dear people who cannot think clearly. These add-ons on win8 will just be add-ons, not required. The idea is to have the SAME os no matter if you are on your smartphone, tablet, PC, or telekenetic interface. The tools for these new devices require different ways of doing input, but if you have a good ol KVM setup you can still use it (I know I will). Now there are some legit complaints here:
1: Come on Toms, this was in the win8 video... they talked about it and explained the whole split keyboard thing... this is not new news much less a leak when it comes from the corporate mouth!
2: Windows needs to have a separate interface for different devices. Tiles are great on a smart phone which has a few but specific uses (recently took a look at phone7 and was surprised at the complaints I have heard about it... it works fine). Tiles are less important on a tablet, nearly useless on your home computer, and entirely irrelevant and unwanted in the work-space. I am all for change, but I am even more for design. Your bike doesn't look like a car. They are both modes of transport, but they have different needs, different uses, different strengths, weaknesses, etc. So it is with the plethora of computing devices. Some are utilities that are good for specific tasks like phones that are good for talking, skyping, and other geographic research (GPS, calendars, routes, local stores, etc). But you will never write a book on a phone. It is the wrong tool for the job. Any-who, you get my point, different tools means a different way of interacting with the device. Make the core OS the same (how software interacts with hardware and handles inter-connectivity between devices and files), but make the interface specific to the tool. We are not that dumb that we need uniformity to the point of needing tiles on our coffee pot, we will figure out how to use the thing.
But in all likely hood they are just showing off the new stuff, and most of this will be able to be disabled in the desktop version, or partially disabled in the tab/netbook environment.
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