Windows 10 the Last Version of Windows? Not So Fast. 154
A multitude of tech sites are breathlessly reporting that Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows. These claims are based on a brief comment from developer evangelist Jerry Nixon while speaking a Microsoft Ignite session on "Tiles, Notifications, and Action Center." However, as Paul Thurrott points out, you probably shouldn't take this news too seriously. Windows development has been changing for the past several years. At the very least, we've known since we learned Windows 8 would be developed for multiple form factors. We've known it specifically about Windows 10 since it was announced — Microsoft has talked about transitioning away from giant, monolithic updates. Thurrott says,
The reason anyone is talking like this is that Microsoft is pushing a "Windows as a service" vision, which doesn't mean "subscription service" but rather that it plans to upgrade Windows 10 going forward with both functional and security updates, plus of course bug fixes. You know, just like it's done with every single version of Windows. Ever. ... In other words, nothing to see here. Beyond the usual: things change. If it makes sense to keep updating Windows 10 and not change the brand or version number, Microsoft will do that. If it makes sense to release something called Windows 10 R2, Windows 11, or Windows Yoghurt — seriously, who cares? — then they'll do that.
Why you should care (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why you should care (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, in some tragic cases, from getting from next back to former.
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As opposed to installing Windows, realizing it was broken by design, and there is fuck all you can do about it.
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It sounds to me like Microsoft doesn't even have a clue what they're doing with Windows.
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It sounds to me like Microsoft doesn't even have a clue what they're doing with Windows.
They do seem to have lost the plot, first a version of Windows so bad they skipped an entire major version number to distance themselves from it, and now it looks like they're killing off their cash-cow upgrade cycle where everyone has to go out and buy version n+1 every few years because Bill^H^H^HSteve^H^H^Hwhoeveritisnow says so.
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It sounds to me like Microsoft doesn't even have a clue what they're doing with Windows.
They do seem to have lost the plot, first a version of Windows so bad they skipped an entire major version number to distance themselves from it, and now it looks like they're killing off their cash-cow upgrade cycle where everyone has to go out and buy version n+1 every few years because Bill^H^H^HSteve^H^H^Hwhoeveritisnow says so.
Buy a new machine? That'll be a new Windows license because OEM licenses are not transferable. I can see a cash cow there as healthy as it's ever been, so long as they can retain their number 1 position in OEM machines.
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Buy a new machine? That'll be a new Windows license because OEM licenses are not transferable. I can see a cash cow there as healthy as it's ever been, so long as they can retain their number 1 position in OEM machines.
New machines are a pretty small cow (maybe a rabbit or something) because they're only getting OEM volume-license prices rather than full retail for a member of the public upgrading their machine. Depends on the volume I guess, but you have to shift a lot of licenses at OEM volume prices to match the profit from a retail license sale.
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Buy a new machine? That'll be a new Windows license because OEM licenses are not transferable. I can see a cash cow there as healthy as it's ever been, so long as they can retain their number 1 position in OEM machines.
New machines are a pretty small cow (maybe a rabbit or something) because they're only getting OEM volume-license prices rather than full retail for a member of the public upgrading their machine. Depends on the volume I guess, but you have to shift a lot of licenses at OEM volume prices to match the profit from a retail license sale.
OEM volume licenses basically cost Microsoft nothing. There is no packaging, no retail overhead, no support costs even (support, if any, is via the OEM) and is tied to the machine on which it's sold. Sure, less cash cow now than when the typical machine lifecycle was 3 years.
The full retail version, however, is a transferable license, and most machines come with a license anyway, so the volume is very low, with the associated packaging, support and retail overhead associated.
WindOwS X (Score:5, Funny)
They'll just do what Apple did, like Windows 10.4 Tiger, Windows 10.5 Leopard, Windows 10.6 Snow Leopard, etc.
Re:WindOwS X (Score:5, Insightful)
Well it is scary to think about it it was 15 years from Mac OS 1 to OS X
We had OS X for 15 years now.
So half of Mac OS existence has been in OS X
Re:WindOwS X (Score:4, Informative)
17 years for System Software 1.0 to OS X, and 14 years of OS X. Not quite there yet.
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17 years for System Software 1.0 to OS X, and 14 years of OS X. Not quite there yet.
