Windows 8.1 consolidates, reaffirms Microsoft brave new world

Windows 8.1 Preview showing four windows at once in the "Modern" UI.

Amidst a choir of misinformed dissenters, who arguably are hooked into other computing platforms and who regularly spew nonsense about the newest iteration of the ubiquitous Microsoft operating systems, comes Windows 8.1 (preview) to shut them up all with hard facts. Someone once said, I'm trying to remember, that criticism is the art of finding reasons not to admire, and that's exactly what I believe has happened to Windows 8 vis-à-vis its detractors. You can download here the ISO file of this updated version of Windows. The product key is right there as well (you will need it). You can also find the Windows 8.1 Preview product key in the FAQs page. Bill Snyder, author of the insightful Consumer Tech Radar column in the CIO.com website, writes that the "constant dissing of Windows and Internet Explorer might lead consumers to think that there's something wrong with the software and that they better switch to something else. But that's nonsense." In its column, Snyder, not a big fan of Microsoft technologies himself, shoots straight when he writes "Sorry Fanboys, Windows and IE still rule" and explains why Windows has 91.51 percent of the overall operating systems market and IE 56.15 percent, with the other 43 something percent shared between Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, in that order. But it is not only a matter of statistics and a bigger user base, it is also sort of a new paradigm in computing in the making, as D.B. Grady, another highly regarded author, puts it: "Windows 8 is a vision of computing that is not only thoroughly re-imagined, but in many ways superior to anything else out there" and that was back in the fall of 2012 when Windows 8 RTM was officially released.