Watching the presentation now (or, at least, an edited-down version), and I have a few thoughts.
First, the execs/presenters feel a lot more downbeat than the Apple people and, as such, seem more human. Still uber-corporate, but more human.
It made me laugh when the first guy said that the start button is now centred because it's closer to you. First off, if you're using a touchscreen, then you'll be sitting in a way where you can touch the whole screen so that makes no difference. And, secondly, if that were true then it'd be in the actual centre, rather than being the leftmost app in a centred list of apps which will be a different size depending on how many apps are in it. I expect that most people will do what there is the option to do - left-justify it again. It's what people are used to after decades of consistent design, and at least then the button will always be in the same place.
I also expect people will do what they did for the menu from Windows 8 onwards - use a third party utility to restore the old start menu, which is still the superior design. I'd also have thought that people who don't use all their connected devices exclusively for work will want to turn off the "have all my most recently-opened files on my start menu alongside a thumbnail" feature.
WRT split screen, when they first announced in for Windows 8 I couldn't see the point. All these years later I still can't. I'm sure there are some people who use it in some ways, but I've never had a situation where it would ever have come in handy.
WRT Widgets, that's another thing that I've not really understood. I barely ever see my desktop. I don't understand what advantage I'd gain from having things taking up space on it. And now it seems like they're going to be a floating sheet that...recommends articles to you for when you want to take a break from working?
The tablet stuff isn't relevant to me, but it seems like much of it is catching up to Apple, which is kind of ironic as most of Apple's big announcements seem to be them catching up to Android.
The gaming stuff seems interesting, but I have no idea if I have the hardware for any of it to affect me. I've got a desktop that had really good specs when it was new, but that's several years ago now, and computers age quickly.
Microsoft store...who cares? I've not visited it once. I don't care about Android apps, either.
I suppose the biggest takeaway is that I can understand why they thought this was big enough change to bust out a new version number, but at the same time there's not actually all that much that has changed. Which is really what you want from an update to an OS, I suppose.
And will you have to log in to that account rather than one on the machine?
