Satya Nadella reaffirms Microsoft's commitment to a unified operating system

[Berryracer]

from the WPCentral article:

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirmed during an earnings call yesterday that the software giant will merge all major versions of Windows into a unified operating system.

Nadella said that Microsoft is set to "streamline the next version of Windows from three operating systems into one single converged operating system. This means one operating system that covers all screen sizes."

Nadella said that the shuffle would allow Microsoft to scale and create new services better. "In the past we had multiple teams working on different versions of Windows. Now we have one team with a common architecture. This allows us to scale, create Universal Windows Apps."

The change does not mean that Microsoft will stop selling different versions of Windows. Nadella said that there will still be several flavours available to choose for end-users, but that the underlying architecture between the versions would be the same. Nadella said that another major change with the upcoming version of Windows is the unification of stores, commerce and developer platforms.

 

[Mem]

The change does not mean that Microsoft will stop selling different versions of Windows. Nadella said that there will still be several flavours available to choose for end-users, but that the underlying architecture between the versions would be the same. Nadella said that another major change with the upcoming version of Windows is the unification of stores, commerce and developer platforms.

I wonder if that will cause any issues for game developers or gaming in general on the PC?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Does this mean that they are abandoning the relatively-open Win32 platform, and converging on Metro? That could mean the end of "Traditional" Windows.

 

[Berryracer]

with each new decision, I see me switching to Mac even though I hated it to death, but it's better than Microsoft's horrible new management, OS, and new plans

 

[T9D]

So will this mean I can have a full OS on a phone? Because that will be awesome and the future if so. Will probably crush android and ios if that is the case.

 

[Dahak]

Wow, that is a whole lot of wrong, and before everyone gets there panties in a bunch

Just finished listening to the Windows Weekly podcast and they said that during the call there was a reporter there that did a followup question and the initial wording that Nadella said was wrong.

Here is some clarity
http://winsupersite.com/windows/microsoft-muddies-one-windows-waters

In a Q&A session at the end of the call, an understandably confused reported asked Microsoft about this "One Windows" thing. And then we got the real answer.

"My statement was more to do with just even the engineering approach," Mr. Nadella said. "The reality is that we actually did not have one Windows; we had multiple Windows operating systems inside of Microsoft. We had one for phone, one for tablets and PCs, one for Xbox, one for even embedded. So we had many, many of these efforts. So now we have one team with the layered architecture that enables us to in fact one for developers bring that collective opportunity with one store, one commerce system, one discoverability mechanism. It also allows us to scale the UI across all screen sizes; it allows us to create this notion of universal Windows apps and being coherent there.

Emphasis mine


It would have been easier if he said one windows ENGINEERING team

So No there is not going to be ONE windows there is still going to be the same split as there always has been. Alot of news sites will take that original quote and run with it without understanding the whole context.

 

[code65536]

It's already converged: Windows Phone 8 has an NT kernel. Microsoft's backpedaling with Threshold means they won't make the same mistake of one-UI-paradigm-to-rule-them-all. But they already have one underlying core OS to rule them all, and they're simply reaffirming that they intend to keep that.

 

[Imaginer]

Something that isn't mentioned, is that the ground work has been laid with .NET framework in programming development for applications to leverage (to my knowledge). It is now that there is some sense to "not to reinvent the wheel many times" and to go forward in a unified, documented implementation of software development.

This in turn, would speed development in many device reach for solutions to be quickly pushed out, with no need for constant struggles across many platforms (barring the ever so fickle "user experience" tastes).

 

[RampantAndroid]

Something that isn't mentioned, is that the ground work has been laid with .NET framework in programming development for applications to leverage (to my knowledge). It is now that there is some sense to "not to reinvent the wheel many times" and to go forward in a unified, documented implementation of software development.

This in turn, would speed development in many device reach for solutions to be quickly pushed out, with no need for constant struggles across many platforms (barring the ever so fickle "user experience" tastes).

Well, being all on the same kernel also allows some ability to have common code across platforms, even outside of .net too. Certainly though, .net allows you to move within various Windows OSes (and even on to Android, Linux and iOS through Xamarin/Mono) leaving you to just implement things like UX that are specific to each platform.

If I can point out to the poster complaining about MS decisions - you seem to draw your conclusions from high level news articles, and not from an actual understanding of what is changing technically...I don't read articles about NASA's latest discovery on CNN, simply because they will pick up on the smallest detail and blow it out of proportion, or simply not understand what that detail means and thus mislead readers.