Washington: Microsoft is facing stiff competition against rival Cupertino, Apple and to lesser extent Google, as Bloomberg Business Week reported that public testing of Windows 8 would get underway towards the end of this year.
Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer was put back late last year by the company’s board, after he failed to move quickly enough against Apple’s iPad and lost market share in the mobile phone and tablet biz.
Microsoft Redmond campus, where its computer scientists works, is taking its struggling time to push out a tablet OS to rival Cupertino, which earlier this week announced its iPad 2 tech plans.
While Apple and, to a lesser extent, Google are forging ahead with their strategies, Microsoft apparently plans to wait until the 2012 back-to-school season before hitting the release button.
Citing people with knowledge of the plans, Bloomberg reported that public testing of Windows 8 would get underway towards the end of this year, which roughly fits in with Microsoft’s typical operating system roadmap.
More interestingly, if the report is accurate it offers a possible insight into Microsoft’s tablet mindset, as it seemingly suggests that the company doesn’t have faith in running its existing Windows 7 operating system on the increasingly popular touchscreen devices.
As the Bloomberg report noted, MS is trying to update its current OS to enable it to work better with touch screen kit. Microsoft is also attempting to fine tune the operating system to cope with the size and battery life of tablet machines.
In January, Microsoft said that its next version of Windows would run on ARM systems using system-on-a-chip (SoC) architectures from NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments. Those chips are typically slotted into smartphones and tablets.
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