Microsoft offered the public its first meaningful peek at its new operating system Windows 8 on September 13 at a conference for Windows developers.
The new software is designed to work equally well on PCs and tablet computers in a key gambit to help Microsoft meet the challenge posed by Apple's iPad and iPhone and other mobile devices like those powered by Google's Android operating system.
"This system is touch first," said Steve Sinofsky, Microsoft's Windows chief, at the Build Windows conference in Anaheim, California. "The minute you use touch on Windows 8 you are going to want it on all your PCs."
Sinofsky described Windows 8 as the most significant upgrade to the world's most popular operating system since the company introduced the desktop, mouse and the graphical user interface with Windows 95.
Sinofsky said that Microsoft had "reimagined Windows from the chipset to the user experience," making it available for the first time on the ARM chips that run many mobile devices, rather than exclusively on the Intel chip architecture that has dominated computing since the birth of the PC.
Sinofsky showed off how the new OS would feature live tiles with notifications from Faceboook, email, calendar and other apps, doing away with the start button that has traditionally been the launching point for programs and applications within Windows.
All programmes that work with Windows 7 will also run on Windows 8, he said. Despite being much more powerful, the new software uses around 40 per cent fewer system resources than its predecessor, he added.
The operating system is expected to hit the market in 2012, succeeding Windows 7 which is the most successful operating system in Microsoft's history with almost 450 million copies sold.
Analysts see Windows 8 as crucial to Microsoft's future and its only chance of closing the gap with Apple and Google over the burgeoning market for tablet computers, a market which is cannibalising traditional laptops and which is expected to reach sales of 300 million per year by 2015, according to research firm Gartner.