Poll: Windows 8: What do you want, and what do you need?

[javajolt]

There is an odd air of mystery around the next-generation operating system from Microsoft. Windows 8 was dubbed by Steve Ballmer, CEO, as the “riskiest product bet” to date.

Simply put, it will be if it turns up in the stores and we don’t want or need half of the features in there.

But unlike with previous releases like ‘Longhorn’ (Vista) and Windows 7, there has been only the tinest of trickles of reliable information and news out of Redmond. At this stage, we know of only a few features, like an in-built PDF reader and roaming user profiles; though only suggested by an ominous looking icon in the taskbar.

I suggested last month one of the reasons this may be the case, with mysterious wallpapers on internal Windows 8 machines, suggests that screenshots could be traced back to the employee or vendor who leaks them.

With a lack of screenshots or leaks comes a lack of knowledge, understanding and features in the upcoming operating system. Instead of asking why the leaks are thin and slow — Mary Jo Foley covered that already, it would be interesting to see what people want and need in their next-generation Windows.

So, to test the field and gain a sense of who wants what and why, with you as the litmus paper, it will be interesting to see what part-enterprise and part-consumer who have a foot in both camps want to see in the next version of Windows.

I am yet to find a killer ’academic’ feature for the upcoming release, as logistically a new user interface will not help the learning process. Kinect support may, but it’s looking likely that the cloud will hold the answers. That is, if the Patriot Act doesn’t get in the way.

[Jake]

My list of demands  

- Remove the extra stuff that nobody uses.  And not the admin tools, those are necessary, but do we need Wordpad AND Notepad?  Surely Wordpad is a bit more featured.  Overall, anything that can be done to reduce the size of a basic Windows install would be appreciated, and help move the OS toward a world of smaller devices.

- Give us the ability to remove more things if we choose.  Windows 7 made great strides in this direction, why not continue this work?

- Stricter rules on what OEMs are allowed to preinstall.  Lets face it, if the exact same functionality is included in Windows, why do you need ANOTHER wifi signal manager?  Instead, continue to push solid products like the Windows Live suite which offer a movie maker, a photo manager, a mail client, etc.

- Virtualize more, use the registry less (or not at all, if possible).  Nobody likes the registry.

- BluRay movie playback ability built-in.  Now that the format wars are over (and the superior one won), it's time to pay the fees and make it just work out of the box.

- Less versions.  One for tablets, netbooks, cheap PCs, etc.  Another for Home users.  One for Businesses, and last the "Ultimate" version (potentially these could be combined and labelled as "Business").  I'd like them to be cheaper too, but we can't have everything can we?  

- Keeping with the above, please sparingly promote the Ultimate edition.  This may help counteract the people that have to have the "Ultimate" one because supposedly it runs faster.  If anything the opposite is true; the lighter one will ALWAYS be faster somewhere to some degree.  These people are horribly frustrating to us techies, why waste your money on "Ultimate" when you use the "Home" features...  


I believe that's about it.

[Samtastic]

I think Microsoft should add support for extracting RAR files. A lot of people upload .rar files to the web these days.

I like the idea of Microsoft adding their own PDF reader into Windows 8. We would all be able to open up our PDF documents without needing to download Adobe Reader.