Wind8w and the corporate world

Windows 8 comes with 15 built in metro applications. Including Mail, which still goes to my hotmail and not the new Web Outlook, though I updated, and Messenger, which uses my MSN messenger contact list.  Aren't they killing Messenger and going with Skype?   That's neither here or there.  The Microsoft store, from which these Metro apps can be bought or updated is not proxy friendly or even proxy aware. As it goes, all 15 of those metro applications need updating already!

So how the heck do they expect these to get updated in a corporate environment? I was asked to test metro apps but I had to use my direct connect. I could not by-pass the proxy. The IT guy spent part of the afternoon in my test lab,  after having configured to open  my sub-net  to all accesses to the Microsoft store. He followed the instructions Microsoft had for IT professionals. It did not work at all.  And they can't open my subnet to everything, that's not secure!

This is really not going to deploy in large companies until it becomes more backwards compatible. Also all those metro apps that all run full screen? In the PC world we don't have just 1 display. Sometimes we even have 16 displays.  Running full screen doesn't seen all that intuitive.  Found an interesting article for running metro apps in windowed mode instead of being full screen all the time.

The Store in Windows 8 is poorly designed. There's no search that I could find. I could hate being on some tablet and have to go through pages and pages of tiles to find the app I want to install? In one category there is already close to 6000 apps. You can sort them by their price or if they are free.  But you can't search. We had to use a browser and then it found the app and launched the store and installed.

Even with open access to internet having metro apps install is slow process and you might have to kill the store over and over, because it seems once an app fails to install, it is in a weird state and until you restart the store app, it is stuck in no man's land.