Microsoft Finally Hits Pause on New Windows Features (Premium)

Microsoft only announced a handful of new features that will come to Windows 10 in a future upgrade. That’s great news.

While we could generalize how Microsoft has improved—or at least added to—Windows 10 over each of its five releases, the one constant has been a piling on of new features. This made sense with the initial release, which had to fix all of the problems that Microsoft inflicted on the world with Windows 8. But its made less sense more recently as Windows 10 has matured and moved to a biannual release schedule.

I’ve had many complaints about Windows 10 over the years, of course: I care deeply about this platform. And rather than simply cheerlead Microsoft, no matter what it does, I’ve always strived to fight for what’s right for Windows users. Not what’s right for me, specifically, though there is, of course, some overlap. But rather on what is right generally.

One of my biggest complaints has concerned the needless addition of nonsense features—big and small—to each Windows 10 version. At some point, I feel like we’ve lost the script on what Windows is, how people use it, and what types of improvements actually make sense to most users.

So what’s “right” when it comes improving Windows, you ask? How can we possibly generalize such a thing when there are so many diverse users, each with their own needs and wants?

Easy. All we have to do is be honest about how Windows is really used today, and about what its role is in our lives. And that role is easily identified, and as easily understood: It’s about productivity.

The world isn’t black and white, I know. There are people reading this right now thinking about how they watch movies, read books, play games, or perform other non-productivity activities on Windows PCs every day. It’s OK, I’m aware.

But this goes back to my point about “optimizing for the every day, and not for the occasional.” With the user base moving to mobile devices for most non-work-related tasks—and for many work tasks, too—Windows can and should return to its central mission of productivity.

Well, I have good news. That’s exactly what’s happening.

To be fair, it was already happening, in a way: Windows 10 version 1803 contains only a single major new feature, Timeline, and that is very much about productivity. The previous two updates piled on features for “creators,” which was just a (creative) way to describe productivity in a more friendly fashion.

What’s changing—in 1803 as well as in the coming release, which will be called version 1809—is that the feature train is slowing to a crawl. Instead of introducing dozens of new features, as Microsoft did a year ago, it is instead introducing only a handful of truly useful major features with each release.

Can I get a hallelujah?

But there’s more: In addition to the language shift away from creators, which was overdue, and the slowing down of major new features, Microsoft has finally learned to stop making promises it can’t and won’t keep. This year, finally, Microsoft said that the new features it introduced will arrive when they are ready, and not necessarily in the next release. That’s good.

(Bad: Joe Belfiore did lie about people “assuming” when new features would arrive in the past. As I already demonstrated, Joe promised specific new features in a specific Windows 10 version at Build last year. That bit was disingenuous.)

This all represents a more mature and reasonable approach to upgrading Windows 10 over time. This a legacy platform that does not require massive shifts in features and functions with each release, especially when those releases are coming at a rate that is six times faster than was the case with previous versions of Windows.

There will always be things to complain about, of course: The de-emphasis of Windows in favor of Microsoft 365 is ill-defined, I think, and doesn’t impact consumers at all. But whatever. This new approach to adding features is good news. And I think we all deserve this moment to applaud and appreciate Microsoft for finally making it happen.