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.

Windows 8 Name Becomes Official, Goes Unnoticed was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.

It’s the news everybody has been waiting for, and now Microsoft have confirmed that Windows 8 will be formally unveiled at the BUILD conference in September.  This conference, which runs from the 13th to the 16th of September 2011 in Anaheim, California was formerly known as the Professional Developers Conference (PDC).

The conference is “a new event that shows modern hardware and software developers how to take advantage of the future of Windows. Learn how to work with the all new touch-centric user experience to create fast, fluid, and dynamic applications that leverage the power and flexibility of the core of Windows, used by more than a billion people around the world.”  It is here that extensive demos will showcase the new operating system and its new features.

It’s the first formal announcement of the new OS in full and Microsoft are playing this up, saying “in 1995, Windows changed the PC.  BUILD will show you that Windows 8 changes everything.”  This is a bold statement and does imply that Microsoft have, as I’ve long suspected, much grander plans for Windows 8 beyond just tablets.

It is entirely possible that Microsoft will use the event to showcase demonstration smartphones and possibly even cars running the new OS.  These are two platforms on which Microsoft already have a good foothold, and it would make sense for them to bring a unified platform across their different form-factors.

One clue to this is on the BUILD website itself, which says “Our approach means no compromises—you get to use whatever kind of device you prefer to run the apps you love.”  Obviously cars would be at least partially excluded from this, though a unified platform will be greatly welcomed by everyone.

The advantages of such a platform are enormous, especially if they are all legacy-free.  This will mean that everything will be leaner, more easily and more frequently updatable and much more exciting and stable as a result.

What is not in doubt is that Windows 8 will be a departure for the company, especially in terms of legacy support.  So far the company has managed to keep its legacy plans mostly under wraps, the only exception being the discovery of their Hyper-V server technology in a recently leaked x64 alpha build of the OS.

It is anticipated that the company will use the move to ARM hardware to justify a wholesale dropping of legacy support natively within the OS.  This would instead harness the power of Hyper-V to run older apps.  Microsoft have announced though the inclusion of “Windows 7 Mode” which again hints at the dropping of legacy software support.

Steve Ballmer said some months back now that Windows 8 would be a “bold” move for the company, and it will need to be.  Getting people to move away from Windows XP was difficult enough.  Now that Windows 7 has proven itself, anything less than a bold departure will be a tough sell for Microsoft, and they know it.

The main keynote at the conference will be at 9:00am PST on Tuesday September 13th.  This is when the new operating system will be fully unveiled.  Following this will be a series of sessions for four days, where the features of Windows 8 and other products including Internet Explorer 10 and the company’s next generation of software development and deployment tools will be discussed and demonstrated in depth.

Windows8News.com will be bringing you all the news from BUILD as it breaks, and we’ll be getting our hands on Windows 8 shortly afterwards, if not on the day.  We’ll be able to bring you all the best and most in-depth details and information on the OS directly.

For all the latest news about Windows 8 stay with Windows8News, believe me there’s some very exciting stuff coming up!

Windows 8 to be Unveiled at BUILD 2011 was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.

More and more evidence is emerging that Windows 8 will be released in 2012.  At this years Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC 2009), budding attendees managed to get their hands on two Windows roadmap slides that show ‘Windows 8′ launching in 2012:

Now these slides don’t really provide any information that we didn’t know; Microsoft typically leave 3 years between each release and with Windows 7 launching this year, Windows 8 was always likely to be in 2012.  It is unlikely that Microsoft would pull Windows 8′s launch forward to 2011 because it would impact Windows 7 sales with customers delaying upgrades, and unlikely they would delay until 2013 as Windows 8′s development seems to be progressing quite nicely.

Source: Microsoft Kitchen

Windows 8 'Confirmed' for 2012 Launch was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.

It’s PDC (Professional Developers Conference) week in Los Angeles for Microsoft and there’s not been, fairly obviously, that much talk about Windows 7.  BetaNews have reported an interesting story however.  Mark Russinovich, the Windows NT Kernel Guru, has been explaining how the Windows 7 kernel, the core of the operating system, turned out the way it did.

"One of the things we had decided to do with Windows 7 was, we got a message loud and clear, especially with the trend of netbooks, on top of [other] things," Russinovich said, "People wanted small, efficient, fast, battery-efficient operating systems. So we made a tremendous effort from the start to the finish, from the design to the implementation, measurements, tuning, all the way through the process to make sure that Windows 7 was fast and nimble, even though it provided more features. So this is actually the first release of Windows that has a smaller memory footprint than a previous release of Windows, and that’s despite adding all [these] features."

One of the things that Windows 7 has received so much praise for is its speed compared to Vista and even the much smaller and lighter XP.  Russinovich went on to talk about core features, called ‘locks’ that were removed completely.  This made significant changes to the kernel, however Microsoft discovered they could do this without breaking software compatibility.

The end result is a system that uses the processor(s) much more efficiently than has been possible in the past.

One of the other things he and other Microsoft employees talked about was how memory is used differently in Windows 7.  Many people have noted that the amount of ‘free’ memory in Windows 7 is significantly less than in previous versions of the OS.

This isn’t because the OS is unwieldy or badly written.  This time around the OS is using memory much more efficiently, loading things that you’ll actually need and holding them there, rather than on the hard disk.  It’s also being very clever about how it does this.

The end result is a version of Windows that’s much, I don’t want to say faster because really it’s not, but it’s certainly snappier and more responsive than previous versions.  BetaNews have the full article.

PDC Report – The Windows 7 Kernel explained was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.