This is how Microsoft envisioned it for Windows 8

Windows 8 was the beginning of the end of Microsoft’s focused attempt to bring touch closer to the first click.

Microsoft has spent three years turning its tide

In 2012, the company launched the operating system … Not very positive feedback.

Users didn’t understand why the Start menu was so big and focused on touch, and after a few years it made less sense because the OS still had many elements in the interface that didn’t make sense on a touch laptop – the traditional Windows interface. Microsoft is still working on getting rid of it.

Users, and Microsoft, had locked themselves in no man’s land with 8.

Take the tiles too far

With Windows 10, launched three years later, Microsoft chose to shrink the Start Menu Metro interface so that it could fit into the traditional Start menu. In Windows 11, the tile philosophy of the Metro interface can be said to have been completely ditched in favor of traditional icons, and although many laptops come equipped with a touch screen, this is often secondary to browsing web pages.

But it was undoubtedly an exciting future that Microsoft tried to push in this way, which is evident in the concept video below that set the agenda for 5,000 Microsoft employees who gathered in the spring of 2010 to see the future they were creating.

See what Microsoft wanted to do with Windows in 2010

In the clip, you can see all the ideas from the teams, grouped into a whole concept quite similar to the experience we got two years later. See Start Menu, IE 9, Excel and transfer files in traditional file explorer and touch widget.

Also note the multi-screen support and a completely different task manager from what we have today.