14 DAY TRIAL // With Windows 10, Microsoft is working to bring its key products closer together, so the new operating system will be installed on PCs, tablets, smartphones, and devices that are part of the IoT efforts, with Redmond planning to offer a similar experience across all these solutions.
But the company still has a lot of work to do in order to make this happen, and Chief Marketing Officer, Microsoft, Chris Capossela, admitted at Convergence 2015 that Apple and Google are two of the best examples right now of how things should be developed in this area.
“Windows is big, IE is big, Office is big, et cetera. But it also shows you that we don’t have nearly the connectivity between our products that Google has engineered and that Apple has engineered,” Capossela told the audience.
“And the beautiful thing about having lots of lines is that you don’t have to market all of your products. You only market the locomotives. And then when someone uses your locomotive, it pulls along the cabooses.”
Same thing, bigger ambitions
Capossela went on to explain that Microsoft was already trying to adopt a similar approach, pointing to the OneNote integration in the Surface Pro 3 as living proof. At the same time, Capossela said, Cortana and Bing are both becoming key features of Windows 10, so they are evolving from apps to stand-alone platforms.
But as far as Bing is concerned, Microsoft is well aware of the fact that convincing people to give up on Google is very difficult since the Mountain View-based rival owns more than 67 percent of the search industry.
“It’s very hard for me to get you to go to Bing.com instead of Google.com. Google.com is just such ingrown behavior. It’s very hard to break that familiarity,” Capossela stated.
And this is here where Microsoft's plan to bring together its products could help. Capossela says that Bing has bigger chances to succeed if users are getting to know its features through personal assistant Cortana and thus discover that there's still life beyond Google.
Obviously, Microsoft has a very ambitious plan for Windows 10, but the company might be a little bit late to the party, as both Google and Apple have been doing the same thing that Redmond is aiming at for several years already.
Windows 10 is projected to be released in the second half of 2015, with the upgrade to be offered free of charge within the first year of availability to PCs running genuine copies of Windows 7 and 8.1.