Microsoft Indonesia president: Windows 9 will be free to Windows 8 owners

[TheWPCTraveler]

zarx said:

TheWPCTraveler said:
Windows 8.1 is fantastic, though. Now, THAT is a rebranded service pack.

Win9 will allow for apps that will run on phone and PC with the same code, Cortana, Modern apps on desktop...
...my body is ready.

Windows 8.1 is a service pack, no rebranding neccessary. It is literally windows 8 service pack 1. Windows 9 seems to be 8.2 just renamed Windows 9. Not that that is neccesserily a bad thing. Windows doesn't need a big overhaul, just some iterative improvements to UI and APIs. Which Win 9 seems to be delivering on so far.

Win 8 had cross platform apps (and it's still just as bad an idea now as it was then), speech recognition has been in since Vista and cortana is just a natural evolution of that (not a particularly useful one when you have a full keyboard available wich is 100% accurate and usualy quicker than speech anyway), modern apps on desktop has been doable since win 8 launched via 3rd party extensions and via snapping, it's not piticularly useful as most of the modern apps suck.

Ah, okay then. I don't count features added by third-party entities as features pushed by the OS, though.

Win9, from what I gather, is a complete paradigm shift for Microsoft. Even in Win8.1, you're still shoved to the Modern side of things pretty often -  if you don't really know what you're doing, or you happen to rely on the retooled PC Settings app. The Charms system (which I find awesome for some reason) also gets pushed to you rather often, even in the desktop.

By the way, as a Windows Phone user, I'll have to correct you on your perception of Cortana. Cortana is fun to use as a virtual voice-controlled assistant for a day. What I end up going back for is the fact that they've literally replaced the Bing (soon-to-be-rebranded MSN) apps for me. It's a one-stop-shop, I guess?