And that's how the PC and Microsoft won the computer wars (Amiga here), Backwards compatibility.
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The PC won the computer wars years before the Mac came out, since it had the magic initials on it (IBM). It never lost its dominance in market share, although it became clear over time that the dominance actually belonged to the OS (PC-DOS, then MS-DOS).
Re:WindOwS X (Score:4, Insightful)
The PC won the computer wars years before the Mac came out, since it had the magic initials on it (IBM). It never lost its dominance in market share, although it became clear over time that the dominance actually belonged to the OS (PC-DOS, then MS-DOS).
The PC won the computer wars over Apple because IBM did not care to hunt down or even hinder clones while Apple did.
There was an evolving cloners scene in Taiwan and environs eager to try their (re)engineering skills with the Apple II but Cuppertino scared them away.
Enter IBM with that PC box and the cloners switch horses, meet no resistance and succeed to create a world standard almost immediately.
IBM wins, cloners win, consumers win, world economy had a new cycle to run through and IP evangelists decided to wait a decade or two before organizing the roll back.
Re:WindOwS X (Score:5, Informative)
Your history is incomplete.
You're aware there were hordes of Apple II clones, right? I started my computing life on a Franklin ACE 1000 - a superior clone of the Apple II. After it died, I got another Apple II clone (A "Laser 128" as I recall). There were Apple clones for over ten years with the Apple II, and several more years with the Macintosh.
Apple II clones died for two reasons: The Apple II was a very old architecture, only capable of 64k of memory. Also, most of the cloners illegally copied Apple's BIOS. Even then, Apple vs. Franklin was in 1987 - ten years after the Apple II was released.
IBM did sue clone makers into oblivion. In fact, after Apple vs. Franklin, IBM sued a number of early cloners out of existence for the because they also illegally copied from IBM's BIOS.
The difference is that nobody saw the point in writing a clean-room Apple II ROM in 1987. The world had moved beyond 64k, and there was no point in denying reality. Even Apple was pounding nails in the Apple II's coffin.
In contrast, Phoenix and AMI both had clean-room IBM BIOS clones written in 1984 and '85 - years before Apple vs. Franklin. IBM couldn't touch Phoenix or AMI.
So IBM tried to destroy cloners by creating the backwards (but not forwards) compatible PS/2, complete with their backwards (but not forwards) compatible OS/2.
In the end, it came down to price: A clone was more capable than IBM's PS/2 disaster, and had a cost far less than the PS/2 or a Macintosh.
IBM tried its best to kill the PC clone. The difference is that unlike the Apple II, the PC clone could handily beat the PS/2 that was supposed to replace it.
Never forget: The PC clone didn't just beat the Apple Mac - it beat IBM's replacement for the PC as well.
And it did so for the same reason Timex has far more market share than Rolex or Tag Heuer: It does the same job for a lot less money.
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Macintoshes were often more powerful than the clones, by using chips like the 680x0 and the PowerPC, which Intel was having trouble catching up to.
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No, they won the computer wars because of the clones and low prices.
More appreciated was software you purchased three computers ago would still worked.
Up until 2010(?), the intel chips could still run 8086 code, just a few years ago (2010?) IBM nixed the backwardness of it's new chips.
NOTE: Packages that are compiled for i486 architecture, are compatible with i486, i586, i686 & i786 architectures. https://myonlineusb.wordpress.... [wordpress.com]
486: "It represents a fourth generation of binary compatible CPUs since the original 8086 of 1978." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... [wikipedia.org]
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The difference is Apple built upon a solid Unix foundation.
Every version, for the first ~6 six versions was faster and faster.
Microsoft has made little innovation from Windows XP .. Windows 10.
- "Kill Process" is STILL half baked. i.e. Applications can still get in stuck state preventing them from being shut-down
- Notepad still doesn't know how to read a file bigger then main memory
- Windows isn't smart enough to turn off the pagefile with more then 16 GB RAM
etc.
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You are sadly misinformed, if youd watch any of the Cloud 9 videos you would know that there has been plenty of improvements "under the hood" since XP.
Even 8.1 is better than 7 in many areas, from the heap allocator to process scheduler and more.
Granted those three points still stand, but if you honestly still use Notepad your getting what you deserve.
