Windows 8

» see windows.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

It went to manufacturing on 1 August 2012 and reached shops on 26 October. The pitch was that touch was where computing was going, the iPad had made that obvious, and Windows should get there before the market did. So the Start menu became a full screen of live tiles, the desktop was demoted to something you switched into like an app, and the Start button came off the taskbar for the first time since Windows 95. In its place was a hotspot in the bottom left corner, invisible, which you were expected to find with a mouse you could not see the target for.

The Charms bar was the other half. Swipe in from the right edge and you got search, settings and the rest of the system chrome, which works beautifully with a thumb and is a small daily indignity with a trackpad. Most of the machines this shipped on had no touch screen. Enterprises had just finished a painful migration to Windows 7 and had no intention of doing another one for a design that assumed hardware they had not bought.

The numbers looked fine for about a month. Four million upgrades over launch weekend, forty million licenses by 27 November 2012. Then the actual market answered: US Windows device sales for the season came in twenty-one percent below 2011. Reviews split down the middle and the negative half was brutal about the interface being two operating systems bolted together with no agreement between them about what a window was.

I was working through all of this and I do not have a Windows 8 period, which puts me with a large share of everyone. Laptops in Turkey came with it preinstalled around 2013 and a genuinely common first act was wiping it back to 7. That was not principle. It was that the thing you learned in 1998 about where a program lives had stopped being true, and nobody had asked whether that trade was worth it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

There was a second product hiding inside this one. Windows RT was the first Windows built for ARM, it only came preloaded on specific devices, and it looked exactly like Windows 8 while refusing to run any Windows software you already owned. Buyers could not tell the two apart on a shop shelf. It did more damage to trust in the brand than the interface did, because at least the interface was honest about being new.

Microsoft moved fast for Microsoft. Windows 8.1 arrived in October 2013, less than a year after launch, and it put a Start button back on the taskbar. The button opened the tile screen rather than a menu, so it was closer to an acknowledgment than a fix, but the direction was unmistakable. The rest of the retreat took until Windows 10 in 2015, which brought back a real Start menu with tiles inside it and skipped the number 9 entirely.

~ the retreat ~

The original Windows 8 died first and almost nobody noticed, because Microsoft ended its support on 12 January 2016 and told everyone to take the free update to 8.1 instead. That is an unusually short life for a numbered Windows release, and it happened because 8.1 was never really a service pack. It was a correction, and Microsoft wanted the corrected version to be the one in the field.

Then 8.1 ran out on 10 January 2023, with no extended security update program offered to consumers, which is a quieter ending than XP or 7 got. The tiles did not survive either. Windows 11 dropped live tiles from the Start menu in 2021 and put the icons in the middle of the taskbar, so the one visual idea Windows 8 fought for is now gone from the operating system that replaced the operating system that replaced it.

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