Windows 8 “something completely different” but Microsoft isn’t talking

Windows 7 is now part of the computing landscape, and is becoming a bigger part of that as consumers and business adopt the new operating system. But what’s next for Microsoft? Windows 8, obviously, probably launching some time late in 2011 or early 2012. But the company isn’t giving anything away at this stage.

Windows 7 is both a brilliant operating system and an evolutionary step up from Vista. But Windows 7 is, to some extent at least, old news now. It’s here, it’s being used, it’s increasing in popularity. What we really want to know about now is Windows 8.

An unnamed Microsoft employee has specified we should expect “something completely different” from Windows 8, or what he refers to as Windows.next. But Microsoft doesn’t want us to hear those kind of positive platitudes. At least not quite yet, and has deleted the post from MSDN.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, there’s a little thing called Google cache which saves a copy of pages on the Web for viewing even after they’ve been deleted. Which Microsoft Kitchen used to bring the post to the attention of the wider world. The full cached post is available here but the two key quotes are as follows:

The minimum that folks can take for granted is that the next version will be something completely different from what folks usually expect of Windows.

The themes that have been floated truly reflect what people have been looking for years and it will change the way people think about PCs and the way they use them. It is the future of PCs.

I can’t really see why Microsoft deleted that post. There’s nothing spectacularly confidential there. In fact, it’s all opinion from one employee, hardly something to worry about shutting out of the public consciousness. Especially as it’s positive and not negative.

As for what was said, I cannot conceive of a Windows OS that fits the description of being “something completely different.” You can certainly see the evolution between different versions of Windows, even as recent as XP through Vista to 7. But they essentially do the same thing in slightly different (and usually better) ways.

Could Windows 8 (or whatever it ends up being called) really be the start of something new, something which will revolutionize PCs and the way we operate them? I can’t see it somehow, but then I’m an eternal pessimist. Maybe if more Microsoft employees started spilling the beans I’d become a believer.

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