Is Windows 8 'bad' for the industry?

Posted by jhenkinson on July 30, 2012 08:22 am 92

Windows 8 certainly is getting a lot of attention from the press and the tech community - and it should. After all Windows is THE operating system running on more than 80% of the computers on the planet, each new release is a big deal.

With that sheer amount of attention, inevitably there is bound to be both positive and negative views or speculations about the new product. And in reality, that has proved to be the case.

So far, the overall reaction from the general public has been positive, especially with the casual users.

What interesting though, is that people inside the [PC] industry have been less welcoming to the arrival of Windows 8, to put it in a 'politely toned down' kind of way. Some of them said what they said for very obvious reasons, while the others' motives or purposes invite more imagination.

There have been grumblings about possible high prices of licensing of the Win RT version for tablet makers, and thus give rise to doubts about the competitiveness of Win RT tablets (on top of concerns about the young ecosystem - since Win RT doesn't support applications built for the x86 architecture).

Of the latters, most notably are Valve's Gabe Newell's comment that Windows 8 is "a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space" and Rob Pardo's (Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard) vague statement that Windows 8 is "not awesome for Blizzard either."

Well, looks like the line is drawn and we have two clear camps.

But the question is: with this latest iteration of Windows, will it mean that Microsoft has to battle everything on its own - and uphill at that - when the PC industry itself (hardware partners and software firms that are important to the Windows platform) has so much skepticism for Windows 8?