The Verdict Is Out: It's the Phoenix

Wow!!!!!

I have just attended what was perhaps one of the coolest keynotes ever at a Microsoft conference. And to tell you the truth, I have never been in my entire career as enthusiastic as I am right now! Those who know me personally know that it takes quite a lot to make me say wow and that I have a tendency to be critical rather than supportive. But the Windows 8 story I saw today is one of those rare things that felt like being the right thing from the very first moment. You know the feeling? Everything just clicks in and seems to be the right thing, at the right time, in the right place. I think I just fall in love with Windows 8 today.

As an overall note regarding the keynote, not only it was sharp and cool, but it benefited from one of the best deliveries I've seen for a long time. A relaxed and confident Sinofsky put up an excellent performance. I've been writing about this previously, and it seems to get better and better. I'm talking about a sense of coolness projected by Microsoft. Seeing the Windows big boss wearing snickers and jeans, talking about the bold decisions taken in order to re-invent the OS was very refreshing.

It's hard to decide where to start, so I'll just stick with my first love: the developer story. As you probably already know, a very heated debate is going on for quite some time regarding the Windows 8 developer story. Folks were concerned about the future of .NET, Silverlight, and XAML. It took Sinofsky one slide to clear things: XAML over C#, VB, and C++, and HTML + JavaScript. End of story. Windows 8 supports both. An amazing demo showed a Silverlight app taken from ScottGu's blog, recompiled, and run on Windows 8. It's what I've been expecting to hear and it was confirmed today.

The hardware story is equally amazing. First of all, Windows 8 will run on x86, x64, and ARM. It will run on every imaginable form factor out there. And the boot time, oh yes... We all know that boot times were one of the things which attracted lots of criticism. Well, that's history. We've seen today systems running Windows 8 booting faster than the time you need to open the lid. But that's just part of the story. Tremendous efforts have been put into optimizing the performance of the OS, and this really shows. Sinofsky showed one of his old netbooks with 1Gb of RAM and an Atom proc, running Windows 8 with impressive results. More than that, things like hardware acceleration are becoming standard in every aspect of the UI.

But perhaps the most amazing thing about Windows 8 its the UI. Simply put, it's just fantastic. Being based on the Metro concepts, it's fast, responsive, and just feels good. After what we've seen today, even the most skeptical attendees were convinced that Windows 8 is excellent for portable devices, especially for tablets. It was about time to have this change, and I believe Microsoft met and even exceeded expectations regarding the new Metro style UI.

It's been proven once again that under immense pressure, Microsoft is able to create amazing stuff. For me, it's beyond any doubt now that Microsoft is set on a course to dominate the consumer space once again. They basically re-imagined Windows from chipset to experience on all major areas: capabilities, scenarios, and form factors. What they got is an amazing OS which, at least for me, is everything I hoped for and a lot more. I just can't wait for the next months and years of developing great solutions!

Well, that's it for now. Time to get into the details. Stay tuned for lots of interesting things to come...