Details Matter (Premium)

I was recently organizing some older computers to give away. Among them was the second of three Intel NUCs I’ve owned, which is based on an 8th-generation Intel Core chipset. I brought it up for the first time in many, many months, noticed it was on Windows 10 version 21H1, and decided to check whether it would be offered the Windows 11 upgrade.

It was, during Setup no less, another minor data point for my soon-to-be-obsolete data set concerning this process, and I went through with it because I’d never experienced that offer before: one of the weird things about my job is that I usually force big upgrades early because I need to write about them. Anyway, that took a while, and it gave me a chance to again reconsider Windows 10, a system I’ve not used, probably, since mid-2021, when the first Windows 11 beta arrived.

To me, Windows 10 looks tired and dated today, and I can clearly see how its flat user interface was designed to work well across phones, tablets, and traditional PCs. For example, you can resize any of the modern apps, like Settings or whatever, so that it has the rough size and shape of a portrait mode phone app, and it still makes sense. It’s shocking how naïve that design paradigm seems today, and it’s disconcerting to remember that by the time Microsoft actually shipped Windows 10 in mid-2015, its still-new CEO had already killed Windows Phone internally.

That’s incredible, but Microsoft pushed forward with this obsolete design for several more years before finally giving way to a successor, Windows 11, with a new design. Windows 11 is very much a surface-level coat of paint on the solid underpinnings of its predecessor, and that’s both good and bad. But it is at least fresh and modern looking, and a welcome change.

Of course, a surface-level coat of paint is all the current Windows team is capable of. Windows 10 was a last hurrah, of sorts, for big ideas, a final attempt to make this aging legacy platform make sense in a modern new mobile world that had rendered it obsolete for most non-productivity personal computing tasks. Windows 10 was Microsoft trying to keep Windows relevant for another generation by making the system work across several different hardware platforms. Windows 11 is … what? Treading water? An attempt to keep its fed-up users from jumping ship to the Mac, Linux, or Chrome OS?

To be clear, I like Windows 11, and I hope it’s obvious that I very much prefer how it looks. That it generally works well is just a byproduct of its heritage: it’s good because Windows 10 was good too. But there is no more groundbreaking architectural work being done. The surface-level is all we have. But even that is easily scratched away. As we’ve discussed so often, there is plenty of old UI from Windows 10, Windows 8, and even older Windows versions still buried one or two levels below that surface.

I recognize this kind of thing because I’m so good at it myself: when I “clean” my office, most of what I do is just hide clutter by stuffing it in drawers, bins, and other hidden places, creating a sense of cleanliness and tidiness. That’s what Windows 11 is, the appearance of modernity and good design.

And … whatever. This kind of thing no longer bothers me as much as it used to, though I know that some of you won’t sleep at night until Microsoft finally exorcises Control Panel from Windows for good, or whatever. What does bother me, however, is how this surface-level mentality betrays a broader lack of detail that pervades Windows 11. Even the new UI isn’t consistent. And it’s getting maddening.

Consider just the past two months or so. In October, Microsoft shipped Windows 11 version 22H2, a minor upgrade that, among other things, added some UI changes to File Explorer. But between that initial release of 22H2 and what we’ll now call the November update, since Microsoft never really bothered to name it anything, File Explorer’s UI changed yet again. And Microsoft added two other new features, neither of which anyone thought was coming in this release: a way to access Task Manager by right-clicking the Taskbar (fixing one of the biggest complaints about the original Windows 11) and a new Search “pill” that replaced the old icon with a wider icon.

The slapdash nature of these updates should bother anyone who cares about Windows. But it’s the lack of detail that really gets to me. That new search icon (“pill”) is wider than any other icon on the Taskbar, and so it throws off the symmetry of its otherwise centered design. Worse, it’s not as functional as before as it inexplicably lost the pop-up menu that appeared when you moused over the old icon. Seriously.

But Microsoft wasn’t done: last week, Microsoft quietly updated OneDrive to a new version that had never even been tested in the Insider Program at all. And this one isn’t just a surface-level change: in addition to the new Windows 11-style Settings interface, which looks great, Microsoft also added two big features: the ability to sync/backup the Music and Videos folders to OneDrive (in addition to doing so for Desktop, Documents, and Pictures), and a new Notifications interface for fine-tuning which notifications you want to receive.

Those are nice additions. But just like those previous two unexpected new features—Task Manager from the Taskbar and the Search pill—it’s the sheer inconsistency here that kills me. In each case, some machines get the new feature(s) and some don’t. And it’s worse with the new OneDrive, where I’m seeing three permutations of the UI: all old UI, a mix of all and new UI, and all new UI. All are on the same build number. It’s … crazy.

It will probably clean itself up at some point, I guess, but there’s no way in Windows Update or elsewhere to fix it as a user. You just have to wait. And you had no idea it was changing, to begin with.

Back when Windows 10 was the primary concern, we knew that we could count on two feature updates (version upgrades) every year. We might not have liked that. And there were different levels of these updates, of course, where some were major with lots of new features and some were minor. But that was the schedule, and Microsoft kept to it. That bit, at least, was predictable.

With Windows 11, we were promised one feature update per year, which we cheered, and while we got that in October, we’ve also gotten several “Moments” updates in the few short months since then too. All of which have been inconsistently rolled out to the user base, haphazardly documented, if at all—Microsoft still hasn’t even acknowledged the OneDrive update, by the way—and none of which were so critical that we needed them right away and without any testing. There was no careful march through the various Windows Insider Preview channels for each feature, no hint that any of this was just coming. Instead, Microsoft just … released them. Publicly. To some of our PCs. But not all of them. A gross reminder that we don’t own anything we use every day and that we’re at the whim of people who just don’t seem to care about quality anymore.

Whatever one thinks of Windows these days, it’s clear that this product is no longer properly managed. Most would agree that the whole Windows as a Service thing that Microsoft created for Windows 10 was a disaster. But this new Moments rollout “strategy,” is in its own small-minded, way, even worse.

And who could possibly have predicted that?