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I use Vim for editing multi-gigabyte files without any problems. The fact that Microsoft is to lazy to design and implement an editor properly shows about the lack of their quality.
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kill -9
-9 is the silver bullet.
However sometimes you will need to kill the child processes before you can kill the parent one.
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Re:WindOwS X (Score:5, Funny)
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They'll just do what Apple did, like Windows 10.4 Tiger, Windows 10.5 Leopard, Windows 10.6 Snow Leopard, etc.
That might have happened during the bald Steve's reign, but Nadella is actually making decisions that make sense. Instead of being a high profile in your face guy, he's listening to customers. The Windows 10 Preview project is very well thought out, so far
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They'll just do what Apple did, like Windows 10.4 Tiger, Windows 10.5 Leopard, Windows 10.6 Snow Leopard, etc.
Yep. Only, if MS is still MS, they'll choose some other animal that THEY think is at least as good as the big cats. Like a bear or something.
Windows Grizzly. Not too bad.
Windows Koala. Well, let's hope people find it cute.
Windows Brown. That's it. They did it again. Those that keep their thoughts away from excrements will think about an electric razor.
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who cares? Me. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Thats why you have a package manager and you can do pinning and dependency management.
This has been in the linux world for about 20 years. Take a look at the various rolling Linux distributions.
Not saying WIndows will do it like this but the problem has already been solved.
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MS is doing exactly that with Windows 10, there will be the slow release branch that will be mostly security fixes, with infrequent but pre-announced feature changes (kind of the service pack model but more modern), and the fast release branch which will be more disruptive but will do things like keep Edge more up to date with emerging standards.
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Responsible software should have a released branch that has only bug fixes, and then other versions for new features. Otherwise, how the fark can one use your software for certified products? How can someone do a risk analysis on something as a platform, when it might change daily? Feature changes should not be casually thrown in. Yes, mozilla stupidly did this - but most software does not, and should not. [...].
Maybe "did," but they don't anymore and haven't since 2012, which is shortly after they switched to the stupid Chrome-esque release model. They have an "ESR" (extended support release [mozilla.org]) branch intended for the enterprise but usable by anyone who only wants important fixes without big changes for a relatively long period of time--though in the world of Web browsers right now, I guess that only means a year.
Re: who cares? Me. (Score:2)
Software development has been moving away from that model for quite some time now whereever at all possible. Facebook updates their code live many times daily, so does Amazon and while you could argue Facebook doesn't power anything critical, Amazob AWS sure as hell does. It's cheaper, faster and more efficient.
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Patch Tuesday may live on as well (Score:2, Informative)
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Everything after Win2K was Ballmer, including both Windows Me and Windows XP.
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Everything after Win2K was Ballmer, including both Windows Me and Windows XP.
Win7 isn't that bad, fairly good in fact. I had to install it to play Battlefield 3 (Game), but Win2K was/is my favorite Windows OS.
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In other news: (Score:3, Funny)
"Did Bigfoot and Nessie's lovechild (Nessfoot?) post nude selfies on Instagram?! Find out at 11!"
@11: "No, none of that happened. Just another Kardashian sighting. Still,...News!"
Our own computers ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares? The problem with all of this is Microsoft seems to be saying "we reserve the right to drastically change your computer as we see fit, and if it breaks that will be your problem".
And, I'm sorry, but both for the computers I maintain at work, and my personal machine ... they're not the property of Microsoft. They're used for stuff that we need to maintain, and we'll decide what version we run and when/how we upgrade the system.
If Microsoft thinks they're going to do anything but piss of the world by suddenly deploying mandatory updates of what their vision of the future is, or by dropping functionality, or deciding we should all have new GUIS ... they can piss off.
Microsoft seems to be angling towards them being able to inform us what we're running, how it looks, and when that gets deployed.
And I'm sorry, Microsoft, but we neither trust your competence nor your motivations in this regard.
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Oh cry me a freaking river.
You want freedom and control? Then use a FREE operating system.
Switch to GNU/Linux - there are THOUSANDS of flavours, some of which "just work" right out the box in 99% of the cases - or, if you don't like GNU/Linux, maybe switch to some flavour of BSD? I hear they are also good.
