Will Windows 10 pull me back into the Redmond Giant’s Ecosystem?

It’s currently 3.55 am in Melbourne Australia, and as I write out this blog post, Mircosoft’s announcement of Windows 9 has just wrapped up. Microsoft didn’t make a big deal of this event, in fact, they didn’t even live stream it. This is more akin to events of the past, back before consumers like me (and hopefully you) were into technology and new products. Nowadays however, to launch a product and not live stream it is almost a taboo. When you think about however, it does really make sense. The main reason a company would want to live stream their launch is to build hype. However, from this event — or at least what I could tell from The Verge’s live blog — was that Microsoft didn’t want to build hype. It seemed more like they wanted to test the waters, I guess they’re still pretty traumatised after what happened with windows 8. I don’t blame them.

Enough with the jibber jabber, on the story. Let’s start with the naming convention shall we, it’s Windows 10. You know why don’t you? We learned this in pre-school. 7 8 9. Ha. Jokes aside, Microsoft claims that they call it Windows 10 because 9 couldn’t encapsulate all that it was. I’m just as confused as you are.

Aside from that, there was not much in terms of important announcements. The coolest thing I noticed was virtual desktops and a “task switcher”. To Mac users, this is more commonly known as Exposé or Mission Control, and is something I was really hoping we would see in the next version of windows. Microsoft also announced improvements to command prompt and that the start menu that was leaked a billion times is in fact returning. Other than that, there really wasn’t anything interesting in terms of announcements.

Microsoft spent a majority of the very short keynote talking about how enterprise users and Windows 7 users didn’t like that they had to learn so many new things, but that tablet and mobile users loved Windows 8, so what they did was merge the two, while keeping them different enough on each platform. One thing they briefly touched on was that Windows 10, no matter on what device, was the exact same OS underneath. This means that the exact same code goes into any windows device, from Windows Phone to Windows TV’s, and it adapts accordingly for the device it’s being installed on. I’d like to think of it as a responsive web page, for Operating Systems.

Microsoft is launching a developer preview initiative, similar to what Apple did with the Yosemite beta, allowing anyone to sign up to be a “Windows Insider” and run the latest build of Windows and report bugs, etc. “We know there’s people who want to live on the edge with us. They’re willing and want to run on our pre-release software” says a microsoft representative.

When I made the decision to stay up till this late hour to follow the event, I had one expectation. I would be seeing the operating system that I’m going to get home from uni in the summer (yes, December is summer in Australia) and run on my computer. In a way, I did get to see that. I will be signing up for the Insider Program and I will test out Windows 10. However, they didn’t actually show us anything. They told us about many things we would be seeing in Windows 10, but nothing really tangible enough. In the header to this blog post, I said “ill Windows 10 pull me back into the Redmond Giant’s Ecosystem?” and as I reach the bottom of this post, I still don’t have the answer to that. Link baity? Maybe, and if so, I apologize. This however is for sure, my main OS on my Laptop will remain Mac OS, and when I get home and install Windows 10 on my PC, it will not be my primary OS. It will however, be one of the many Linux Distro’s out there. Possibly Fedora, since Gnome 3.14 looks beautiful.

Thanks for reading folks, see you soon enough.