Windows 10 build 9926 has been with us for 53 days, or almost two months.  While faster releases would be nice for those of us who don't mind bugs, it gives us an idea that Microsoft is going to release something that looks 99.9% like this build in the end.   My opinion after looking at this OS and using it as a daily driver on my Surface Pro 3 while teaching and researching is that it is the OS of the future in many ways.  In the future we will not interact with our computers by mouse and keyboard.  That future is finally becoming technically possible.  If other OS's don't evolve to deal with this shift then they will be left in the dust. 


Windows 10 will likely end up looking just like this.  Maybe with a more polished theme and a few UI tweaks.  Under the hood and behind the scenes it could change in important ways. 


Before Windows 8 all anyone who used a touch based Windows 7 or earlier PC heard was how awful it was for touch.  Now we hear how Windows 8 and latter are too focused on touch.  Windows 10 has made adjustments which will make those who are still stuck on the old mouse and keyboard feel thought about and cared for.  However this OS is looking forward.   I can see it. 

I use something called a SmartBoard in the classrooms I teach in.  It is a interactive white board which is sensitive to touch input and allows inking and drawing.  Windows 8 and 10 both make full use of this for education.  My students can come up to the board and manipulate objects and see how changing their relationships changes the situation.  It is one thing to talk about moving a vector from one place to another and something else to be able to actually do it. 

In the future that kind of direct manipulation of objects will only become more common.

 Consider computers like the HP Sprout and the Microsoft Hololens.  Being leading examples it is likely they will not be adopted widely at first.   However, if one writes on the potential of such technology one makes the same mistake and Xerox and others in not seeing how the mouse-keyboard-desktop paradigm would change the office forever.    For example with something like hololens and a very fast internet of the future business meetings could take place "face to face" and full body even if people are on other sides of the world.   

Not to mention the dark horse of internet business how adult entertainment will use this.  Imagine a realistic virtual gentlemen s club and how much money that could make.  Such things already exist in an online VR world called second life.     Such innovations have influenced quote legitimate unquote internet business.   

Then of course there are the scientific uses of all this technology.  Anything that enables better collaboration will aid in scientific research.  Anything that allows more ways to visualize and manipulate complex data structures will aid scientific research.  A mouse and keyboard will always be needed for programming and working with raw data but once raw data is crunched into data products why limit that to tables.  Why not publish peer reviewed VR "landscapes" based on the data and theoretical interpretations there of?   Hololens and it's successors will run Windows 10. 

Right now like everyone else I just want a new build of Windows 10 to test.  Nothing is more fashionable than having what the designers are going to release months before others know it exist. 


UPDATE: Build 10041 is out and I am using it.  Other than minor cosmetic changes it is much like build 9926.  Certain Windows store apps work now that did not before.  What you see now with Windows 10 preview will be 90-95 percent of what we get.  The transparent start interface is cool....but I saw something like it for KDE 4.0 in Linux years ago.