"Project Blue" - Windows 365?

Overheal

http://gizmodo.com/5985006/microsoft-job-postings-confirm-windows-blue-and-yearly-updates-from-here-on-out

Something we started speculating about in retail circles after it was evident that Office 365 is actually going to be sticking around. The advantage is obvious: aside from being cheaper than Netflix, you get constant updates for what is traditionally a piece of software you basically drag into the grave with you rather than spend any extra money updating, resulting in gradually worse stresses trying to keep it current with everything else - the biggest problem being nobody is really fond of lurching into a new UI change every 3-6 years.

So it looks like this is what Project Blue is. 365 for Windows, meaning instead of bigger jumps in major changes, we would see more gradual things. It also ends all of the arguments of "ah sure, these were all things they could have just done to Vista with a SP, etc" and perhaps just as importantly keeps people updated. I cringe when I think of people still running IE6. This stuff just gets to a point where it's not worth hanging onto because of security flaws.

It also fortunately hints that they aren't just going to leave the Tile UI where it sits, which is still pretty basic. It needs multiple extra layers of functionality before I could honestly consider it a workspace or even a playspace.

The bigger question would have to be though, how are consumers going to react to an OS that seems to be in a state of constant evolution.

Fysh

Hmm.

I think people are already wondering whether they can be arsed with a 3 year release cycle for Windows given the retail cost, so this could go either way - on the one hand, if they're smart and the costs are low, it could help get people into the habit of keeping up to date. On the other hand, new Windows releases have a tendency to be unperfected, so I'm kind of scared of moving to a setup where that's perpetually the case.

Fedora already does something similar to what you describe - it's a free distro that's used as a development testbed for RHEL. Version 18 has been getting a thorough shoeing for having quite badly fumbled aspects of the UI and the installation/migration tool. Similarly, the last 2 releases of OS X have had, in my experience, at least a few interesting bugs that make immediate adoption something to be avoided.

Another thing to consider is the difference between consumers and corporates. Consumers might go along with Windows 365, especially if they're given no choice (I'd frankly loathe the idea myself, I run enough stuff that I don't want to be dealing with an annual upgrade cycle across the several machines I own). Corporates are another matter entirely, especially the more specialised ones who have in-depth testing and support requirements (there are engineering firms whose software has to go through months of validation against defined OS releases because the implications of eg a change in how floating points are handled for a real-world engineering project can be disastrous), so attempting to force them into a constant-change cycle would not work out well for Microsoft.

Torqay

Fysh wrote: »

Another thing to consider is the difference between consumers and corporates. Consumers might go along with Windows 365

As they did with in the olden days, culminating in Windows 2000 and Windows ME?

Sure, let them split it up again and see how consumers "go along". In the case of ME, it didn't take too long and they demanded better than the crap Microsoft was feeding them. An entire shlt storm broke loose, bad press, broken down help lines (that was long before the usefulness of nice chaps from the South Asian subcontinent had been discovered), etc. A few month later they got their "revamped corporate OS" and thus began the tale of Windows XP.

Fysh

Torqay wrote: »

As they did with in the olden days, culminating in Windows 2000 and Windows ME?

Sure, let them split it up again and see how consumers "go along". In the case of ME, it didn't take too long and they demanded better than the crap Microsoft was feeding them. An entire shlt storm broke loose, bad press, broken down help lines (that was long before the usefulness of nice chaps from the South Asian subcontinent had been discovered), etc. A few month later they got their "revamped corporate OS" and thus began the tale of Windows XP.

Apparently I'm the only person in the world who ever had a good experience with Windows ME. Preinstalled on an eMachine box about 12 years ago, but it ran very smoothly for me. The hard drive died on me a couple of years later and the reinstalled version was much worse, however, leading me to jump ship to Windows 2000.

My point was that whether or not consumers are interested in Windows 365, corporates and their much greater requirement for testing and accreditation of standard builds will be a bigger obstacle - which may end up with a requirement to offer different products to different client bases. Attempting an apples-to-apples comparison of the consumer computing marketplace now to the marketplace of 13 years ago is foolish - the number of users and number of devices are both much greater than they were, and the number of internet-dependent services used by the population at large has also exploded.

