Microsoft executive Jerry Nixon confirmed at the company’s Ignite conference held on May 9th, that the upcoming Windows 10 update will be the company’s last version of Windows.
Windows is not going away, in fact; Microsoft plans to update the OS in a more incremental manner going forward, and that could mean a much more dynamic platform.
“Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10,” Nixon told a room of developers last week at his firm’s ongoing Ignite conference May 9-13, 2016.
That’s different, said Nixon. Before, Microsoft would talk about the newest edition but would keep quiet about the next, which it had already started.
“I can say things like ‘Yeah, we’re working on interactive tiles and it’s coming to Windows 10 in one of its future updates,’ Nixon said. “We are now not always just thinking about what’s not here today. Now we can talk about things in a new way, and much more open way than we have before.”
His point was that Windows 10 will be updated regularly — and far more frequently than its predecessors — to become, like Google‘s Chrome or Apple‘s OS X, a constantly-churning product. Microsoft has described this model as “Windows as a service” to note its always-fresh trait, like a cloud-based service, even though the OS resides — as it always has — locally on the device.
Without a new name every three years or so — Windows XP begat Vista which begat Windows 7 which begat Windows 8 — the OS will be pegged as Windows 10 for the foreseeable future.
Each edition will be “Windows 10”
Certainly, Microsoft expects that most consumers will stick to the tick-tock of updates, and so will always be on the latest, ameliorating the nameless Windows. Yet not everyone updates. And businesses may stifle the fast cadence for their workers’ devices and their networks’ machines, making it prudent for Microsoft to tag monikers at intervals.