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Microsoft has given us a first taste of Windows 8. Unfortunately, while it has some attractive visual elements, Microsoft’s approach shows that the company hasn’t learned much from its product failures over the past decade.

My first impression is that there are two big problems with what Microsoft is doing in Windows 8, but there’s also one change where the old software behemoth is on the right track. Take a look at Microsoft’s first five-minute demo video of Windows 8 and then read my analysis below.

The Windows 8 demo

The video below was released on Wednesday evening to coincide with Windows President Steven Sinofsky offering the first public demo of Windows 8 at the All Things Digital conference (a.k.a. D9). In this video, Jensen Harris, director of program management for the Windows User Experience, provides a quick walk-through and promises that more video demos will be coming soon.

One thing right

Alright, first for the positive. Microsoft is finally getting serious about multitouch, which users love for its simplicity. The new UI that it showed off at D9 and in the Web video obviously draws a lot of influence from Microsoft’s recent work on Zune and Windows Phone 7. Although Microsoft says this new Windows 8 UI will be used for desktops, laptops, and tablets, the demo is on a 10-inch tablet and it’s pretty clear that this is Microsoft’s answer to the iPad, which has been doggedly eating into the sales of Windows PCs. The UI looks clean and self-evident, and it introduces some nice UI innovations for multitasking that a lot of tablet users will appreciate.

Microsoft has been doing touch interfaces for a long time. The original Windows CE (a.k.a. Windows Mobile) had basic touch. Microsoft Surface has sported advanced multitouch gestures and a multitouch UX. But, Microsoft has allowed Apple, Google, HTC, Samsung, and others to outflank them in winning over the masses to multitouch devices.

Think about this. At the D5 conference four years ago when Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs shared the stage, both of them had forthcoming multitouch products to boast about. Jobs had the iPhone and Gates had Microsoft Surface — and, at the time, the tech community was excited about both. The iPhone has sold over 90 million units since then, and spun off massive sales of the iPod Touch and the iPad as well. The Microsoft Surface is now available in a dozen bars in Las Vegas.

Two things wrong

There are two big issues with what Microsoft is trying to do in Windows 8, although they both boil down to the fact that the company is still trying to be all things to all people, and as a result it’s unlikely to make any of its customers fully happy.

First, let’s talk about Microsoft’s shotgun approach to product development in Windows 8. On Wednesday, Windows president Steven Sinofsky said, ”It’s ‘no compromise’ and that’s really important to us.”

When I hear “no compromise,” it usually means “no discipline.” Microsoft has always been afraid to offend any of its potential customers, so it typically piles tons of features on top of the existing codebase and ends up with a Frankenstein monster like Microsoft Office.

When I first heard about Microsoft’s Windows 8 plans on Wednesday night, I posted on Twitter that my translation of “no compromise” was a lack of discipline. I got several great responses from tech professionals who agreed, but the best was from @dgackey, who wrote, “When you say ‘no’ to nothing, it usually means you know nothing about your market.”

What Sinofsky is referring to when he says “no compromise” is that tablets running Windows 8 will run tablet apps, HTML5 apps, and traditional Windows apps, and that Windows 8 itself will run on both traditional PCs as well as tablets.

I would have thought Microsoft learned its lesson here. It has already tried to take the full version of Windows 7 and run it on tablets. These “slates” — as Microsoft calls tablets — have gotten trounced by the iPad. Now, Microsoft has decided to take the full version of Windows and make sweeping UI changes so that it’s much more tablet-friendly and then apply all of those changes to the standard desktop/laptop version of Windows as well. Say what?

That leads me to the second big issue with Windows 8 — it just might ruin the core Windows product that powers most of today’s laptops and desktops. A touch-based UI focuses on large icons and images and imprecise actions (to accomodate different sized fingers). Meanwhile, a traditional UI for a standard mouse and keyboard has much smaller, more complex, and more precise actions and navigational elements. By forcing the tablet-focused Windows 8 UI on traditional Windows, Microsoft could end up removing much of the power and precision that most users rely on to do their daily work.

Microsoft would be much better off just creating a tablet OS, while continuing to tweak and innovate its desktop/laptop OS for users who demand the power, precision, and versatility they get from it. Sure, there will be a lot of users who only need a tablet, and there will be plenty of users who will want a tablet as their secondary computing device. But, declawing the standard version of Windows in order to better compete with the iPad is not the right answer.

