This is the third article in the Windows 8.x: Cutting Through the Noise series.
When the Developer Preview for Windows 8 was released, it was trying to accomplish a lot of things that Microsoft had been working towards in one radical step. Because it was so different, it is often a temptation of bloggers and (part of what we are seeing lately) consumers to react to what they like and don’t like with no sense of context among the competition. As someone who uses or used multiple operating systems including previous versions of Windows, I think that by looking at other operating systems we can gain some context for some of Microsoft’s choices for Windows 8. Usually bloggers start comparing Windows 8 to earlier versions of itself. However since Microsoft was trying to do something new, I think we should also compare it to what we see on two other major players at the time, Ubuntu 11.10 and OS X Lion. [Read more…] about Windows 8 Design Context