So last month I got myself a new laptop. Nothing crazy, but a very nice mid-range AMD quad-core. It came with Windows 7 pre-installed. It also came with a voucher to get $25 off Windows 8. So I said what the heck, why not.

Now I’m just waiting for the install to complete. So far so good. The only thing it hates is my Bluetooth drivers so I’ll have to redo those when it finishes.

On a slightly peculiar side note, when it complained about the driver, and it did so in French. The rest of the installation is in English. Strange, but not any sort of disaster.

Now ten percent…… The wait continues.

Nearly an hour later, I’m now running Windows 8 on my laptop. YAY! I have to say, I like what I see so far. It’s a clever amalgam of Windows Phone OS with access to a more traditional PC desktop.

The Windows 8 interface consists of a set of large, colorful buttons/icons linking to a variety of pre-installed apps. That’s right, apps. Just like those things on everyone’s smart phones. So much like a smart phone in fact that additional ones can be had through Microsoft’s own app store.

In this lies the true innovation in this latest effort from the nice people at Redmond. They’ve beaten Apple to the punch by integrating their mobile and less mobile OS platforms to an unprecedented degree. iOS looks nothing like OSX Mountain Lion. I’ve yet to see a desktop Linux build that remotely resembles Android despite Google’s abortive Chrome desktop a few years back.

Microsoft took it the other way. Instead of trying to figure out how to strip down and shoehorn a desktop OS onto a phone, they built up their phone OS into something that could be useful on a notebook, net book or desktop. Along the way, achieved a couple of other really impressive feats. They lowered its hardware requirements and it’s base price.

It owes both of these achievements to its phone OS DNA. Phones have pretty wildly varied hardware specs. This means that your phone OS has to be able to work smoothly on as broad a hardware spectrum as possible. Hence Windows 8 minimum requirements of 1ghz processor, 2gb of ram and 20gbs of hard drive space. Pretty modest by today’s standards, or yesterday’s for that matter.

The other piece of phone DNA can be seen as either good news or bad depending on how you see it. That’s the idea of the app store. For years Windows has been jeeringly regarded as the epitome of bloatware. Packed with tons of useless items for which Microsoft demanded a ton of money whether you wanted them or not. Not so much anymore. You can still pay a ton of money (a little bit at a time) but now it’s up to you whether or not you get anything from their app store.

Personally I’m liking the new business model. Because I had recently purchased my laptop, I was able to do my upgrade to Windows 8 for a whopping $14.99 CDN. For those who haven’t bought new hardware, it’s much, much pricier…….. $39.99. Pretty outrageous eh?

The verdict so far…. I’m liking it. It’s innovative. It’s pretty. It’s a whole new direction from a company that’s been running in a straight line for years.

Congratulations Microsoft… Job well done.

Cheers, Winston