Jason Perlow
for Tech Broiler
| June 18, 2021 — 12:00 GMT (13:00 BST)
| Topic: Microsoft
Next week, Microsoft is set to unveil the next version of Windows. All evidence — including leaked builds and teaser videos released by Microsoft in anticipation of the event — suggests this new version will be called Windows 11.
Now, we had initially thought that Windows 10 would be the “last” version of Windows; at least, that was what Microsoft had messaged in 2015. So, what we would be getting in the future were more incremental updates instead of the “Big Bang” releases we saw previously.
So, why are we getting a new major version of Windows now?
Windows 11: Is Microsoft having its Spinal Tap moment?
The PC is not the Mac, and Microsoft’s customer base is not Apple’s
We can play the usual “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” nonsense, and it makes for fun sound bites, but this is not how the real world works.
Clearly, in the last year, we have seen Apple make significant changes to the Mac. First, it switched chip architectures, which yielded some real performance improvements in CPU and power consumption when it went to Apple Silicon, based on the Arm architecture. Second, it introduced a new x86 emulation layer, Rosetta 2. Third, it introduced Catalyst so that iPad apps can run on the Mac. Finally, it added sandboxing and containerization on Apple Silicon Macs.
A lot of armchair observers hope Microsoft will do something like that. But in the PC’s case, it doesn’t make sense to completely clean the slate and make so many drastic changes all at once.
It’s easy for a company like Apple to toss apps that were written more than 10 years ago; it decided with Catalina, which is two versions back, that it would throw out a lot of old APIs and frameworks. So, if you didn’t upgrade apps as a developer or as an end-user, you were out of luck.
But it doesn’t work that way in the business and enterprise world when you have vertical industry stuff and in-house apps that are 20+ years old. Apple does not have a server OS on the same basic architecture that runs stuff in the cloud or data centers as Microsoft does. Apple also doesn’t have a hyper-scale commercial cloud business that has to run that legacy code as Microsoft does — or a business application unit as with Office 365 — which all still needs to work.
While we can say that Microsoft needs to take a page from Apple, in reality, when Microsoft has to decide to introduce a new version of Windows, there are a whole different set of things it needs to be concerned about.
Changes are coming at a reasonable pace
Microsoft could introduce a new Windows architecture based on ARM, containers, and all that stuff to make Windows behave more like Apple does with iPad and MacOS Monterey on Apple Silicon. But does it have the technical expertise and the ability to implement it?
Yes, but it also can’t afford to break things at the end of the day, or it will be a total disaster.
But the good news is Microsoft has been working on these things for quite some time, even though you might not have noticed them. The company has been openly discussing these sorts of changes at its BUILD conference and with partners. And the infrastructure for these changes — such as for containerized and sandboxed apps that would have been rolled into Windows 10X — is still there.
Related Topics:
Apple
Enterprise Software
Windows
Windows 10
Collaboration
Cloud
Jason Perlow
for Tech Broiler
| June 18, 2021 — 12:00 GMT (13:00 BST)
| Topic: Microsoft