Taking apart the clues on the future of Windows distribution and branding

My bet: Windows will just be called Windows. There will be numerous releases and updates you get gratis with your Windows license. For enterprise customers and developers, we’ll refer to the current/ planned features incrementally by year — Windows 15, Windows 16, etc.

Read on for more…

Taking apart the clues on the future of Windows distribution and branding.

This is my first blog post in six years. I’m planning to do speculative and a bit silly posts like this, UX reviews of products, and some more deep thoughts. But let’s start with fun.

There’s been a little pool of guessing on the official name of Windows Next among Windows geeks. Terry Myerson (Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of the Operating Systems Group) sent a tantalizing picture to Mary Jo-Foley and Tom Warren after their (joking) guess the name would be Windows X.

I spent (waisted) an hour playing around with this image and overthinking about the future of Windows. I thought it might be fun to share my findings. The picture might not even feature the official new logo. It might still change. Who knows. But lets play.

Playing with the image

If this image was taken front and center, we’d be able to infer a couple interesting things from it. Like the length of the branding mark after Windows. So let’s do that.

There we go. Lightened up so it’s easier to work with, and pushed around to get rid of that initial weird perspective. Now lets take the official Windows 8 logo and put it here to see if it lines up.

Fits perfectly. Replacing the 8 with a 9 would be simple. Now, in all of Microsoft’s marketing collateral, the full product mark is always centered. So lets double check that part.

Uh oh. Those horizontal red markers are the exact same length. For it to be Windows 9, we’d expect to see the whole image shifted right. Lets try the 365 branding.

Looks good, but the 365 would have to be a substantially smaller weight to work. Microsoft’s been pretty gung-ho on “unified branding” the past couple years, and just throwing in a tinier font hasn’t really been their thing. Plus, they don’t own the www.windows365.com domain. Of course they could acquire it, but leaving it up for sale this close to Tuesday seems suspect. Let’s go back in time to Office releases named by year.

Well then. A two character branding seems to fit perfectly. And Microsoft does own www.windows14.com, www.windows15.com, www.windows16.com. Windows TH (for Threshold — the official codename) has been thrown around, but they don’t own www.windowsth.com. Given Microsoft’s transition to One Windows, simplified branding, and the expected rapid update cycle of Windows going forward, this seems a bit… off.

What we know

Microsoft has already announced that coming later this year, the “Windows Phone” brand will be dropped in favor of just Windows — another step towards One Windows.

Through numerous leaks and speculation, it’s become abundantly clear that updates to Windows will come much more quickly and easily. Microsoft executives have also spoken towards this. Windows Next will probably be free, as will it’s updates.

This jives with Microsoft’s enterprise model. Customers buy a number of licenses for a number of years, and any version of Windows released is made available to them. On the consumer side, Microsoft makes a pittance on their buying of upgrades — it’s all preinstalled OEMs.

None of that is speculation. But where does branding with 2 numbers fit into the picture?

Speculation

You buy a device with “Windows” — going forward it’s called just Windows and you get all the updates/ upgrades from then on, and that’s that.

But enterprise customers and developers need to plan. They need a way to categorize features available, features they need to test for, security models they must validate, etc. So some versioning needs to remain.

Lets look at Chrome for example. Google separated the branding and development milestones. Google Chrome is just known as Google Chrome. But the technical community knows Chrome 36, 37, 38 — updates all released within the same year — silently to consumers, I might add.

I don’t think we’d expect Microsoft to emulate Google in such a direct manner.

My bet: Windows will just be called Windows. There will be numerous releases and updates you get gratis with your Windows license. For enterprise customers and developers, we’ll refer to the current/ planned features incrementally by year — Windows 15, Windows 16, etc.

I guess we’ll find out Tuesday.