Performance By Design

I am writing this in the wake of the Windows 8 launch on October 26. It continues a blog entry I posted last week that discusses some of my early experience running and testing the new Windows 8 release. I want to focus here on discussing what Windows RT is, which seems to be generating a good deal of confusion. That is probably because Microsoft has not done great job in explaining what exactly Windows RT is. Windows RT itself is not as complete and as fully realized as it should be, and that, of course, is another source of some of the confusion. If you go out to the Microsoft Store, you will see this description of Windows RT: “ Windows RT is a new version of Microsoft Windows that's built to run on ARM-based tablets and PCs. It works exclusively with apps available in the Windows Store. Windows 8 Pro runs current Windows 7 desktop applications. It can also use the programs and apps available in the Windows Store. ” That first sentence is confusing because Window...

Windows 8 is about to become widely available to great fanfare, while Windows Server 2012 was quietly released recently “into the wild,” which is the discouraging way many Microsoft product development teams characterize the real world environments where their products run. Third-party developers have had access to the final RTM (Release-to-Manufacturing) versions of the Windows 8 release for several months now. Here at DemandTech , we have been testing Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 in the lab, making sure our software is compatible, etc. We have been running Windows 8 on virtual machines exclusively, not the dedicated hardware (tablets, mainy) it was designed to showcase. The most noticeable change in Win 8 is the new UI. There is also a new kind of Win 8 app that when it runs, takes over the entire screen. Under the covers, the Windows OS is still multithreaded, but the interaction model is that, in any of the new apps, you are only working on one thing at a time. It is like...