"beans" (Java) will have much to do with it... C#, more likely.

upgrade from Win7.

Until then, I see no reason to upgrade the O/S on existing home hardware.

I do hope to deploy 10 in an Enterprise sooner rather than later, but that's a whole another ball of wax.

Had to buy a new computer and looked for one with Windows 7. I'm still holding on with Office 2003 - I despise Office 2010 that we use at work. It's hard to find the tools I need. Give me back my menu bar!

It seems like they are just focused on rethinking the GUI. Nothing wrong with having a new GUI but if they put all their eggs in one basket, the tech will not evolve.

will now be green.

It's called Windows Edition 8.1

(Which is really version 6.3 if you bring up a command prompt and use the ver command.)

I gave up on Windows when they came out with what they called Windows 7 and it was really Windows version 6.1. Vista warmed over with a point update.

Windows 8 is even worse. Do a ver command and you will see that it is VERSION 6.2.
When they came up with Windows 8.1, the command prompt reveals that it is really, you guessed it, Windows version 6.3

The way that they got around the versions is now they call it a "Windows Edition." It is no longer formally a version, which to me, seems that the basic kernel of the operating system has not changed since Vista.
Vista was the biggest nightmare...

So you see, it's only logical, that by their current naming conventions, that they do not come up with Windows 9. They just dress up the user interface, and call it Windows Edition 10, when it is probably version 6.4.

I better stop before more of my nerdiness shows any more.

Tot ziens.

Never heard of Millennium or commonly as ME? I've had both, there is no comparison. Vista is light years better than Millennium.

It was Microsoft's second worst disaster after Microsoft Bob (which my Mom liked, but to be fair, it was the kind of OS that only a mother could love).

Notice that both have EVEN version numbers?
Version 2 was so bad that they didn't release it.
Version 4 (98, NT and ME) were bad enough. Me was Windoze 98 patched to the nth degree.
Version 6 (Vista, Seven, Eight and Ten?) sucks
and anything above is just Vista patched. Now what is is about patching feces with feces?
Do you think that they will do the same thing and patch the crap out of Vista, only to call it something else?
I do, because they have.

The other big flop was Microsoft Bob! Remember Bob?

Oh, and do you know what the experimental version of Windows was that took parts of Windows ME, Windows NT, and Windows CE was called?
It was Windows CEMENT, and sunk like a rock!

This is kind of the opposite of the Star Trek film paradigm, where every even number was good. Though, I could find something terribly bad with ANY version of ANY OS.

Was the animated paper clip also part of Bob? Funny I either had or worked with 3.1, 95, and NT but still don't remember Bob.

But as for NT, I worked with NT for years and thought at the time and still think it is the most stable release of Windows to date. I have the most knowledge of and experience with it may be the reason. Windows XP was pretty good probably because it was based on NT but my feelings may be prejudiced because I replaced Millennium with XP as soon as I could. 7 may be better than NT but I haven't used 7 much except for a while at school.

Windows 8.1 that I'm using now seem to be stable but I just don't like it and still can't find some things without thinking about it or even looking it up, maybe if I had a touch screen but I don't want one. Windows Server 2012 which I've had limited experience with although looking much like Windows 8 doesn't seem to be as bad to use.

I'm not saying Vista was good, but it was much better than Millennium. Millennium crashed my computer about every hour and a half if I didn't reboot every hour.

Was another Microsoft Flub. It was an interface that was supposed to replace Program Mangler.. I mean Manager. It used objects like a house and rooms which were supposed to be places to keep your programs. I put the whole thing in the bathroom, in the toilet.
Here's the Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

I think that "Clippy" was part of the help structure.

We had a couple of NT servers that would crash weekly. It got to the point that we knew when they were going to crash, and we just stayed late that night, shut them down and restarted them.

Windows versions 6.2 and 6.3 are okay if you have a windoze phone with a touch screen, but that's about it.

And what about those like myself, who use Windows 7 and Windows 8.1?

Only 13 years behind Apple

"Windows 10 will run on the broadest amount of devices. A tailored experience for each device,"

This says one of two things to me. Either there will be a built in bloated emulator slathered under all Win10 devices *or* C# (with a might-as-well-be-an-emulator .NET framework beneath). Neither is wonderful for performance, although C# is better than Java. Not exactly something to whoop about...

Also, do they not realize that the number one biggest problem with Win8 was that the interface was designed to be the same on mobile & desktop devices? Are they now saying that Devs can magically write one set of (incredibly bloated) code that will have a tiled, touchscreen interface for mobile devices but a kb+mouse interface for desktops? That would not bode well...

