Are you agog, waiting to see what
the next version of Windows will look like?
Of course you are! Counting the days
until June 26. After all, Windows 8 has been out for months and months. Time
for Windows Blue.
Oh, it’s not going to be Windows
Blue? They are calling it Windows 8.1? Not even a Service Pack?
I heard that. Somebody in the back
could not care less. Probably the guy who was cursing out his computer, a few
weeks ago, telling me his computer had been just fine and then someone insisted
on upgrading it to Windows XP. Another Luddite. No wonder this person is in the
back; he is used to everyone else being ahead of him. Let those other people be
early adopters; he is waiting for them to find all the bugs. I bet he still
breaks in a new car by driving it at 35 mph for the first 500 miles. Or he
would if he bought a new car.
But for those of us who are ready for the Next operating system, it’s official now. What? Yes, I said “Next.” Why do you ask?
Oh, you mean NeXT! As in Next
Computer, Next Software. A Company founded by Steve Jobs in the 1980s after he
had been forced out of Apple. Eventually Apple took Jobs back and bought Next,
including its object-oriented NeXTSTEP operating system. Which, incidentally,
is pretty much the foundation of Apple’s OSX and iOS operating system.
But that is not our topic at the
moment, okay? I set out to discuss the latest about the next iteration of
Windows.
What Microsoft had been calling
Windows Blue, the successor to Windows 8, henceforth will be called Windows
8.1. A preview version is due out on June 26, in time for the BUILD conference.
It will be available for download
from the app store, but at no cost.
No, that doesn’t mean that anyone
with a hankering for Windows 8 can download and install it. It requires Windows
7 or Windows 8.
Rumors abound. One is that Windows
8.1 will bring back the Start button. The lack of Start may be the biggest
single defect mentioned by Win 8 users. You’d think MS would have tumbled to
our affection for Start, sometime in the beta period. It would be a popular
feature to add, or restore, at this point.
Most public announcements are coming
from Tami Reller, chief financial and marketing director in the windows
division, and by Julie Larson-Green, who leads Windows 8 development.
Another Win 8.1 feature will be the
ability to boot straight to the desktop. Other interface refreshes will
be more choices of tile sizes and a bunch of other customizations.
Now that we have a MUI instead of a
GUI (Modern User Interface instead of Graphical User Interface, what we have
used ever since we left the Command Line and started pointing and clicking), do
we still need and want a desktop? Seems as if a number of indicators had told
MS that we do, especially for production work.
Why call this new version 8.1?
Reller says it makes sense because it is an update. And not a patch kit,
absolutely not.
This release coincides with
Microsoft’s efforts to fit on tablets and convertibles of a variety of sizes
and capabilities. The MUI’s split-screen multitasking will be more workable
A new crop of Windows devices is
coming: lower end, more compact, less power hungry and more battery gentle,
positioned to compete with the slicker, more powerful than ever Android devices
stampeding to market.
If anyone still thinks 8.1 is a
service pack, one indicator against that is that it updates the NT kernel
version from 6.2 to 6.3. Would they do that for a service pack?
Nomenclature in technology is
confusing, to be sure. There are those who insist that Jobs was not Steve Jobs’
original name, and that he had his surname changed to suggest that his company
would become enormous and employ great numbers of people. And it did, didn’t
it! However, Jobs was the guy’s name, ever since he was adopted by a family
with that name.
Then there was the Apple Lisa. It
was in development in the late 1970s, and somewhere along that time Jobs’
girlfriend gave birth to his daughter, Lisa Nicole Brennan. He insisted that
she be named Lisa, but the Apple Lisa came from the acronym for Local
Integrated System Architecture. Much later Jobs would tell his biographer the
Apple Lisa was named for his daughter; but he had been forced from the Lisa
project and had joined the Macintosh development team before that the daughter
arrived.
The Lisa was a resounding flop, one
of quite a few by Apple, most of which we can blame on Steve Jobs.
If Windows 8.1 is a new version,
it’s the first free one. I don’t recall Windows 3.1 being free, do you?
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