 |
| Pic: Microsoft |
During Satya Nadella’s keynote speech at Microsoft’s Build 2021 conference, he mentioned that Microsoft is working on “one of the most significant updates to Windows of the past decade,” and added that he was “incredibly excited about the next generation of Windows.”
It is expected that Satya was referring the Windows 10 Sun Valley update (also known as the Windows 10 21H2 update), which is a major update coming to Windows 10 later in 2021.
In 2015 Microsoft launched Windows 10 and announced that it was the “last version of Windows” different from releasing new version every few years.
Microsoft is at a point where the market share of Windows has dropped to 73% according to Global Notebook PC market share because of insane growth from Chrome OS, just a UI refresh might not be enough to regain the numbers.
Chrome OS is extremely light and because of that reason itself the growth is exponential over the years and it has increased its market share up 6% than last year in the Q1, 2021. Microsoft is having the challenge of introducing a new update or version, whatever they chose to, but with significant increase in all the area as it is so much necessary to keep up.
MacOS on the other hand has the numbers increased too with Apple making significant improvements and the ecosystem is being working so well for its users and more and more people being attracted to the very closed yet very well connect Apple ecosystem. At the same time Apples has introduced their own chip and taken the optimization to next level.
Many of the features introduced in Windows 10x is expected to be ported in into this new update and everything is expected to be the same in UI. Over the years, Microsoft is slowly moving out of many critical applications which is used mainly by end users like Cortana and Edge(which is now based on Chromium and not on Microsoft's own Edge(HTML) also Windows OS, which would have a very significant market as privacy concerns are on talks globally(We will have a detailed article on this with app situation and others mentioned in detail soon).
In short, Microsoft desperately needs a lighter version of Windows which is functionally way better and with a refreshed UI to keep up with competition of MacOS and Chrome OS.