14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, Microsoft kicked off the TechEd North America 2012 conference in Orlando, Florida, with a keynote focused on cloud computing and cloud OS.
Today, the company is focused on offering details on what Windows 8 has to offer to all users, including enterprise customers.
The day 2 keynote at TechEd is hosted by Microsoft’s Antoine Leblond, corporate vice president, Windows Web Services, and it can be found on Microsoft’s website.
One thing that the Redmond-based software giant has been long touting about Windows 8 is the fact that it reimagines Windows, and Antoine Leblond offered some more info on that.
According to him, although there were changes in various flavors of Windows starting with Windows 95 to Windows 7, the core of the platform remained the same.
However, Windows 8 changes that, first of all by improving all that Windows 7 came with. Windows 8 is better than Windows 7 when it comes to performance, file systems, support for devices, system actions (such as file copying and the like), and more.
However, all that users were able to do on Windows 7 can be done on Windows 8 today. In fact, the new platform even offers support for older machines that came to the market with Windows 7.
Not to mention that it comes with support for more input methods than the older platform, including optimizations for use on touchscreens, another feature that Microsoft has been long stressing on related to the next-gen OS.
In fact, the software company claims that Windows 8 can be used easily on any type of device, despite its Metro user interface. Microsoft’s Linda Averett demonstrated that to the TechEd audience.
The same gestures that one would use to navigate on a touchscreen device can be used for controlling the OS on a notebook that features a touchpad. Semantic zoom is available on such notebooks, the same as pulling apps from the edge, scrolling and more.
Sharing of content on a Windows 8 is very easy as well, courtesy of the already known Charms bar that users can find on the right side of the screen (through reaching any of the right corners with the mouse on traditional computers).
Moreover, the platform offers increased mobility through enabling people to install it on flash drives and use it on any available computer that has an USB port.
Many have been complaining of the major UI changes that Microsoft has made in Windows 8, yet the company seems confident that it will manage to appeal to users, and looks at the over 600 million Windows 7 users as a possible base for upgrades to the new platform.
Those who haven't had the chance to have a look at Windows 8 can download and install the Release Preview flavor of the OS from Softpedia as well, via this link.