Microsoft sees a future through cleaner Windows 8

Windows 8, the PC giant's new operating system, is stylish, award-winning, multi-platform and critical to its future Among the many criticisms lobbed at Microsoft by Apple's late founder Steve Jobs, one of the best remembered was about design: "They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products." The latest version of Microsoft's operating system for smartphones is a revolutionary product for its parent company because it is considered to have both taste and culture. Windows Phone uses the company's Metro interface, whose graphics are so cutting-edge they can make the iPhone seem out of date. Its creators, Microsoft's in-house design team, claim it is changing not only how their products appear, but the company's philosophy. Windows 8, the latest version of Microsoft's world-dominating PC software, will be released later this year and has been given a Metro makeover. The worry is that Microsoft has discovered the power of good taste a little too late. Windows software is installed on 95 per cent of the world's estimated 1.5 billion home and business PCs, but in the western world sales of laptop and particularly desktop computers have reached a plateau. When Windows 8 is released later this year, millions of Microsoft customers will ask themselves whether they should spend money upgrading an old computer, or treat themselves to new one. For many, that new machine is likely to be not a PC but a tablet, and until now Apple has been the only company capable of selling tablets in large numbers. "The ground is shifting under Microsoft," says Jean-Louis Gasse, former head of Apple Macintosh development and contender for the chief executive role in the late 1980s. "The world will no longer be PC-centric. We will see growing numbers of smartphones and tablets and we as users will spend more time on these devices. PCs will be reserved for the tasks of content creation." This could also be the year when investors form a view on whether long-serving Steve Ballmer the 30th employee Microsoft hired and its chief executive for the last decade should continue in the top job. Ball-mer's efforts to catch up with Google on web search, and play a meaningful part in the mobile world, have so far proved fruitless. Windows Phone took just 1.5 per cent of the mobile operating system market in the third quarter of 2011, according to research firm Gartner, compared to over 50 per cent for Android and 15 per cent for Apple. These setbacks have not mattered while Microsoft remains dominant in PCs but all that could change if PCs no longer dominate. Research firm IDC forecasts that in affluent western economies, desktop computer sales will slip from 57.8 million a year in 2010 to 49.8 million by 2015. Laptop sales dipped by some 7 million in 2011; they are expected to recover this year, but go on to grow at a far slower pace than previously. Sales of tablets are heading the other way, rising from 17.6 million in 2010 to 77.4 million last year and a projected 326 million in 2015. "This is going to be one of the most important years in Microsoft's history," says Gartner analyst David Cearley. "The desktop era has been supplanted by a new mobile computing era and it makes Windows 8 the most critical version of Microsoft's operating system we've seen in a long time." Cearley says the transition is "as big, if not bigger" than that made when Microsoft moved from its command-line operating system DOS where words without graphics appeared teletext-style on a black screen to the Windows format.