But that's my point - metro is designed as a touch interface. Has no business even showing up on Win 8 running on a box with a non touch monitor,

I use swype and I still would never prefer typing on a touch screen to a well-designed heirarchical menu.

I think they really dropped the ball trying to make the look and feel of a non-touch interface be exactly the same as a touch interface. If they had just made the touch stuff a feature that kicked in when appropriate they would never have suffered the disastrous reaction from the large installed desktop / laptop base where i imagine touch screens are extremely rare right now. The demo should have been "Here's windows 8 on your current box. Look, faster, cleaner, boots faster than Win 7 with many internal improvement users have actually asked for. Now we plug in a touch screen -ooooh, cool "

Then create synergies with touch screen vendors to pair win 8 upgrades and touch screens.

What they did was tone deaf and ham fisted and sure, it won't kill MS but it should certainly get a whole lot of people fired. If anyone sees the need for Win 8.1 as anything other than a disaster I think they are drunk on kool aid.



>If touch, Metro is easier for a couple of reasons...
>
>Bigger hit area for the finger
>Typing is much faster than navigating a hierarchical menu
>
>
>>But think about it. This is a touch-screen interface and you are saying all you gotta do is start typing ...?? This is easier than picking from a menu by touching???
>>
>>A real UI enhancement would have been simply sensing if you were running on a device with a touch screen or not and configuring the default UI to be whatever would be most appropriate - i.e you'd never see Metro on a non-touch screen desktop and it would simply be Win 7 with a rewritten core and better internals. Touch devices would give you touch goodies by default.