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Microsoft's CEO Says He Wants to Unify Windows

Posted by samzenpus on from the by-your-powers-combined dept.

Deathspawner writes A lot of people have never been able to understand the logic behind Microsoft's Windows RT, with many urging the company to kill it off so that it can focus on more important products, like the mainline Windows. Well, this is probably not going to come as a huge surprise, especially in light of mass layoffs announced last week, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that his company will be working to combine all Windows versions into a unified release by next year.

10 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Best Wishes ! by mythosaz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Unices? Who knows.

    Anyway, it'll be a little easier since they have full control of all Windows production. Nobody has to convince another distribution.

    I'd love to see a single UI that works across 4" phones and 7" tablets with gorilla glass, and 13" laptops and 10" convertibles with membrane keyboards, and 24" desktops with 101-keyboards, and 60" XBox Ones with controllers but I'm not holding my breath.

  2. Death bell tolling for thee.... by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    People HATE windows 8 because they are trying to force a touch interface on it, most people do not buy touch montiors so it is less than intuitive.. now they want to make it even more touch oriented? unless they are going to send me FREE 27" and 40" 4K touchscreen monitors it's not going to be worth a damn.

    STOP TRYING TO UNIFY THE PC AND TABLET/PHONE WORLDS! I am so sick of companies trying to do this, it's a failure an utter failure.

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    1. Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... by plopez · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If it was a good idea Apple would have done it long ago ;)

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    2. Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... by roc97007 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      > I think I understand why they want to do this: Only one code base, less overhead and more profit.

      Not if nobody buys it.

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      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    3. Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, Insightful

      People HATE windows 8 because they are trying to force a touch interface on it, most people do not buy touch montiors so it is less than intuitive.. now they want to make it even more touch oriented? unless they are going to send me FREE 27" and 40" 4K touchscreen monitors it's not going to be worth a damn.

      STOP TRYING TO UNIFY THE PC AND TABLET/PHONE WORLDS! I am so sick of companies trying to do this, it's a failure an utter failure.

      They certainly can unify the PC and Tablet. They just have to give up on the insane idea that the UI will be identical between devices. The mouse didn't work on a small screen so they put the touchscreen on my 52" TV?!?! Seriously, who thought that was a good idea?

      This is a very easy thing to fix... XP/Win7 style desk for PCs, Android style for anything smaller than 10", Remote/MediaPC controlls for TVs. And... wait for it... Alt-windows key toggles between UIs for those that like different ones at different times. Eeegads! Am I the next Wozniak with my insanely brilliant ideas or what? Oh wait... no, it's just that obvious.

  3. Re:Best Wishes ! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    History isn't encouraging, though. They've been pursuing the dream of one windows to rule them all since the days when that involved smearing a crude layer of flayed win95 across winCE and pretending it was a good fit for PDAs.

    Now that hardware has advanced they have a much better shot at architectural unification (if memory serves, NT has basically edged out everything else except for whatever CE support they provide for legacy customers); but UI? That won't go well.

  4. Re:Best Wishes ! by techno-vampire · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd love to see a single UI that works across...

    You might, but I, at least, wouldn't because what you'd end up with was a UI that worked equally badly on all types of screens and wasn't really right for any of them. I'm not a fan of Microsoft, preferring to use Linux, but I will say that they're right in not trying to shoehorn a One True UI onto everything.

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  5. Re:Best Wishes ! by Bugler412 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Chicago was what became Windows 95, DOS was present as something vaguely like a "kernel" although that definition doesn't fit well. The 32 bit mode stuff was layered on top of DOS. NT4 was the first shipping version that used the NT kernel with the Win95 interface, that was codenamed "Cairo" and was really mostly a shell update using the NT 3.51 underpinnings.

  6. Very old saying by jklovanc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Jack of all trades master of none.

  7. No to a unified interface yes to unified software by Harlequin80 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If I could have a Win 7 style interface on my desktop / laptop. I really good touch interface for my tablet / phone and a really good lounge room interface for my xbox that could run the same software across all 3. Now that would be cool! RT wasn't crap because it was a different interface it was crap because it felt like it should run the same stuff as normal windows but didn't