"When enteprise customers deploy Windows 10 we will engage with them about how they might think about what is the right level of consumerisation they might take on with each of their devices, so they have the right level of freshness, the right level of stability. But we will continue to offer that mission critical level of support, the long term commitment - whether that be for servers or industrial Internet of Things or emergency rooms where they want to deploy and not change. And then there are all of these productivity workers that want the latest and the greatest but they're not Insiders; they don't have time for that. They say 'I want the latest but go fix your stuff. Make it high quality before you give it to us'. That full continuum of Windows users is what we're trying to reason against."
Joe Belfiore explained that there will be different options that businesses can choose for keeping Windows 10 updated. "One of the things we're being intentional about is designing this system In a way that an enteprise that wants to have a slower upgrade cycle can have that option; or if they want they can go at a faster speed - or they can be an Insider and get ahead of the line."
How often will Windows 10 technical preview get updated?
"We're aiming at roughly monthly, it could be 6 weekly," Belfiore told us, but he pointed out "there are bunch of things that are core apps and we can work on those [separately]". That's happened on Windows Phone already, where the calendar became a separate app." We don't know how far we can get breaking things into individual parts but it is definitely accurate to say we recognise the value of having components and we're hunting around for what works. There's already the music app, videos, mail; we expect to add more to that list but we're not really quite sure of exactly what yet."
What's happening to Internet Explorer?
"In Windows 10 there's only one Internet Explorer and the one Internet Explorer is integrated into the desktop," Belfiore said. "We don't want to have two distinct behaviours, separate feeds… people don't want that. We want to simplify it for people; we want people to choose IE and get a simple IE and get all the benefits of the work that went into the modern one in a way that makes sense. Some of those are tricky like sandboxing and plugins, the questions of the benefits of performance and reliability, it's tricky to figure out." So what you see in technical preview is far from the final look of IE: "there's more coming later," he promised.
What will you be able to run Windows 10 on?
"We are building the software so we can update the vast majority of devices out there," Belfiore told us. "We have experience both from PCs and phones so we know sometimes you need hardware vendors to be engaged with you to sure the support is there. We're doing that as much as we can and our general intent is to make this available as an update for the vast majority of devices."
What about Windows Phone and Windows RT?
"We're building it all at the same time," Terry Myerson told us, "but we don't have all the answers for how it will all be released." Partly that's because releasing new phones or updating existing ones means working with the mobile operators, but he also admitted that because it's so early in the Windows 10 cycle "For devices where we do control the release, frankly we don't have all he answers yet either." Joe Belfiore was also coy about the next Windows Phone interface, beyond it being part of the Windows 10 family, but he promised it would be "a natural step forward in evolution from Windows 8.1 today".
When we asked him how many of the features in Windows Phone we might see in Windows 10 by the end he told us "it's definitely the philosophy and the architecture of having a common core really helps". But when we pressed him for details - perhaps the Shape keyboard? – he only said "yes, but without saying which items!"
What's happening about Microsoft's research OS projects now they're part of the Windows team, and now Rick Rashid – a veteran OS researcher – has moved from running Microsoft Research to be in Windows?
Mostly, it's been an organisational change, Treadwell told us. "We are integrating all of the company's OS product engineering work into the OS Group; it was very dispersed before so having technologies like Midori and Drawbridge and all the rest of them within the OSG means we can look at those concepts and see if we can make them part of the platform and we're looking at those." Indeed, he said, "there's a lot of that functionality that is now part of Windows."
And it turns out that Rick Rashid has moved on inside Microsoft. "Rick was in Windows until about a month ago," Treadwell told us, "and now he's with the application services group. He spent about a year with us; he did good work, he did a great job – but the company needed him in the Office area a little bit more!" Microsoft has had plenty of small experimental apps come out from the Office team already, like Mix and Sway; perhaps Rashid is working on how those kind of projects will develop to help Microsoft compete with all the startups trying to replace Office.
- Is the new OS any good? Read our hands on Windows 10 review to find out