But now I'll hear you say:
"But anonymous coward, my favourite (closed source, obviously) application that does XXX doesn't work on the FREE operating system"
Then seek an alternative. Heck, if you have time
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Blah blah blah blah ... spoken like a clueless halfwit who doesn't work in industry on anything significant, and who naively believes OSS
Re:Our own computers ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Long time /. user here; I've been doing game dev for 20+ years and as someone who uses Windows, OSX, and Linux daily and thinks all OS's suck, some just more then others -- hopefully you won't treat this as just a random user posting ...
It's true Open Source can't solve all business needs. (Anytime an ideology is taken to an extreme you usually end up with delusions, but I digress.)
However, I was curious what are your specific business needs that OSS can't solve?
It sounds like you are tied to closed source and MS. Right now you are at the mercy of Microsoft. Is that where your business wants to stay ?
i.e.
What is your 10 year migration plan to not be locked into one vendor's proprietary solutions? (Notice how I didn't specify MS or Linux.)
If you have already spent millions on your platform, what is it going to cost you to stay with MS when they no longer support your needs?
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I create very little software (and almost always for in-house use).
My plan is to use Windows (98 through 10) whenever I need an application (including peripheral support) that I cannot find a substitute for. If I can find a free substitute, I will use it.
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This is going to be harsh, but I have no idea how else to put your statement into perspective. You mean to say that because you are lazy the rest of the world must be too? Since you are choosing to remain ignorant, everyone else must be just like you?
I have spent nearly 30 years working in IT. The last 15 of that has been where Linux was the primary business operating system. This is not at one company, but every company I know runs Linux as their primary OS. Anything Oracle Database is probably runnin
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Want to know something else which is going to be harsh?
Other than you being some self aggrandizing ass on the web who thinks his job title in his signature should impress the rest of is, WTF would you know about it?
If you think changing how a major corporation does its infrastructure has NOTHING to do with lazy, and everything to do with corporate will and funding.
What you do to support yourself has nothing to do with supporting thousands of users who are running business critical t
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When you can't answer basic issues insult the person asking. Then ask questions that are not really questions but rather the same excuses you used previously attempting to look intelligent.
If you stop and realize that the overwhelming majority of today's Servers _are_ Linux then you can not use the excuse that nobody will support Linux. Most companies have teams of administrators doing just that, supporting Linux.
So perhaps you are stuck in 2000 and think Windows will be the biggest thing in servers, but
Re:Our own computers ... (Score:5, Insightful)
But that in no way means that all mission critical/enterprise software has any meaningful open source analogs.
I'm not saying it's not possible to run mission critical software on Linux, but I'm saying all the drooling idiots who say "yarg, run teh linux and teh open sores" are usually talking out of the ass and don't know a damned thing.
Sorry, but I run stuff which has been around for 10+ years, has millions invested in it, and impacts many aspects of company business.
So when some whiny punk says "just run Linux", they demonstrate how utterly clueless they are. In the real world, that's rarely an option.
Re:Our own computers ... (Score:4, Interesting)
So when some whiny punk says "just run Linux", they demonstrate how utterly clueless they are. In the real world, that's rarely an option.
Maybe, maybe not. If you have a truly mission-critical application that requires Windows, it's clear what you're going to do.
I'm not so sure about the whole support thing, though. How good is most commercial support, really? Not so great, and that's true for a lot of "big name" things like ERP packages, databases, etc. Sure, you pay for support. Generally you pay a lot. Do you get a lot? My own experience (decades in the industry) is quite mixed, but a "big name" and a big fee don't necessarily correlate with quality support.
A lot of the free stuff that you deride is actually supported better, for free, in online forums. Now, that's not the type of guarantee that corporate types want to see. But the idea that paid support is solid support is not necessarily true. I remember some years ago being pushed by management to move from Apache to Microsoft Internet Server (or whatever it was called) so we could get "support." That would not have been such a great idea, because --- get this --- the servers were mission critical and the FOSS solution worked better and was better supported.
So I'm saying there's no one answer. Commercial software is not a guarantee of anything. You do what you have to do to run your business. Sometimes it's one way, sometimes the other. I've done everything I've needed to do for many years using mostly free open source software. It meets my needs. If I had some real specialty application, that might not hold true. To each his own.
