Windows 10, PCs, and the Future of Apps (Premium)

This Spring, Microsoft will make its upteenth attempt to get developers excited about Windows 10 at Build 2017. But as users have discovered, the apps platform in Windows 10 isn’t in any way enticing. And that’s just fine.

Pity poor Microsoft: It just hasn’t been able to get developers to adopt a major apps platform since the slow-motion Longhorn train wreck of the early 2000s. In Longhorn’s wake, mobile and web usage have exploded, leaving Microsoft and its traditional personal computing platform behind. And you know what? I think that’s great.

It’s great because Microsoft’s real future is the cloud anyway, and as the most prestigious provider of productivity solutions in the world, it has a rich opportunity to take advantage of other, more popular mobile platforms.

But it’s great for us as well.

With mobile devices, especially smartphones, assuming the mainstream role in the personal computing market, PCs have, in turn, become more vertical devices that are focused on specific productivity scenarios.

Today, there are entire categories of tasks that most people no longer perform on the PC, including reading and browsing, enjoying video content, social networking, light gaming, and much more. But increasingly there are other light productivity tasks—email, document editing, messaging and other communications, and so on—that are likewise done more often on devices, and less so on PCs.

We tend to beat this metaphor to death, but it’s apt: Mobile devices have become the cars, as Steve Jobs noted, and PCs are now trucks. Yes, this means that most people don’t actually need a PC anymore, or just need one rarely. But it also means that, for those people who do need them, PCs—like trucks—are just as valuable as ever.

That point is often lost in any discussion about the decline of the PC, of course. Because a headline noting the “death” of the PC is a lot more dramatic than a nuanced story about our transitioning usage patterns.

But I have long believed in the “best tool for the job” philosophy. And while one might be able to perform all of their personal computing tasks on a single device, I find it both freeing and more productive to use the different devices for different tasks.

Our workflows are all different, of course. But I use a real PC to get real work done. This regularly includes writing, of course, note-taking (often while on a Skype call), but also research and information gathering (in the form of web browsing), email, scheduling (including such things as booking flights or trains, tasks I would never complete on a mobile device), graphics and photo editing, podcasting, posting to this website, and publishing book updates. And then there are the tasks I perform less frequently: Video editing, DVD/CD “ripping,” OS testing in virtual machines, and so on.

That’s a lot of stuff. And while much of it could be done on a modern hybrid device—a Chromebook that can also run Android apps, perhaps, or an iPad Pro, less so—it’s also fair to say that I need a PC regardless. So why not just use the best tool for the job? The PC is that tool. For those jobs.

I use a smartphone every day, like most people. It’s great for certain tasks—photography, obviously, social networking, reading emails (but not typing long replies), reading, browsing, and so on. There are also some mobile apps I do use daily, like Duolingo, for language learning.

I use an iPad mini, a small tablet, to read news in the morning over coffee because I prefer the bigger screen. And I use it while traveling to read other content (Kindle books and magazines, typically), watch rented movies, and the like.

But let me bring this back to Windows 10. You’ll note that two of the three devices I use regularly or semi-regularly are not Windows devices. That’s because Windows phones and tablets are a Titanic-level disaster with no app or ecosystem support. Windows makes sense on PCs. And that’s pretty much it.

Microsoft, of course, keeps trying. It has been very clear about its lack of desire to compete in the smartphone market, of course, but it has seen some success in a hybrid market for PCs that can also be tablets, so there is still some effort there.

But this will be Microsoft’s next defeat, and the issue is one of usage, as always. If you accept the truth that mobile devices are the norm, because they are, then it’s only natural to assume that the popular hybrid devices of the future will be mobile devices that can do PC-like tasks sometimes, and not the reverse. (PCs that can be used like mobile devices sometimes.) If you don’t accept this truth, then you’re on the wrong side of history, sorry. And all you have to do is look at the lackluster collection of apps in the Windows Store to see the light.

Microsoft can’t fix this problem. And as Mary Jo Foley and I have observed on Windows Weekly in recent months, the end result is that the most successful and most useful Windows Store apps won’t ever be the native Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps that Microsoft has been trying to promote. They will instead be hybrid UWP apps that let developers bring apps in from elsewhere and sell them in the store.

Centennial apps—now called Desktop Bridge apps—are the primary example of a hybrid UWP app today. These apps are really just classic Win32 desktop applications from the past—Adobe Photoshop Elements, Evernote, whatever—that are placed in a UWP container and sandboxed from the system. To the user, these apps work just like the normal Win32 applications. To the system, however, they are safe, and secure, and reliable. They can be uninstalled in one click. They don’t leave DLLs and other garbage all over the PC.

And, most crucially, they can be extended with certain UWP features, like live tile and notification support. They are hybrid apps.

Desktop Bridge apps help bring legacy applications into the modern era. But future new app development will almost certainly occur through another hybrid app type called Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs. Yes, PWAs are truly universal in that they will run on any OS with a web browser, including iOS and Android. But don’t worry that this makes Windows less valuable or necessary: As I noted last year, Microsoft is going to embrace and extend PWAs in Windows 10. They will become Store apps on Windows 10. They will look and work like native apps. Like Desktop Bridge apps, they will adopt key Windows 10 technologies, making them unique on the PC.

Since I deal with push back all the time on this kind of thing, I’ll also note that this transition is already happening. As Microsoft’s Brandon Heenan noted recently, “Windows users [already] spend more than half their time on the web.” And that usage is going up. This fact explains both the strategy behind Windows 10 Cloud and that product’s name. Microsoft knows that the PWA platform—the cloud—is, in fact, the future of Windows.

So, no, “pure” UWP apps do not matter, which is great because most of them are so terrible. Instead, Microsoft is already making the past better with Desktop Bridge. And Windows 10 has a great future apps platform coming in the form of PWAs, too.

UWP has failed. Long live UWP.