If you remember the fiasco Microsoft had with its Windows operating system, you will recall the following:
Windows 98/SE was a great success – people stayed on it for many years.
Windows Millenium Edition (Me) was a failure – too little, too boring.
Windows XP was a success – it formed the staple OS for many years.
Windows Vista was a failure – the User Account Control (UAC) was painful, and boot time was painful.
Windows 7 was a success – again another well adopted version.
Windows 8 was a failure – a flop – losing the start button, trying to be everything mobile and desktop, but end up as nothing.
Windows 8.1 arrived some time back to rescue the start button and allow booting to desktop, and some additional features, but was it too late?
Going by the sales figure of Windows 8, which is only half of Windows 7’s performance, we know that it is definitely not doing well. News had it that the new version of the Windows 9 operating system, code-named “Threshold”, will arrive sometime next year, around April 2015. It promised to be a complete update of the Windows 8/8.1, and it is expected mature and fix the ‘Metro’ design language used by Windows 8. Windows 9 – well, we just hope it would learn from the past lessons, and emerge a winning operating system! After all, some of the folks have shared that to succeed, you must fail, and that failure is the mother of all successes!
In particular, I would hope that Windows 9 would provide an enhanced flexible environment where it can optimally work in a tablet-mode with great touch-screen features and sip on power, and then switch to desktop mode with full desktop capabilities when docked, and yes, please give me the start button back where it used to be (not the half-baked one in Windows 8.1 though). Fix also the lagging Windows store which does not instill confidence when using it.