Windows 8 Shows Desktop Will Go the Way of the Dodo

The Desktop in Windows 8 is little more than an afterthought, by design. I've got the evidence that shows why Microsoft hopes to kill it off as soon as it can.

The first piece of evidence is the most obvious: When you boot into Windows 8, you boot into the Metro interface, not the Desktop. I've nosed around various options, and haven't figured out a way to boot into the Desktop, so even if it's possible, Microsoft has made it very hard to do. (If the last thing you were doing before leaving your PC was use the Desktop, and Windows 8 goes to sleep in the interim, you'll head into the Desktop when you wake it from sleep, of course, because Windows goes to the last app you used before it slept.) If Microsoft wanted to keep the Desktop around for the long term, it would have made it simple to boot into the Desktop.

Here's another piece of evidence: In Windows 8, the Desktop is just another app, run as a tile from Metro. It's clearly been relegated to the sidelines. And it's not just that the Desktop is another app, but that Microsoft hasn't bothered to spend any time improving it from previous Windows versions. Microsoft has done a very good job in designing Metro, but has essentially ignored the Desktop.