Thursday, 17 March 2016

Windows 10 to get ground-breaking features that will 'change everything'

Some potentially very cool features are just around the corner for Windows 10, those who have adopted Microsoft's newest OS will doubtless be pleased to hear.

The pace of the operating system's development has been rather slow of late, thanks to Redmond working on the underlying architecture of the OS, and spending time reshaping the way the preview build process works internally.

Indeed, we recently heard that the second chunk of Redstone (RS2) has been pushed back from its original target of the end of this year to spring 2017, meaning the dollop of new features that this update will carry is a long way off yet.

However, according to a couple of Program Managers at Microsoft, some really smart new stuff is coming to Windows 10 very shortly.

Neowin spotted that Rich Turner, Senior Program Manager on Windows, tweeted: "Finally getting to play with new #Windows10 features. You are all gonna FREAK OUT when you see this."

Turner, who only started his role last month, also notes in his LinkedIn profile that he's "delivering some ground-breaking new features in Windows 10".

A second exec, Scott Hanselman, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Azure, ASP.NET, and Web Tools, also tweeted: "These features (I know what this is because I'm helping) are going to CHANGE EVERYTHING. No joke."

Serious hype

All in all, that's some serious hype building by these managers. Indeed, replies to Turner's tweet noted that this is bound to build up people's expectations considerably, and that could be a dangerous thing – to which Turner replied, "there are no smoke and mirrors here!"

Exactly what these features might be, or what they might deliver for either consumers or businesses, isn't clear at this point, and no hints were dropped as to what might be forthcoming.

One thing we do know is that they're nothing to do with Cortana, as one Twitter user replied to Turner's tweet indicating he didn't use the voice assistant and would be disappointed if the new stuff is Cortana-centric.

Turner replied: "Nope, no Cortana from me!"

As for when these nifty new bits might be revealed, according to Turner, we'll see stuff at the Build conference – which kicks off in just under a fortnight. Hopefully we'll know a lot more after Build, and fingers crossed we're not disappointed with the gravity of these revelations.