Guest Post By Jason Hiner of Tech Republic

Last week at All Things Digital’s D9 conference in California, Microsoft Windows and Windows Live Division president Steve Sinofsky introduced the next version of the Windows OS to the world. And what a coming-out party it was. The guest of honor was all dressed up in a brand new Metro-style GUI, putting to shame all those reports earlier this year (based on leaked screenshots of early builds) that this would be only a “minor update” of Windows 7.

Since that presentation, there have been countless analyses of what we saw, ranging from straight “just the facts” reporting to some pretty wild speculation, peppered with lots of opinions. One thing we know: Microsoft got everybody talking about Windows again, and for a company that many pundits had begun to label irrelevant, that’s a good thing.

An OS by any other name …

Prior to this official unveiling, Microsoft has tried to keep a tight lid on all the details of the Windows release that Steve Ballmer called Microsoft’s “riskiest product bet.” Those within the company weren’t even calling it Windows 8, despite the widespread use of that moniker in the tech press.

In fact, it was interesting to me that Sinofsky, when pressed by Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg at D9, said “we’re just going to call it a code name”- although when Steve Ballmer called it Windows 8 at a developer’s conference in Japan last month, that prompted many reports that the name had been confirmed. Sinofsky has previously referred to it as “the Next Windows” or “Windows vNext.” During the demo, he called it “this build of Windows.”

All this makes one wonder if there is disagreement within the company about the name, or if they just haven’t made the final decision yet.

It’s obvious that the company has at least settled on Windows 8 as the official code name. A video of Jensen Harris, Director of Program Management for Windows User Experience that demonstrates the UI, is titled “Building Windows 8.”

Does it even matter? After all, a rose by any other name would smell the same – but Microsoft isn’t selling roses. They’re selling software in a market that is becoming increasingly competitive. In the marketing world, names matter a lot.

Marketing is an area in which Microsoft hasn’t always excelled – and it’s something that Apple does very well. The naming scheme for OS X (Tiger, Leopard, Lion) conjures up the image of something that’s sleek and fast and powerful.

On the other hand, Microsoft has been all over the map when it comes to naming Windows. First we had version numbers (1.0 through 3.11), then year numbers (95, 98, 2000), a couple of two-letter labels (NT, ME, XP), then Vista (which Microsoft probably would like to just delete from the timeline altogether), and finally, full circle back to version numbers again with Windows 7 (well, sort of. The actual version number is 6.1).

As an OS name, Windows 8 has some advantages: It’s short and sweet and simple; it clearly identifies this version as the successor to Windows 7 and, perhaps most important, it’s already firmly established in the public mind. Let’s just hope Microsoft doesn’t find itself behind the 8-ball with the new OS.

If Microsoft does decide to break away and go with a “real name” again, rather than a number, I hope they’ll get a good theme going like Apple has, and give us some continuity. Given their “all in” philosophy, maybe they should name future operating systems after types of clouds. Windows Cirrus, anyone?

Does this really change everything?

Whatever its name ends up being, as Walt Mossberg noted during the demo, the new Windows looks very different from previous incarnations. From its v1.0 beginnings, Windows has been menu-centric. Although the look changed and got more refined over the years, most tasks were performed by clicking a menu, which opened up a list of selections. This works fine with a mouse or trackball, but on touchscreens, not so much – especially if the screen is small.

That’s one of the reasons Windows-based tablets never really caught on (along with the premium prices that the early tablet vendors put on them). It’s also the reason Windows Mobile was so frustrating for its users. Putting a desktop interface on a handheld device just didn’t work – at least, not well.

And that’s the reason Apple so often gets the credit for “changing everything” with the introduction of the iPhone and iPad. The Apple devices succeeded where others (including Apple’s own previous stab at the tablet market with the Newton) failed. That happened because they stopped trying to make a small device that worked like a desktop computer (and thus needed an input device such as a stylus to emulate the mouse) and designed iOS for a whole new way of doing things.

I read one commentary claiming that Windows 8 just “copycats” Apple. While that might be true in a very broad sense (it will have integrated touch support; it’s rumored that it will have an app store), that’s a bit like saying GM copied Ford because they started building cars with four wheels and a steering wheel in 1908, after Ford did it first in 1896.

If you watched the D9 demo, you know that Windows 8 looks nothing like either Mac OS X or iOS. The Apple products are still icon-based, whereas Windows 8 uses “live tiles” instead. At first glance, it might seem as if tiles are just big square icons that butt up more closely against each other – but the difference is in how the tiles behave, providing you with information without the need to open the program a tile represents.

