Microsft CEO looks to a future beyond the current operating systems

Windows, Android, iOS, Linux. The argument on which operating system is better would likely rage on for ages as each has their pros and cons that largely lie down to your preferred choice of hardware or willingness to tinker with your system.

Perhaps another debate worth having is not just which OS is better now, but which one would be bigger and survive into the future and if you ask Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the answer is probably none of them, as he revealed his views in a recent interview with The Verge where he revealed the company’s focus on Cloud computing and how he believes that workstations in the future will be driven by the cloud and not so much by the OS onboard the hardware:

The way I look at it is Windows is the billion user install base of ours. We continue to add a couple of hundred million PCs every year, and we want to serve that in a super good way. The thing that we also want to think about is the broader context. We don’t want to be defined by just what we achieved. We look at if there’s going to be 50 billion endpoints. Windows with its billion is good, Android with its 2 billion is good, iOS with its billion is good — but there is 46 billion more. So, let’s go and look at what that 46 billion plus 4 [billion] looks like, and define a strategy for that, and then have everything have a place under the sun.  

With the cloud expanding and smart technology beginning to be embedded into almost every type of appliance or hardware imaginable, Nadella makes a good point that the focus shouldn’t just be on operating systems that can run on powerful processing devices, but on lightweight ones as well and the one with the most reach is inevitably going to be powered by the cloud. Not that there will be one winner to that either, as he believes, much like the current OS landscape, there is space for many different players.

We are absolutely, no question, allocating a lot to what is that next big thing. But at the same time, we’re also not saying that’s our way back to saying all of iOS, all of Android, and all of Windows will suddenly be subsumed by this one thing. What people have come to realize is that Windows is there with a billion users, iOS is there with a billion users, and Android is there with 2 billion users. It’s not like one killed the other.

I do agree with Nadella here that I think computing as we know it is going to change drastically as our cloud technology improvements and devices get more and more interconnected. Our existing way of using computers might work for now, but there is a whole new landscape for interaction that we perhaps don’t even fully understand yet and it’s going to be exciting to see exactly what the OS of the future is going to look like.

Last Updated: January 22, 2020