One of the hallmark differences between Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella, and his predecessor Steve Ballmer, is that Nadella understands how to make a deeply symbolic gesture. While Ballmer relied on shouting ‘Windows’ very loudly, Nadella has produced a series of turn-ups designed to convince the world that this is a new Microsoft, not just a new CEO with a snappy if vague motto (mobile first, cloud first). The first was to release the new mobile Office for iOS before Windows itself; the most recent is to jump straight from Windows 8 to Windows 10.
There may have been pragmatic reasons for that (too much confusion with previous releases with ‘9’ in them, like Windows 95 and 98). But Nadella certainly turned the leapfrog into a clear message – the next release of Windows will be two steps ahead, not just one; it will bear no relation to the troubled Windows 8 platform.
Instead, Nadella badly wants us to believe that this will be an all-encompassing platform supporting apps, web services and a common experience across PCs, mobile devices and the Internet of Things. Microsoft has played around the edges of this single platform idea for years but without the courage to take on some of its darker implications for the Windows heritage – the need for significantly more openness, and indeed open source and open licensing, in the diverse world of mobility and IoT, where any OS will have to work happily with Google, and derive most of its power from being a viewing window to the cloud.
Nadella told the Gartner Symposium ITxpo conference last week that Windows 10 was the first step to creating a fully unified platform for multiple screens, and was insistent that it was not just about screens, but also IoT form factors with sensors but no displays.
“Windows has gone through a re-architecture to one core Windows that runs everywhere. We architected the right Windows in the right devices with the right features,” he told the conference audience, saying the idea was to have a platform sufficiently flexible to adapt “to whatever computing shift emerges”, whether that is based around sensors, wearables or other concepts. “Windows 10 is a very important step for us. It’s the first step in a new generation of Windows as opposed to just another release after Windows 8. General purpose computing is going to run on 200+ billion sensors. We’ve architected Windows where it can run on everything,” he proclaimed.
Of course, Nadella is not Ballmer. His eyes are not lighting up at the idea of the Windows spinning blue circle appearing in every smartwatch, or connected appliances sporting a rebooted Windows paperclip – nor at the number of licensing fees all those billions of devices could generate. It is clear that in the IoT, the OS will be invisible, free and, thanks to emerging web technologies, even irrelevant. Its function for Microsoft will be to provide a sufficiently useful engine that it gets embedded into consumer and industrial ‘things’, particularly controlling hubs and larger items like cars, and then delivers large amounts of data to the Azure cloud platform for the analytics which will underpin real revenue streams.
Nadella said: “The internet of things endpoints will need an operating system that’s manageable and secure. I feel Windows will be a fantastic operating system to run on the edge.” But he added that Azure predictive analytics are “really our IoT strategy … We’re in IoT today.”
At a press preview of Windows 10, operating system chief Terry Myerson stuck closely to the Nadella songbook, also emphasizing that this would be a brand new Windows which would support cloud, mobile and big data efforts rather than being an end in itself. “One way to look at it is that Windows is at a threshold,” he said. “It’s time for a new Windows. This new Windows must be built from the ground up for a mobile first, cloud first world.”