Making Windows 8 Better

Windows 8 has been something of a flop. It's selling even worse than the much-loathed Windows Vista did, and the entire PC industry is feeling the pain.

Microsoft is listening. It's hard at work on Windows 8.1, which it says will be much better. It's expected this October.

You can see a video of Windows 8.1's highlights. As you'll discover, there's not much new in Windows 8 - just the tiniest tweaks. Incredibly, forehead-slappingly, Microsoft seems to be completely ignoring the two elephants in the room. It won't bring back the Start menu (you'll still have to install one of the free third-party Start-menu-restoration apps), and it won't split up the desktop and TileWorld environments.

Yes, two. To understand these two halves of Windows 8, you can read my review. But the gist is this:

“TileWorld is fantastic for touch screens… Conversely, Desktop Windows is obviously designed for the mouse. Most of the menus, window controls and buttons are too small for finger operation. Unfortunately, in Windows 8, you can't live exclusively in one world or the other.”

Each of the two environments, on its own, is very good for its intended purpose; Microsoft's big mistake was to mash them together. The solution, I wrote, is simple:

“You know what would have been perfect? Keeping the two operating systems separate. Put TileWorld and its universe of new touch screen apps on tablets. Put Windows 8 on mouse-and-keyboard PCs. Presto: all the confusion would evaporate. And the good work Microsoft did on both of these individual operating systems would shine.”

That was more or less a pie-in-the-sky suggestion. I didn't really think that Microsoft would take it seriously, after having put so many millions of dollars and hours into creating and marketing this FrankenOS in the first place. Best case, I figured, Microsoft might have the chance to split up the two systems in a couple of years - in Windows 9, for example. Or maybe Microsoft was counting on the mouse and keyboard and the desktop to go away entirely, leaving only TileWorld (formerly known as Metro) to soldier on.

But this week, InfoWorld took the radical step of analyzing Windows 8 and figuring out how it really could be fixed - in this fall's Windows 8.1.

Now, InfoWorld isn't some general-interest publication for consumers. Its mission statement doesn't include striving to be entertaining, as mine does. It's for hard-core technology professionals - system administrators, network geeks.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that the first item in InfoWorld's “How to Fix Windows 8” feature was this:

“Eliminate the duality of Metro and Desktop on every device. They don't work well together, and shouldn't be mixed together. Instead, PCs run a modified version of the Desktop and tablets run a modified version of Metro.”

It made me think: What, realistically, would the downside be of busting up Windows 8 into its two component environments, to be installed separately?

Well, part of the problem is that there are now two categories of software programs. Category 1: the four million existing Windows desktop programs (Photoshop, Quicken, iTunes, and so on). Category 2: the new breed of TileWorld apps, like iPad apps - full-screen, no menus, no overlapping windows, generally simpler than desktop apps. What happens to all those apps?

InfoWorld suggests that in Windows 8.1, TileWorld apps would run in their own windows on the desktop, so you'd really lose nothing. In fact, you'd gain something: the ability to run them alongside your desktop apps without having to switch into a different environment.

But what about Microsoft Office? Right now, these are desktop apps that don't have TileWorld versions. If you had a tablet (which would run TileWorld), how would you run Office?

InfoWorld suggests that Microsoft should cook up a TileWorld version of Office. Problem solved.

What about the learning curve? Now you'd have two operating systems to learn: one on your touch-screen device (Windows TileWorld) and one on your laptop (Windows Desktop).

Well, actually, guess what? In Windows 8, you have to learn them both anyway. If Microsoft split up the two operating systems, you'd have to learn only one version of Windows. You'd have to learn both only if you owned two machines, one touch-screen and one not - and that, as iPad owners have discovered, is really no big deal.

I have a feeling that InfoWorld was, in part, going for blue-sky, headline-grabbing thinking here. (For example, it calls its hypothetical Windows 8.1 “Windows Red,” a spoof of Windows 8.1's actual code name, “Windows Blue.”) Did the editors there really imagine that corporate, slow-moving, conservative old Microsoft would take a step as radical as busting up Windows 8?

Who knows? What matters is that the idea is out there. It's solid. It's doable. The only serious downside to splitting up Windows is the huge servings of crow and humble pie that Microsoft would have to consume.

But you know what? Ask the makers of New Coke, or Apple Maps. Sometimes, the best thing for your customers and your company is to admit you've committed a colossal blunder - and set to work undoing it.