Windows 8 is going to be a truly great operating system is all the rumours are true. We already know a great deal about the tablet interface, which seems to have won universal acclaim, and other announced and leaked features are getting significant interest such as cloud / SkyDrive integration. Not the least of these is Microsoft’s announcement of a “Windows 7 Mode” and the discovery of the company’s Hyper-V virtualisation client in some x64 builds. Together these hint strongly as the final dropping of internal legacy support.

Throughout all of this however the one aspect of the operating system most people seemed concerned about was what it would be called. Microsoft had a policy of only referring to it as Windows Next. Steven Sinofsky, the Microsoft vice-president heading up the Windows division wouldn’t even go that far, only referring to it as “the next version of Windows”. Finally in May at a conference in Japan, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer let slip the Windows 8 name.

Microsoft almost immediately issued a retraction though saying that “no final decision on a name had yet taken place”, so there was still no official name for the product. Now though it has been confirmed on the website for Microsoft’s forthcoming BUILD conference in September. This conference, formally called the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC), is where Microsoft have now announced they’ll be unveiling Windows 8, and they refer to it by name many times on the site.

The headline states “in 1995 Windows changed the PC. Build will show you how Windows 8 changes everything.”

I find it curious then that, after all the commotion and hype surrounding the name of the operating system, that there’s no discussion any more about it.  It’s even more curious as the proportion of people talking about the name before compared to those discussing the new features in the OS, certainly in the early days of the alpha, was huge.  It’s an odd acceptence that’s taken place.

The BUILD conference takes place in Anaheim, California between the 13th and 16th of September 2011.  The main keynote takes place between 9am and 11am on the opening day, and this is where Steve Ballmer and Steven Sinofsky will unveil Windows 8 to the world.

It will be very interesting to see just how “bold” this new operating system really is, a quote Steve Ballmer made to the BBC last year.  For years now Apple have had a single operating system underlying all of their platforms, OS X.  With the final stripping out of legacy support, if this is what could happen at Microsoft, the company could finally make the jump to a single underlying OS for all of theirs.  This includes Windows Phone, the next generation Xbox and even their Sync in-car product.

The advantages of a single underlying platform for Microsoft are enormous and not to be misjudged.  With only one legacy-free platform to worry about the company can concentrate less on malware and  hotfixes, and more in giving us better and regular updates.  Certainly on smartphone and tablet platforms this will be essential if Microsoft are to compete long-term with Apple and Google.

Microsoft have a long history of letting in-built features in Windows stagnate until the next version of the operating system, three years later.  Just look at Windows Media Centre to see an example here.  Indeed some features such as Mail were removed simply so they could be updated more frequently.  Microsoft simply cannot afford to do this with the tablet components of Windows 8.  Thus we could now be looking at the first annual update cycle for the OS.  Moving to a unified platform would give Microsoft the breathing room to be able to do this effectively.

Whatever the outcome we now officially have a name, albeit not the big trumpeted announcement many were expecting, just a small quiet product announcement on a side-website.  Now the work can begin of getting excited by the features.