In addition, tiles don’t only represent “apps.” A tile can also represent a particular website, a specific social networking contact, a location on the map, etc. You can pin tiles to your screen (we no longer seem to be calling it a “desktop”) and arrange them in groups for better organization.

This doesn’t copy Apple, but of course it’s not entirely new, either. Microsoft uses the live tile concept on Windows Phone 7, which was first introduced in February 2010 at the Mobile World Congress. The phone OS also draws on elements from the interface on the Zune music player.

But the basic look of the new Metro UI goes back further than that – it’s very familiar to fans of Windows Media Center. In fact, when I first saw the WMC edition of Windows XP, I said Microsoft should extend the pretty interface of the Media Center application to the whole OS. Who knew they were listening?

In addition to the WMC/Windows Phone 7 look and feel, Windows 8 includes some innovative elements that we haven’t seen before, such as the split keyboard that will make it easier to thumb-type on a tablet-sized device.

In the D9 demo Sinofsky’s co-presenter, Vice President Julie Larson-Green, said this is the biggest change to Windows since the switch from Windows 3.x to Windows 95. I would go even further. From the user experience point of view, this could almost rival the move from MS-DOS to Windows.

Does one design fit all?

While some are accusing Microsoft of copying Apple with Windows 8, others  think they didn’t copy Apple enough. In Jason Hiner’s Windows 8 analysis titled One Thing Right and Two Things Wrong, he takes issue with Sinofsky’s stated “no compromise” approach and says Microsoft should have created a separate tablet OS as Apple did with iOS. He argues that because it didn’t work so well to put Windows 7, which was created for the desktop, on tablets, it won’t work to put the touch-friendly Windows 8 on the desktop.

I’m not so sure of that. Based on Sinofsky’s demo, Windows 8 will offer a lot of flexibility. On the desktop, it can be touch-centric. Or it can operate as a mouse-and-keyboard OS. Or it can combine the best of both of those worlds, allowing you to interact via touch for some tasks and via traditional input devices for others. The presentation made it clear that the taskbar and menus are still lurking in there, for those who just feel more comfortable with the “old way” or who need that capability due to the lack of a touchable monitor.

I think that was a good decision. Following the demo, I heard several people bemoan the fact that the “old house” (Windows 7 style appearance with the taskbar) hasn’t been done away with completely. Apparently they have never worked with real users in the real world. I have, and while some users happily embrace a new interface, many others want the option to reap the under-the-hood benefits of a new OS without a drastic change in its look and feel (hence the popularity of the “Windows Classic” theme). Giving both groups what they want is part of the “no compromise” stance.

Had Sinofsky asked me, I wouldn’t have called it that, though. When you build a product as with everything else in life, there are always some compromises. I’d have labeled it something like “full flexibility” – because that’s really what it’s about.

I want to be able to sit on the plane or a park bench and browse the Web, check my mail, or watch a video on my slate. I want to be able to go to a meeting and take handwritten notes. Then when I get to the hotel room and need to get serious work done, I want to be able to plug in a keyboard and mouse and get down to business – without having to bring along multiple devices. I want something that lets me both consume and create content, and does the two equally well. I want the best of both worlds.

Jason worries that in trying to do the job of both desktop and tablet, Windows 8 will do neither very well. That position makes sense if you assume that there will be only one “flavor” of Windows 8. But I’m guessing we’ll see several different editions, as we do with Windows 7. And I think the edition that’s designed to run on ARM devices will be leaner and meaner than the one that’s made for enterprise desktops – while still able to do much of what full-fledged Windows can do, if that’s what you need.

I think sometimes hard core techies forget how important it is, to ordinary users, to be able to run the programs with which they’re familiar. Microsoft’s assurance that everything that runs on Windows 7 will run on Windows 8 is a big deal to those people, and just might be the deciding factor when they’re faced with the decision of which tablet to buy.

I like my Android tablet a lot, but I sometimes get frustrated with its limitations. I ditched the iPad after a few months because its functionality was even more limited. I’m excited about the possibility of more continuity across my desktop, laptop and slate, without sacrificing usability or performance. Will Microsoft pull that off? I don’t know, but if they can, it could put Windows out front in both the desktop and tablet games.

Guest Post By Debra Littlejohn Shinder of Tech Republic