Disclaimer: These rumors were never confirmed from official Microsoft sources. At the time of this writing, there is no official announcement from Microsoft regarding the new features of Windows 8.

You’ve probably noticed the stir that some leaked Windows 8 presentations have caused in the blogosphere. Most bloggers only picked out one or two of their favorite features. In this series I will outline my own interpretation of the leaked presentations.

There are different reports where the presentations appeared first. I didn’t bother to find out what is true. The complete collection of all presentations can be accessed at the Microsoft Kitchen. But let me give you two warnings before you move ahead.

First, most of the presentations are quite unspectacular. They are more about the metaphysics of Windows 8 than about real new features.

Second, Windows 8 obviously is only in an early planning stage. This means that these presentations have brainstorming character. At this point in time, neither Steve Ballmer nor Steven Sinofsky nor Paul Thurrott know which features Windows 8 will really have.

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Disclaimer: These rumors were never confirmed from official Microsoft sources. At the time of this writing, there is no official announcement from Microsoft regarding the new features of Windows 8.

In my last article, I described in depth why everything that can be said about Windows 8 is now only speculation. It is important to note because many bloggers and even journalists took the contents of the leaked presentations too seriously. When you read now about the new Windows 8 features that appear most interesting to me, you might come to the conclusion that I made the same mistake. However, it is just too boring to always write “could be,” “may be,” or “hopefully.”

Windows Store

Windows Store is an application store where you will be able to buy Windows software. I suppose, the software you can buy there will also run on Windows versions other than Windows 8. Yeah, sure, Microsoft got this idea from Apple. Nothing wrong with that. I wonder if this will become Microsoft’s main revenue stream in the future considering the gigantic market for Windows applications.

Cloud integration

Steve Ballmer made clear in his famous cloud speech that the cloud is the next big thing for Microsoft. I have outlined already in detail how I interpret Ballmer’s notion of the cloud. The expression that caught my eye in the presentations was “connectivity is assumed.” This reminds me of Google’s Chrome OS.

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Disclaimer: These rumors were never confirmed from official Microsoft sources. At the time of this writing, there is no official announcement from Microsoft regarding the new features of Windows 8.

In the last post, I speculated about the features related to the cloud and to new form factors Windows 8 could have. While these will probably be the most discussed Windows 8 functions, the new features I will discuss today are also noteworthy because they will have a significant impact on user experience.

Kinect support

You might have heard of Kinect for Xbox 360. It enables players to interact with games using gestures without touching any kind of hardware. I think, this new feature is not just for gamers. Actually, I believe, it is possible that we’re seeing the beginning of a new kind of user interface. Combine this with 3D displays, and you are in Minority Report. Yeah, right, Apple will probably pick this technology up and use their powerful marketing machinery to create the unbelievably successful “iAct.” But that is okay. (Do you remember the first presentations of Microsoft Surface and that the iPhone appeared shortly afterwards?)

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are only my own. At the time of this writing, Microsoft made no official announcement about the new features of Windows 8.

Before these Windows 8 presentations leaked I already planned a post about the features that I would like to see in Microsoft’s next operating system. Some of those features on these slides were already on my wish list, so I won’t include them here (Windows Store, Instant-On, Kinect support). Others have been mentioned in the presentations but were not detailed or radical enough for my taste. In this article I will outline my vision of these enhancements and some new ones.

Radical new user interface

The Windows user interface has been improved continuously over the last 15 years or so. But since Windows 95 we have seen no real radical changes. Considering that Windows will have to run on machines with many different form factors, it is essential that Microsoft introduces radical changes in Windows. Apple created a new operating system just for this purpose. I think this would be the wrong way to go for Microsoft. The Windows ecosystem is too big and it would be foolish to give up this advantage.

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Disclaimer: This poll is not conducted by Microsoft. At the time of this writing, there is no official announcement from Microsoft regarding the new features of Windows 8.

I want to be sure all features that have a fair chance of receiving a significant number of votes in this Windows 8 poll are included, so I created a brainstorming list with all possible enhancements I could think of. Some of you have already mentioned your wishes in previous posts in my Windows 8 series. I included them in a short version in this post. (Let me know if I missed something.)

If you have a blog, you can just copy my list here and ask your readers on your site. If there is enough interest, we could run the final poll on multiple blogs simultaneously by using an online poll service. I suppose this increases the chance that someone at Microsoft will take a look at the results. If you are interested in running this poll on your blog, please contact me.

If you have ideas for additional features that should be on this list, please post a comment below or send me message.

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In this post I discuss the five winners of the Windows 8 feature poll: better performance, instant-on, better security, malware protection, and less bloat.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are only my own. At the time of this writing, Microsoft made no official announcement about the new features of Windows 8.

It has been a while since the Windows 8 poll was launched on 4sysops and 16 other blogs. About 4000 people took part in this poll. For me, the results are somewhat surprising.

Readers could assign stars to 20 possible new Windows 8 features. The maximum, five stars, signified that the feature is most wanted. Visitors could only vote for selected features if some of the features were unclear to them or if they had no opinion about a feature.

The votes from all 17 blogs were collected at a central server and are presented below.

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