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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Microsoft event lacks rock-star appeal

By: Peter Svensson and Ryan Nakashima

Posted: 10/26/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

NEW YORK -- For a company that has launched products with Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and Jay Leno -- and has even paid to light up the Empire State Building in its signature colours -- Microsoft's unveiling of Windows 8 on Thursday was a subdued affair.

Windows 8 is Microsoft's radical reimagining of its ubiquitous operating system. What makes it vastly different from past Windows releases is it's designed to work on touch-enabled PCs and tablet computers. Microsoft is also making its own tablet computer, the Surface. Both the Surface and Windows 8 will go on sale today.

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For the event, Microsoft dressed up a cavernous former bus depot on a floating pier jutting from Manhattan into the Hudson River. With no rock stars in attendance, Microsoft executives took the stage to introduce Windows 8 desktops, laptops and tablets made by AsusTek Computer, Dell, Samsung Electronics and others.

Instead of raising expectations, Microsoft did what it could to reset them.

In recent days, some reviewers have panned the Surface tablet. Others have criticized the dearth of apps in the Windows Store, the new online store where customers can buy apps that will work on the current model of the Surface and other devices that use the streamlined version of the new operating system, called Windows RT.

"The Windows Store has more apps than any competing app store had at its opening," said Steven Sinofsky, president of Windows and Windows Live, in a thinly veiled reference to Apple's iPad, which launched in April 2010 relying on apps that had been developed for the much smaller iPhone.

"Thousands of new developers are joining the Windows Store ecosystem," Sinofsky added.

Microsoft's event in New York took on the look and feel of Apple's famous unveilings but lacked the element of surprise. Most of what came out Thursday already had been known long ago -- a consequence of Microsoft's need to work with a wide array of partners, particularly PC makers.

Perhaps in a nod to its many manufacturing partners such as Dell and others, Microsoft didn't talk about its own device, the Surface tablet, until the end of its morning presentation.

It followed that with a separate presentation in which Surface general manager Panos Panay dropped the tablet from shoulder height to demonstrate its toughness. Sinofsky also showed off a couple of Surface devices the team had turned into skateboards by screwing on rails and wheels.

-- The Associated Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 26, 2012 B11

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