“One OS on all platforms” strategy to remain despite massive changes at Microsoft
Don’t expect your Microsoft desktops, tablets or phones to start looking any different any time soon. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has confirmed that having all platforms run the same operating system is still Microsoft’s overall goal.
As spotted by WPCentral, Nadella is quoted in a rather dull financial press release as saying the plan is to “streamline the next version of Windows from three operating systems into one single converged operating system. This means one operating system that covers all screen sizes.”
This should perhaps be unsurprising to anyone who has used an Xbox, Windows 8 computer, or Windows Phone – all have the same tile-based “Metro” user-interface. Significantly, this approach is divergent of the one taken by the likes of Apple and Google, which both have separate mobile and desktop operating systems, and different interfaces for their devices.
There has been some expectation though that Microsoft was planning to break with this consistency: new leaked pictures of the Windows 9 Start menu appeared that looked much more like Windows of old.
It’ll be interesting to see how this seeming inconsistency marries up with Nadella’s vision of everything coming from one place. In fact, Microsoft’s developers are now all working in the same team, as Nadella explained:
“In the past we had multiple teams working on different versions of Windows. Now we have one team with a common architecture. This allows us to scale, create Universal Windows Apps.”
Long time TechDigest readers will know about my antipathy towards this approach – here’s hoping Nadella can square the circle of the same experience, but needing different input devices and having different purposes.
