Windows 8: The Top 4 Things You Should Know

Microsoft says it is “reinventing the OS” with Windows 8, the company’s next-generation operating system.

Microsoft fired off dozens of announcements and showed off countless features of the new OS at its Build conference in Anaheim, California. Features such as the Metro interface, support for touchscreens, improved performance and a Windows Store for apps are making headlines.

But which Windows 8 features are the most important ones?

We’ve scoured the Windows 8 feature list, played with Windows 8 devices (our first impressions coming soon), and come up with a list of features that we believe define Microsoft’s next-generation OS.

Without further ado, here are the top four things you need to know about Windows 8:

View As Slideshow » Microsoft demonstrated a lot of Windows 8 devices, including tablet devices, at its Build conference in Anaheim, CA. Windows 8 Devices: A Closer Look These are some of the devices running Windows 8 at Microsoft's Build conference.

"Your personalized lock screen shows you unread emails and other app notifications. The image shown here is a photo of the road leading to Mt. Cook National Park in New Zealand."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"See your apps and content in a glance on the start screen."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Pick the files you want to send or share from one place."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Touch browsing is fast, fluid and intuitive."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"The thumb keyboard feels natural and comfortable."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Large buttons help you type on the touch keyboard."

Courtesy of Microsoft

Windows division President Steven Sinofsky Windows division President Steven Sinofsky takes the stage at Build.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Windows 8 and its predecessors is that this OS is designed to work on not just laptops and desktops, but on tablets as well. Microsoft is introducing the Metro interface it popularized with Windows Phone into Windows 8. Users can access the Metro view or the familiar desktop view with a simple click or tap.

To work well on tablets, Windows 8 has been designed for touchscreens. More importantly, it has been designed to work on ARM-based processors. ARM technology runs most of the smartphones and tablets in the world. ARM chips are simply better suited for these smaller form factors due to their energy efficiency. Even the Apple A5, the chip that powers the iPad 2, contains a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU.

The result is that Windows 8 will work on almost any device you put it on. It works with keyboards and touchscreens, and it doesn’t matter if a device has an Intel, AMD or ARM processor. This makes Windows 8 a versatile OS in a world where the desktop no longer dominates.

Windows 8 boasts vast performance improvements over its predecessors. The memory footprint has been reduced, the boot time has been decreased (Windows 8 boots up in less than eight seconds) and the Metro UI launches apps almost instantly. The OS also supports USB 3.0 and Hyper-V.

The result is a slick OS that’s as fast as iOS and Mac OS X Lion. Most people will be surprised by how quickly Windows 8 starts up or runs apps. We certainly were surprised.

Windows 8 will have an app store. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody. The rise of Apple’s iOS App Store has launched a wave of app store mania across the tech ecosystem. Microsoft also gave away its intent to launch an app store in a leaked slide deck last year.

Still, the inclusion of a Windows Store provides new business opportunities for developers. It creates an incentive for developers to build Metro-style apps that could potentially sell well on the world’s most popular OS. And it’s a clear indication that Microsoft doesn’t intend to give up any ground to Apple and its App Store.

Windows 8 was designed with touchscreens in mind. And while the OS works just fine with a keyboard and a mouse, Microsoft touted the Metro UI as the future of the OS.

Yes, Windows 8 includes the familiar desktop UI. And yes, you can install your standard desktop apps (the first app I installed on my Windows 8 tablet? Firefox). However, the real magic of the OS occurs when you’re swiping through the tile interface, launching games, launching the Charms bar and interacting with the device via touch.

Microsoft isn’t allowing itself to be stuck in the Stone Age. It knows the future of computing is mobile. It knows less people will be sitting at desktops to do their work and will carry around ultralights or tablets instead.

That’s what Microsoft is betting on. If Apple’s trying to pioneer the touch-based OS with iOS, Microsoft is trying to perfect it. The company is making a radical bet with the next version of Windows. We have to give the company credit: It’s not afraid to take a big risk in order to make a comeback.

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Apple Opening Hong Kong Store, Should Prevent Future Crossbow-Related Smuggling

Biggs is the editor of TechCrunch Gadgets. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. ? Learn More

Apple will be opening a new store in International Finance Center Mall in Hong Kong this quarter. Ming Pao Daily, a local paper, noted that the store should open on September 24.

The store is the first in Hong Kong and should ameliorate some of the crossbow-related smuggling associated with the region.

Businessweek writes that this is the fifth store in China and the other shops have so far generated $8.8 billion in revenue, no small feat. The company has long depended on resellers in the area to support and sell Apple hardware and this store will create a more central location for Macheads to get their fix.

The store should be about 20,000 square feet when finished.

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Fortune First, Fame Later—Why You Should Aim For The Enterprise

Editors Note: This is a guest post written by Geoff McQueen, the cofounder of AffinityLive, a business management platform for professional services. McQueen recently moved to San Francisco from Australia.

Who doesn’t get excited about the consumer web? Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare. Billions in revenue, Hollywood movies, overturning indistries, and curing boredom. So it is natural then as a startup entrepreneur that you’d first think about doing a consumer web product. But as someone who’s been a tech entrepreneur for a decade outside the Valley, the one thing we’re not told is that unless you’re in one of four or five places on the planet, you’re almost certainly doomed to fail in the consumer web.

Why? Because consumer web plays, for all their allure, require two ingredients you’re not going to find in Sydney, Vancouver, London, Johannesburg, or pretty much anywhere else: they need big markets and big money.

Big Markets

In the United States, if you want to reach a million users in a consumer play, you need to convince one in 260 people to use your product. In China, you’ve got to get just under one in 400 people to get on board. But if your startup is pitching to users in the UK, you’ve got to achieve more than 5 times the penetration of the US. The same goes for France—it might be close to the UK, but as a market it might as well be in another galaxy. Germany is only slightly better. And in my homeland, Australia, you’ve got to achieve almost 20 times the penetration as in the US—to get to a million users, you need to be able to convince 5 people on that bus you caught to the city to use your product—profitably, and scalable across the entire market.

