Amidst all the bad news about job losses and closures, somewhere in Microsoft's quarterly conference call, held yesterday, the company's CEO Satya Nadella, confirmed that the company was working towards a unified Windows operating system, potentially replacing Windows RT, Windows 8 and Windows Phone.
Following the release of the Universal Windows Apps developer tools back in April, Nadella said that "We will streamline the next version of Windows from three operating systems into one single converged operating system for screens of all sizes."
He added, "In the past we had multiple teams working on different versions of Windows. Now we have one team with a common architecture. This allows us to scale, create Universal Windows Apps."
In practice, developers are still having to deal with two fundamentally different architectures (x86 and ARM) but development tools (like Visual Studio) transparently handles the coding process, making it less demanding in terms of money and human resource.
Microsoft biggest competitors, Apple and Google are also likely to merge their mobile and desktop OSes; MacOS has adopted some of iOS' features while Google confirmed years ago that Chrome OS and Android will merge sooner or later.
What that entails in the long term is an architecture agnostic approach that focuses more on the market, the audience needs and the screen sizes. Windows Pro, Windows Phone, Windows Enterprise, Windows Embedded and other versions will still exist, albeit in slightly different formats.
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