[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by franYo

On Windows 8 Enterprise edition (Build 9200) you can run two apps in the Metro interface. I'm not sure how it's done on a touchscreen, but with a mouse you go to the top of the screen until the cursor changes to a hand and then click and drag without releasing the button. If you drag the app to the bottom of the screen, it closes. If you drag it to the left or right it sort of docks there, taking up about a quarter of the screen. Now you can start another app and it will fill the other three quarters. Not sure if this can be done on Windows 8 RT, but I don't see why not.

Also, as far as I understand (this is not from personal experience), Windows 8 RT does in fact include a desktop. RT comes with a basic version of the MS Office suite, and the four included applications (Word, Excel, Power Point and One Note) are not Metro apps. I expect some other standard Windows applications will be included too (Windows Explorer and such). What you can't do is install third party applications (desktop applications, that is); it's a compatibility issue, since RT runs on ARM processors.

the consumer versions I have seen didn't do that. Probably br a selling point.
"For $100 more, upgrade to enterprise, where you can have TWO apps on screen at once!"

Originally Posted by Edward M. Grant

Who exactly was complaining about the 'clearly inferior' Windows 95 GUI compared to Windows 3.1? Or the 'clearly inferior' Windows 2 compared to Windows 1?

Similarly, about the only complaints I remember about XP's GUI was that it had rounded corners on the windows and shadows on the mouse pointer.

It's only since XP that people have been complaining about each new release being a step backwards in usability.

Where were you? Lots of people complained about 95. Main reason it saw faster adoption was due to improved networking. XP also had lots of complaints about the "Fischer Price" colors and new start menu.

Originally Posted by Edward M. Grant

Windows won the desktop GUI wars because it was the cheapest viable option.

The first really usable version of Windows was 3.0, and at that time you could buy a Unix workstation ($10,000+), a Mac ($5,000-10,000?), an IBM PC with OS/2 ($2,000-10,000?), or a generic PC with Windows ($1,000-2,000?). Prices are based on what I could find on the web and I don't remember whether early OS/2 ran on generic PCs as well as PS/2.

Windows was a joke compared to a Sun workstation, but you could buy a new car for the difference in price. Even OS/2 required more powerful hardware than Windows and came with a lot less free software. Pretty soon Windows had the largest software market overall, and when Windows 95 came out it was all over for the competition.

Windows will not be the cheapest option on tablets, will not have the largest tablet software base, and will still be seen as the cheap, low-quality brand it always was. Perhaps they can sell to business markets that are still tied to Windows, but I honestly can't see how they can sell Windows on consumer tablets short of massively subsidising tablet OEMs to push the price way down. Users looking for a premium brand will keep buying iPads, us cheapskates who don't want the Apple lock-in will keep buying Android.

and as it has been shown, MS is actively competing with the OEMs (MS Surface). The OEM lock in was why MS got so far ahead on desktops. Problem is, they've not tried that on phones or tablets.

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

Would this depend on the available RAM?

Yeah. The info on last state gets flushed based on amount of available memory, how many apps you've opened in the meanwhile, and how long it has been since you've last used it (which the latter two come in to play due to memory limitations)