Re:Under the hood of Windows 8, or why desktop users should ...
by morsch on Tuesday October 23, 2012 @08:03PM
(#4690997)
Of course, CLI aren't dead and are in fact still going strong in certain areas. The same will remain true for WIMP in the forseeable future.
Re:Under the hood of Windows 8, or why desktop users should ...
by city41 on Tuesday October 23, 2012 @10:51PM
(#4691415)
The only people really using the CLI are developers and people in related fields, who will be writing the apps that everyone else will run on their tablets/car/fridge/etc. PCs will not be going away in the foreseeable future for the simple fact developers will need them.
Because Microsoft is getting ready for the future, where non-PC computing devices will be far, far, far more important to most peoples' lives than PCs.
Windows 8 is the beginning of Microsoft's play to be on those devices. That means that design considerations to make it work nicely on "post-PC" devices take precedence over design considerations to make it work on PCs.
Windows 8 isn't a PC operating system with device-friendly concessions bolted on. It's a device operating system with PC concessions bolted on. The idea presumably is that the PC desktop piece of it will get smaller and less important as time goes on, then eventually become completely redundant and easy to drop altogether.
In other words, the plan is to do to the WIMP interface what they did with the CLI interface of MS-DOS. Its death will be slow, quiet, and (they hope) painless. But it is definitely going to die.