Hey, Microsoft! Howsabout you fix some of the basic underlying issues with things like the file system itself ? See, desktop users typically create lots and lots of files and need to move them around. It's the *opposite* of mobile users.

& before I end by yelling at the kids to get off my lawn, does MS really plan on running their server OS off the same code as their phones (again) and call it a good thing? 'Cause if they do, I'm grabbing some popcorn & junior mints...

the one and only CPU killer. Until Microsoft can figure out how to prevent their framework from over working CPU's I say no thanks.

All growth is on mobile. Even Apple has become a cellphone company.

Mobile and tablets.

Are you aware that in 2014, there was more internet traffic was on cellphones than desktops. The average consumer doesn't "need" a desktop".

The Windows 10 concept is basically also telling you that they want everything to work on 'all platforms".. which really means you can code for desktop, but we want to make sure it works on mobile as well.

Imagine a cellphone or a watch... that has wireless connection to large monitors. Today's cellphones are much more powerful than "desktops" a decade ago.

(or Windows laptops sitting on desktops).

Phones and tablets are fine for what they are, but not very useful for office work.

On top of their stranglehold on the desktop OS market, Microsoft has another one with Office. Even though sales of desktops/laptops have flattened, the user base is so large that is will be a cash cow for many decades.

and we NEVER run anything MS on our servers... and we build enterprise ecommerce solutions.

And all our video is editing is in Final Cut Pro... on a Mac.

"Office Work"?

During the peak "dot.com" period (1995-2000) I worked creating online apps for Fortune 100 companies.. so they could fill out all their "forms" online, especially payroll and insurance sign-ups... thus NOT NEEDING MS Office.

Office costs more than the $99 for Win8.1. Home and Student, 1 PC costs $140 at Newegg.com and it goes up from there. Home and Business, $219. Office Pro, $399.

People pay those prices every day, Microsoft can sit back and do nothing but pump out minor improvements to Office and be profitable for generations right now.

You pay X dollars per month per employee for Office, email, web collaboration stuff, etc. I used to think no-one would go for this, but I guess for small businesses, it might be attractive.

I work in IT for a mid-sized business. We tested Win8 and its mobile and tablet interface with our workforce. 100% of them hated it, viscerally. Worked to my advantage however, we were getting resistance form the workforce about upgrading to Win7 from XP. Once they saw Win8, they all lept for Win7 and resistance dissolved completely.

Yes, on the consumer side, PC's are dying. If a home has one, that's usually enough. But in most homes (not counting those in poverty or near poverty in the US), there are multiple mobile or tablet devices. From a growth perspective, for Apple, its been good for them. However, Apple has been continuing to develop excellent Macs for consumers and businesses. They know that market is important and pay attention to it.

Unlike Microsoft with Win8. Microsoft should have paid closer attention to Apple, on this and kept two code bases. OS X and iOS. Instead they want a unified OS. While I understand the internal need for that, they decided that the UI for the unified OS should be the same on all platforms. But, again, Apple knows this, how someone works with a computer versus a mobile device are very different, so the UIs need to be respectful to how the user interfaces with the device, be it a smart phone or a workstation. Microsoft, learned this lesson the hard way with Win8.

In the business arena PCs and workstations far outnumber consumer PCs and workstations. Win8 was rejected by IT departments all over the world because we knew the learning curve for the new touch-centric interface would fail with the end-users, most of whom don't have touch enabled screens or systems. Which, of course, would increase the workload on us answering stupid tickets all day increasing the cost of IT. Which, of course, would wipe out any savings made by the lower licensing costs of Win8 and any improvements or efficiencies that exist in Win8 over Win7 or XP.

Win8 is a disaster like Microsoft Bob was a disaster. History repeated itself and Microsoft didn't learn from it. Bob is an apt comparison to Win8 because, technically for the time, there wasn't anything wrong with Bob, but the UI was soundly rejected by Microsoft's clients. Microsoft didn't even bother to find out what its clients wanted, it just made Bob and put it out there. Same thing with Win8's UI.

Win10 (I still don't know why they skipped '9') is a step towards making things different for PC needs and mobile needs. According to Microsoft's presentation, Win10 will know if its running on a mobile device or a full PC and things can be set differently depending on the needs of the machine running the OS. Its a smart move, but one they should have made in the early design phases for Win8... years ago.

2.5, 2.6 %?

But let's say Microsoft's "Universal Windows" (aka Windows on ARM processors) goes to fruition. They'll essentially be shooting their corporate (ie x86/x64) market in the foot. Either way, if they unify the code they risk losing one of two markets.

