Microsoft likely to unveil Windows 9 in India today

Microsoft Corp is likely to boot the next version of the Windows operating system on Tuesday. In a high-profile event, Windows 9 is being flagged off by its global chief executive officer, Satya Nadella, from no other place than his home country, India. Code named 'Threshold', the event raises the bar for India by several notches, catapulting it to the big league for technology launches.

Barely two weeks ago, Microsoft's closest rival Google Inc unveiled its latest mobility project Android One from India. The launch was presided over by Google's vice-president Sundar Pichai, another India-born global executive.

According to analysts, some of whom are part of a pre-launch conference call with Nadella on Tuesday morning, Windows 9 is said to be a major overhaul for the company - fixing the damage done by its predecessor Windows 8 - and also furthering Microsoft's latest strategy under Nadella, which is 'cloud first, mobile first'. A parallel event is also being planned in San Francisco.

The next version of Windows, which may get a completely new name according to a Reuters report, is expected to have a single code which will work across all three platforms of personal computer, phone and tablet.

"I think they initially underestimated the emergence of mobile," said Vishal Tripathi, principal analyst with Gartner India. Tripathi added the company was now trying to make amends. And a launch from India may be the perfect indication of that strategy.

Due to the popularity of smartphones and tablets, only about 14 per cent of devices sold last year are running on Windows, according to Gartner. And India's smartphone penetration is booming. While 2.5 million PCs were shipped in the second quarter of 2014, vendors shipped almost seven times the number of smartphones at 18.42 million. The smartphone market grew by 84 per cent year-on-year during the period, according to IDC.

On his maiden trip after becoming CEO, Nadella arrived in the country last week. He has been touring all the key offices of the company, including Bangalore, Hyderabad and New Delhi, over the last few days.

However, company executives are being extremely tight-lipped about the details of his interactions.

On Monday, he addressed employees at the Microsoft India Development Centre in Hyderabad, the company's largest research and development centre outside its headquarters at Redmond in the US. Nadella paid a half-hour courtesy visit to Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhara Rao. He, however, couldn't meet Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu, who was away to Visakhapatnam. In New Delhi on Tuesday, apart from the launch event, Nadella will also address 35,000 school children along with Union minister for human resource development Smriti Irani.

The Hyderabad-born Nadella is only the third CEO of Microsoft in its entire lifetime and he took over the reins from Steve Ballmer in February this year.

Nadella was trying to make Microsoft think above and beyond the constraints it had under the previous CEO, said Jaideep Mehta, country head of IDC India.

"All investments are being made with a very strong lens to drive the mobile and the cloud ecosystem," said Mehta. The decision to open up Microsoft Office to Apple was another "masterstroke" through which the company is trying to make the popular product available to as many people as possible. "He is making it more open, collaborative and market-oriented," said Mehta.

Greyhound Research's CEO Sanchit Vir Gogia said on Tuesday Microsoft would announce that all devices below 9 inches would have free licensing of the Windows operating system, putting it on a par with Android. "Anything above 9 inches will be discounted. They are also likely to have a new strategy for device manufacturers which will help them to launch inexpensive phones like Android One." The company is very aggressively targeting the Rs 6,000-10,000 price range of phones.

Windows 9 is expected to be a big leap for the company in the enterprise domain, a traditional stronghold of Microsoft that has weakened a bit in the past.

According to a senior employee at the Hyderabad centre, Nadella has said cloud technology is going to change the IT landscape the worldover. He is said to have elaborately spoken on the importance of the cloud and asked the employees to upgrade themselves and hone their skills around the technology. "We are going to work with the central and state governments on cloud and digital technologies shortly," Nadella is said to have indicated, adding that Microsoft's expansion in Hyderabad was on the cards, sources said.

K Rajani Kanth from Hyderabad contributed to this report