The future of Microsoft Windows: One core and many SKUs

Is Windows RT dead? Is the desktop going away ? What’s ‘Threshold’ got to do with it? Here’s my latest attempt to try to make sense of where Microsoft’s Windows roadmap will lead in the next couple years and beyond.

Recent remarks by a Microsoft exec who noted there won’t be three different Windows variants in the future have set off a storm of speculation  — just about all of which is dead wrong. Microsoft Executive Vice President Julie Larson-Green recently told attendees of a UBS technology conference that Microsoft was not going to have three different Windows SKUs(Windows Phone, Windows RT and Windows 8.x). She didn’t say how many Microsoft ultimately plans to have, but some believe the answer is one, given Microsoft’s “One Microsoft” mission and creation this year of a unified operating-system engineering team.