The Windows 8 "Walled Garden"

From MSDN:

(On the new touch-UI apps for Windows 8) Distributed through the Windows Store. Apps must pass certification so that users download and try apps with confidence in their safety and privacy. Side-loading is available for enterprises and developers.

This is scary. Or should be. The concept of having to defer to someone else for "permission" to install a piece of software is absolutely outrageous, and is one of the reasons why I'm avoiding the iOS sphere.

About the nearest thing to a positive I can think of (well, not a positive so much as a "might not be as bad as..." thing) is that Microsoft's dominant position pretty much rules out the idea they can screen for content, in the same way that Apple does. If Microsoft uses the concept to screen out, say, compilations of political cartoons (as Apple did) then Microsoft is likely to attract the attention of a lot of anti-trust lawyers again, especially if Windows 8 truly ends up having the devastating affect on the market I think it will.

This, again, really, really, really, underscores the need for Canonical and Google to address the situation. I desperately hope both organizations are discussing this internally. Android doesn't stand a chance as long as it remains a stripped down single user operating system, and Ubuntu doesn't stand a chance as long as its primary APIs have no relevance to touchscreens.

Microsoft are teh greatest

Not really, they just signed a letter supporting AT&T destroying T-Mobile. But, well, here are some things they do I like:

1. Active Directory, although they need to create a cheaper version, and it shouldn't be as complicated. I thought I'd throw that in first to make people go "Wait? What?!"
   
2. X-Box 360 Kinect. What an awesome idea. WANT.
   
3. HD DVD. OK, that was withdrawn, but it was the better of the two HD standards. Who knows, if WB had killed BD rather than HD DVD, maybe we'd have a successful HD disc format.
4. Windows 8. There's some awesome ideas there.
5. .NET - a copy of Java it may be, but it's a commitment to the way things should be, not the way things are.
6. Office Web Apps. A copy of Google Docs it might be, but they've done a great job and they have even taken the effort lately, not just with this but with OWA and other web systems, to get in some decent Firefox/GNU/Linux support.
   

I think Microsoft's major problems are:

• They have a lot of legacy crap that keeps tripping them up. This has been chronically damaging to their products and yet unavoidable. Think how much cleaner and more secure Windows NT (and by implication 2000/XP/Vista/7) would have been had Cutler not needed to support Win16/Win32.
• They feel the need to control the entire ecosystem yet don't know how to do it in a way that doesn't get in the way of others.
• Their pricing always assumes a neat division between home users and business users, and many of their technologies have an absurdly high cost of entry.
• They're not open source. That's a problem for me, obviously not for them, and it's why I'm not going to adopt much of their stuff any time soon.

Still, they're definitely less evil than they were ten years ago.