Windows 7 has been a powerful success for Microsoft. As an evolutionary upgrade to Vista, it patched almost all of Vista’s glaring holes: broken driver support, sluggish performance and the horribly annoying User-Account Control. It sold more than 240 million licenses in one year.
Asked about the riskiest product bet the Redmond crew is currently developing, the answer is not Windows Phone 7 or Bing or even Office Web Apps – its fearless leader Steve Ballmer took no time in answering "the next release of Windows."
Windows 8 is expected to be another revolutionary release to the Windows product line. Windows 8 plans already leaked to the web – Facial recognition, True-Instant On, Windows Store, and more – all evolutionary, nothing revolutionary.
Revolutionary would be an entirely new booting system / kernel, an all new registry design and an all-new interface design that takes Microsoft right back to the drawing board – starting from scratch a la Windows Phone 7.
Watch Steve Ballmer at the Gartner Symposium in the video embedded below :
So why did Ballmer characterize Windows 8 as “risky”? Guesses? Ideas? Crazy (or not so crazy) theories?
Leave a Reply