Microsoft COO Kevin Turner
Julie BortMicrosoft is on track to deliver Windows 10, its next version of Windows, as early as the late summer, COO Kevin Turner
told attendees of the Credit Suisse Technology Conference on Thursday.
The company has been showing off the new OS for the past few months,
mostly playing up the features that businesses are going to love. And most of those features, so far, involve bringing things back from Windows 7.
That’s important because businesses have for the most part ignored
Windows 8, preferring Windows 7 instead. Even when they buy new PCs,
which they have done in droves this year, when Microsoft retired support
for XP.
Turner says that in the spring, Microsoft will start showing off new
consumer features in Windows 10. Developers will get their hands on a
preview version, too, in the spring, giving them a chance to write apps.
Surely that will happen at Microsoft’s annual developer’s conference,
Microsoft Build, which begins April 29.
With Microsoft’s major reorg, the company has changed the way it
builds Windows. It is sending versions of Windows 10 out continuously to
anyone who wants to play with it, asking for feedback. That happens
through the
Windows Insider program.
So, a developer preview version shouldn’t be the first time
programmers see Windows 10. This also means Windows could get to market
faster than ever before. Microsoft may even have Windows 10 out for the
back-to-school PC shopping season.
Here’s what Turner said:
The thing I want to tell you about on Windows 10 is the Windows 10
timeframe. We plan to talk about the end user consumer experiences in
the early spring, we’ll have a developer preview and be able to talk to
that in depth in the early summer timeframe. And then by late summer and early fall, we’ll be able to bring out this particular OS. That’s the current plan of record.
He also talked about another interesting phenom going at Microsoft right now.
On the one hand, CEO Satya Nadella is very firmly pushing Microsoft into the post-PC era, rolling out new cloud services
and apps that run on any devices, any operating system. The more operating systems supported by these apps, the better.
On the other,
thanks to the major reorganization of the company,
Windows “is now the third biggest entity within our company behind the
Office franchise and our enterprise franchise,” Turner said.
The “enterprise franchise” refers to all the software products used
by IT, things like Microsoft’s database SQL Server, and its tech
management tools, System Center.
With Windows still being the third biggest thing at Microsoft, Turner
emphasised that it’s still “a big important franchise for us as a
company.”
So at Microsoft, the mantra seems to be Windows ISN’T DEAD YET. LONG LIVE THE CLOUD!
And for that to happen, Windows 10 needs to be a hit. Not only do
businesses need to love it, but Microsoft has an ambitious new plan for
developers, Turner emphasised.
They will be able to write one app and it will run on any Windows 10
device: phone/tablet, PC, Xbox, or Internet of Things device.
That’s a developer’s nirvana
known a “Universal Windows Apps.”
If it works as advertised, Windows 10 will be overflowing with cool new
apps and will rise from the ashes of Windows 8, stronger than ever.
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