Getting a picture of the "Blue" Wave...

Redmond Recap - Approaching Build: What is the “Blue” wave?

This week will be quite a barrage of Microsoft-related information. TechEd Europe kicks off tomorrow in Madrid, and the Build conference will get rolling on Wednesday in San Fransisco. This blog post will put some of the agenda items in temporal perspective.

“Blue” was originally the rumored code name for the next update of Windows 8, later announced as Windows 8.1. But during the winter, the news broke that Blue will encompass a larger platform update spread over a period of time. With TechEd North America now behind us, we already know quite a few pieces of the puzzle, but is that all?

I don’t usually take part in speculation, but this post almost wrote itself as I oriented myself in preparation for all the information that will be released in Build. I hope the information contained herein will help the readers understand the conferences’ offerings in a broader perspective.

The following graphic shows what I hold important.

The “Services updates” is somewhat murky, but refers to alleged updates to services such as Skydrive, Outlook.com and others. It is fuzzy, but serves to remind that this is more than a set of service packs released in tandem.

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This is a great pic of the coming "Blue" release cycle...