Dwight Watt - Newspaper Article #268 10/8/2014


Question: What is Windows 10?

Answer:

Microsoft announced last week the newest version of Windows will be Windows 10. While they have been doing early development on it, they have called it by its project name of Threshhold.

Windows 10 will not be commercially released until later in 2015 they announced. Which means it may be a year until it gets here. There had been many guesses on what it would be called and you may have seen articles about Windows 8.2 or Windows 9. They chose to name it windows 10.

This new release Microsoft says is aimed at the enterprise (commercial) customer and is to have a uniform feel across versions. Windows 8 seemed to be more aimed at consumer who mainly browses Internet. There will be a Start menu back in it although it will use some of the Windows 8 interface in that menu. It will still have the Windows 8 tile or Metro interface and the desktop or Windows 7 type interface.

Microsoft says this will be the last major release of Windows. In the future they either intend to go to a subscription model (like Office 365) where you pay a monthly fee and the version on your computer constantly updates to latest features or to just do upgrades that we can install regularly. I suspect there is a third option being considered to do something different and call it different. The subscription model has been pushed since about 2000 on software, but never has really caught on. People and businesses have tended to want to buy in one payment their software. In a way like cars. You can lease a car but most of us buy, especially high mileage drivers like me.

With the further improvements I suspect unless they foul up something in the coming year this version of Windows will get wide consideration by business and consumers.

It has been interesting watching the names they have giver different versions of Windows. There was Windows 1, Windows 2, Windows 3, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows, 98, Windows 98se, Windows millennium, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and now Windows 10. That is the major versions of the client versions of Windows. There is also a server side that appeared after Windows 3.1 initially appeared and is now Windows Server 2012.

 

Microsoft has a beta program for Windows 10 to allow people to get the latest beta (testing0 versions and try them and show Microsoft where bugs are. I am signed up in the program. Warning if you do sign up, do not use beta operating systems like Windows 10 will be for the coming year) on your real production computers as it is test software and can fail or foul everything up. I will run it in a virtual machine so it is essentially on its own machine.