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posted by mattie_p on Thursday April 03 2014, @04:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the yes-microsoft-still-has-relevance dept.

A couple of interesting tidbits came out of Build 2014 yesterday. The conference is being streamed for those who cannot attend in person.

Microsoft Planning on $0 Windows for Some Devices

Apparently competition, combined with a desire for Microsoft to invade new market spaces, is applying downward pressure on the price of some forms of Windows licenses. Microsoft announced that Windows would be available at no cost for "Internet of Things" devices as well as for phones and tablets with screens less than 9 inches. Not included: Whether this applies to Windows 8.1 or Windows 8.1 RT, but the inclusion of "phones and tablets" leads me to believe that it will be the RT version.

Start Menu To Return To Windows 8.1

After nearly a year and a half since it was removed in Windows 8, the start menu is finally returning. The previews shown at BUILD show that live tiles (similar to those on Windows Phone) will be displayed side-by-side with the more traditional hierarchy of groups. No word on when this will finally be released to users.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by clone141166 on Thursday April 03 2014, @10:57PM

    by clone141166 (59) on Thursday April 03 2014, @10:57PM (#25917)

    What is remarkable is that Micro$oft managed to take an operating system that was pretty terrible (XP) and make it worse (Vista, Win8) to the point that it actually made its previous bad operating systems look amazing in comparison.

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  • (Score: 2) by keplr on Friday April 04 2014, @01:08AM

    by keplr (2104) on Friday April 04 2014, @01:08AM (#25958) Journal

    XP Professional grew into a fine OS after three service packs and being hammered on for a decade. The only real "problems" with it are related to artificial version limitations that MS imposed in an effort to force people to upgrade (IE, Direct X, et al). We are going to see the same thing with Windows 7.

    They've already made their money back on XP. Anything else they could squeeze out of it is pure profit. They should have re-released it for $50 and another five years of support. MS follow the needs of other businesses, but MS have spent the last decade thinking the world works just the opposite; that they could control the flow of enterprise and dictate update paths and product life cycles. They can't. They shouldn't try. Sell what your customers want, and if that's more years of XP support then sell that while you're working on your Next Big Thing (TM).

    --
    I don't respond to ACs.
    • (Score: 1) by clone141166 on Friday April 04 2014, @02:48AM

      by clone141166 (59) on Friday April 04 2014, @02:48AM (#26008)

      Yes I have to concede that for certain common needs it was quite a capable operating system in the end - definitely in comparison to some of MS's later OS's.

      However, even XP was lacking (either completely or in configurability) a lot of what I would consider "basic" functionality and options that are available in *nix based operating systems.