Windows 10: Ambitious But Realistic

Windows 10 seems to be an incredibly ambitious operating system that is more realistic than you might have expected.

As Microsoft unveiled the details of Windows 10 on Wednesday, I heard company executives explaining how it will work on a wide range of devices from desktops and laptops to tablets and phone, from an 84-inch conference room device called Surface Hub to an augmented reality headset called HoloLens. The sheer number of different kinds of devices that are meant to run this operating system and work with it seamlessly seems a huge undertaking. Yet on other aspects, Microsoft executives—especially CEO Satya Nadella (above)—seemed to understand the relatively small position Windows occupies on phones and tablets and to accept that Windows 10 will not be a quick fix.

The operating system is still in progress—an earlier test version aimed at corporate users came out in the fall, and a new version with many but not all of the features shown this week came out on Friday for registered members of the free "Windows Insider" program. But this week's press event showed a lot more about how the OS should function when it is officially released later in the year.

"Windows 10 ushers in an era of more personal computing in a mobile-first, cloud-first world," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, summing up the day's announcements. But while there are 1.5 billion users of Windows, Nadella acknowledged that the operating system is mostly just seen as a tool and that Microsoft needs to change that. "We want to move from people needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows," he said.

For standard desktop and laptop users, Windows 10, as shown in the previous builds, is aimed at people upgrading from Windows 7 and Windows 8. Terry Myerson, Microsoft's Executive Vice President of Operating Systems (above), promised that "Windows 10 will provide a seamless transition for our Windows 7 and Windows 8 customers." Given the reaction that many Windows 7 users and especially enterprise customers have had with Windows 8, that's a big ambition.

For a desktop user, Windows 10 looks more like Windows 7 than Windows 8, with a Start menu in the traditional location and with old and new applications running in windows (not just full-screen or docked tiles). That seems far more likely to entice Windows 7 users on traditional machines than Windows 8 did and should especially be more appealing to enterprise customers who by and large bypassed the last version of the OS. So in that sense, it seems a much more realistic upgrade.

Myerson said Windows 10 was designed to be an enterprise platform that would "work seamlessly with existing applications" while being easier to manage and offering more built-in security features, including some he said would have stopped some of the recent cyber attacks. (In later demos, some of the Microsoft employees talked about features like built-in multi-factor authentication and using Intune for managing devices the way many companies manage mobile devices, being able to deploy and remove applications remotely. But Microsoft was clear that the current methods companies use to manage Windows 7 machines would continue to work as well.)

Myerson said that Windows 10 will be a free upgrade for the first year for users of Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1 and suggested that once consumers are on Windows 10, Microsoft would continue to provide updates "for the supported lifetime of the device," including security advances and new features. He said that while Microsoft will continue to support the way enterprises manage and update Windows, in the long run, the recommended practice will be to directly connect all Windows 10 devices to Windows Update so they get those patches immediately.

The overall goal is to treat this like "Windows as a service," Myerson and others said. In this respect, they said the goal was to redefine the relationship between Microsoft and its customers. But later Nadella said this represents "no fundamental shift to the business model," so device makers will continue to pay to license Windows. It sounds like those of us with Enterprise Agreements and Software Assurance will still be expected to pay annually.

Still, Nadella stressed that the "as a service" concept is a fundamental change for Microsoft, as it will require the company to move to updates as a "continuous stream" of new features (as is common with most cloud and Internet-based applications) as opposed to the big new releases every couple of years we've been used to with Windows.

(Windows 10 overview)

The overall message of the event was that Windows 10 will be a single codebase for desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones but with the look changing to reflect the needs of each environment. The emphasis here is on "universal apps"—those that can run on all the platforms but which can resize and use the special features of each kind of hardware. (For instance, phones and tablets usually have sensors to tell when the system is rotated, and phones have broadband radios for making calls; desktops usually don't.)

Myerson said that Windows 10 will work with processors from Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD, but wouldn't go into detail about which processors would be supported in which form factors. He said Microsoft was working on an update for Windows RT (and thus presumably for the Surface tablets based on the Qualcomm ARM-based processors) but said they haven't worked out all the details yet. Microsoft also acknowledged that there will be new versions of Windows Server based on the Windows 10 code and Azure but didn't share any details.

Within the client version of Windows 10 itself, Microsoft showed a number of new features—a new version of the Cortana personal assistant that now works on Windows 10, a new more modern browser, new versions of Office optimized for the touch interface, updated "universal apps" for all the basic functions, and better integration with the Xbox for gaming. (My reactions to the specific features are in my next piece.

But Nadella seemed pretty sober when it came to Microsoft's position in the mobile market. He said the company was focused much more on the "mobility of experiences"—meaning experiences that work across devices—as opposed to the mobility of any single device. That sounds realistic, given the tiny share that Windows 8 has in the phone market, though left unsaid was any new way of Microsoft experiences working across multiple mobile operating environments (though, of course, there are iPad and Android versions of Office and some other Microsoft tools). He did talk briefly at the end about the importance of cross-platform support, presumably alluding to the iPad and Android versions of Office, but he said that Windows 10 devices will always deliver the best experience.

He acknowledged Microsoft's small market share in phones, talking about how Microsoft's first goal is to get developers to target Windows 10 more generally—where there is a big market in desktops and laptops—and then discuss how they can amortize those investments to create phone applications using the universal apps concept. He suggested we will hear more information about this at the Build conference in April.

Microsoft has huge ambitions for Windows 10. Not only is it meant to be a replacement for Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1, but it is meant to be the transition to a new world of "Windows as a service," as well as opening up a bunch of new software features and new kinds of hardware. But at the same time, the user interface and business model seem designed to move customers relatively gradually from the traditional world of Windows into this new world, and to recognize the gaining acceptance for the new OS in the corporate world, on tablets, and especially on phones, is something that won't happen immediately. In other words, this is big step forward, but it's meant to just be a step in a longer journey.