Five years of Windows 10 – End of Windows-as-a-service not yet in sight

It’s hard to spot a cadence in Windows releases since the late 1980s, but if we stick to a three-year window, we could be gearing up for Windows 12 right now. Obviously, that’s not the case. Five years ago on July 29, 2015, Microsoft introduced Windows 10 and at the presentation in January of that year, the company made it clear that it saw its operating system as a service. A service that would be continuously updated to keep as many users up-to-date as possible. In that respect, Microsoft has kept its word and a cadence can be observed in those updates. Microsoft still gives Windows 10 a major update every spring and every fall, in addition to the patches that appear monthly to close security vulnerabilities.

In 2014, we reported on the arrival of Windows 9 , which Microsoft would be working on under the project name Threshold. Threshold is the name of a planet in the Halo game series. Windows 9 would be a logical name after Windows 7, 8 and 8.1, but Microsoft opted for Windows 10 , as it would be more appropriate given the big step that was taken. Microsoft also considered using Windows One “to emphasize the unity of its products,” but decided against it because that name had already been used: for Windows 1.0.

Windows 10 was different from previous Windows releases for several reasons. The operating system has always been a significant cash cow for the company. As an illustration, the presales of Windows 8 licenses earned the company almost a billion dollars in a quarter in 2013. However, when announcing five years ago, Microsoft announced that users of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 could upgrade to Windows 10 for free. This free upgrade path was supposed to last up to a year after release, but through the Media Creation Tool it is even now still possible and it looks like it will stay that way. Microsoft’s goal was to get as many people as possible to adopt its new operating system, to prevent fragmentation of the Windows versions in use and to make the OS more attractive to developers. The company even announced its target of one billion users by 2018, which should include not only PCs, but also smartphones, internet-of-things devices and tablets. In 2016 it turned out that this number was too high in such a short period of time and Microsoft scrapped the target. At the beginning of this year , the milestone was reached after all .

The One Windows ecosystem that never came

Achieving 1 billion installations in a relatively short period of time was an example of the very ambitious plans that Microsoft had with Windows 10. The company had One Windows as a vision, which meant that a single development team would work on the different versions for mobile, internet-of-things, embedded, and pc and tablets. Also, those versions would maintain a shared base and there would be a single store of Universal Windows Apps.

One of the main pillars of that strategy fell apart when Microsoft discontinued Windows 10 Mobile. That mobile operating system had to offer users a universal user experience and seamless connection between mobile and PC. For example, with the Continuum feature , users coulduse their mobile as a kind of desktop PC with monitor, keyboard and mouse. Where Apple iOS and macOS, and Google Android and ChromeOS can increasingly connect to each other, Microsoft Windows has since had to connect mobile via the competing platforms. The company does this, for example, with the Your phone app, with which messages and photos can be linked. There was never a specific announcement to pull the plug on Windows 10 Mobile, but the company did announce in 2017 that developing new features was ” not the focus “, sealing the fate of the operating system. Support for the software finally ended on January 14, along with Windows 7.

The answer to the Windows 8 critique

In addition to being a starting point for a broad Windows ecosystem, Windows 10 was of course mainly a response to the criticism of Windows 8. That operating system appeared in 2012 , but soon turned out to be much less popular than its popular predecessor Windows 7. Microsoft’s adjustments under the hood were positively received, such as the changes that made the kernel faster and more efficient, the extensive boot protection of Windows Defender and the integration of Hyper-V. However, users did not like the Metro interface or Modern UI. Microsoft was inspired for this interface by the ‘bare’ visual style, as used in public transport, and therefore the metro.

Windows 8 had to make Windows especially suitable for operation with a touchscreen. Apple had successfully introduced the iPad in 2010, while Microsoft had been trying to interest the market in so-called tablet PCs for years. From now on, the Windows start screen was a screen-filling interface with Live Tiles, large colored tiles for the applications. According to Microsoft, the traditional start button was superfluous. Windows 8 presented users with a touchscreen-optimized software environment that was very different from the classic desktop environment that was still present. Users, most of whom used mouse and keyboard, were torn between these worlds and the arrival of Windows 8.1 in 2013 did little to change that.

With Windows 10, Microsoft focused more on desktop users again. Windows Store apps no longer ran full screen by default and there is a less strict separation between the new and the old Windows. A touch-oriented start menu has since been there, but only in tablet mode. The old trusted start button is back and for desktop users it opens a start menu with Live Tiles that only takes up part of the screen.