Microsoft launches Windows 8, its 'biggest product' ever

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Microsoft launches Windows 8, its 'biggest product' ever

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer speaks Thursday during a news conference to launch Windows 8 in New York. "This is the biggest product we've ever done," he said. / TIMOTHY A. CLARY/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Microsoft introduced the biggest overhaul of its flagship Windows software in two decades, reflecting the rising stakes in its competition with Apple and Google for the loyalty of customers who are shunning personal computers and flocking to mobile devices.

"This is the biggest product we've ever done," CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday, comparing it with the arrival of the PC in 1981 and the introduction of Windows 95.

Microsoft packed the new Windows with touch-screen capabilities, designed to vault the company into the tablet market dominated by Apple's iPad. To avoid being left behind as computing increasingly shifts to mobile devices like tablets and smartphones, the company radically altered Windows' familiar design and scrapped a strategy that had it relying entirely on partners to produce Windows computers.

"In creating Windows 8, we shunned the incremental," Windows President Steven Sinofsky said. Windows 8 and the company's first-ever computer, the Surface tablet, go on sale today.

More than 1,000 computers have been certified for Windows 8, Sinofsky said. That will include the first Windows machines capable of running on chips with technology from ARM Holdings, instead of Intel. The Windows store does have some popular apps, including those from media-streaming companies Hulu and Netflix. Still, Microsoft won't say how many apps are available for the operating system, and the lack of a broad range of games, tools and other downloadable software will detract from the Surface in a head-to-head comparison against the iPad and its more than 275,000 apps.

Machines with Windows 8 that run chips from Intel can run older Windows programs.

More Details: Start button disappears

One of the biggest changes with Windows 8 is the disappearance of the familiar start button at the lower left corner of the screen. There will be a new screen filled with a colorful array of tiles, each leading to a different application, task or collection of files.

After his keynote address in New York on Thursday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was asked by the Associated Press whether there was any chance of bringing it back.

His reply: “You’ve got a whole screen as a start button.” It’s a reference to the screen of tiles.

Source : Detroit Free Press - http://www.freep.com