By Steffen Sorrell
“Ladies and Gentlemen, now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for” – Ed Sullivan
It’s official – Windows 10 was released as a free upgrade in 190 countries as of yesterday. The question is, do the words of Pulp Fiction’s Ed Sullivan hold true as they did when W7, or even when W8 was released?
Changing Times
Make no mistake: the consumer and indeed, enterprise computing landscape has changed dramatically since the thing that had “no chance” in the market came out. Different CEO, different times.
- The “PC” is now: a smartphone, a tablet or a PC
- No physical storage? No problem, you’ve got broadband right? Use the cloud!
It’s a post-PC eraSome people claim it’s now a post-PC era
Let’s take the last point: in the consumer space, we may well have entered into the post-PC era when one considers that “recreational” computing is centred around content consumption, rather than creation. The tablet and smartphone are ideal for this. Nonetheless, the PC remains hugely relevant in the enterprise space, despite its shortcomings.
For Microsoft, the principal aim of Windows 10 is to a) remain relevant in the enterprise space and b) re-gain mindshare in the consumer space. By all accounts, W10 is a fine piece of software, despite continuing the frankly appalling modern-day paradigm of release-day “we’ll just fix it with a patch” bugs; phase one is complete.
#include <dev-lov.h>
Phase two requires going back to the first two bullets however: it’s clear that the long-term success of the W10 platform will hinge on the ability of Microsoft to leverage its ability to offer successful cloud services (check) and integrate seamlessly with the mobile ecosystem (hmm..).
Above all, the developer communitymust be enticed. Why develop W10 apps when you can just develop web apps? Well, “because mobile and cloud”: thus convincing iOS and Android developers to convert their code onto the W10 platform as well as Continuum will no doubt prove to be Satya’s aces: whether aces are high or low in this game will depend on his convincing the dev community that there’s money to be made on W10…
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