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I'm way too old to be a hipster. And the mission critical software run on Apache was part of a large ISP operation.
My post, unlike yours, had some genuine content, citing specific industry experience.
Re: Our own computers ... (Score:2)
Actually MS is doing just what you want. Windows 10 is the next XP but will have updates as some of us get new hardware want modern browsers etc.
Times change man in this field. Virtualization means your grandkids will use IE 6
Re: Our own computers ... (Score:2)
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There are enterprise controls that you can use to control updates, so most of your post is moot.
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Have you ever used a Mac?
They are famous for not giving two F's about compatibility from a previous version.
Windows on the other hand has always been plagued by this hanging on to compatibility. So much so that there OS is huge. Much bigger than it needs to be.
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To borrow from Mel Brooks (Score:3)
Yogurt! (Score:2, Offtopic)
Yogurt! Yogurt! I hate Yogurt! Even with Strawberries.
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Heh. Yeah too bad it wasn't as strong for the moderator. I mean Space Balls is never offtopic even if it is.
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And if you hold your tower up to your ear you can make calls!
Windows 7 was last real version (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows 7 was last real version (Score:4, Interesting)
Totally agree. Windows 7 is an OS that does what's supposed to: Stay away and let you do your work. Windows 10 is a giant advertisement for Microsoft services: Don't like OneDrive? Sorry you can't uninstall it. Don't want to use Bing search? Sorry it's baked in to run when you try to do a search on your computer.
You even get suggestions (ads) for apps on the Start Menu! Also it's a bipolar UI, an unholy mix of touch/mobile and desktop flavors and applications and even in the desktop you're sometimes forced to use a touch UI for some tasks.
Windows 7 was a nice OS for users, Win 10 it's only for Microsoft sake, no wonder it's a free upgrade: They're hoping to get the money from you through your data, the money they'll get from you using their services, etc...
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If you want a version of Windows that doesn't require talking to the mothership, about the last version you can use would be Windows 2000.
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Windows Vista was the last real OS. Windows 7 is nothing more than a service pack. Vista was a revolution in itself, only got hammered because the hardware wasn't there for it yet.
Wiser MS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks to me like they realized a few things:
1) Practically NOBODY upgraded Windows on their machines, they simply got a new computer that had the latest version of Windows on it when their old machine got too slow, died, or was no longer shiny enough.
2) Circa Vista and Windows 8 it became clear that people were actually going with older OS's on new machines rather than adopting MS's vision of how they should use their computer, and still never upgraded. MS was pretty powerless against this. Even their attempt to push touch by tying it to Windows 8 on laptops backfired and people would rather take Windows 7 on a laptop to avoid a touch based laptop with Windows 8 on it.
So MS is loosing almost no revenue by keeping you up to date, but they get to push whatever new "vision" they have on us at almost any time. So we can get Vista'ed, lose the Start menu, get tiled, Clippy'ed, or Ribbon'ed any time they decide to "improve" our lives.
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Looks to me like they realized a few things:
1) Practically NOBODY upgraded Windows on their machines, they simply got a new computer that had the latest version of Windows on it when their old machine got too slow, died, or was no longer shiny enough.
Took them long enough. Only computer enthusiasts upgrade their OS or build whitebox PCs with retail licenses. Charging this small influential group the most for Windows licenses was always insane.
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Yeah, I saw the latest Office recently. Man, what a heap of smelly stuff.
'But people won't understand menus if they're not in UPPER CASE!'
It's like they've got confused and are trying to do a Nokia on Microsoft itself.
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well if you for some stupid reason decide to make clickable/touchable elements look like everything else, I guess it makes sense to make them upper case. or perhaps they were too small for fingers so somebody just uppercased them to make them bigger in 10 secs.
which actually is the real problem with their zune derived ui style. it's not immediately obvious from screen to screen what is clickable and what is not and in some cases(in windows 8.1 install sequence of all places!) it's not immediately obvious th
Obviously (Score:5, Funny)
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Please, please, don't make a fuss. (Score:2)
Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows (Score:2)
Just like Final Fantasy was the last RPG ever made.
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And The NeverEnding Story never ended.
