For those that don't follow this sort of thing, on January 23 Microsoft had a big 2 hour press conference about their next operating system Windows 10. (They skipped 9 because reasons). For those that don't have the time to watch a 2 hour event. (Of which the first 20 minutes or so seem like an extended commercial directed by somebody who doesn't know how to make his commercials interesting). Here is my rundown of said event and my thoughts on each individual thing.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room. Said elephant being that if you own windows 7 or 8 (which make up roughly 68% of the market share so it’s pretty likely) windows 10 will be free for the first year it comes out. Now this is great for me you and basically every windows user. I’m curious how this makes any business sense as about a third of microsoft's profits come from windows sales.So I’m weary of Microsoft attaching asterisks to that statement. Or maybe they're just willing to take a hit in revenue for a year for amazing PR and possible future income. It’s just that big corporations aren't exactly known for their amazing long term thinking.
Secondly, Cortana comes to Windows 10 desktops. For those who aren't aware what cortana is. (Or if the name brings up the image of a halo character instead). She is essentially siri (or ok google or hello moto if you prefer) for windows phone. And unlike siri it actually works. (At least that’s what I've been told I can't speak from experience). It seems cool and all but the main point of these things on a phone is so you don't have to take it out or spend time fiddling around looking for your web browser app. Neither of which are really problems on a desktop PC you just click your browser icon and start typing no holdup. For tablets it makes more sense though. <sidenote>I think that the most likely reason that they have it on desktops is to imprint the unity between devices motif that windows 10 has by giving us all the same services for different platforms even if they're redundant</sidenote>.
Thirdly, Windows Phone 10 and Windows 10 for tablets were announced. I mean, yay everybody knew it was going to happen. They mainly just wanted to express the fact that it will be a seamless transition from walking away from your Dell xps 8700 to grabbing your hp stream 7. To putting down that and grabbing a nokia lumia 830 and having it be free of complexity. With Windows 8 it was overly complex and got a lot of flack for it.
Fourthly, Project Spartan. Microsoft’s next gen (aren't buzzwords the best) web browser that hopefully doesn't suck. I personally am very glad that they're doing this as internet explorer has been the butt of so many jokes between tech guys (especially on reddit). I'm also not sure if it’s going to be called ie 12 or something completely different to get rid of the bad rep ie has. Unfortunately unless it’s by far the best browser the world has ever seen. I’m going to stick with chrome as my main browser. I'm heavily reliant on the google ecosystem (one of the reasons I'm in the process of building my own website so I can have my rules) and due to it being google’s own, new features for google things get rolled out at least a month or two before firefox and ie. I’m still happy about it for other people as ie makes up around 60% of the browser market share so this will give millions of people the opportunity to see what better browser experiences are. That is definitely a good thing for the people who don’t bother to change the default.
Fifthly, New MS Office apps that are the same between devices (here we are again). I don’t really use office (I like google drive just for the convenience of free cloud storage for google docs files) and it hasn't really changed that much since 2003. Something that’s nice is it looks like it will switch touch first stuff of if you're on a PC, so no more of the Windows 8, we think you’re on a tablet when you aren't crap.
Sixthly, Some stuff that already existed but people couldn't be bothered to download by themselves and other miscellaneous crap on windows that people rarely use will be polished up given the unity between platforms treatment. Like movie maker, photo gallery, video, and music. (You store this stuff in the cloud service that again, nobody uses, one drive) so you can continue a project you started on your desktop on your tablet.
Seventhly (this is starting to get a bit stupid), An Xbox app for Windows 10. (Now my thoughts on the XBox one and the other current-gen consoles I don't own one so take this with a grain of salt. Can be best summed up here but anyway). This will let you let you use XBox live on PC. (Why? You may ask , because reasons and logic are for losers) Stream XBox games to your PC (and tablet) and bring better compatibility for Microsoft’s PC gaming platform, Direct X. Now these are all just nice little things I don't get why they just don't keep Consoles and PC gaming separate. I've felt like we’ve shown that for grown men and women, the 2 gaming platform camps (I’m aware that mobile is a third camp but bare with me) can’t seem to play nice and I think console and PC perform best when separated from each other and doing their own thing. I don't have much to back that up other that just a thought so take it with an extremely small grain of salt.
Eighthly, Continuum mode. On laptop-tablet mashups they will detect when you put them in tablet mode and vise-versa to switch the interface between keyboard and mouse focused and touch and stylus focus. There isn't too much to talk about here except for that I think this shows Microsoft is listening to everybody complain about the touch first on PC so they found a way to make both UIs work. The fact that they're listening to complaints I think we can all agree is very good. (With all of the unity between devices stuff I can't help but think that Microsoft is taking a page from apple. I don't particularly like apple but credit where credit is due).
Ninthly, The HoloLens. <sigh> Microsoft’s HoloLens is “the world’s first untethered holographic computer”. (I feel like that’s a bold statement guys). It’s an AR machine that you wear on your head and look through the glass to use windows 10 apps. This will make HoloGrams of said apps to come up. I mean it’s really cool that we can do this at all but why, just why. I see no current reason to use this thing and frankly I think the hype around it is stupid because it doesn't seem practical in any way. But who knows maybe they'll find some amazing use for it (is my google fanboy showing, I think it might be)
Last but not least they introduced the Surface hub. A 84 inch surface pro TV tablet thing. The Microsoft surface line of tablets are tablets that also work as very good high end laptops. What they’re doing is taking the whiteboard tablet idea shown on the surface and making it TV sized. (Big TV sized jeez) I actually have a lot of faith in this product (nobody else seems to really care about it though) and I think that 15 years from now most board rooms will have them for presentations during meetings. I don’t see it becoming a consumer thing but I don't think Microsoft was targeting the Surface hub at that demographic anyway.
To wrap things up, the over arching themes of consistency between mobile and home and listening to customers were really nice to hear. I hope for the sake of all of us that windows 10 won't suck and, based off this press conference I think it indeed won’t.
Welcome to the outro screen. The idea for this blog post hit me pretty quickly and I had to work fast to make sure it was still topical when it came out. The script for this was made in a day and a half. I plan to do more tech event roundups and reactions in the future. The next big tech event would be the Mobile World Congress or MWC at the beginning of march in Barcelona. (After that would be Pax east in april, e3 in june, WWDC in July, the September Apple event in, well September and finally the October apple event but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here). For now leave comments positive or negative if you want to. Subscribe if you want to. If you don't want to I'm not going to make you. Now I hope you won't mind if I read out my completely and utterly amazing haiku about this event.
The MS event
They showed off cool new features
that windows 10 has
Beautiful. Oh and one last thing. Click this text to watch my other editorial piece on Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. Ok now I'm really done. Bye Bye.