Windows fans are worried that the desktop PC will follow too closely the design of Windows 10 for phones and tablets, and they are right to do so. This all plays out due to Microsoft’s plans for convergence, but it's a twisted approach that only makes things more complicated than they should be.

Canonical announced a couple of years ago that they intended to follow a concept called convergence, and they were not the only ones. Unlike Canonical, which announced this openly, Microsoft and Apple are now both following the same idea, but from different directions and with different goals in mind.

You might think that all of these convergence talks make no sense, but they’re actually following the natural evolution of technology. Microsoft knows this and it's aiming to converge its platforms as well. Unfortunately for Windows fans, they are doing it all wrong and that will only become clearer in the next couple of years.

It will come a time when developers will be able to write a piece of software that will work both on Windows Phone and on Windows PCs. The store will probably be shared, and the integration of services like OneDrive will be omnipresent. The problem is that this is not consistent and it's only mostly for show.

Convergence is not enough, you need true convergence

Now that companies like Microsoft and Canonical are getting closer to converging their platforms, users are beginning to see that this must be implemented on a much deeper level. As it stands right now, the mobile and the desktop versions of Windows only share some similar design choices and very little architecture, which is the main problem.

Canonical is working on implementing true convergence because it wants to achieve something much more complex. The ultimate goal is to have a single operating system that can be installed on any given platform, be it PC, mobile, or tablet, and to have the same kind of experience. Also, developers will only make a single kind of applications, which will work on all platforms. This is true convergence.

Granted, Canonical is still far from completing this goal, but they have already taken some important steps, like the desktop environment which is currently being adapted from mobile to PC (with the necessary modifications).

Microsoft will only be able to achieve true convergence with a radical shift in the way it builds operating systems and that won't happen any time soon.