The End of the Windows 8 Era? Hardly (Premium)

Yes, support for Windows 8.x is ending soon. But Windows and its users are still living with the mistakes of that era. And always will be.

A lot of people have opinions about which version of Windows was the worst. Many of them are wrong.

Some will point to Windows Me, which is ridiculous given that Microsoft was already pushing forward with Windows 2000 and that it was only a limited side-show. Most also forget that Windows Me was the first public testing ground for several key technologies that went on to great success in Windows XP, including driver rollback, System Restore, and Universal Plug and Play (UPnP).

Some will naturally point to Windows Vista, the middling result of the several years that Microsoft wasted trying to bring Longhorn to market. This is a more defensible choice, since Microsoft’s inability to deliver disappointed developers right when Microsoft was also distracted, allowing competitors like Apple and Google to target and then dominate key new markets. And it would probably be the right answer if it weren’t for one other release.

Which is, of course, Windows 8, an internal coup that saw selfishness and political infighting undermine Microsoft’s greatest platform at the worst possible time. With the iPhone and iPad ushering in a new era of mobile- and multitouch-based personal computing, the leadership of the Windows team of that era, such as it was, overreacted and, sadly, overreached. The result was an embarrassment, a bareboned WinRT/Metro mobile platform that wasn’t just strapped on top of Windows like some bizarre Frankenstein’s monster, but something took over for key user experiences for all users, mobile or not. The product’s leader was fired before the product was even finished, and his key lieutenants were gone, either from the company or from that division, within a year or so.

My biggest fear with Windows 8 was that it was the death blow. I later evolved that view into “the iPhone was the asteroid that killed the Windows dinosaur,” and there’s some truth to that. But it’s important to put Microsoft’s reaction to the iPhone in perspective. While it’s unlikely that Microsoft could have done anything to blunt the success of Apple’s products and the resulting shift in the personal computing industry, it is very clear that Microsoft’s reaction—Windows 8—exacerbated the damage. Microsoft couldn’t have responded more poorly.

Tied to this, it’s important to remember that Windows 8 is also why Windows Phone failed. And that’s doubly tragic because Windows Phone, while not perfect, was chock full of good, customer-friendly ideas, and it was superior to what Apple and Google were offering, not just technically, but from a user experience standpoint. Had different people been in charge of Windows 8, that team would have worked with the Windows Phone team to create a converged platform that worked across PCs, tablets, and phones as far back as 2011. And that would have been Microsoft’s best chance for the future.

But that’s not what the Windows 8 team did. Thanks to its maniacal need to recreate everything important, a clear example of the “not invented here” syndrome, the Windows 8 team simply stole some ideas from Windows Phone and created something similar but different. Thanks to their belief that the Windows Phone team was inferior, so-called “B-teamers,” they did not work with those people to chart the way forward. They competed with them, and with the .NET team that had created their app and programming models. And they created a different and incompatible platform, one not based on Microsoft’s core developer technologies.

Windows 8 was the first major release of Windows to feature Microsoft’s reaction to the mobile and multitouch era kicked off by the iPhone and iPad. It was the wrong reaction. Doubly sad, if you stripped away the Metro nonsense that Microsoft foisted on its users, you’d find that Windows 8 was a solid upgrade to Windows 7, with the same level of improvements that its predecessor had offered. Had Microsoft just shipped that, with or without Windows Phone app compatibility, the customer base would have celebrated Microsoft.

But it didn’t, and the good in Windows 8 was lost in the bad. The Windows 8 user experience was a disaster, and it came with this new mobile platform that offered very limited capabilities compared to both the desktop apps of the past and the mobile platforms that were evolving around it. The Metro-based Start screen took over for desktop environment for launching apps, with no way to go back, another hallmark of the “not invented here” years. They nearly murdered .NET by going in their own direction, and while I’ve never examined this angle, this decision must have played as big a role in the open sourcing of .NET as anything. Otherwise, .NET would have simply died.

Microsoft’s leadership saw the disaster coming before Windows 8 even shipped. And it began scaling back the Windows 8 stupidity immediately. Within months of the release of Windows 8, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer started talking about how his firm had gotten “the blend” of mobile and desktop wrong in Windows 8. And the Windows 8 Update, released just a year later, brought many improvements including a smart Snap experience and windowed Metro apps. A subsequent Windows 8 Update 2 brought back the Start menu. And then Windows 10, delivered just three years later, mostly closed the book on that era by focusing on the desktop experience that most users needed most. Windows 10 also belatedly ushered in a single developer platform across Windows PCs, tablets, and phones. It had finally gotten the blend right.

But it was too late.

As bad, Windows 10 didn’t go far enough: for all the good work that the Windows team did in that release, there wasn’t the time—or energy—to reinvent the underlying mobile platform that had arrived in Windows 8. Now called the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) because developers could use it to write apps for multiple Microsoft platforms and not just Windows, UWP was just WinRT/Metro version 3. Microsoft had given up.

This is sad but understandable. There was no stomach for the resources and investments that a new platform would require. And there was no need for one either: no one was making new desktop apps anyway; Microsoft had observed as far back as Windows 7 that Windows developers were largely just maintaining existing codebases while new app development was targeting the web and, starting with the iPhone, mobile. And even if Microsoft could have somehow invented a new desktop platform, a new take on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, or whatever) that adopted some of the advances in UWP, that would have sent a bad message to the developers that did embrace WinRT/Metro/UWP. Their investments were for nothing, and Microsoft was abandoning them.

It wasn’t until the Windows 11 timeframe that Microsoft made a major change to UWP by decoupling it from specific Windows versions as the Windows App SDK. This was a good move given the confines of the system it still supported. But this doesn’t go far enough either: Windows App SDK apps are the same kind of Frankenstein’s monster that the Windows 8 team had created. They’re sort-of desktop apps with the same limitations as UWP, and not a true desktop technology or a new platform. This platform is not the successor to the Windows Presentation Foundation and the Longhorn-era technologies that marked the end of Microsoft’s true desktop SDK/API push.

And Microsoft will never do anything like that. So instead, we push forward with this vestigial and unloved technology from Windows 8, one that’s not based on .NET and is not really desktop technology.

As bad, Windows 11 marks a disappointing about-face to what made Windows 10 great. It’s a return to the ideals of Windows 8, which we know was a disaster, a system that embraces mobile and simple over desktop and complex. We are reliving the past, like some Greek myth.

So sure, let’s celebrate that the end of support for the final version of Windows 8.x is coming. But we must also see this as a pyrrhic victory. Few people are actually still using Windows 8.x, after all, so the end of support won’t impact a large audience. Instead, most customers are using Windows 10, which one might think of as Windows 8.2 given its underpinnings. And we will never escape the terribleness that Microsoft injected into this platform in Windows 8. It’s like a cancer lurking inside of Windows, compromising the experience for all of us every single day. And that cancer will continue long past January 10, 2023, when support for Windows 8.1 ends.

We will be living with Windows 8.x forever.