WINDOWS 8 LIKES

      

Windows 8 brings significant advantages to those who are upgrading existing PCs or purchasing new ones, thanks to features that better take advantage of the new OS's capabilities. The operating system offers improvements in performance, existing capabilities, and is cheaper. Finally, the world has had a chance to weigh in on it, and some solid improvements are just around the corner in Windows 8.1. For an in-depth look at the OS, read my review of Windows 8, but here are a few of features that make upgrading worthwhile.


SkyDrive integration.  Microsoft's cloud service has become way, way more than just online storage. Sure, it still lets you save and access files to an online space that's accessible from a Web browser or apps that run on not only Windows, but also Mac OS X, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. But with Windows 8, SkyDrive is accessible to any app that wants to use it, just as though it were a local drive. It also backs up your PC's settings, letting you replicate your environment should you get a new PC.

App Store

Finally, a number of IT shops have expressed an interest in living under Apple's App store and a fear of Android's largely because of the number of malware apps that have appeared in that ecosystem. Microsoft's Windows 8 app store is a blend of the best practices of both, providing the willingness of the Android products for application breadth and the curation of the Apple store assuring a malware-free environment. This best-of-both-worlds approach may make it easier for line managers to use this store to QC their code and for IT to get out of the middle of the process much like many do with the Apple App Store. In addition, the process the app goes through during approval is reported back and anomalies can be more quickly addressed as a result, assuring a more timely release of the related code.

In short, this might be a way for IT to pass responsibility over to Microsoft while still maintaining a high quality level on the custom applications. Better and cheaper are seldom seen together and should be well received.