During its earnings call post release of Q2 results, Microsoft‘s CEO Satya Nadella has confirmed about merger of Windows, Windows RT and Windows Phone in one single operating system. While we reported evidences about about “One Microsoft OS” with Windows Onecore, this comes from the horse’s mouth. All the stores, commerce and developer platforms will be unified to support this merger.
On phones, we saw a good early start to Lumia 630 and 635 as well as Lumia 930 especially in Europe. In the year ahead, we are investing in ways that will ensure our device OS and first party hardware aligned to our core. We will streamline the next version of Windows from three operating systems into one single converged operating system for screens of all sizes.
We will unify our stores, commerce and developer platforms to drive a more coherent user experience and a broader developer opportunity. We look forward to sharing more about our next major wave of Windows enhancements in the coming months. Our approach to first party hardware going forward is clear. At times, we will develop new categories like we did with Surface and we will responsibly make the market for Windows phone. However, we are not in the hardware for hardware sake, and the first party device portfolio will be aligned to our strategic direction as the productivity and platform company.
At the same time, Satya has also confirmed the SKU based segmentation of unified Windows in future. So, there will be multiple Windows SKUs: for enterprises, for OEM, and for end-users. If you remember earlier reports, there were talks about only Two SKUs, but seems we may see more than Two. We have seen screenshots from one of the unified Windows SKUs, which is codenamed Windows Threshold.
My statement Heather was more to do with just even the engineering approach. The reality is that we actually did not have one Windows; we had multiple Windows operating systems inside of Microsoft. We had one for phone, one for tablets and PCs, one for Xbox, one for even embedded. So we had many, many of these efforts. So now we have one team with the layered architecture that enables us to in fact one for developers bring that collective opportunity with one store, one commerce system, one discoverability mechanism. It also allows us to scale the UI across all screen sizes; it allows us to create this notion of universal Windows apps and being coherent there.
So that’s what more I was referencing and our SKU strategy will remain by segment, we will have multiple SKUs for enterprises, we will have for OEM, we will have for end-users. And so we will – be disclosing and talking about our SKUs as we get further along, but this my statement was more to do with how we are bringing teams together to approach Windows as one ecosystem very differently than we ourselves have done in the past.
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