Dual Boot – Insult to concept.

Dual Boot is a hack that is doomed to failure.

• CES 2014 is full of devices that are trying to be both laptops and tablets.
• A large number of these are attempting to do this by offering the ability to run both Windows 8.1 and Android.
• The idea is that the user uses Windows 8.1 when he or she is working and Android when at leisure.
• This is a crazy proposition as the whole point of Windows 8 is to make an environment that is optimised for both use cases and it telling that the OEMs feel the need to add something else
• This is a slap in the face for Windows 8 and a signal that something is badly wrong.
• There are two main problems.
  • First: App. availability on Windows 8 remains woefully inadequate despite large investments.
  • Second: Microsoft has done such an awful job of telling users why they should use Metro, that they are simply not interested.
• The Metro user experience is perfectly capable of offering a good experience for Digital Life but these two problems are hammering user acceptance.
• Hence, OEMs have decided that they need to offer an alternative tablet experience to Metro in order to entice users to buy.
• I believe that this strategy is doomed to failure and plays directly into Apple’s hands.
• Apple has long believed that hybrid devices make compromises that make the overall user experience suboptimal.
• Dual-boot will do exactly that.
• These devices are highly constrained when it comes to memory, processor and storage in order to keep the costs down.
• Intel has enabled fast switching between the two but two OSs will always consume more resources than one.
• Hence a dual boot device will have worse performance than any comparable device that runs just one OSs.
• Hence, I suspect that these devices will get mediocre reviews and very little traction.
• The answer to this problem is to fix Windows 8 not to replace the bits that one thinks the users don’t like.
• This is possible, but it is out of the control of the OEMs.
• Only Microsoft can achieve this and with its performance to date I am not optimistic that much will change in 2014.