Windows 10 tries blending new with familiar

eh should it not be Windows 9?

where is windows9?

So the big ass start menu is gone, how is that moving forward?

PR ploy.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2690092/12-things-to-know-about-windows-10.html

The natural name would have been Windows 9, but Microsoft is eager to suggest a break with the past. “We’re not building an incremental product,” said Terry Myerson, head of Microsoft’s Operating Systems Group.

Once again we see Windoze trying to copy the interface of OSX on a base system that is so complicated even the developers don't fully understand it. Windoze peaked with XP over a decade ago and now, they are bringing back features of that OS into their new version. That's the way to innovate guys! Just recycle the old the rubbish. Hahahahaha!

Windows 10 users will be able to use COPY and PASTE in the Terminal (called Command Prompt because "Terminal" sounds too negative).

LOL. I switched away from Windows in 2002. Forgot how developer-repulsive that system was. I only eve launch it to - sigh - patch my work for Internet Explorer bugs.

Windows is so behind the times...

Let hope they don't pull another page from Apple's play book and call every future major release of Windows a subset of 10. Windows 10.1 10.2 10.3 ..... 10.10. Apple's upcoming OS is actually Mac OS 20 under any standard numbering scheme.

This creative numbering of software versions is nothing short of confusing. Take Adobe's suite, CS CS1 CS2 CS3 CS4 CS5 CS5.5 CS6 CC CC2014

Then there is Microsoft's crazy names for their consoles XBOX - XBOX 360 - XBOX One

At least Sony hasn't lost their minds yet. PS PS2 PS3 PS4

The natural name would have been Windows 9, but Microsoft is eager to suggest a break with the past. “We’re not building an incremental product,” said Terry Myerson, head of Microsoft’s Operating Systems Group.

But it is incremental. Clearly it is an evolution of Windows 8. Between this sort of stuff and Apple's marketing, there seems to be more hype than product these days.

Not everyone is a developer, @FishForest. Some of us are just plain users. I hope Windows 10 will include a PDF viewer so I don't have to install Adobe every time I reinstall my Windows. Oh, and not having to reinstall it every couple of months for sanity (sloooooow) would be nice.

Let hope they don't pull another page from Apple's play book and call every future major release of Windows a subset of 10. Windows 10.1 10.2 10.3 ..... 10.10. Apple's upcoming OS is actually Mac OS 20 under any standard numbering scheme.

Apple wants to keep the X in OSX (as with Gen X, Xtreme, X = cool, etc).

So Microsoft skips Win9 - "9" could probably be erred for "6" anyways.

Like when they went too far to digital with the original plan for Xbox One, Win8 just went too far to touch. They need to hit the proper balance between touch and the old familiar. Major businesses depend on the old familiar yet the new upcoming generations grow up on touch. They prefer incremental changes, not revolutions. Hopefully Win10 lives up to letting you choose depending on how you're used to and what device you're currently using.

Yet, the biggest thing that could come out of this is the concept of universal apps. Developers would just write one app, then the underlying OS would just scale it automatically to different platforms. Saves time and money. For the consumers too, e.g. just buy a game app in your Xbox, continue playing it on your PC or smartphone.

Isn't windows the OS that you have to go to start in order to stop/shut down? Hardly intuitive. Good luck if that kind of stuff is going to prevail.

so "moving forward" nowadays means copying and pasting old versions with the new version? how ingenious!

Is the ability to copy and paste into a terminal really not supported up to now? Windows takes up so many gigabytes yet once you've installed it you still can't do anything useful. No word processor, no spreadsheet, no compiler, no IDE, no scripting languages, no cutting/pasting into a terminal ... What exactly are you paying hundreds of dollars for?

Hope the 10s as easy to use as the 8.

Mmm I love 7, I pass on 8, so I'll probably get 10. Apple computers might be easier to use, better designed etc. and be less virus prone...using my wife's Apple just frustrates the crap out of me....at a certain age you just want to use what you're used to....

Unless all the additional devices such as some EPROM/microcontroller programmers will work in W10, I will always have 1 machine in XP. The rest will never be Windows (mostly Linux) as I am really sick as tire of its progression to slowness on each every patch. Never mind many reboots just to update some totally non-essential applications such as IE......

They blew it with Windows 8 in their attempt to get to the mobile users. The desktop users were beyond lost with all that tablet format and no start menu. I hated the new Windows 8, it took five times as longer to find things that I could easily find in Windows 7. When it came to upgrading my computer, I ended up with a Mac instead. At least Mac is not prone to getting viruses and it never slows down and have file fragmentation issues. The Mac is still going at the same speed as the day I opened its box. You can't do that Windows PC. They inevitably and gradually slow down with all the junk out there, until you have to reformat and reinstall. No such problems with Mac's.

