Rumor: Microsoft working on new OS 'Windows Blue'

[Noir Angel]

If anyone has the resources to pull off yearly releases it's Microsoft. Good for consumers but a nightmare for businesses.

[Eric Veteran]

Well, this is interesting. Is this due to the change of leadership in the Windows division?

Doubtful. Windows Blue was mentioned many months before the Windows 8 RTM.

[MorganX]

Doubtful. Windows Blue was mentioned many months before the Windows 8 RTM.

While I won't go in to detail, anyone with an Enterprise Agreement for Operating Systems knows what the real reason for this is. They know what XPs expanded lifetime did, and know that many haven't even gone to 7 yet. When they do, if XP went 8 years through 2 EA cycles, what do you think 7 has the potential to do. In this economic climate?

Microsoft needs business to jump on that incremental upgrade cycle in a hurry to justify those costs every 3 years.

[Mando]

I don't think WinRT should kill Win32 but it should be extended to the desktop side at least. Once developers can take advantage of the desktop as well with their WinRT apps then it will get very interesting. Hell I should be able to pin winrt apps to the taskbar if I want to.

As for the enterprise knee jerk effect, this is a non-issue. They don't have to upgrade, hell they don't have to install service packs for quite some time so they can test them. If they upgrade to Win8 and want to skip blue then that's just the norm for IT. They skipped Vista for years and stayed on XP, I don't see a difference here. If you think of these as beefier SPs then nothing has changed.

right on the button, we have a winner :) we, corporate IT have tight budgets these days and a 3 year rolling replacement (heck you can stretch to 4 if you want to save even more) and youll skip 2 of these updates just as we always have. 98, nt4 w2k, xp, w7 ??

[xendrome]

Metro isn't going anywhere. Those "UI changes", if anything, will be to fix any problems now with the UI, and possibly add more features to it. Not kill it. You're still not getting the Start Menu back.

Can't get something back that is still there :/

[PNWDweller]

The problem i have with yearly updates if this is where they are going (Apple seems to do that now anymore), is once a new release comes out - the tech forums, news sites, hack sites (Tweaks), etc...all focus 100% on the new fangled version and leave out the other versions in the dark, as if the old version is dead. I wouldn't say that this is the case here just yet with Win8 since it has a very lukewarm reception amongst users. I personally didn't like it until I gave it a chance and played with it for a night. Now, I actually find it pretty well built and the Start Screen (Metro screen), I do use, but not as much as most. I spend most of my time in the desktop and use the Start Screen mostly for launching items. :)

One of the reasons IMHO that IT has stuck so long with XP is because Microsoft still has supported it with security updates. That - and software vendors refuse to build new software to support Win 7. Some IT departments restrict compatibility options because of said vendors software crashing with compatibility enabled. Sadly, with this software, throughout the 11 years that XP has been in full deployment (RTM and beyond), businesses have built themselves on such software so leaving their foundation to go to new software is not an easy option.