Windows 10 marks end of an era
This could be the last big version of Windows. After version 10, Microsoft could abandon big product release cycles in favour of smaller, more regular iterations. By Duncan McLeod.
Microsoft announced this week that it will jump past version 9 and go straight to Windows 10.
The official line from Redmond is that it’s to signify that the next version, due out in final form in about a year from now, is a really big deal. But the changes — the new operating system will be a mash-up of the best elements of Windows 7 and Windows 8 — aren’t really that dramatic.
Certainly, the operating system isn’t being rewritten from the ground up, so it does seem that Microsoft wants to move on from Windows 8 as fast as possible. Like the runt of the litter, it’s not getting much love.
The problem with Windows 8 — and its upgrade, Windows 8.1 — is that it feels like two operating systems in one. It has a split personality.
It offers users the traditional desktop, albeit without the Start menu first introduced in the mid-1990s with Windows 95, but it also has a tile-based user interface — the modern UI, also called Metro — which is designed first and foremost for touch, not keyboard and mouse. The two interfaces never gelled. The modern UI felt like a kludge, a solution in search of a problem.
I have got used to Thunderbird mail and I know it is not for every one but it works well for me, the biggest mistake that Microsoft made was killing outlook express . If it had that I believe many would have jumped on board windows 8 and 8.i they would have made money. Sometimes I think one can be to intelligent.