Will Windows 8.1be enough to begin Windows 8 adoption?

Two of the biggest complaints I keep hearing from users is that Windows 8 doesn’t look like Windows and where is the Start button? I know that anything new always has a hard row ahead of it but the antagonism associated with the Start Screen and the loss of the Start Button has been vicious. I haven’t completed moving over entirely to Window 8 myself but I do have it running on my laptop and I have become quite comfortable with it. Though I don’t have a touch screen on the notebook to take advantage of the what that brings to the table, I have played with tablets that do and if I were to purchase a Windows 8 notebook I wouldn’t do so without it having a touchscreen. You just lose too much function without it.

With Windows 8 booting to the Start Screen doesn’t bother me at all, it does cause me to one extra step every time I boot up to jump to the regular desktop where I do all my work.When the free Windows 8.1 update comes out that will provide a choice of booting to the desktop, this will satisfy one of the complaints that most new users have with it not looking like Windows. On a tablet device the Start Screen is probably more desirable  but in a world where users are trying to be productive and get some work done, this is not the case.

Microsoft’s constant drive to make your experience simpler when using the Windows interface initially makes it harder to change to the simplicity of new Start Screen interface. On a desktop computer that has a keyboard as its primary input interface you can just type the word of the action or program that you are looking for and that immediately brings up a list of things that meet the criteria you are typing in.  I am a touch typist and I find this feature very useful. On Windows 7 I used the Windows Key to jump to the search bar within the Start Button a lot to find things and to launch programs and now if I am on the desktop I can do the same thing to jump to the Start Screen and begin my search in the same manner. Once you think of the Start Screen as the growth of the natural evolution of the contents of the Start Button than the new changes begin to make sense. The Start Screen becomes a more customizable palette for you to access many of the p[programs and utilities that were once found only on your Start Menu. But does Microsoft tell you this?

In a recent Redmond Channel Partner article by Kurt Mackie, many of the new networking features of Windows 8.1 were revealed and they are really sounding pretty interesting. Many of these new features will require adoption of the technology by other device manufacturers to be able to use these new networking functions and only time will tell if they will do this. If the do great but for now it is useless. Tethering will become a big function as well but again, there will be limited use of this function beyond turning your Windows phone into a hotspot I would think unless you are connecting your notebook wired into your internet connection and wanting to then piggy back your Wi-Fi devices on to it to have a sharable hotspot.Read Kurt’s article to find out more about some of the new BYOD Features and Security Features that are being shown at TechEd Conference last week.