After the failure of Windows 8 adoption especially with the enterprise users, Microsoft recently announced Windows 10, its future desktop Operating system aimed to correct and seduce back most users to Windows. I got myself the latest Windows 10 technical build preview and took it for a spin. The question that keeps leaping on my mind whenever I turn on Windows 10 is; Are desktop operating important going forward? They seem like they are and less important and who knows by next year, how important they will be.
Clearly Microsoft made it’s bones with Windows and to a less degree Office, but it also seems the future is Operating system independent, its cloud based and the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadela is very aware of that and he is fully behind a cross platform Microsoft as he stated way back in his letter to his staff. So how important is Windows 10 to Microsoft going forward?
The future is multi-screen and OS independent
Windows is a key part to Microsoft’s DNA and they can’t afford to screw it up and they have basically good architectural underpinning for it in Windows 8, they just have a bunch of deployment blockers that they need to remove there. The desktop PC market space isn’t getting smaller, it’s the number of screens that we have on which we can interact with our world which is getting so much bigger that as a proportion, desktop PCs are less important. Because there is so many other ways we interact with things. Basically there aren’t fewer PC out there, we have many other ways of computing.
So things like Office 365 for example which will be released on Android I think this year, already exists on iOS and Windows devices. So with a phone, a ‘phablet’, a tablet or a PC you can do work and you can work on the same document in the cloud irrespective of the Operating system you are using. And it might be a private cloud on an Office 365 enterprise server that is managed by a company or it might be a public available free cloud like One drive or Google drive which is more of a consumer service. But in either case you are going to be interacting with that on whatever screen you want running whatever OS you want. I think Microsoft has pretty much realized that it needs to make sure that the experience is good, solid, capable and productive regardless of what the operating system is and the screen size.
Obviously Microsoft knows the future is OS independent and Windows 10 seems to be a step closer to this future.
