14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 10 will launch in just two weeks, and it's pretty much obvious that Microsoft is betting big on it, as it cannot afford another mistake after Windows 8 proved to be a flop.
So statements that praise the work put together for Windows 10 are not at all surprising, and Microsoft executives are expected to release such comments very often in the next 12 months or so.
This time, Kevin Turner, Microsoft's COO, has talked about the upcoming operating system in his keynote at WPC 2015, explaining that Windows 10 is pretty much the best Windows version released so far.
“This will be the last monolithic release that we have that was built around the three-year cycle. It's the greatest Windows that we've ever done. The ability to keep a customer current with the latest Windows has always been our Achilles ... [but] this is Windows as a service,” he has said.
Windows as a Service is a new concept that Microsoft adopts for Windows 10 to provide updates for customers at a much faster pace. Users will get updates when they're ready, and the company will continue the insider program to develop the next improvements together with users and get their feedback.
1 billion devices by 2017
Turner has also reiterated Microsoft's ambitious goal of bringing Windows 10 on 1 billion devices in just two years.
While this sounds really difficult, keep in mind that Windows 10 is not all about PCs. Instead, Windows 10 will become available on desktop computers, tablets, smartphones, and IoT devices, so it might not be so difficult to reach this figure.
But the biggest challenge is definitely upgrading Windows 7 computers to Windows 10. Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella has said that this is the company's main priority, especially because of the market share that Windows 7 currently has. More than half of the world's PCs are running Windows 7 right now, according to the third-party data, so if at least 50 percent of them are upgraded to Windows 10, Redmond should really consider this mission accomplished.