hi everyone kevin here it’s official microsoft is releasing the next version of windows and it’s going to be called windows 11. we’re going to look at all of the biggest announcements from today’s microsoft event and i’ll also share my perspective on things but first what happened windows 10 was supposed to be the last version of windows and microsoft was just supposed to release periodic updates to windows 10. well when we look at pc sales over the last 10 to 12 years pc sales have been on the decline and then the pandemic hit and for whatever reason everyone decided to go out and refresh their pcs and i think microsoft saw all that increased growth and interest in pcs and they had a change of heart all right well let’s jump in and let’s take a look at what some of the biggest announcements were [Music] the first biggest change is there’s a new start menu at the very top you have your pinned apps and then you also have recommendations down at the bottom the entire start menu is also cloud powered so that means if you go on to a different device you’ll have the same start menu so what am i most excited about well i think new the new recommended section really has the potential to be a game changer let’s say you just worked on a document or maybe you’re iterating on a document it’ll recommend it to you to make it quicker and easier to get back to all in all i think on windows 10 the start menu had somewhat lost some relevance and i think windows 11 tries to give it a renewed purpose [Music] next the look and feel has also gone through some substantial changes you’ll notice transparency under the windows you have rounded corners for your various windows also the transitions are a little bit smoother overall it just feels like a more polished product windows 11 also introduces a batch of new themes so if you want a light theme well there’s a theme for that if you want a dark theme well there’s also a dark theme and there are many other themes that you can choose from so you can truly customize what your windows 11 looks like [Music] windows 11 also makes improvements over snapping and on windows 10 you’ve been able to snap you could position a window wherever you wanted but with windows 11 you get these helpful hints that tell you where a window is going to snap and there’s also a new concept of snap groups so you could position let’s say four different windows snapped into different positions and let’s say maybe something else comes up you can then restore that group of snapped items that’s a nice improvement over what was available in windows 10. [Music] there’s another new feature called pick up where you left off and this is really beneficial if say you’re using a laptop and you dock it to let’s say a larger monitor when you undock your laptop your laptop windows will be shown in an optimal way in the past when you undocked you then had to rearrange your windows on your laptop and then when you re-docked you also had to optimize the way things looked this promises to make that whole process even easier [Music] next you also have something called the personalized feed and it’s composed of different widgets so you’ll see things like the weather news sports scores maybe stocks all of that content will be pulled into this feed and the promise is that it’s optimized based on what you look at and what interests you so over time as you interact with it in theory it should get better so is this a good addition i’m not really sure i think today most people go on to the web to access that type of content but when you look at things like ios and other platforms they all tend to incorporate a feed so i think it’s really just microsoft trying to catch up with what other platforms do and i think overall they’re just trying to increase the relevance of windows and trying to get more people to stay on the platform versus going elsewhere whether it’ll be successful i don’t know we’ll have to see but it’s an interesting addition [Music] the next big announcement windows also has virtual desktops basically you can set up multiple desktops and you can have one set of apps open on one so maybe you have your work desktop and then maybe you have another desktop for say school with a different set of apps open you can also customize what the background looks like now microsoft has always had virtual desktops or at least in windows 10. the big change now is you can now customize what the background looks like also microsoft is now putting it on the taskbar so it makes the entry point even easier to find now my guess is microsoft research probably found a lot of people requested this and even though it already existed in windows 10 most people just didn’t know about it so i think microsoft went back made some enhancements invested a little bit more and now they’re going to give it another try [Music] the next biggest announcement has to do with performance and this is one that i’m personally really excited about microsoft claims that everything across the board will just be faster windows updates will be 40 smaller your updates will happen in the background and your computer is now supposed to be more energy efficient when i worked as a pm at microsoft if you had a list of 10 different features you could invest in you could never go wrong by choosing the performance enhancements [Music] microsoft has also announced improvements to how you input into your computer so voice touch pen all of those have seen improvements now windows 10 supported these as well but things have now gotten better with your voice when you talk to your computer in the past you had to go back and add punctuation apparently they can now do all that for you also when you use a pen as input on your computer you now get haptic feedback now of course that’ll probably also require some new hardware but it’s really neat seeing them invest in better ways of inputting into your computer [Music] microsoft also announced now that they’re going to be integrating microsoft teams directly into windows throughout the pandemic microsoft teams has been a very bright spot for microsoft the app has seen a tremendous amount of growth and when we look at windows 10 windows 10 had skype integrated with it now skype used to be the de facto way for messaging but then for whatever reason it kind of lost its luster now when you think of messaging you think of messenger or facetime or whatsapp no one ever really thinks of skype anymore so i think by including teams directly into windows this is microsoft saying hey we believe we have a product that works really well let’s reset our strategy on communication and see if we can turn things around by including teams [Music] let’s now shift gears and talk about how gaming will be better on windows 11. first off there’s something called auto hdr or high dynamic range what does that mean well your games will simply look better the colors will be more vibrant also back to the earlier point on performance performance has been improved greatly also for gaming your games will launch faster there’s also something called direct storage where instead of going through the cpu it’ll connect directly to the gpu so you remove some of those bottlenecks all in all your gaming experience should simply be faster [Music] lastly microsoft also announced a completely revamped microsoft store now the microsoft store has somewhat struggled in the past whenever you go to the store you can’t really find many quality apps within the store and microsoft is now hoping to change that you can now submit all types of apps you could submit win32 uwp pwa and even now android apps that’s one of the biggest changes so now you can run many more apps on windows directly say for example tick tock microsoft also announced that if you’re a developer you can use your own commerce platform so what does that mean well let’s say i sell on the microsoft store i could process all the transactions on my own and microsoft won’t take a cut at it now that’s really kind of pointing their finger at apple who takes a 30 cut of all sales that originate from their store so why is microsoft being so altruistic well let’s just say that very few people use a microsoft store so you don’t really have much to lose instead microsoft wants to attract more developers and get more people on their platform and hey i’m sure they’ll figure out ways to make money down the road [Music] so what are my thoughts of all of these announcements well when you look at all of this there’s quite a bit of innovation but it’s really more iterative compared to windows 10 and i think microsoft is taking a more measured approach when you look at windows 7 to windows 8 that was a drastic departure from what windows 7 was and microsoft got a lot of negative feedback and blowback from that so i think they intentionally tried to keep it as familiar as possible while also innovating on it so when is windows 11 coming out well my best guess is they’re either going to try to align it with back to school which is in september or they’ll aim for holiday 2021 but my guess is it’ll become available this year also will it be a free upgrade when we look back at windows 10 windows 10 was a free upgrade and i see no reason why windows 11 would be any different if you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing and i’ll see you next time [Music] [Music] you