I don't like the idea of a perpetually-in-development Windows platform much (it's one thing in Fedora, for which there is a zero upfront cost, but quite another in a commercial product). Then again, I don't like Apple's total refusal to provide their customers with a technology roadmap or a lifecycle for their OS, and they're doing pretty well out of it. We'll have to see what they put on the table and judge that, rather than trying to decide whether we like some imaginary vaporware devoid of specifications. (I guess they could cater to the corporates by making the Enterprise releases static builds using a defined kernel release onto which they backport security fixes and for which they provide long term support. As an end user I think I'd prefer that to the perpetual-moving-target idea.)

Torqay

Fysh wrote: »

Apparently I'm the only person in the world who ever had a good experience with Windows ME.

Nah, you're not. ME was in fact a helluva lot better than Windows 98. At the time, however, this was just not good enough anymore when its older "corporate" sibling was light years ahead in terms of performance, stability and indeed security. The Windows 9x branch was past its shelf life and no longer up to standards.

The reason for not making Windows 2000 available to consumers, of course, was pure greed, as it always is with Microsoft. In 1999, the corporate market was for more interesting for MS and having a superior product for a clientele willing to pay the ridiculous price ($319 for W2KP retail as opposed to $109 for 98/ME) made sense.

Overheal

http://gizmodo.com/5986499/report-microsoft-blue-is-coming-this-summer-with-internet-explorer-11-baked-in

Apparently, more insider leakage points to Blue being unveiled as early as the Summer, along with IE11.

On the Retail side, I have no information on any of this. According to these links, Blue is going to mainly focus on additional improvements to 8's (already awesome) search capabilities

We're told that the Bing team is working closely on Windows Blue to improve search in a significant way. A number of scenarios are being targeted, including the ability for users to search for a movie and have apps surface that content and provide a quick way to play it. The current implementation of search in Windows 8 supports deep search within apps, but users currently have to select those apps to search within them. Blue will expand on that, providing apps are updated to support it, by extending the search abilities of the OS.

If true, the Release Preview will be out in a few months for current users of Windows 8. I for one had to do a software overhaul on our demo units tonight... imagine having to uninstall boot-strap software, run updates, uninstall virus protection, do a few reboots and then boot the boot-strap back on, on 30 machines, in 3 hours. The current version of search for settings completely saved my ass.

Torqay

Overheal wrote: »

Apparently, more insider leakage points to Blue being unveiled as early as the Summer, along with IE11.

So, Windows 8 is dead already, long live Windows Blue?

Well, Windows 8 didn't last very long, now, did it? That certainly makes it the most short-lived Microsoft retail platform (formerly known as operating system) ever. I don't care much for the "Bing team", any word on the progress of the "Start Button" team?

Overheal

Torqay wrote: »

I don't care much for the "Bing team", any word on the progress of the "Start Button" team?

apparently the Bing search engine heard your tongue in cheek remark and responded:

http://bingiton.com

Though in 5 rounds, for me it lost to google 3 to 2

Capt'n Midnight

Overheal wrote: »

apparently the Bing search engine heard your tongue in cheek remark and responded:

http://bingiton.com

Though in 5 rounds, for me it lost to google 3 to 2

was bingiton supposed to do something like http://www.bing-vs-google.com ?

My acid test for a microsoft search engine is to search for stuff on technet. So far (and I'm going back to the 90's) Altavista / Google have completely wiped them.

You can add me to the list of people who had no real trouble with Windows Me. I had far more compatibility issues when I went to XP at first.

Capt'n Midnight

Torqay wrote: »

So, Windows 8 is dead already, long live Windows Blue?

Well, Windows 8 didn't last very long, now, did it? That certainly makes it the most short-lived Microsoft retail platform (formerly known as operating system) ever. I don't care much for the "Bing team", any word on the progress of the "Start Button" team?

are you familiar with the concept of vapourware ? :pac:

as for users getting used to changes, ubuntu has an update every 6 months and they've had a lot of changes thrown at them