I recently read Joshua Topolsky's excellent review of Microsoft's new piece of hardware, just released today, the Microsoft Surface with Windows RT. I then continued to read a fairly hilarious Verge Forum post called "Josh Topolsky Vs. The World."
It has occurred to me that between Josh Topolsky's review, David Pogue's review, and just after thinking about it and chatting it up with people about the device that Windows 8, Windows RT, and the Surface (RT and Pro) hardware might not quite be what I want it to be. In short: I may have been fanboying.
I have thought about this a little bit as I've looked at various bits of news coming out about the device and the operating system. In a way, I already know a bit about Windows 8 because I have been using a preview version on one of my work PCs for quite a long time, and I've had the final bits (again, for PCs with x86 processors) installed on that machine for a few weeks. On the desktop side of things, Windows is a great mix of "evolutionary" changes under the hood and on the desktop and fairly "revolutionary" changes in terms of user interface and experience and the shift in expectation about how application software will be delivered to the computer.
Windows RT is a totally different beast, however, and the Microsoft Surface hardware is pretty interesting, too. I think that the question posted in Topolsky's review "who is this for?" is fairly accurate. I'm the kind of person who, even in my home life, happens to live in OneNote, and I'm in Excel almost more often than Calculator. Plus, I very nearly live and die by writing things, and I'm almost always in multiple RDP sessions.
It's for those reasons that I'm excited about the Surface RT – Even if we presume that Windows RT will never do more than what it does today on launch day, it does an awful lot for me that the iPad either doesn't do, or does poorly. This isn't to knock the iPad, but when you've got an existing ecosystem, sometimes it's really nice to be able to map a drive or mount a USB disk and copy that Word document you've been editing to your desktop PC or Mac.
These things make a lot of sense to me, but I can also totally see why they're absent in the iPad. Apple is almost always more daring than Microsoft when it comes to changing expectations about how computers work, and there is a very large number of people for whom getting rid of the traditional file system is a very good thing (just as one example.)
My hope for Windows 8 and/or Windows RT is that it eventually becomes the OS I use to read books and news articles while I'm on the bus or in a car, as well as the OS I sit down at my desk and use to write blogs, books, and forum posts as well as play World of Warcraft and use Adobe or Autodesk products. This'll all be even better if at some point, between the software vendors and the hardware vendors, I can start doing this on just one device.
And at the end of the day if Windows RT fails miserably, I want to be able to say I was there and I tried it and I've got one. Microsoft has a veritable trail of "a subset of Windows" devices; from the original Pocket PCs all the way out to ARM-based thin clients and now the Surface. It'll be interesting to see how the Surface (and other RT devices) fares in comparison. The ultimate success of Windows RT is even better for me, as it'll mean that I've bought into a thriving ecosystem.