Microsoft bets the farm on Metro

The Metro interface is the thing that unites the company’s major product efforts going forward

如果您想帮助Microsoft，请喜欢它的地铁界面。

它在开始页面上有所有这些彩色瓷砖，这些瓷砖填充了整个屏幕，并且似乎没有可见的导航工具从一侧到另一侧延伸。

You have to swipe the tools in from the right side where they are displayed on the Charms bar, and if you want to switch to other open applications you have to swipe them in from the left.

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If you want to take actions within applications, icons to accomplish them jump up from the bottom of the screen.

Is it intuitive? No. Is it learnable? Yes. The question is, will you and other potential customers bother to learn? Because the answer is vital to Microsoft.

该公司通过Windows Phone推出了Metro，它借给了小触摸屏，然后将其扩展到Windows 8中，具有相同的以触摸为中心的偏见，但使用鼠标和键盘导航是一场噩梦，可以学习（但可行）。为了确认这可能有多困难，Microsoft保留在Windows 8中的传统桌面（或它的版本）作为替代方案。

Now the Metro UI has moved past the phone and is the common link among Windows phones, Windows tablets, Windows laptops and Windows desktops. Microsoft is shooting to sync phones and computers with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 via cloud services, creating a unified body of data that is accessible from any Windows device. The common thread? The Metro interface that becomes a familiar environment regardless of what device is accessing the data.

That’s a great broad architecture that isn’t so easy to put into effect given the lack of support for Metro in older Microsoft products. Customers have to buy into the Microsoft vision and that could be a big investment. The benefits would have to be as great and tangible.

The Metro environment isn’t ideal for all environments. Perhaps it could be some day after developers become thoroughly familiar with it and write applications that embrace its nuances.

Business apps written for Metro have to do jobs better than the old apps did them if they are to succeed. If they can do that it will help create the motivation and the business case for end users to learn a new way of doing things.

For Windows 8 to work its way into businesses, the current standard desktop has to change shape and become a laptop with touch or a tablet that can use a keyboard. That is exactly what the two models of newSurfacedevices represent. There is a tablet with a keyboard so it can support Metro apps to their best advantage and support legacy Office apps that were written to fit in the mouse/keyboard mold. There is also a full, workhorse laptop that can handle any legacy applications that run on Windows 7 as well as any Mero app that comes along.

为了鼓励工作硬件的这种转变，微软希望骑Byod Wave。它的表面RT设备可能会成为客户希望按照iPad进行的工作方式使用的消费者打击。Surface RT - 如果Microsoft对此提出的主张可以相信 - 可以说是更适合工作环境的，因为它伴随着上述键盘和有限的办公应用程序集，这是iPad所没有的。

But the first challenge is getting these devices in the hands of consumers. That will lead to their use at work where they may become so engrained that IT decision makers move faster from Windows 7 to Windows 8 wholesale. They will likely be waiting for Windows 8 to prove itself as secure and stable anyway before committing.

This discussion hasn’t even mentioned the difficulties Windows Phone 8 may present given its incompatibility with Windows Phone 7 hardware, but it complicates the prospects for fulfilling the one-interface-on-all-devices vision. It’s a huge gamble that must weigh heavily on Microsoft executives. If the photos from the Surface coming-out party are representative, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer looks worried about something: