Report: Windows Blue Reaches Its First Milestone Build

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley has been collecting tips on Microsoft's accelerated Windows development schedule, codenamed 'Blue.' She reports that the program, which is attempting to replace the multiyear product drops for the Windows-branded desktop, server, phone, and network services products with a more agile release cycle, with better continuity across the suite, has just hit the first of two scheduled milestone builds. What's in the build? As with North Korea's nuclear program, details are scarce, but so far we have a Chinese Windows start screen; indications that the kernel number has been bumped from 'NT 6.2' (Windows 8) to 'NT 6.3'; and a job posting for a Windows Blue SDET (test engineer). Slashdot reported on Windows Blue in November."

will they kill the patch/reboot/patch/reboot cycle

[RotateLeftByte]

If they don't then IMHO, this is a dead duck. They have a wonderful opportunity to stop the patch/reboot/patch/reboot cycle here

or the Patches on top of patches shell game.

If they don't grasp this then they are merely fiddling while the City of Redmond burns to the ground.

Re:Let me guess...further deprecation of desktop a

[Alkonaut]

They will never, ever be able to remove support for the legacy desktop apps that is what keep customers from moving away from windows. What they WILL do however, is realize that home users don't really provide as much income as they should for microsoft. Apple is a shining example of a company that makes money from consumers, not business. Microsofts cash-cow is income from people using workstations and servers in offices around the world. So the question: How can microsoft make good business from consumers, without risking their revenue stream from business? Answer: by separating the tiers further. Make desktop/legacy a "premium" product, and sell the consumer OS cheaper by forcing users to adopt apps that give MS a piece of the revenue. I predict that the desktop will live forever, but only in the higher SKU:s of windows. Meanwhile, microsofts "Home"/OEM offerings of windows will steadily become cheaper and slowly move into an apps-only ecosystem.

Re:Let me guess...further deprecation of desktop a

[Spottywot]

This sounds about right, it'll be interesting to see how quickly consumers take this up. I haven't met anyone yet who actually wants to use the 'Metro' interface, much less buy thier software throuh the Microsoft store. Of course I've read plenty of 'I use Win 8 and I don't see what the fuss is about' posts in various tech forums, but even from those people I've never heard anyone extolling the virtues of a 'killer' Metro app. Until such things exist, where is the compelling reason to make the switch? I fear the only answer is that we will be steadily 'forced' to use the new interface with subsequent versions of Windows.

I currently use Windows for productivity and gaming, this Metro crap I can see being the reason I move to Linux for my productivity stuff, and if Steam for Linux takes off with enough publishers, possibly my gaming as well.

I've never loved Windows, but I've never really hated it either (well maybe sometimes), it's always been 'good enough' to do what I want it to do, as soon as it starts to tell me how I should interact with my desktop, and where I should buy my software, well thats the point at which it ceases to be useful for me, and probably a great many others.

North Korea

[ErnoWindt]

Totally hilarious reference to North Korea - but c'mon - Microsoft is run like an open source software project compared with Apple. What's interesting is that consumers seem to greet Apple's secrecy and paranoia with an almost Willy Wonka like fascination.

Re:will they kill the patch/reboot/patch/reboot cy

[sapphire wyvern]

It would be nice if the Windows application management interface was a _little_ bit more like a package manager, though. It would be great if you could scan through the list of installed programs and see which ones are dependencies for other installed programs and which are not. Then, you could go through removing leaf nodes from the dependency tree until you run out of things that aren't needed, with confidence that you aren't going to be breaking stuff that you actually use.

My pet hate are all the minor dot releases of VC++ frameworks installed by various games. I'm sure I don't *really* need them all, but damned if I can figure out which are expendable.