Microsoft has only demoed Windows 8 tablets in landscape mode thus far, which lead to speculation that landscape is all it would support. It also led to a large amount of skepticism about the operating system and its viability on tablets. But this week on the official Building Windows 8 blog, Microsoft developers confirmed that Windows 8 will support both modes and that Metro developers will have the tools to create apps that can work in either layout.

Although it will support portrait views, Microsoft is still heavily emphasizing landscape views. In a blog post last month, RedMonk co-founder and analyst James Governor described Windows 8 as the first OS for the widescreen Web. Governor wrote:

A while ago the growing prevalence of wide screen monitors set me thinking about information representation and user engagement a while ago: these screens lend themselves to context-adding sidebars, and intriguing context juxtapositions. Thus for example, SAP’s activity stream platform Streamworks never made sense to me until I saw it demoed as a sidebar to a traditional SAP business application screen; where structured data, manipulation and entry met unstructured conversations and semi-structured business docs. In other words- what is Twitter if not a sidebar?

Services Angle

Microsoft has a lot riding on Windows 8. Apple dominates the slate-style tablet arena and is slowly eating away at Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop. Still, Windows will likely be the dominant platform for quite some time. So the user interface guidelines Microsoft establishes have big consequences, both for Microsoft’s future and for developers, who will be stuck building apps for Windows for years to come. A landscape-only approach, while innovative, may have been too radical. This seems like a good compromise.