XP rules and is the most stable version. So many companies, Microsoft included, like to repair what was never broken. Google is another major example.

The only thing I like about Windows 8, is that it boots Faster.

Microsoft really messed up by turning Windows (now a misnomer) into "Screens"... whereby every application occupies a full screen at a time - big mistake for a Corporate World, yet fine for a simple tablet.. but really, lacks vision - they introduced the same "full-screen' mode in Windows 98, and that failed, for good reason.

Microsoft has a problem and it's a Cultural spiral decline - perhaps they need to invest in a more Diverse cultural development/creative platform, and draw upon more experiences from different regions of the World and a more diverse business range.

Open Source practitioners benefit there, though progress is completely stifled by the IP Lawyers who argue now upon even gestures.... this area really needs reviewing - maybe set a 1 -2 year limit before such patents lapse, or just simply bring into law a distinction between Free - "open source" and "Commercial" usage,

Apart from trying to kill off their OS, they're really making a really good stab at killing off their Office suite too - which has now become a less productive for the professional user since their 2003 release. And even their Corporate Premium Support (which I unfortunately experienced) isn't that great , so I wouldn't really waste the money there.

Gripes aside, if you look at the other Commercial Alternatives, they've all got their differing problems... So it's simply a case of better the Devil you know.

Is the ability to copy and paste into a terminal really not supported up to now? Windows takes up so many gigabytes yet once you've installed it you still can't do anything useful. No word processor, no spreadsheet, no compiler, no IDE, no scripting languages, no cutting/pasting into a terminal ... What exactly are you paying hundreds of dollars for?

Every time Microsoft tries to add a commonly used utility to their OS, they get sued by some third-party software maker for monopolistic activities. When they added IE to the OS, Netscape (remember them?) sued them for sabotaging Netscape's business model ("Why would people buy our product if Microsoft is including an equivalent product in their OS?"). Windows 7 had the ability to play video DVD's using their Media Player, but when Win 8 came out, that capability was removed. I guarantee it was removed because some company that made a software-based DVD player threatened a lawsuit.

Copy/Paste works in programs that allow you to copy/paste. It's not an OS restriction. There are websites coded to specifically prevent copy/pasting (snopes.com, for example)

Every time Microsoft tries to add a commonly used utility to their OS, they get sued by some third-party software maker for monopolistic activities.

I generally have positive feelings towards Microsoft, but there's little doubt about the truth of this, as I am intimately familiar.

Since Microsoft's OS's are not open source, manufacturer's like Netscape have to write their code to the API that Microsoft publishes for them. That leaves Microsoft completely free of the risk these companies take by developing and growing a market -- they just sit back and see what develops and, if it looks like there's a real market, they develop their own software to compete. Their developers are privy to the unpublished internals, so they can write their code to outperform anything in the published API. You mentioned Netscape. You can add WordPerfect, Lotus (spreadsheets), and many others to a very long list.

Sometimes, they downright sabotage another vendor. When Microsoft decided it wanted to take Novell's networking business, they did something very ingenious and diabolical. When the Windows 95 client was first released, Novell held over 80% of the office LAN market. As soon as file and print sharing was activated on any Win 95 client that was also a Novell client, they wrote Win 95 to pretend it was a Novell server. The only problem with that is that a Win95 client could not authenticate anyone to the Novell system. Essentially, what this meant are massive connection problems, blamed on Novell, when Windows 95 was rolled out.

Novell's color was red (just as IBM's is blue), and our network engineers jokingly referred to Win95 as Microsoft's "Project Murine,:" because Novell steadily dropped as a network vendor from that point. (Novell can be faulted for being very late moving from IPX to TCP/IP, but that's another story.)

When I was hired as a network administrator by the school division I work for back in 1997, Novell Netware was the NOS used by the school division. This lasted until 2011 when we decided enough was enough. The annual licensing scheme the Netware reseller was foisting on us actually made the cost of converting the school division to a Microsoft NOS cheaper over a four-year period than sticking with the already established Novell server setup. Two years into the change-over, we're back up to speed. Novell's problems extended out much farther than having Microsoft as an adversary.

For the record, we hardly ever enabled file and print sharing in the various versions of Windows. Connections were handled by the Netware GINA. When there were connection problems, it really WAS Netware's fault.

So you click on start and get the metro tiles? How is this any different from Windows 8.1?

