Yes, if MS starts treating Windows like Apple treats iOS, i.e they will do bigger point updates and polish the OS and possibly add features in-between major releases, it’ll be needed as some parts of it has some glaring issues.

I don’t know what “metro,” is. I thought you were going to at least throw a sentence or two into the article describing what it is for all the people who have no idea what it is.

Let me be clear, Metro/Modern UI is the best thing that has happened to Microsoft… ever. I agree that for PC users Windows 7 will do just fine and they probably don’t need Win8 to be happy, when the time comes for Microsoft to release the tweaked/improved version in 2014 called Win9 people will be in love with the live tiles etc. (even those that will be bashing Win8 now). I experienced MacOSX, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and I believe that Windows was far from perfect for like forever so this completely different direction is awesome for me after all that time, they nailed it considering that touch is essential (and the next step forward). I’m interested in this New Windows and that’s something I didn’t expect to say so they must have done something right here.

It looks gorgeous, but the features are hard to discover. I don’t think it can ever be used for serious work as is, except perhaps by being adapted to run multiple applications on multiple monitors for power users (and perhaps being able to have multiple ultra-cheap tablets side-by-side on the desktop interacting seamlessly through a shared account running a different application each).

Sure, we used to do serious work on single application computers in the past (circa 1985-90) – it required having piles of books on your desk and constantly printing out everything you typed into the computer so you could read it while editing in another application, but the advent of windowed operating systems made our tasks paperless and simplified the whole process. It is a retrograde step to go back to the old days, in my view, but changes in the future may solve this major problem in the new design. (After all, the major obstacle for the automobile was the lack of roads, but they fixed that soon enough).

Of course, many of the day to day tasks in Windows require no more than simple dialogs which would be ridiculous on a full screen. Look at the new Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard centre – an entire screen with a ton of blank space doing nothing more than what a small dialog used to do. Simple tasks like tagging photos and audio files still takes flicking between three or so applications within each minute (no one application does everything required to do the job properly) and this common task would be a nightmare in Modern interface as it stands. Programs like RSS readers can be read far more easily and quickly in the classic Windows list box format than using tiles, which are incredibly hard to scan when your brain is in speed-reading mode.

Modern also has big performance problems to overcome – the sandboxing adds so much overhead that one developer reports that a simple 30 second file listing task now takes 5 minutes!

Finally, Microsoft has paralysed developers by being coy about its plans. I expect they are providing both the Desktop and Modern and letting the market decide, but it is not possible to develop serious applications in Modern at present and it costs extra money to do so (Microsoft wants developers to pay a premium for the privilege of getting Windows 8 off the ground for them).

So, it has promise, but ultimately I think it will have to be optionally made windowed for future versions so that we have a new RT-based Desktop for power users in the future, presuming the performance issues are overcome.