Andrew Tech Help

So I've finally gotten around to finishing this article about Windows 8 and Windows RT and it’s only about 3 months later than I expected to finish it. It’s been about 90 days since Windows 8 and Windows RT were finally released in stores (and it’s been over a year since I installed the first version of Windows 8 released to the general public for testing: the Developer Preview, back in September 2011). I did plan to write this article much earlier than January 2013, but other things have delayed it and I'm actually glad they did, because I've been able to gain some additional insight and experience that would have been missing if I had of written this in November last year as planned.

This article isn't a formal review as such, nor is it a detailed explanation of how each individual feature of Windows 8/RT works. This article is more about explaining some of the things that I've felt have been miscommunicated in a lot of what has been written about Windows 8/RT and then using those explanations as a factual base to discuss what I think makes Windows 8/RT great as well as what isn't complete yet and still needs work. Finally I wrap up this article by firstly discussing some of the reactions I’ve witnessed from a few non-technical people who’ve purchased Windows 8 PCs recently and then secondly discussing what I think will happen next (because one thing is for certain, Windows 8/RT ship isn't going to be staying still in 2013). This is a LONG article (I know, it took me weeks just to write it) and even though long form articles aren’t popular on the internet these days, I’m hoping that at least a few people stick through to the end. J So here we go, these are most of my thoughts about Windows 8/RT!

Back when I wrote the first version of this article I had not started university yet, Leo Laporte was still broadcasting from a cottage, Mary Jo Foley hadn't yet joined Paul Thurrott on Windows Weekly, Windows 8 hadn't been revealed to the public yet and Microsoft had just relaunched their mobile operating system in the form of Windows Phone 7.

So much has changed since January 2011 and Microsoft has come a LONG WAY in expanding their services to an international audience. This article is an updated version of the 'Windows Phone 7 Feature Availability Matrix' article from January 2011 (and subsequently May 2011 for Windows Phone 7.5). I've retitled the article though because since last year, Microsoft has launched Windows 8 and that operating system now integrates many of the services that Windows Phone first integrated back in 2010. So the new updated name for this article is the "Microsoft Feature & Service Availability Matrix" and includes information about Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the Xbox. These matrices have been weeks worth of work compared to the first version I wrote (which took about 6 hours), because Microsoft has expanded from availability in 18 countries (with 5 languages) in October 2010, to availability in around 200 countries and territories (with 50 languages for WP8 and 109 languages for Win8) as of October 2012 (which they should be commended for). Therefore I've had to completely rewrite these matrices, but because I've taken advantage of the new Office Web Apps to host and display them here, they are now a LOT easier to update in the future. I would appreciate it though if other bloggers don't just copy & paste or embed these matrices directly into their own blogs. I don't make any money off this website, I just would appreciate the attribution and would also like to keep the matrices in context with the rest of the article I've written (including explanations etc).

2012 promises to be an extremely exciting year for Microsoft, with the company essentially updating every single major product they make, as well as integrating them all with each other in a way we've not seen before. I plan to write a lot more about this in the coming months, but in this article I'm going to write about something that's already starting to change, even before the new products have been released: Logos! This article won't be too text heavy, instead I'll do some brief explanations and them just show you all the logos here so you can see them all for yourselves!

Over the last few days, there has been a big uproar over a blog post that Mozilla made regarding Firefox not being able to be developed for Windows RT. I feel that because the reasons behind why Microsoft made the decisions they did are complex (and often not communicated in the clearest way by Microsoft) that those reporting about this issue and the reactions that their audience have are automatically swayed against Microsoft, simply because they don't have the entire picture. This editorial hopefully will give the whole broader picture and demostrate why Firefox & Chrome can't and shouldn't be allowed to run on Windows RT. This blog post has been adapted from an email I wrote to Tech News Today (a fantastic tech show on the TWiT network @ www.twit.tv/tnt ) on the 11th of May 2012. I'm happy to take any feedback from readers who have any additional technical information about this issue (I'm not a Microsoft employee and so I can only report information that I have gathered from Microsoft's blog posts and from playing with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on an x86 machine).

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