Opinion: Windows 10 is a balancing act

sincity · October 1, 2014

Call it an unveiling. Call it a preview. Call it walking across a threshold. Call it Microsoft trying really, really hard to say that Windows is fresh and new – and yet familiar enough for business users who've been clinging to Windows XP and 7 but want some of the advantages of Windows 8.

The event yesterday was all about the conversation Microsoft has started having with its business customers in an attempt to sell Windows 7 users on Windows 8 features and benefits.

It's trying to do so by backing away from the extreme Windows 8 touch interface that businesses failed to adopt and the consumerisation-before-everything approach of logging in only with Microsoft accounts. In Microsoft arithmetic, that rather complex equation adds up to ten.

The first look we got at Windows 10 didn't necessarily fit the trendy San Francisco setting; a brick-lined theatre in the middle of a fast-commercializing area of Market Street where pot-smoking chess players and adult theatres are being replaced by cloud startups.

Consumer connundrum

But the down to earth practicality of the approach Terry Myerson and Joe Belfiore bring to Microsoft's attempt to bridge the worlds of desktop, touch, IT, business users and consumers isn't entirely out of place either. Change is hard. "Users are saying 'don't move my cheese'," Myerson commented to us; "but they're also saying 'give me more cheese, give me better cheese'."

The outspoken reaction to the Windows 8 interface, which was reminiscent of the way people who had never used Windows Vista still complained loudly about it, was hard cheese for Microsoft. When they rejected the modern interface, businesses also rejected the benefits of apps that don't have Trojans tucked inside them, laptops with extra hours of battery life and a file system that automatically encrypts your files.

Windows 10 has those advantages and more, including a sophisticated containerisation system that separates personal and business files in a way that's becoming common on smartphones; think Samsung Knox or BlackBerry Balance, but without the confusion of moving from one environment to another.

Windows 10 doesn't want to be confusing, or challenging. What the technical preview shows is a much less adventurous, less forward-looking change than Windows 8. If you found the transitions from the Start screen to the desktop jarring, it's a slightly less schizophrenic system where the keyboard shortcuts you know make sense.

That's regardless of whether you're pasting a script into the command prompt or tabbing between modern and desktop apps and the mouse lets you move all of your apps or whether you install them from a DVD or stream them from the Store.

Tricky moves

It would be easy to joke about Microsoft turning back to the command line after problems with the interface people still call Metro, but recognising that all of the rich heritage of Windows is useful to someone, somewhere is a good thing.

And with the Insider program letting users give feedback instantly as they try out features, Microsoft has the chance to show how carefully it's listening because monthly updates may soon become the norm.

The question is whether, as well as stepping back and integrating the new platform into the familiar desktop, Microsoft can carry on moving forward with Windows 10 as well.

When Windows 8 came out, less than 5% of the PCs you would see in a store had touchscreens. Now it's more like 40% (ed: although that market has been shrinking), but the Windows 10 that Microsoft unveiled today isn't counting on that change, or on the familiarity of touch people have from smartphones and tablets.

It's designed for the businesses who have had to finally get off Windows XP, who have mostly picked Windows 7 (unless they're specifically choosing tablets and Windows 8.1) and who need to be coaxed onto something newer. Microsoft doesn't want to have a "Windows XP bis" problem, getting them off Windows 7 in another decade's time.

A unified approach

When Terry Myerson joked that they'd wanted to call the new version Windows One to match Xbox One and OneDrive, he made a more serious point that Windows is one platform for lots of different devices, from sensors to data centers, smartphones to consoles.

That's where we need the continuum of interfaces Microsoft has only talked about, that will make sense of everything from phones to tablets to desktops to 85" touchscreens.

It's likely we won't see that until new devices (including perhaps the Surface Mini) come along, and it's where Microsoft needs to deliver on Myerson's promise that Windows 10 deserves the name "because we're not building an incremental version of Windows."

In an obvious reference to the Threshold code name for future Windows touch interfaces, he claimed "We're at a point where we carry forward all that's good in Windows and step across into a new way of doing things."

But we haven't quite seen that. We haven't yet seen the new tablet mode for switching from keyboard to touch in action and given that hybrid PCs like the Surface Pro are the area of the PC market that's seeing some of the biggest growth in sales, Microsoft can't afford to lose the users who have bought in to touch in Windows

The best is still to come

We know there are plenty of changes still to come in Windows 10 from what we have seen, especially for the Charms. That's where Microsoft has the trickiest balancing act to achieve; keeping touch users from feeling they're being asked to take a step backwards and adopt Windows 7.5.

We're also going to have to wait until early next year to see the consumer features like Cortana that will sell Windows 10 to enthusiasts as well. So far, Windows 10 is full of useful, helpful, handy features that will make your life easier.

It also does away with some of the challenges that stopped businesses stepping into the modern Windows world, where they get the advantages of security, performance and better battery life.

Building a more modern management option and separation of business and personal data in containers under an interface that doesn't make desktop users feel they have to learn a new way of working, is the definition of compromise.

That's what businesses have been asking for and what we see in the technical preview is an acceptable compromise; but Windows 10 will need to be more than that. And we won't find out how much more it is until next year.