Lead by Example (Premium)

Windows 10 and the Microsoft Store have an apps problem. And it's all Microsoft's fault.

Someday soon, perhaps even this week, Apple will release its first Microsoft Store app, iTunes. This will be celebrated by some, and I will at least acknowledge that it's necessary on some level. But iTunes coming to the Microsoft Store in 2018 should be seen as the defeat that it is: While Apple is racing ahead with new mobile apps like Apple Music on modern mobile platforms, bringing a legacy desktop application like iTunes to Windows 10 just serves to highlight the utter pointlessness of the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps platform.

The message here is that the future is elsewhere. On Windows, we're stuck with the past. It is not coincidental that the very best apps in the Microsoft Store---Adobe Photoshop Elements, Spotify, and so on---are legacy desktop applications wrapped in Desktop Bridge containers and a handful of high-quality games. You can't point to more than low single-digit number of high-quality UWP apps.

And that is, I think, the problem. Microsoft cannot expect developers or users to embrace its next-generation client platform---a combination of UWP, the Microsoft Store, Windows 10 S, and Windows 10 on Snapdragon ---unless it can make a compelling case that this platform is superior to the legacy technologies that still push Windows forward, like a shuffling zombie in The Walking Dead. Today, Windows is driven more by inertia than by innovation.

To be fair, the company has done what it can do to attract developers. It's iterated on the Windows 10 SDK with every major release of Windows 10, and has sped development so that there are two such revisions each year now, each of which comes with some major new features. It holds developer events around the world, and virtually, to highlight the advantages of UPW and Microsoft Store. And it has bent over backward to accommodate legacy code bases in the hopes that developers would bring their existing apps to this new platform, all to no avail. There is not even a single example of a major new app on UWP, nor is there is a single example of a major app from some other platform being ported to UWP. All we get is a few warmed-over desktop apps in the form of Desktop Bridge containers in the Store.

That is a situation Microsoft cannot control: Developers either will or will not embrace a platform, based on pragmatic concerns that include both the size of the user base (which is substantial, at 600 million and growing) and the level of engagement they see from those users. And it is in that latter case that Windows 10 fails. Windows 10 users overwhelmingly turn to the same desktop applications they use on Windows 7 and 8.x.

And that is Microsoft's fault.

Starting with Windows 8, and continuing through every release of Windows 10, Microsoft has saddled its customers with some of the most amateurish built-in apps that have ever graced a major computing platform. To a one,...