Living with Windows 7: And Now, The End is Near (Premium)

With Windows 7’s support end-of-life just days away, I find myself thinking about Windows 10, not Windows 7.

I don’t miss it.

Yes, there are little things that are better in Microsoft’s most recent desktop OS. Probably many of them. But the most striking thing about using Windows 7, really, is how familiar it is, how similar it is to Windows 10. For all of the work that Microsoft did, foolishly, to try and transform the platform into a “touch-first” mobile system with Windows 8 and then step back the most egregious changes in Windows 8.1 and then Windows 10, all it really did was arrive at a fairly logical conclusion. Windows 10 is, in many ways, where we would have arrived had Windows 8 never happened.

The vestiges of Windows 8 past, of course, are the biggest problems with Windows 10. Most would point to the obvious: The mobile apps platform (UWP) and app store (now called Microsoft Store) that so few people use. But if we’re honest about how Windows has evolved over the past 10 years, that isn’t the biggest problem.

No. The biggest problem is that Microsoft has tried in futile fashion to further monetize a product that its users only purchase once every several years. And the results are both negative and obvious. They are:

In-box advertising. This debuted in Windows 8, when I accurately called it a “slippery slope,” and it has since escalated over various versions of Windows 10.

In-box crapware, Another attempt at post-purchase monetization and one that was, in this case, first used by PC makers. (And always reviled by users, and even by Microsoft, which set up its now-hobbled/defunct Signature PC program to show PC makers how to deliver high-quality products to their collective customers. Oh the irony.)

In box-telemetry. The over-reliance on telemetry to triage and fix bugs also came from an effort to lower the cost of making Windows, so it really falls under that same monetization heading: Microsoft once maintained a large team of human testers who would both create tests to find bugs and would respond when customers had issues. Now it relies almost exclusively on in-box telemetry that cannot be disabled by individuals, and the results are obvious: Most Windows 10 feature updates, which are really full product upgrades, have had major reliability problems.

None of this was true when the software giant released Windows 7, and while the lack of a giant testing team can arguably impact this product too, it’s old enough and well-understood enough—-and isn’t changed at all, as is Windows 10—that the negative ramifications are comparably minor. Collectively, these three areas, plus the mobile app platform and store, are what makes Windows 7 truly different from Windows 10. The rest is just façade (like the use of Aero Glass vs. the flat UI that debuted in Windows 8 and continues today) and a long list of minor changes that would have occurred naturally over any decade. That, yes, can add up—both positively and negatively—over time.

But that’s the thing. Do they add up?

I have often noted that one excellent way to judge any Windows upgrade—and, really, any software upgrade—is to go back and use the older version again. What you’ll typically discover is that you miss new features in the newer version, and that that reality is what makes the upgrade worthwhile. Moving from Windows 7 to Windows 8, I recall stating that the problem then was that Windows 8’s touch-first and mobile nonsense obscured some nice improvements, like the OneDrive placeholders functionality. And of course moving from Windows 8 to 8.1, 8.1.1, and then Windows 10 was a very positive experience because the bar was so low: Windows 8 was that broken.

But going back two OS versions is very telling in this case. Today, we think of Windows 10 perhaps overly-positively because Windows 8 was so bad. Comparing it to Windows 7 is another story.

There’s some irony there, too: Windows 7 was really just a minor update to Windows Vista, a fix for some obvious issues, like performance and resource usage. And the passage of time meant that some early Vista problems, like older PCs that couldn’t handle Aero glass, simply solved themselves. Windows 7 is very highly-regarded, but the reality is that all the important changes arrived first in Vista, which is still unfairly reviled, and that Microsoft issued a single service pack and then let that OS stagnate for the entire rest of its life cycle. There were serious problems—like Windows Update—that Microsoft only fixed in Windows 8 or later, a bid on its part, I think, to drive upgrades.

For all that, Windows 7 is still the more cohesive and solid product, and that’s true even here in 2020. As I wrote previously, it is notable for being the last version of Windows that is true to the original NT vision. It is a desktop OS, not first and foremost, but completely. That’s all it is. In the worldview of the Windows team of 2009, Windows was/is for PCs, not for “devices.” Yes, Microsoft tried to adapt Windows to other device types back then, but the results were different products. Windows Mobile. Windows CE. Windows Embedded and so on. No one was pretending that they were all the same. Or that writing a single app that ran on all of them made even a lick of sense.