So far, it looks like Windows 10 will "undo" many of the design blunders of Windows 8, much the same as Windows 7 undid the Vista fiasco. For one thing, the traditional start menu is back, albeit embellished somewhat. If it finally got through their thick skulls that serious business computer users can't use a toy-like interface to do actual productive work, only good things will result.

The expected release date is Q4 2015, probably in time for 2015 Christmas sales.

Interested parties can participate in its final development with the Technical Previews of Windows 10, released tomorrow (Wednesday.) It will start with a version for laptops and desktops and following later with a version for servers. These early releases are pretty rough and unpolished but are available to almost anyone via preview.windows.com.

they should be working on their .NET framework rather than finding ways in adding more wallpapers over their bloated and bloviated OS.

Why not do what Apple have done, that is working on a fair and better stable security OS, that should be the focus instead of finding new ways of hiding backdoor access from users.

For GUI systems, only XFCE makes Linux tolerable for me. Unity? Gnome 3.x? They're as infuriatingly dumbed down as Windows 8. The new KDE looks like it was designed by a bunch of ex Android and Office Metro developers.

"Dumbed down and primitive" seems to be the future of GUI computing.

I'm considering giving the MATE desktop a try but was waiting for the bugs to be worked out.

MATE is a continuation of Gnome 2 but I made a VERY complicated custom theme and would have to go through all the code again to make it compatible with MATE. Ubuntu is still doing new Kernels on 10.04.4 so it hasn't been urgent.

I haven't had to mess with anything in it for a few months now.

I'm also aware that I'm not a typical computer user. I like to keep things simple.

LXDE works fine for me too as I'll habitually open a terminal rather than look around for some menu button or graphic utility. If there's any "missing" functionality in either desktop, things that a Windows user might expect, I haven't noticed.

The last Windows I used on my personal machines was 98SE, and it was hacked up well with things like 98Lite.

I use XP and Visa as a game OS. Too risky to go online with it even with firewalls and anti-spyware. In fact, I can't remember the last time I used Firefox in Windows. No doubt, I should upgrade it.

I've played with LXDE and like it better than KDE (which feels like bloatware). A big advantage is the themes are powered by GTK+2 which was the most common prior to Gnome 3 so all of the GTK+2 themes over at gnome-look.org should work on it. (May need a tweak or two)

The other lite weight one I've tried is XFCE. It lacked visual options.

Windows 1.0
Windows 286
Windows 386
Windows 3.0
Windows for Workgroups*
Windows NT 3.0
Windows NT 3.5
Windows NT 4.0*
Windows 95
Windows 98*
Windows ME
Windows 2000*
Windows XP*
Windows Vista
Windows 7*
Windows 8*
Windows 10

Did I miss any?

* Based on my experience, these were the versions that were stable. Windows 8 was fairly stable, but changed so many aspects of the UI that nobody liked it and I never recommended it to my clients.

nope, you got them all.

There was a 3.1, a 3.11, an NT 3.5.1 and there is currently 8.1. You also didn't include the "server" line.

and OS versions they got right mostly from the get go. Until Windows 3.0, Windows was almost unusable since it really did not get along with DOS programs, and even then it was buggy as an ant farm. The versions I marked actually worked out of the box most of the time and didn't die during installation.

The ultimate nerd t-shirt.

for all I care.

I loathed that system and have resisted upgrading my Win7 box because of how much I hated it.

God Himself appears before the three most powerful people in the world and announces that He will end the world in three days.

The President of the USA calls his cabinet together and says, 'I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that God exists. The bad news is that He will end the world in three days.'

The Premier of China convenes the inner party members and says, 'I have bad news and I have worse news. The bad news is that God exists. The worse news is that He will end the world in three days.'

Bill Gates goes before the Microsoft board of directors and says, 'I have good news and I have great news. The good news is that God exists. The great news is that we don't have to fix Windows 95!'

I thought XP was a good system. And 7. I still have a desktop Windows 7 computer but I was given a MacBook Air for my 62nd birthday and now I have to learn a bunch of new stuff. A friend let me babysit his HP notebook with Windows 8 installed. That was harder than learning a Mac.

when we need that one extra push

an old toaster, iron or furnace? Every time I see these new ''operating systems' I want to scream. OK, I know technology advances but for those of us in the dark ages of computer use, this is a pain in the backside. I feel outdated enough without all these enhancements.
I bet all old timers like me feel the same way. Leave us alone with out outdated systems. What harm are we doing that it should cost us even more?

OK, vent over, I hope you advanced users understand. I know my compatriots do.

like apple lets you

evens are good, odds are bad - but I forget - maybe it's the other way around - evens bad, odds good?

I'm not playing anymore.