After Windows 8 disappointed many of its users, Microsoft sets the ball in motion to start previewing Windows 9.
If the game of computer operating systems was a round of bowling, Windows 8 would be a notorious turkey, rolling down the gutter and getting jammed at the end of the lane where not even the most committed lane attendee would be willing to go over and fish it out. From its very foundations, Microsoft have bungled the release of their most recent operating system as they made it too touchscreen-centric, putting off a large amount of customers who don’t have touchscreen enabled machines as they found it hard to get used to the square, app-like layout which is a complete 180 from the PC operating systems we’d been using years beforehand. So a range of problems thwarted Windows 8 then, but the biggest question, after ‘when are Microsoft going to fix it?’ is simply ‘when are they going to give us Windows 9?’
We might not have to wait much longer for Windows 9, as it happens, because Microsoft are currently working on something called ‘Windows Threshold’. Said to be a placeholder name for their next OS, Windows Threshold/Windows 9 will finally give us the features we’ve been asking for since Windows 8 debuted as well as scrapping the features that the dud of an operating system brought with it. This includes giving us a Desktop mode with a start menu if we’re using PCs with a keyboard and a mouse while systems that have both touchscreen and desktop capabilities (such as the Surface Pro) will stick with the existing, app-friendly layout. The Charms bar (the list of settings options that sometimes show up when you cursor scrolls the side of your screen) is said to have been canned.
Furthermore, Cortana (Microsoft’s answer to Siri) could also be wheeled out onto PCs, with the personal assistant software potentially being quite useful as it has reviewed positively on mobile devices. It’ll need to be tested out though, as will everything else, when the first preview build of Windows 9 goes live next month. That’s according to some unnamed (but apparently reputable) sources, who also claim that this early build “will be public and available to all those interested.” For those who don’t want to play tester and would rather wait for the full thing, Windows 9 is expected to launch in Spring, 2015 so we’ll keep you posted once we know more.
Source: ZDNet
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