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Will Windows 8 Be Ready For Release In 2012?
MrSeb writes with an excerpt from an Extreme Tech article on the Windows 8 release timeline: "...A Microsoft vice president announced that the Windows 8 beta would begin in late February 2012. The beta will be feature-complete and will allow developers to begin listing their apps in the Store. The timing of the beta is curious, and ultimately quite telling. ... The first public build of Windows 8 ... emerged in mid-September 2011; by the time the beta rolls around, it will have been ruminating for more than five months. If we follow the timeline forward — it took 10 months for Windows 7 to go from beta to public release — then it's possible that Windows 8 might arrive just in time for Black Friday 2012, or perhaps not in 2012 at all. Will its late arrival affect its chances of cutting out a swath of the tablet market from Apple and Android? Or will Windows 8 be different enough that it will do well, no matter when it arrives?"
In related news, an anonymous reader notes that IDC predicts Windows 8 will be irrelevant to the traditional PC market.
Ill be waiting for SP1. Server 2008 R2 has shown (at least to me) that Microsoft is trying to make server tasks more accessible at the cost of options and tweaking. Instead of having a nice GUI with lots of options, it's a purdy GUI with few options and the rest buried in some power shell syntax. Server 8 doesn't look like its helping their case.
Who would have guessed that phones would completely be the thing to mangle and ruin PC user interfaces... It's crazy but I've come full circle to thinking KDE4 might actually be the only sane desktop team left. Unless they're planning on turning it into a tablet/phone UI as well.
They can certainly do all of that in Windows 8.
Are you under the impression that they can't?
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
The problem with this "more frequent release" model is that it is going to push businesses to some other OS. The company I work for should have just about completed the process of preparing to migrate to Windows 7 by the time Windows 8 comes out. This is a result of having to ensure that everything that is essential to business operations will work on Windows 7 before starting to roll it out. They do not want to be in the position of having to support multiple versions of the OS depending on what software the users need. In addition, because of regulatory requirements it is not practical to just upgrade the software to a version that is compatible with the new OS version.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
You're wrong on Win95. 95 was a revelation when it was released; a much better user interface than 3.1 and preemptive multitasking, and more stable (given good drivers) than 3.1, plus built-in TCP/IP. Sucked that they didn't give OSR2 as a free upgrade (or indeed at all except to OEMs) so that we could have had FAT32 sooner.
98 sucked when it came out, so you're wrong there as well. 98SE was pretty awesome in its day, though.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
"Windows 9 is going to be everything and nothing at once. They're stripping the kernel to its core and use it as the basis for all their products. Desktop OS, mobile OS, Xbox, set top boxes, etc. It's going to be a great thing for MS because they'll be able to focus on improving a unified core. Basically, they're trying to do with Windows what everyone has been doing with Linux for years, make it something that's easily scalable and customizable across a family of products.
It's going to save MS a ton of money and allow them to focus on keeping their products secure and fast instead of constantly having to patch crappy modules of code that have been carried over for a decade"
How is that going to work? They'll be supporting the New, Really new We Mean It This Time This Is The Shiznit API and all the old ones starting from WFC, J++, silverlight, some of the .net, etc etc rot but still need to be patched.
How much of the support problems are from the kernel and how much from the huge layers of stuff on top?
so.. in other words. everything a *nix based os has had for years. why do i get the feeling microsoft is like a horse in a race wearing a dunce cap?
My guess: Win will own the corporate tablet market 80+%. Maybe ~25% of tablet/netbook type devices people buy for home use since people will feel "more comfortable" buying something they know will work with the programs they are used to. Funny thing for home use for a lot of people: even though it is their personal computer they still in my experience, base a part of the decision on "will it do the stuff I do at work?" which for most people means windows. They might dual boot but few people go completely Windowsless.