Microsoft employee Jerry Nixon provoked a lot of online chat and speculation this week when, at his company’s Ignite conference in Chicago, he declared that Microsoft is currently “releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10”. Does this mean that the tech world – in fact, the world generally – should be preparing to wave goodbye to Windows? Is this really the end of the road for arguably history’s most influential computer operating system? Actually, not quite. In fact, it seems that Windows is simply entering a very different but exciting new phase.
Basically, there will continue to be updates to Windows in the foreseeable future. Those updates will, however, be updates to Windows 10 – not a whole new version of the Windows operating system with the moniker of Windows 11. This, it seems, is what Nixon was really referring to when he said that “because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10.” Microsoft has built Windows 10 in such a way that its different components can be updated independently to the operating system as a whole. The ultimate intention, it seems, is for Windows 10 to work well across different types of devices – from desktop computers, to tablets, all the way through to smartphones. It’s an exciting development and we are eager to see how Microsoft handles it over the coming years.
