Windows 8: What I'd Like to See

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Last week, a passel of leaked PowerPoint slides appeared to give a sneak peek of Microsoft's plans for Windows 8. (I should call them "alleged Microsoft PowerPoint slides" or something, but Mary Jo Foley and Ina Fried are accepting them as the real deal-and that's good enough for me.)

 

Among the features mentioned: A new technology for superfast startups (a perennial boast of new versions of Windows dating at least back to Windows 98), multiuser login via face recognition, an improved help system, and a tool for restoring Windows to its original settings without munging your data.

 

The company would apparently like to help PC makers build machines that have some of the "it just works" reliability associated with Macs. (It turns out that consumers are willing to pay for a better experience-apparently, the price premium that Apple commands is about more than unicorn tears.)

 

It would be a mistake to take the leaked slides as a definitive guide to the upcoming OS: Windows 8 is still early in the development process, and the details in the deck were prepared to address early questions from hardware types, not to serve as an overarching prospectus.

 

And Microsoft's early pitches for forthcoming versions of Windows usually haven't been a terribly reliable predictor of the products it's actually shipped-just ask anyone who took the initial scuttlebutt about Vista very seriously.

 

But thinking about Windows 8 left me mulling over what I'd like to see when the the OS (which may well be called something other than Windows 8) arrives. Here's my quick wish list-I'm assuming that Win 8 will still be recognizably Windowsesque rather than an utter reimagining for the Web era...

 

Full story: PC World