
Windows 9 to be unveiled in April, distances itself from Windows 8 - dded
http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/threshold-be-called-windows-9-ship-april-2015
======
bergie
Blogspam, a lot more content in the original:
[http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/threshold-be-called-
window...](http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/threshold-be-called-
windows-9-ship-april-2015)

~~~
quenlinlom
You'd thought somebody would've written an algorithm for detecting blogspam
and have it implemented in news aggregator sites already.

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shawabawa3
> "To distance itself from the Windows 8 debacle, Microsoft is currently
> planning to drop the Windows 8 name and brand this next release as Windows
> 9."

I... I don't...

As opposed to what? Windows 8 2? Or Windows 8 SP2 I suppose. Still, one of the
most ridiculous sentences I've read in a while

(edit: didn't realise they released 8.1, thought it was SP1. I guess I
partially retract how stupid I think the sentence is)

~~~
drcongo
Windows 8.2 Professional™ Media™ Home™ Premium™ Edition™ Enterprise™ Ultimate™

~~~
angersock
I prefer Windows_8_2_n0CD_XcRaCkEdX

~~~
WalterSear
At least with the pirated version you know there was >some< form of quality
control.

~~~
angersock
Sad but not that far from true.

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raganwald
So, this is a blog post, quoting a blog post, describing rumours of an
operating system release that is over a year away, with no specific features
quoted, just a name and a bunch of "it may ___s?"

Hacker News, you can do better than upvoting this garbage to the front page.

------
programminggeek
Microsoft is in an unlucky spot. They sell to businesses and are trying to
transition to something closer to Apple's business model, which is kind of a
tricky proposition. Consumer and business have totally different buying cycles
and expectations.

Also, Apple spent like a decade rebuilding their business to make it work
before the iPhone happened. It started with the iMac, then iPod, then iPhone,
then iPad, but with each one they learned something, killed some businesses,
started new businesses, and in general worked to keep getting better at what
they do.

Microsoft is only a year or two maybe into trying to do the same and until
recently they haven't had the same kind of singular focus on it because they
are just so freeking big. Apple was big, but Microsoft is a company of 99,139
people.

Think about moving that many different interests in the same direction. That
takes time.

~~~
WalterSear
It's not unlucky if you put yourself there.

------
astral303
I hear no end of non-techie people cursing Windows 8 and its metro interface.
As a latest example, one of my friends said he wanted to buy a new Windows
laptop, but walked out of the store after being really confused using Windows
8 (quote was: "I don't know how I will be able to get work done in this.").

Personally, just the sheer learning curve to help someone set up a new Windows
8 laptop was ridiculous. I had to search the web for answers on things like
locating the control panel.

Whereas Vista had quality and "annoyance" problems (new security UI), Windows
8 seems to have all the quality, but behind a blunderous user experience.

This tells me that Microsoft has really screwed this up. We techies quickly
learn the new UI and adapt to it, figuring out how it works. It seems like the
new UI was developed with a techie mindset, and but people outside of tech
don't get it.

Or perhaps there's a simpler explanation. The Windows 8 UI really is an
awkward meshing of "tablet-like" and desktop-like experience, with both
experiences compromised. And it's filled with bad decisions, such as Metro-
only Skype that requires you to convert your existing Skype account to a
Windows login. Don't want to mess with your Skype account? Then you install
"desktop" Skype. Two Skypes. Two different experiences. Seriously? You have
gotta be kidding me. How could you ship that?

~~~
mattmanser
How was it for a techie mindset?

Hit windows key, type in 'environment'. Where the hell is change environment
variables?

A lot of the really important techie menus items are missing from Windows 8,
it's actually pretty useless as a techie interface without modding vanilla,
which I'm not a fan of because I use so many different machines.

Also try using server 2012 with a remote desktop connection. Nightmare.

 _NB: This was true last time I was using a win 8 machine, may have changed
now._

~~~
astral303
You're right, it sucks for a techie too. I'm just surprised at all the
"Windows 8 ain't so bad" comments around here, so I assumed I might be missing
something.

------
currywurst
People skeptical about Windows 8.1 should try one of the new 8-inch tablets (
I tried a Dell Venue 8 Pro). The Modern UI just makes so much sense on it.
Very satisfying experience once you spend 5mins getting used to it ..

~~~
chris_wot
I don't care about tablets. I can't use it on my laptop or desktop.

~~~
yuhong
can't?