The deeper problem with Windows 8 is that it had most of the same functionality as Windows 7 (and even lost functionality in some instances), but the interface scrambled where everything is found. Stuff that had been easy to find in one place since XP was suddenly put somewhere entirely and unintuitively different. Need this certain control panel item? Well, the control panel isn't found in the same place anymore, and this particular control is no longer part of the control panel when you find it. Instead, you've got to wade through several metro tile pages, which bizarrely open outside of your windows so that they can't be minimized. It's simply a pain to navigate, and if they've kept those metro control pages and left the various controls scattered all over in different places, then Windows 10 will be nothing more than 8.1 warmed over. Better than 8? Maybe. But only in the same way that Windows 7 felt good only because Vista had been so terrible.

Really, Microsoft screwed up by trying to make Windows serve too many purposes. The interfaces on PCs and mobile devices are different. People interact with those devices in utterly different ways. If Microsoft were smart, it would develop two different OS that were closely related to one another, that interfaced seamlessly, and that gave users a similar look and feel, but that were designed for PCs and mobile devices respectively. Taking what was already a mediocre OS for PCs on its good days and trying to complicate it by making it work on other devices using radically different interfaces was stupid. Windows needs to be dedicated to one kind of device, and Microsoft needs to make something else that is dedicated to mobile devices. One OS to rule them all just isn't going to work.

Windows 8 was a disaster, as was Vista, and as will 10 be (I notice they just shrugged and gave up on a 9 altogether, which is probably wise). I bet they are absolutely kicking themselves over eliminating XP, or making it non-usable at any rate to 'forward' their new OSs. Navigating through Windows 8 is an exercise in frustration, and doesn't need to be.

They had a good product in Windows 7, very stable and rock solid. It's more reliable than XP. But then they went bonkers over Windows 8 and hiding all the functions under the tabs. What they should have done was keep improving on Windows 7, and come out with a new O/S for mobile computers, calling it Windows Mobile or something like that, which could work with Windows 7 desktops seamlessly. But they try to be everything, and end up doing none of the function well.

Just buy Mac's, and if you have to run Windows programs, you can purchase Windows O/S separately, then install/run Windows on the Mac, using VMware Fusion (which is free). That's how I set up my computer and it works great, as well as having both worlds (Mac and PC).

So they're combining the Windows 8 icon map with the Windows XP start button? (from accompanying photo)

I wonder if I hit Win-D will I go to a desktop that DOESN'T have this "feature", or does?

I just DON'T LIKE the Metro icon map. Now maybe forced to use it.

Win 10 looks awful already and not even released.

Five years to release ten to replace eight with nine features seven users liked just in time for the disaster of twelve hacked systems that make all vulnerable to any intrusion? It's not features, it's security that makes future systems desirable. Vulnerability is so last century.

I just installed it to my test PC several hours ago. My test PC is Dell Latitude D830 (2.2GHz Dual Core, 4GB RAM) that I bought in 2008. Just like Windows 8, Windows 10 runs faster than the Windows-7 Enterprise Evaluation that I installed in this same PC two years ago. Since my home PC and Work PC are Windows 7 and 8.1, I have no plan of migrating to WIndows 10 when this release next year.

However, just like Windows-8 promo price of 3,000yen for online upgrade from Windows-XP, I wouldn't mind upgrading again my PC to Windows 10 next year.

This is clearly BAD for the PC Industry as a whole. A Sell Signal if you hold any 'Tech' stocks dependent upon Microsoft . Think about it,t why buy a Computer with a defunct OS that's impractical when just around the corner is something that may be better.... Windows 8.* is now dead. (Official)

I'm already pissed off with Microsoft upon their 8 to 8.1 release - and believe if they wish to survive this, they need to fix the 8.1 release to start with. Firstly by fixing the Start button issue features they're releasing in 10 ... otherwise it's simply "Game Over" and becomes Red Hat vs Apple upon the Desktop....

The Management Structure of Microsoft's R&D Department needs to be reviewed since the "R" is clearly lacking over past years, and lately looks as if it's in Terminal decline. I'd certainly not want to hold it's Stock in my long term retirement plan, and to balance that nor would I want to hold Apple's. we have here, two Companies sitting either side of the Sea-Saw... and right now, Microsoft is hitting the low.... (but will the seasaw plank holding the two break... ?).... I think so, unless Microsoft refocuses.

Microsoft has developed a nasty habit of producing new versions that involve steep learning curves without any significant improvements in functionality. That's why I'm using Office 2003 on Windows 7, which I've configured to look like XP. I challenge anyone to explain the advantages of the Ribbon.