Why Windows 10 will be a game changer?

Do you remember having to meet at your friend's house to ask him to lend you his Zanac cassette tape?

Do you remember buying a double cassette player to be able to copy the game just for testing purposes?

The floppy disks arrived then and we had those huge bendy disks of 5 1/4 they were really fast and their capacity was amazing but they didn't change the fact that you needed to go to your friend's house to get a copy of Alley Cat.

Then the internet arrived. And you still had to go to your friend's house to get the diskette if Ishar because it took much less time to get to the other side of the planet walking than downloading 1MB.

But the internet was a game changer. After some time you completely forgot about 3,5 diskettes and you would only visit your friend to get the CD of Dungeon Keeper II or something like that.

And some time later (today) you can download 60GB virtual machines in minutes. It looks like the moment proper internet arrived I stopped enjoying computers...

Windows 10 is similar when it comes to changing the paradigm of the distribution of the software and I will explain my point.


Most of the programs and games for desktops were created for Windows and not for Linux or Mac and there's a good reason for that. The market share of the windows desktop made working for any other platform a waste of money.

The the market places arrived. And instead of going out to the scary internet to download you programs you would go to a supervised environment where you could download your programs safely.

BUT

When it comes to desktops only a "ridiculous" 16.45% of the computers (W8 + 8.1) can execute market applications while the vast majority of desktops (W7 + XP) a 72.36% are still stuck in the old paradigm. (source)

And the question comes again... Why develop an application for the 16% of the computers when, for the same amount of money I can create the same app for the 88.81% (given that W8 and 8.1 are compatible with the old desktop code)? It's a no brainer.

And here comes Windows 10.

Offering Windows 10 as a free upgrade will surely convince most of the users out there with W7, 8 and 8.1 to get the latest bits and with them the ability to be clients of this new market.

Not only that. Given that Windows 10 apps will also work in any hardware capable of executing W10 the target audience will be not only increased but probably multiplied.

You will develop an app once and it will be downloadable by the desktop users, but also by the Windows Phone users, the XBox users, the Raspberry Pi users... the Hololens users! you name it.

The estimations of Microsoft about this is that in a couple of years there will be one billion W10 devices out there and then the question will be again:

Why would anyone develop for any other platform?