Hello, Please microsoft please have a proper windows 8.1 OS then switch to other version Cheers Trojan
Ballmer is close to be kicked out so the future of Windows Vista 2 is anything but clear. However, and right now, MS is working hard, MS just recently launched Minefield and Solitaire
Well, it's true that x86/x64 has become their platform of choice, but on the other hand: What are the alternatives? ARM is getting a lot of attention these days, and Windows already runs on it (in a limited way), but what's left apart from that? I mean, we shouldn't forget the fact that full-blown Windows is just too massive to run decently on low- to middle-end architectures like ARM, especially the Win32 part. It's just not been designed for devices where battery life is an important factor. So maybe you could go and strip a lot of the "legacy" stuff out there, what actually kind of happened with Windows RT, but Win32 is massive, and to support desktop applications as we know it you'll need a lot more than a lean kernel and runtime layer on top of it. People don't seem to realize it, but in fact, Windows RT is the living example of a breakup with being tied to x86/x64 and being backwards compatible: Except for Office and some built-in utilities, no desktop applications (which represent "the past") can be run there, only stuff that's written for the new Windows Runtime. But what happened? People hate this platform because it is not backwards compatible and they can't run their "old" familiar desktop applications. I'm not so sure if "breaking with the past" is always the right choice to be innovative. Now speaking about the modern UI: I wouldn't go as far and call it ugly. IMO, if you look at it as a touch-first interface, it's much better than what Apple or Google offers on their devices. It might be simplistic, but it is unique, and I don't think people really fully understood the paradigma of the Metro design. Now they cry out for a notification center, while it is already there in front of their eyes: it's called live tiles. You've got mail? The tile will tell you. Your upcoming appointments? The tile will tell you. Skype? The tile will tell you. The story goes on like this. In fact, live tiles made a notification center kind of obsolete. We'd rather need the ability to review toast notifications that were missed. Don't get me wrong: I'm not one who was convinced from the very first day, and I think I'm still being far from it. I don't think it was a good choice to mess up the Windows desktop OS and turn it into a touch-first tablet OS. It's just hard to do it right and they sort of failed. They should have taken only the Windows kernel as a basis and build Metro on top of it. But then they couldn't go and call it Windows anymore, because maybe they thought it will be doomed to fail if they call it anything but Windows. So, if it's only for the brand that people might be willing to buy your product even though you radically changed it, you got something fundamentally wrong. And, I'm highly suspicious about the sustainability of the "apps era". I remember how people always complained about vendor-specific extensions to HTML/JavaScript that made websites incompatible between browsers. HTML5 could have been the answer to it... but wait: If it's no longer important if you use IE on Windows, Firefox on Linux, Safari on iOS - how can we make people to invest in our platform? The answer: A proprietary application model! An iOS app only runs on iOS, an Android app on Android, and a Windows Store app on Windows. Problem solved. Three different APIs and user interface models. You might be able to share some business logic code between them, but in fact you have to build three different UIs against three different APIs in at least two different programming languages. It feels a little like the browser wars in the late 90s. Now it's just the "app wars".