touch! Everything is touch! Can I touch this? Then it sucks! Give me touch! More touch!
I mean... yeah. Touch is cool, touch interfaces will probably be the main way to use computers eventually.. but as usual, it feels like they are going at it in the wrong way. It doesn't improve Excel to put it in a touch environment. Apple did try that and discovered that it wasn't what people wanted.
Then again, this video focuses on the new stuff, so it's hard to tell just how much they've moved things around.
Also, another part of the video that I instinctively reacted negatively to was the swipe to switch apps. Not even while using a touch interface do I want to pull something in from the left side of the screen without knowing what will pop out from there. To find the app that I want I have to flip through all of them? That seems that the worst possible way of organizing / not organizing different running apps.
What makes it even stranger is that they pass by a much better implementation of the same thing in passing while demoing IE 10, where he pulls down to reveal thumbnails of all the open tabs. Something like that in the main interface would have been much better than having to swipe, swipe, swipe, accidentally pausing videos, replacing views and causing all kinds of frustration just to locate the particular app I was looking for.
Microsoft is like a kid with OCD. Touch! Touch is great! I love touch! Everything is touch! Can I touch this? Then it sucks! Give me touch! More touch!
I mean... yeah. Touch is cool, touch interfaces will probably be the main way to use computers eventually.. but as usual, it feels like they are going at it in the wrong way. It doesn't improve Excel to put it in a touch environment. Apple did try that and discovered that it wasn't what people wanted.
Then again, this video focuses on the new stuff, so it's hard to tell just how much they've moved things around.