Mark Lyn­der­say

Mi­crosoft will be­gin rolling out the newest ver­sion of its flag­ship op­er­at­ing sys­tem, Win­dows, in a process that looks set to be far dif­fer­ent from pre­vi­ous up­grades from to­mor­row.

Get­ting a new ma­jor Win­dows up­grade used to be a mat­ter of lin­ing up out­side a ma­jor tech­nol­o­gy store, but Mi­crosoft in­creas­ing­ly makes use of mod­ern dig­i­tal de­liv­ery sys­tems to not just de­ploy its soft­ware; it's al­so been busy lever­ag­ing the large pool of users who aren't afraid to try out code that isn't ful­ly baked.

Since Sep­tem­ber 30, 2014, Win­dows has been in a ma­jor tech­nol­o­gy pre­view phase, which al­lows in­tre­pid users to use the new OS through the Win­dows In­sid­er pro­gramme.The test pool for Win­dows 10 is the largest in Mi­crosoft's his­to­ry of be­ta test­ing its op­er­at­ing sys­tem soft­ware, and the free up­grade for users (for the first year of re­lease) cur­rent­ly us­ing Win­dows 7 and 8 is like­ly to be in hot de­mand once it be­comes avail­able.

There are cur­rent­ly 55 mil­lion peo­ple who have re­served their copy of the soft­ware ac­cord­ing to Mi­crosoft's In­eke Geesnik who spoke ex­clu­sive­ly with the T&T Guardian last week.Geesnik, the com­pa­ny's Busi­ness Group Lead for Win­dows in its Latin Amer­i­can mar­kets, ex­plained that Mi­crosoft is in­creas­ing­ly po­si­tion­ing the soft­ware as a ser­vice and the new Win­dows is go­ing to be more uni­form across all the de­vices that the com­pa­ny sup­ports.

Win­dows 10, with a fea­ture called Con­tin­u­um, will adapt to the screens and ca­pa­bil­i­ties of dif­fer­ent de­vices and change its func­tion­al­i­ty across PCs, tablets and phones, but users can ex­pect a more fa­mil­iar in­ter­face wher­ev­er they use the soft­ware.That's a big change from Win­dows 8, which saw the com­pa­ny make a bold ef­fort to craft a new ver­sion of Win­dows, best re­mem­bered by the Mod­ern tiled in­ter­face that was most use­ful on tablet and phone de­vices.

On PCs, the Mod­ern lay­er lives on top of tra­di­tion­al win­dows and that du­al­i­ty be­came a source of con­fu­sion and frus­tra­tion for users who open­ly pined for their fa­mil­iar Start but­ton. A Mod­ern UI on­ly ver­sion of Mi­crosoft's Sur­face tablet went nowhere.

The Start but­ton is back, and it's great­ly en­hanced. The Mod­ern lay­er has been re­duced to be­come a launch­er, but it lives along­side the more fa­mil­iar Win­dows soft­ware list and tools, which in­cludes–no doubt to the great hap­pi­ness of users with in­grained mus­cle mem­o­ry across the world–the pow­er but­ton.

"Users will be hap­py," Geesnik said, "with how we have blend­ed the ex­pe­ri­ences of Win­dows 7 and 8 to­geth­er. It's go­ing to be one Win­dows, across all plat­forms and de­vices."

The com­pa­ny will al­so ad­dress a sig­nif­i­cant con­cern of de­vel­op­ers, the cod­ing gulf be­tween Mod­ern apps and tra­di­tion­al Win­dows desk­top soft­ware by giv­ing soft­ware writ­ten for the Mod­ern UI an equal pres­ence on the PC and uni­fy­ing the process of writ­ing soft­ware for all Win­dows 10 de­vices.In this hal­cy­on world, an app writ­ten for Win­dows 10 run­ning on a phone will al­so work on a desk­top PC, some­thing that seemed sen­si­ble, but nev­er seemed to hap­pen af­ter Win­dows 8 was in­tro­duced.

De­vel­op­ers in­ter­est­ed in work­ing cre­at­ing the new Uni­ver­sal Win­dows 10 apps that can be de­ployed on phone, tablet, PC and Xbox will find in­for­ma­tion at www.dev.win­dows.com from to­mor­row.Sev­er­al fea­tures in­tro­duced for Win­dows phones and tablets are al­so mak­ing their way to the new, Win­dows 10 "na­tive" de­vices, in­clud­ing the dig­i­tal per­son­al as­sis­tant Cor­tana and Win­dows Hel­lo, a new face recog­ni­tion ad­di­tion that makes your face your pass­word.

These new Win­dows 10 de­vices will be avail­able in T&T no ear­li­er than Oc­to­ber and the re­lease of Cor­tana for T&T and the re­gion is still to be con­firmed.Win­dows 10 users will al­so find much greater in­te­gra­tion with OneDrive (for­mer­ly Sky­drive) for mov­ing their doc­u­ments and mu­sic to the cloud, im­proved se­cu­ri­ty and a new, spare brows­er, Mi­crosoft Edge, which sup­ports vir­tu­al pen ca­pa­bil­i­ties, al­low­ing users to write di­rect­ly on a brows­er page.

The new Win­dows store will al­so be open to all Win­dows apps, not just Mod­ern UI soft­ware and busi­ness users will be able to choose how they adopt Win­dows 10 on ex­ist­ing plat­forms.If you are a Win­dows 10 be­ta user, you'll get a no­ti­fi­ca­tion that your up­grade is ready, though the prod­uct, large­ly tar­get­ed for on­line de­ploy­ment at first, will be in­tro­duced in phas­es.