------
pmelendez
>"To distance itself from the Windows 8 debacle"

I must be a really weird person, since I like Windows 8 a lot and I actually
liked Windows Vista (albeit I used the later in the SP1 iteration and with a
decent machine)

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computerJanitor
Windows 9 Core. They didn't like our GUI, so we're sure end users will love
learning Powershell.

~~~
Pxtl
Am I the only .NET developer who doesn't get the point of powershell?

"Look it's C#! But with uglier syntax. And terrible tools. But with a handful
of tiny features that let it work like a command-line language!"

~~~
mhurron
It is a CLI. So what you're not getting is server management.

~~~
Pxtl
As a CLI it's hideously baroque. It brings in all the mental overhead of OOP
without the tooling needed to make OOP comfortable to work with. OOP is
pleasant in .NET languages thanks to the relationship between Visual Studio
and all information the .NET framework has about classes and assemblies - all
the documentation around the object you're manipulating is right there.

The lightweight-but-still-too-heavy Powershell ISE leaves the user completely
in the dark about the .NET framework.

~~~
tbrownaw
It's an experiment, to see how hard it is to make "everything is an object"
work as well as "everything is text" for scripting.

------
jhardcastle
So are we now seeing the confirmation of the anti-Star Trek Curse[1]? Windows
9 will be OK, 10 will be terrible, 11 will be OK, and so on...

Microsoft's new leadership needs to start thinking about resigning itself to
being the stable operating system choice. Nothing fancy, nothing sexy, no
major "rebirth" to keep up with the Jonses ever other version. They are an
enterprise operating system for 95% of businesses out there, and businesses
don't want rapid change. They will continue to buy Windows in huge numbers as
long as they can rely upon it. It's too expensive to switch to anything else.
If MS wants to keep turning over the apple cart to try and stay in the
consumer market, they're going to upset their true core audience (IMHO).

[1]
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StarTrekMovieCurs...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StarTrekMovieCurse)

~~~
Systemic33
I can see your points, but this is EXACTLY how Nokia and RIM went down the
drain. They both thought that as long as we just churn out new iterations of
the same thing, it'll keep people on. Look how that went...

~~~
Silhouette
The difference is that there were plenty of competitors whose commodity
products were overtaking even the premium, business-friendly features in
BlackBerry gear, just as generic PCs eventually made dedicated high-end
workstations obsolete. Right now, the only credible competitor to Windows for
a user-facing business PC operating system is OS X, and even then a lot more
of the serious business software is better on Windows today so Apple's
penetration seems to be mainly laptops for management and sales roles.

There are plenty of ways Microsoft could develop Windows that would play to
their existing customer base and their established strengths; I've argued at
length in previous posts that Microsoft are the best positioned business in
the world to push a "private cloud" trend, for one possible example, and that
they could offer genuine benefits to businesses that would justify upgrading
their installations. All they have to do is regain the focus they had a few
years ago and play the cards they've been dealt to best effect, and as far as
desktop Windows goes, I believe that means not rocking the boat trying to be
too clever and "consumery", but instead building out the technical strengths
under the hood and making them easy and familiar to access.

But if their next desktop OS is another turkey, I suspect their luck will
start to run out. It will take them several years to even try a different
strategy, and by then I expect at least one major competing platform will have
reached enough maturity to take them head on and start stealing away the big
business software market. Apple could do it -- they have the technical smarts,
the war chest, and the scale to pull it off -- but I don't think they will
under their current management team. I suspect a more direct challenge might
come from a start-up with a big name backer building something on Linux. While
"year of Linux on the desktop" is still a running joke, the likes of Android
phones/tablets, Chromebooks, and probably soon Steam Machines show it can work
as a non-geek's OS given the right front-end. Looking 3/4/5 years from now,
around the time Microsoft's next-but-one generation user OS arrived, a huge
amount could have happened in an industry this fast-paced.

~~~
Systemic33
Apple wasn't a competitior to anyone in the phone industry, right until they
made the iPhone and blew everyone out of the water. My point still stands.

~~~
Silhouette
Apple didn't blow BlackBerry out of the water overnight, though. The BB phones
available around the time the original iPhone hit the market were competitive.
The brand was strong. They had technical innovations like a high resolution,
full colour display several years before Retina iPhones arrived.

Then they dropped the ball even harder than Microsoft when it came to the
mobile Internet, persisting with a proprietary browser with insufficient
market share and other non-standard tools for far too long. They also released
some ill-timed new products that fell behind the curve, such as the Torch that
still had a "normal" resolution display when everyone else was doubling up.