The market forces that doomed Windows and the PC to a declining role in our daily lives could have happened differently, with Microsoft playing a more prominent role. They didn’t for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being the antitrust issues and Microsoft’s lost decade, which I’ve already discussed. And while we as Microsoft or Windows enthusiasts might bemoan this reality, and wish to conjure up alternate realities in which Microsoft or Windows “won,” or whatever, let’s be honest here. What happened wasn’t perfect. But it’s better.

It’s better because heterogeneous and diversity and openness is always better. And are perhaps always destined to win in the long run, at least in the technology markets that we care about. That doesn’t means that “Linux is better than Windows,” “Android is better than iOS,” or similar. But it is perhaps notable that closed platforms tend to open up over time, not because their makers want to do the right thing but because their hands are forced.

Even Microsoft defeats, like Windows phone, should be viewed as natural steps towards this future: Windows phone would never have happened if the iPhone didn’t happen and disrupt the industry (and the world). Instead, we would have gotten a tired and uninspiring succession of Windows Mobile releases. That we are as a community still mourning Windows phone now is kind of interesting. It never should have even happened. And was, perhaps, doomed to fail.

Looked at from a different angle, Windows 7, like the traditional PC, is in many ways a relic. A useful relic, to be sure, but a relic. A PC user of the early 1990s would gaze upon the futuristic flat screens and small form factors of today’s PCs with wonder, I guess, but would immediately recognize these PCs for what they are. They haven’t really changed that much. But the smartphones and deeply-connected services on which we all rely would be truly magical to them. Even science fiction fans would be surprised.

Looking anew at Windows 10, I will say this: After a few years of trying to make its twice-yearly feature updates (version upgrades) seem like major leaps forward, Microsoft has at last calmed down and is delivering less feature-packed releases each time. The cumulative effect is little different than the situation of yesteryear, when the software giant would release a new Windows version around every three years. Actually, it may even be slower: Windows 10 version 2004 doesn’t really look or work that different than the first Windows 10 version from mid-2015.

As is so often the case, it wasn’t clear thinking and good strategy that got Microsoft to this new place, it was reality: The reality that its twice-yearly upgrade strategy was too aggressive and led to massive reliability problems. That the mobile platform it debuted in Windows 8 continues to go nowhere fast, that its users and developers simply do not care about this nonsense. And that all that in-box terribleness I mentioned above—the ads, the crapware, and telemetry—have all had a net negative impact on the product and its users.

So here we are, ten years later. Microsoft has still not figured out how to effectively monetize a product that its users only “buy” once every several years. The PC is better than ever, but it has an identity crisis that continues into 2020 with Windows 10X, Microsoft’s latest attempt to pretend that we use devices and not very specific devices called PCs. And the PC industry is as small or smaller than it was when Windows 7 first arrived. Today, it is less than two-thirds the size it was at its peak in 2011.

And Microsoft is about to kill off Windows 7 this coming Tuesday.

I have never felt so mixed (and so mixed up) at such a milestone. For most Windows releases, 10 years had been enough. Windows 2000 begat Windows XP, which started off poorly but became one of the most beloved Windows versions over time and the one with the longest support lifecycle; by the time it disappeared, the world had seen multiple XP versions (Tablet, Media Center, SP2), Vista, and 7. Windows Vista, unfairly hated, begat Windows 7, which is now the most popular version of Windows of all time; its usage was never particularly high to begin with. And Windows 8, a real dud, led us—or, dragged us kicking and screaming—to Windows 10, which is very much an improvement over its predecessor. Literally no one is using Windows 8.0 today, and 8.1.x usage is minimal.

But is Windows 10 an improvement over Windows 7? Reluctantly, I have to say no. It is not.

In using Windows 7 semi-exclusively over the past few weeks—only my work on the WinForms Notepad Project has occurred under Windows 10 in this time—I have been reminded, repeatedly, of how much I prefer this clean, minimalistic system. There are weird little issues and differences. But at a high level, the workflow is identical, and it just works. I’m going to miss it. And I worry about what this says about Windows 10 and the future.

That’s a topic for another time, of course. And while I eagerly await some future in which legacy Win32 apps are run in some container/virtualization solution and we finally move past the aging Windows 8/10 user interface, I will for now pause and regard Windows 7 with great fondness. It is the end of a truly great platform. And it will soon be history.