Yesterday, the docking station for the Samsung Series 7 tablet came in the mail.  I hooked it up to the computer and set it up as the computer running our 50” plasma TV in the main room from which we do our stand-up meetings in the morning.  Now we have Windows 8 running on the big screen.

Take a look.  It’s a rough video, but you can see what the dock looks like.

Earlier this week, we received shipment of some Samsung Series 7 tablet computers from the Microsoft Store.  Kurt Schindler volunteered to installed Windows 8 on the computer, so he made a rather large USB drive

bootable with the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool (how-to article here).  I briefly go over the initial experience in this video.  You can see the new tablet interface called Metro.  These apps run in the WinRT runtime, which is a constrained runtime similar to Silverlight’s runtime.  You can also write C++ and Html/JavaScript apps in this runtime.  When running applications you are familiar with, like the desktop version of Skype, you tap the Skype tile that is laid out there for you.  No more hunting around in a huge start menu. 

In Fred Brooks’ book, The Mythical Man-Month, Mr. Brooks provides several essays that share his experience in the software industry going back to 1959.  One of the common themes found through several essays is that the size of the project is directly related to the risk of failure.

If the size of the project puts the project at a greater risk to fail, then a smaller project mitigates the size and scope risk.  There are many factors that could contribute to a failed project, but it is interesting to ponder whether we will see project success statistics change at a macro level when the normal size of an interactive application decreases because of the industry’s move to tablet form factors over the next five years. 

What do you think?