In short, it wasn't BB continuing to churn out the same kind of products that
led to their downfall because the iPhone arrived, it was them falling behind
the curve and putting out _inferior_ products for several years even _after_
the competition had arrived and started to become established.

Right now, there is no iPhone-level disruption in the end user PC operating
system market, but if someone started the ball rolling this year and made
their entrance to compete with Windows 9, they could be a serious competitor
by the following generation if Windows 9 chokes the way Vista and Windows 8
did.

------
alexdowad
Sigh. More new stuff to learn when I need to help people with their Windows
boxes.

How long can these guys go on releasing new operating systems? And how long
will people keep buying them?

~~~
sliverstorm
Major new releases are hardly inappropriate. There's still a lot of change in
computers. Recall XP had no wireless support until SP2, and it hasn't been
until Win7 or so that SSD's have been handled optimally (TRIM and so forth)

~~~
robert_tweed
There really haven't been many major changes to the x86 architecture since the
386, with the notable exception of 64-bit recently. Pretty much everything
else should be handled with driver updates or at worst a service pack.

I wouldn't even object to paying for those kinds of upgrades, if I needed
them, if I could take them without getting a bunch of unwanted tinkering with
the UI and toolset.

I eventually gave up on Windows as my primary OS because of many small,
incremental breakages like changes to the batch language (without really
fixing any of its serious shortcomings), it becoming impossible to do a simple
file search from Explorer, then it becoming impossible to change file
associations without a 3rd-party tool. But hey, if you want an animated dog
for no reason, that's no problem!

I still need Windows 7 for some things (3D software is still almost
exclusively Windows-only) and I still find certain things about OS X a bit
clunky, but overall I'm rather happy that I no longer have to care about what
Microsoft might mess up in Windows 9.

~~~
sliverstorm
_There really haven 't been many major changes to the x86 architecture since
the 386_

CPU architecture is hardly all that matters to the core OS

 _Pretty much everything else should be handled with driver updates or at
worst a service pack._

Driver updates work fine for adding support for a new model of graphics card,
but when you introduce a whole new _kind_ of device (e.g. WiFi, SSD) the
implications reach into the OS itself. They managed WiFi in a service pack for
XP, but it was both a pretty unprecedented level of change for a service pack,
and always felt kind of tacked-on.

------
johnatwork
I hope with this release they resolve some edition confusions between
nonsensical words, like Premium, Professional, Ultimate, etc.

~~~
daigoba66
Despite some of the earlier marketing, describing how much simpler the
editions became, it's still a cluster-mess.

For example read about problems upgrading to 8.1 for various editions:
[http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/why-can-t-
find-...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/why-can-t-find-update-
store#). Upgrading to a "service pack" in previous versions of Windows never
seemed this complicated.

~~~
yuhong
What is also funny about the 8.1 "update" is also that the system requirements
for the 64-bit versions actually increased.

------
Xdes
The only thing I want from Microsoft is for them to stop messing with the UI.
Metro is fine and users will learn to like it.

~~~
Karunamon
I agree in that they need to leave the UI the hell alone unless there is a
concrete benefit, but metro? Fine for everything except getting real work
done, that is.

Mediocre tablet UI, godawful desktop UI.

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duiker101
I like Windows 8 but there is like 10 people using it. Most of the people are
still on 7. I really don't see the need for a Windows 9 that will just bring
driver troubles, incompatibility and inconsistency.

~~~
tiziano88
not if it's in fact just a rebranded windows 8

~~~
Goronmon
You mean like how Windows 7 was basically a rebranded Vista?

~~~
WalterSear
It was more than that. It was Vista with 2 years of bug fixes.

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rthomas6
If Microsoft follows their old pattern of consumer OSes, Windows 9 will be
fantastic:

* 95: Dud

* 98: Great

* Me: Dud

* XP: Great

* Vista: Dud

* 7: Great

* 8: Dud

~~~
jiggy2011
Was 95 a dud? That's not how I remember it, although it was a huge change from
3.x. You also miss Windows 2000 which was a very good OS though not really
sold to consumers.

~~~
WalterSear
Drivers were a nightmare for a while, IIRC.

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puppetmaster3
In April ... of '15\. Who cares.

psa: ChromeOS(fast, stable) is based on Gentoo.

~~~
pjmlp
NSA takes care of your data.

------
_pmf_
Ye olde two version tango.

