Windows 8

[faceless]

It doesn't look very special to me... and why anyone would want to put their greasy fingers all over their screen to use it is a mystery. You touch my screen, you die!

[SquareEyes]

Oh, bloody great! So now I have to give up picking my nose and eating pizza while using the pc ... and the wrist-exercise...

[Kezza]

Appears to be yet another scheme to force users to buy new equipment -- in this case, an HDTV-touch-screen monitor.

From first glance, this new OS seems more suited to a "portable pad" than for people in the workplace. Who would want to do, say, Excel spreadsheets without a keyboard? Or only use your thumbs to type a document?

Maybe I'm getting too old, but I'm glad that I learned to type and don't foresee swapping out my keyboard when I'm working .....

[Bob]

I've seen some demo stuff of this and for the office environment, it's quite nifty in parts, especially for presentations.

Not a keyboard replacement, but a fancy touchpad addition.

[major.tom]

I think M$ is going a little barmy with the recent trend in "touch" computing. That's great for a handheld, but desktop is not the same. I'll stick with my keyboard & mouse, thx.

And no ugly huge "tiles" (also known as "icons") on my desktop, thx.

One interface area where they might do something interesting would be to mimic the virtual desktop concept from linux. That might actually open up the user experience for Windows users

To give them their due, although I was skeptical about the "ribbon" they started using with Office 2007, that was a huge improvement. Office was so bogged down with features that it was hard to find what you needed to do. It still can be that way, but to a much lesser degree. Unfortunately, it looks like they're trying to do the same sort of thing, albeit in a much clumsier manner, to Windows itself.

My $.02 (which is worth about .00000001 M$ shares).