Given that the economics of most consumer web plays are based on selling access to an audience, if you’re not in a big market, you’re pretty much screwed. Which is why unless you are in Silicon Valley, New York, Shanghai, Mumbai or perhaps São Paulo the deck is stacked very much against you.

Big Money

If the consumer web requires big scale, achieving scale requires big money. Sure, the cloud and lean startup principles have cut the capital requirements a lot, but to succeed you need to get to millions of users, with dozens or hundreds of staff, with little to no real income (since your users aren’t paying you).

Most venture money isn’t dumb, so if you want to raise consumer web funds, you’ll need to head to one of the handful of places in the world to get it. This isn’t a bad thing—it is just reality. Entrepreneurs all over the world bemoan how hard it is to raise capital, yet we are reading constantly about the bubble.

Of course there’s an exception here if you were to create the next Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare and grow it virally, but that’s really a one in a million shot on its own, and even those companies required serious levels of funding to scale before they were able to pull in revenue.

The Alternative

Of course, the most obvious solution to this problem is to move to one of the few places in the world where you stand a chance of building a consumer web business. But it isn’t possible for every entrepreneur in the world to do that, and places like Silicon Valley have their own pitfalls, like trying to hire an engineering team when Google, Facebook and others are waging a war for talent.

If you’re thinking about what to do for your next venture, my opinion is that you are better off looking to businesses as your users. Here’s why.

Businesses Spend Money

The biggest reason why business customers make a great market for your startup is that they have money, and aren’t afraid to spend it to solve a real problem. There are lots of unsolved problems in business today in areas such as sales, marketing, finance, operations, management and more where technology can be disruptive and highly valuable.

As we all know, consumers have pretty tough expectations of value when it comes to parting with money—one of my favorite consumer services, TripIt, costs less for a year than the price of the cab to the airport for one flight, and still a very small minority of people pay.

On the other hand, businesses have a stronger ‘investment’ mentality when it comes to their decision making. The nexus between money spent and value received is still largely intact, and if a business finds an online product or service valuable and starts to rely on it, not paying for it can make them worry that it is unreliable or going to disappear on them without notice.
A target market with problems that need solving and a willingness to pay doesn’t necessarily mean there’s an opportunity for startups.  Tech giants like Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Adobe and many others have massive advantages of incumbency over new, smaller, emerging players. But changes in the expectations of businesses—thanks ironically to the consumer web—are making it much easier for a startup to take on the big boys.

Innovation Expectations

While the power of incumbency and size might be true for the big corporates, in the small and medium segment—which is a much bigger market—there’s an opportunity to run circles around the big guys. With the possible exception of SalesForce, almost all of the incumbents are hamstrung by bloated and high-cost sales models, monolithic, bureaucratic product development and release cycles, and in many cases the innovators dilemma.

While saying they can’t move as fast as a startup is a truism, what matters is whether their customers want them to move faster. And in my experience, they absolutely do.
Business people are consumers too, and they’re being spoiled by the pace of innovation they’re experiencing in their personal lives. The smartphone wielding-CEO, who adopted Facebook without “training” and “change management”, and who uses Skype to talk to his travelling daughter, is the norm, even if he or she still types with two fingers. Business people like this aren’t happy to wait 18-24 months for the next major release from Microsoft or Oracle to catch up with personal tech they’ve been using for a couple of years already.

These new expectations about the pace of innovation are making it much easier for startups to compete.

New Distribution Platforms

All of this sounds good, but aren’t business web plays expensive too? You’ve got to build sales, marketing and distribution, which surely costs a ton, right? Not necessarily. There are an increasing number of emerging platforms for the business web which are helping startups scale without the traditional enterprise sales and marketing costs.

The Google App Marketplace and Salesforce App Exchange as distribution platforms are making it easier for developers and startups to connect to markets in the same way the mobile markets do. They make going to market at scale more affordable than ever.

Additionally, the disruptive effect of the Cloud technology and SaaS business model has meant value added resellers (VARs) around the world are having to rethink their business models. Smart ones are basing their businesses on consulting, support, and training rather than just selling licenses at a margin; the lower prices and subscription revenue model means VARs can’t survive just by clipping the ticket on a sale.

The smart VARs are actively looking to develop partnerships with startups so they can offer their solutions to clients. For a startup, this provides the opportunity to distribute their services and cultivate the kind of face-to-face sales and support network many businesses want in a very fast, capital efficient way.

What about mobile?

In some ways, mobile apps have more in common with business web plays even though they’re mostly targeted at consumers. Users are conditioned to pay for apps. Often they’re solving a problem, whether it be productive or entertaining. Mobile of course has built-in distribution, which is why we’re seeing so many successful mobile plays from outside the traditional startup hubs; Rovio from Finland, Firemint from Melbourne and dozens more examples bear this out—geography doesn’t have to be as much of a disadvantage in mobile either.

The consumer web, with its bigger markets and consumer appeal will of course continue to get most of the headlines, particularly in the techo chamber of Silicon Valley. But while we’re obsessing about the next social location photo platform, companies like Australia’s Atlassian, Chicago’s 37 Signals, London’s Huddle, New Zealand’s Xero and hundreds of others will keep booking hundreds of million in revenue from business customers all over the world. Which is why I encourage you to look to businesses as your market when you’re doing your next startup.

Photo Credit/Flickr/eleaf

Geoff McQueen is the Founder and Managing Director of Hiive Systems, the company behind AffinityLive. He is also the founder of Internetrix, a Google partner and successful website performance...

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