As for Final Fantasy... Yay, catgirls! [uol.com.br]
Versions (Score:1)
The version number is dead... (Score:3)
... Long live the version number. We saw it with Windows 95/98, XP and Vista, despite the names they still had nice conventional version numbers just like earlier versions. You just had to know where to look for them. MS may remove visible version numbers from Windows, but they'll still keep adding functionality and making backwards-incompatible changes which means software will still need some way of telling whether the system it's installed/running on supports the functionality it needs. Application developers being too lazy to write the large chunks of code needed to probe every single API they want to use and test for which specific variation is present, and the Windows team not having the time/resources let alone the inclination to go back and retrofit everything in Windows with individual version numbers or feature/variant flags, that means a version number that can be incremented to indicate the point at which a particular API or variation became available that app devs can easily test. And of course corporations are going to demand some way to make sure that the Windows 10 machines they buy in 2017 will run the Windows 10 image from 2016 and that the 2017 "written for Windows 10" software will actually run on machines using that image.
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If Microsoft is releasing "backwards-incompatible" changes to Windows 10 (probably meaning new APIs and features are available), then presumably Windows 10 users will be able to upgrade and patch their systems. This isn't completely unprecedented. For many years, if software was compatible with Windows XP at all, it was generally "XP Service Pack 2 or later". Windows 10 will probably be the same way. For better or worse, if you want to run modern software, you'll likely need to keep your system up to da
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A year behind is typical for corporate users. Selected security patches get applied after thorough testing, but unlike a home user a corporate IT department can't simply apply any update Microsoft sends down. They have to insure that every bit of software they run, which is overwhelmingly not from Microsoft, is compatible and runs correctly with the updates applied to Windows, and is supported by the vendors. That's the major reason why corporate systems were running Windows XP for so long after Win7 came o
wake the hell up (Score:3, Insightful)
A more accurate name (Score:2)
A more accurate name would be "Windows Marketing Edition".
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Build numbers stay (Score:2)
Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
Lone Starr: Who hasn't heard of Yogurt!
Princess Vespa: Yogurt the Wise!
Dot Matrix: Yogurt the All-Powerful!
Barf: Yogurt the Magnificent!
Yogurt: Please, please, don't make a fuss. I'm just plain Yogurt.
I just couldn't agree to the Win10 ToS -Beta (Score:3)
I became a Microsoft Insider, you know to beta test Win10, but just couldn't agree to their ToS. I know if your also a Microsoft Insider you've read the ToS; I just couldn't allow MS to access my mic, webcam or just browse my system whenever they wanted; I only went as far as downloading it.
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Mozilla is already doing it. Why should Microsoft be any different? They can't let the open source community out-evil them!
I just disable the service: MozillaMaintenance and hope for the best, while called maintenance it's mostly for updates which I don't appreciate being installed without notice. It's also my secondary browser and rarely used (Battlefield 3 requires it (Plugins)).
When Chrome slipped through while installing Google Earth, I also disabled it's maintenance service, before just removing it all together.
As for browsers updating, Opera 25+ is awful for this. There is no service to disable and it updates at will with
Click Bait. (Score:2)
That's what said articles are. That's all. Nothing to see here.
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Done for the benefit of Big Data (Score:1)
This is the same discussion as another thread on /. asking what is the future of desktop applications... when more and more software is being deployed as a service over the internet and the browser provides the interface.
The answer is also the same: this is done for the convenience (and profit) of the software provider.
For instance (as pointed out by another poster): Chromebooks.
Big G will take care of you. No user serviceable parts. Nothing for you to do but actual work (or play).
There appear to be benefi
Doesn't matter...... (Score:2)
This is windows.... no matter how much they evolve it every couple of years you're going to have to reinstall it anyways... so realistically it doesn't matter if they go to a 'rolling release' or not.
fail at counting (Score:3)
3.1, 95, 98, me, (2000), XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10.... who the heck taught Microsoft product managers how to count?
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I think they were afraid of the future...Windows 13!!!
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They should just go back to using the year for the Windows version, just like most of their other products (Office, SharePoint, Visual Studio, Windows Server, etc.). Funny thing is, 20 years ago it was the complete opposite - they were using the year for Windows and version numbers for everything else.
MS Comments (Score:1)
Re:Blah (Score:4, Funny)
Call me when they've implemented systemd.
What version?
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I don't know why, but to me it brings to mind the Borg.