I was watching an interesting video with SteveB from a recent Swiss event. Part of it is where the attendees got to put questions directly to him and he (as always) answers with a frightening level of knowledge that spans from business to tech and back again.

The video’s linked from the picture above and in the Q&A session there’s a little bit of information that Steve shared about the next version of Windows. The question from the attendee is something like;

“One of the things that concerns a lot of developers is the discussion about the right application platform. One ISV sends a question "we all know that the next version of Windows will come. As an ISV that is planning the renewal of my software product, which development technology should I bet on? Silverlight? HTML5? WPF?"”

Steve provides some early insight here;

"If you have a Windows application then you're going to renew on top of Modern Windows which really means you're going to want to be a native application on the next version of Windows. We haven't said when it's coming but we started showing technology in the form of Windows running on System on Chip architectures – ARM, as well as System on Chip architectures x86 from Intel, AMD and there's no doubt that when you renew you're going to want to renew on the next version of Windows.

Today you either have a Win32 app or you have an app that's been written basically either in C++ or C#. We will have development environments for the next version of Windows. We'll have C++, we'll have C#, we'll have JavaScript, so you'll have your choice of ways of building those applications but you'll want to be native so no matter whether your application today is built in C++, C# or whether you're looking at JavaScript we'll certainly support all of those in the next version of Windows".

Sounds interesting – nothing that I can add to that. I’m more focused around talking about the current version of Windows as I did at last year’s event with SteveB in London but it’s interesting to hear a little about futures.

While on the topic of “Steves” and client operating systems, I was recently re-watching the interviews that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did back in 2007 and I was really struck by something that Steve Jobs said about native client applications – it starts at 6 minutes 38 seconds into this video;

and there’s a very clearly expressed view, to quote this other Steve;

“There’s still a lot you can do with a rich client environment and the hardware is progressing to the point where you can run a rich client environment on lower and lower cost devices. On lower and lower power devices. So there’s still some pretty cool things you can do with clients”.

which I thought (5 years later) still lines up pretty well with where things seem to be and it feels like there’s some resonance with what SteveB was saying.