We Need a Better Plan for Windows (Premium)

While this week’s impromptu drama over the fate of Microsoft Paint was a lot of fun, it’s only a small example of what’s wrong with Windows. And I think we need a better plan.

The set up is simple enough: Here’s Windows with its massive, decades-old code base, and a billion-strong user base. And it has no future. No future at all.

Just as surely as Windows phone was doomed from the get-go, Windows—Windows on the desktop—is likewise doomed. I’ve kind of tiptoed around this one in the past, have tried to soften the blow by noting that this doesn’t mean that Windows disappears overnight. That we will be using it for years to come, and we will be utilizing our familiar skills to get work done well into our retirements.

This is all true. But it also obscures a central truth: Microsoft will never put the required resources into Windows to truly modernize it, because doing so is too arduous and expensive, and because the software giant is racing forward with the products and services that may generate most of its profits and revenues in the future. You know, after its digital transformation is complete.

Windows, put simply, is the past. And it is in maintenance mode.

Microsoft won’t—can’t—admit this. And let’s consider Windows phone again to see why. If Microsoft cannot explicitly stand up on a stage, or clearly write in a press release, that Windows phone is no longer a thing, that it is no longer actively developing a mobile operating system that runs on phones, then how on earth can it do the same for a platform with over one billion users?

It can’t. And it won’t.

But this inability to communicate this truth is leading to all kinds of horrible side-effects for those billion people. And that is, of course, what I’m concerned about most: Not Microsoft. But those people who use Microsoft’s products every day. Folks, I’ve been doing this for about 25 years now, and it still continues to amaze me that readers and listeners misunderstand my relationship with this company. I care about you. Us. Not about some corporation. Which, quite frankly, has very different goals, tied to financial growth and new markets, that stand in opposition to what Windows really needs today.

Here’s what Windows doesn’t need.

To be updated with major new product versions twice every year, double the rate at which simpler, more mobile platforms like Android and iOS are updated.

To be spray-painted with an endless array of pointless new in-box features that few will ever use, like an e-book store that is tied to a web browser no one even wants, Cortana yelling at us during Setup, or MyPeople, which I assume needs no explanation.

To have the foundational and fundamental parts of Windows—like File Explorer and the file system, mouse input, and typing—ignored and not modernized while those goofy new features are added.

To have a special product version, called Windows 10 S, developed in secret, and then updated in secret, with no input from the community.

To have silly names for scheduled feature updates. The Fall Creators Update isn’t just a bad name, it’s confusing. You know what isn’t confusing? Windows 10 version 1709.

You get the idea.

The more important thought, perhaps, is what Windows does need. If we can be honest about the fact that PCs are never going to grow into a meaningful market again, and that Windows as we now know it is never going to be acceptable on truly modern mobile hardware platforms, then we can come up with a plan that makes sense for both Microsoft—which, again, is distracted with more important, forward-leaning efforts—and its user base. Us.

First, Microsoft needs to slow down the pace of new features. Windows 10 is not a leading-edge, modern software platform to which developers and new users are flocking. It’s a legacy platform, and it should be updated as such. That means every three years, in my opinion, but since we know that isn’t happening, let’s just fall back to the annual schedule that Android and iOS are on. That’s still too fast, but whatever. (And remember, apps are still updated all the time.)

Next, Microsoft needs to stop adding new features to Windows 10. Not permanently, but for some period of time during which it can focus on the fundamentals, fix years-old problems, and improve reliability across the board. Like the Trustworthy Computing Initiative work that happened in the wake of the disastrously-insecure Windows XP.

Then, Microsoft needs to formally decide on a schedule for deprecating major technologies in Windows. Up to and including Win32. A version of Windows 10 in which Win32 is “turned off” would essentially be what we have today in Windows 10 S, but this should be a choice, and one you can back in and out of easily, and at any time.

As part of this, Microsoft should examine the stock set of utilities that ships with Windows and decide what to do with them. For example, Microsoft said this week that it will put Paint in the Store, and when I wrote “I have some thoughts about a better approach for this and other utilities in Windows 10, but I’ll share those in a future editorial,” this was one of my ideas.

That is, some in-box utilities should be put in UWP containers, and made into Desktop Bridge-type Store apps. Some should actually be rewritten from scratch as pure UWP apps. And some should simply be removed from Windows and made available via the Windows Features control panel. Let’s make a plan for dealing with that stuff.

As I wrote in Thinking About the Future of UWP, Windows Store, and Windows 10 S (Premium), it’s time for Microsoft do something a little more sophisticated than have one version of Windows 10 that can only run Store apps. What it needs is a path to that future, one that has concessions for the needs to today, but a real plan to get us there over time.

Guys, I love Windows. And I write that as a person who uses Android and iOS every single day, and macOS and Chrome OS every week. (No, I don’t use Linux all that much. I’m starting to think about it, though.) I’m also someone who has spent more time than I am comfortable admitting trying to understand how post-PC devices like the iPad Pro can ever possibly replace the PC.

The thing is, they can’t. Not directly. But as you and I both know, what they can do is assume enough of the functionality and productivity of a traditional PC to make PCs even-less necessary to most people. And as they do, the ongoing free-fall in the PC market will simply continue as we race inexorably to a certain future.

I don’t want to work and write on an iPad Pro. Or a Chromebook. Or even a Mac for that matter. Because I still love Windows, still prefer it to all the other choices out there, which again, I test regularly. And it is my intention to stick with this platform past the point where it makes no sense to do so, just as I did with Windows phone. Fortunately, this one is on such a long slow slide that I’ll be retired long before I need to worry about that.

But then, I’m being realistic about the future. I’d like to see Microsoft offer up the same kind of common sense. And show some respect to the platform that made their new future possible.