Windows 8 and human computer interaction

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This week I started testing Windows 8 Developer release. It is a bold step for Microsoft. They have really bet that the tablet is the future of computing. While I am a huge fan of new user interfaces for computers, Windows8 will be  a challenge for computer users that are using a desktop or traditional laptop. Yes Microsoft does include the normal desktop to run applications like Word, Outlook, and other non-touch oriented applications, but the Start menu has been replaced with the Start Page. This might throw people, and may be a steep learning curve. For a tablet user however, Win8 begs you to touch it. It's big colorful blocks of "live" information make it so easy to use your hands and stylist to interact with it, you can't help but want to use it. What I'm looking forward to is seeing how Windows 8 can be used in non-traditional computer situations like, kiosks, way finding, touch aware surfaces etc. I want to see Windows go further than just "cool" interfaces.
Speaking of going past cool interfaces. I think we the people have given up on computers that actually assist us in favor of fashion and flashy graphics. I love UI; but I began to question it when I started teaching my kids programming. Because of TRON they were interested in "programs" so I basically went back to the early days of coding to start teaching. Free Basic was the time machine I used. As an exercise I wrote an recipe program. Now it was nothing fancy just a list of recipes written in the code. But what was fun was the "Print" commands I created. I used very human sentences asking the user questions about what the user wanted to cook. So you see something like:
"Good (evening or morning depending on the clock). What would you like to cook?"
BREAD
"What kind of bread?"
WHITE
"Old Fashion or French?"
OLD FASHION
"Enjoy!"
(Followed by the recipe)
Remember these were just exercises. However these exercises reminded me of what I wanted from computers; a sense of assistance and interaction. I fear that we have given up that dream in favor of fast, flashy UI. If I had to give an example of what I would like to see more of it would be IBM's Watson. I think the Watson project at IBM, and the New User Interface work being done at Microsoft Research which gave us things like Kinect, and Surface is so much more in the right direction. However I think that developers need to be aware of what IBM and Microsoft Research is discovering; we in the technology field need to be more aware of how humans interact with world around them. We use more than one finger and we use more words than "OK" "yes" "next" and "search".

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