Programming Windows: One Billion (Premium)

Confusion reigned in the wake of Microsoft’s consumer-focused Windows 10 event in January 2015. There was a lot of good news, not the least of which was that Windows 10 would be a free upgrade for Windows 7 and 8.x users during the first year of availability. And there was some bad news: Windows RT was being put out to pasture and would not be upgraded to Windows 10, leaving the future of Windows on ARM in doubt. But there were a lot of unanswered questions too.

Terry Myerson had seemed to indicate that users would be forced to let Microsoft keep their PCs continually upgraded as a condition of getting Windows 10 for free. But even more confusing was the way he framed the support lifecycle. “Once a device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will be keeping it current for the supported lifetime of the device,” he had said.

That was not how Windows support had ever worked. To date, each major Windows version was supported for ten years, a timeframe split into a five-year mainstream support period, during which Microsoft could provide functional updates, and a five-year extended support period, during which it would only supply bug and security fixes. Because the firm typically released a new version of Windows every three years, the support lifecycles for the previous two or three versions would overlap, giving customers the option to stay with whatever version they were using or, if they wished, they could pay to upgrade to a newer version.

Windows 10 seemed to change this. There was no promise of ten years of support---though several years later, Microsoft would quietly revert to this system---and with forced upgrades and two new versions of Windows 10 appearing every year, it appeared that customers---especially business customers---would be spending a lot of time upgrading and rebooting their PCs. But that line about the “supported lifetime of the device” was particularly troubling. It didn’t seem to mean anything.

Sidenote: Within two years, Microsoft would use this line to justify ending support for Windows 10 on PCs that ran specific Intel chipset versions. This was actually done to punish Intel, as the two companies were at the time in a dispute over which company should upgrade the firmware on Microsoft’s Surface PCs. But even this incident did little to clarify the support policy for Windows 10.

Instead of explaining itself, Microsoft simply pushed forward: it released Windows 10 Technical Preview 2 in the wake of the consumer event, publicizing the many functional changes it had made in response to feedback from the Windows Insider Program. And this build included some of the new features Microsoft had shown off, like Cortana integration, the new Xbox app, and the full-screen Start experience for tablets.

There were also hints of trouble to come. With Windows 10, Microsoft would be much more aggressive about pushing its own apps and services, and this version of the OS would come with multiple entry points fo...