The next version of Windows, codenamed Threshold, will get its first official unveiling later today. A mix of leaks and accidental publications have shed a little more light on what we should—and shouldn't—expect to see.
Microsoft is releasing a "Technical Preview" of Windows. As reported by Neowin, the download page was accidentally published over the weekend. The 4GB release is being clearly billed and targeted at enterprise and developers.
To that end, it should have the new hybrid Start menu—created to appease desktop-bound corporate users—a notification center, and windowed Metro apps. It isn't, however, expected to have a full visual refresh, and it won't have all the consumer bells and whistles. This means that Internet Explorer 12, believed to be getting a streamlined new look, and the Cortana personal assistant, believed to be making her desktop debut, won't be there.Mary Jo Foley writes that in some ways, the most important part of this release will be its regular updates. Threshold will have a new instrumentation system, enabling Microsoft to get near-instant anonymized data about the operating system's usage and any problems that occur.
This data will be used to guide updates on a monthly basis, a move that should be laying the groundwork for a continuously updated "Windows" platform.
Microsoft has its work cut out to persuade users, especially corporate users, that it can consistently and reliably update systems in this way. The last few months have been marked by a number of retracted Patch Tuesday updates after problems have emerged once the patches were released into the wild.
While the number of users affected by these bad patches appears to be relatively small, such problems do not do much to inspire confidence in the company's patching process. The new instrumentation system ought to let the company detect problems faster and react sooner, but system recovery in the event that a bad update does escape Redmond arguably needs to be simpler and more automatic.
Of course, Microsoft isn't the first company to engage in regular software updates of critical software. Google has been doing it for a long time for Chrome. Through a combination of multiple release channels (a development and beta stream that run ahead of the stable release stream) and staged rollouts (each new update is initially offered only to a limited number of users, who then act as canaries to detect any major problems), Google for the most part manages not to break hundreds of millions of computers each time it updates Chrome.
Were Microsoft to adopt such a strategy, it could go a long way toward convincing enterprises that it's safe to perform this kind of updating.
One other thing we may or may not learn today: the new operating system's name. One rumor that keeps popping up is that it will just be marketed as "Windows." There will still be some kind of a version number to cater to those customers buying perpetual licenses, but for home users, there'll just be one operating system that's updated forever.
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