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Comment by kijin | Hacker News Reader

No sane corporation should allow itself to become a guinea pig for even-numbered Windows releases. Me (4?) was horrible. XP (5?) was OK. Vista (6?) was a bomb. 7 was OK. 8, meh. 9, maybe the tablet fad will pass by then.

Stick to odd-numbered releases, they're like LTS.

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When I look at things like the Samsung Series 7 Slate, I don't think tablets are a fad. It's a laptop with a portable screen, or a tablet with a dock and a keyboard. It's running a full OS, with real hardware backing it. How many times have I wished I didn't have to undock my laptop and lug the bulky thing over to a coworkers desk to show them something when all I needed was the screen?

Tablets and keyboards are the new laptops.

Tablets may not be a fad, but I sure hope tablet style interfaces for laptops and desktops are. The UI should be adapted to input devices and screen size.

Really I think the push is that desktops will be relegated to only the most power users. Already laptops are king even in business. Tablets are an extension (or evolution) of that. Desktops are those mainframes you run at home to store your movies and play your video games.

Desktops will increasingly have to prove their value in the market. In a world of booming connectivity and mobility, desktops (and even laptops) are legacy technology. All hail gestures and keyboard shortcuts.

I believe it is laptops which tablets have made redundant, and desktops which actually have a more valuable usage case at this point. A laptop only makes sense if you need to set up a workstation for productivity in several locations, which limits the target market to traveling business professionals. Most people don't do extended productivity work from multiple locations, however. For people who simply need a mobile device for recreational use, a tablet is vastly superior, with its extended battery life and ease and comfort of operation. For those who only need to have a workstation at a single fixed location, a desktop is the superior option, as the large screen, full-size keyboard and mouse are positioned in an optimal ergonomic manner, with the screen at eye level, keyboard and mouse at proper height and distance, etc., allowing for extended usage without repetitive stress injury. A desktop for productivity and a tablet for casual mobile use represents the most comfortable, ergonomic and financially justifiable option for the largest segment of the market; it's laptops which are imminently doomed to niche relevance.

Either way the market goes, it will be interesting to see the adaptations. One thing the tech market shows, there's no way of knowing which technology will explode (and it's not always the most useful tech that wins).

Yeah, that's what I was trying to say. Don't we all know by now that one-size-fits-all is not an optimal solution?

Well, you have to look at those versions a little bit finer grained. Windows NT 3.51, 4.0, 2000 and XP were all very usable in a business environment; Windows 95, ME and Vista not so. Windows 7 seems workable, and with Windows 8 it seems that Microsoft wants again to alienate their business public, catering to 'consumer tablets' instead.

The funny thing is that during all those transitions, the basic Win32 API stayed more or less stable. The programs I wrote for XP (or even Windows 2000) still work well in Windows 7. They just don't have the visual bling (which my customers don't need anyway).

Don't think too hard about Windows version numbers; your head will asplode.

Windows Vista is Windows NT version 6.0; Windows 7 is actually version 6.1. Similarly Windows XP was version 5.1; its predecessor, Windows 2000, was 5.0.

Windows Me was version 4.9 of the Windows 9x code base (whose first version -- as an obvious successor to Windows 3.x -- was 4.0, Windows 95).

Well, then it looks like X.1 is what you want, at least since 2001. There was a grain of truth in the old "enterprise" adage, "Don't use X.0", after all.

If I remember well, XP wasn't received with great enthusiasm either. A lot of companies remained on Windows 2000. XP became good with the release of SP2.

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