The Way Forward for Windows (Premium)

With Microsoft killing Windows 10X, many are scrambling to figure out the way forward. But the answer is right there in front of us.

That answer? S Mode, or what we used to call Windows 10 S.

I know, that sounds like crazy talk. But bear with me a moment.

That S Mode/Windows 10 S has a tortured history is, of course, obvious and well-understood today.  But it could have been worse. When Terry Myerson first told me about this initiative during a back-door meeting at CES 2017, it was still called Windows 10 Cloud. And I was able to point out some important shortcomings that I’m still surprised had never occurred to Terry at the time. Key among them that charging customers to “upgrade” from Windows 10 S to normal Windows 10 would be a “gotcha” moment that they would feel betrayed by. As a result, Microsoft never charged customers to make this change and it eventually made that policy official.

S Mode, as we now call it, evolved over time but it never really overcame its core limitation: This mode can be enabled or disabled, but there’s no middle ground. That is, one can’t choose to run in S mode but grant exceptions to one or more desktop applications. And I’ve never understood why Microsoft didn’t make that single, crucial change. It would allow users to benefit from all of the advantages of S mode—improved system security and performance, primarily—while not restricting them solely to Store and web apps.

In January 2017, I opined that S Mode (still called Windows 10 Cloud at that time) could be the future of Windows. This isn’t the first time I believed we could be witnessing the next generation of Windows: I described Windows RT as possibly being the next NT, for example. But let’s step through this.

S Mode, unlike Windows RT (and Windows 10 on ARM), isn’t tied to a single platform. It’s a literal mode that works with any Windows 10 version.

Microsoft allows customers running Windows 10 in S Mode to switch to the normal operating mode in which desktop applications are no longer restricted. Choice is always good, of course, but this is just a half step that ensures that very few customers will ever experience the benefits of S Mode because there are apps or drivers/utilities that they need, and S Mode does not allow for that.

For S Mode to be successful, the Store app/UWP platform needs to mature to the point where few users wouldn’t be able to find everything they need between the Microsoft Store and the web. That wasn’t the case in 2017, obviously—in 2017, I wrote that “Microsoft needs to solve the inadequacies of the UWP/Store ecosystem before users will embrace this smaller, lighter, safer, more robust platform”—but it’s also sadly true today. But Microsoft has been working for years to solve this problem, and since S Mode is just “real Windows” with one big limitation, whatever it comes up with will benefit those using S Mode.

Anyway, here’s the fix.

Going forward, all Window 10 product editions should simply ship in S Mode. Not “by default,” but at all times. S mode goes away because it’s no longer a mode. It’s just what Windows 10 is.

Naturally, users will still need to run the occasional desktop application or install a desktop-based hardware driver and its supporting utilities. In such cases, the user can be warned about the danger of doing so, whatever, but the system should treat them like the adult that they are and let them install the desktop app(s) they need. These apps will be exceptions, essentially, to what used to be called S Mode.

Could there be some technical advance that makes this safer? Perhaps the Win32 container that Microsoft failed to make work with Windows 10X? Yeah, sure. But until and unless that solution is ready, there’s no reason S Mode with an exception list couldn’t just work.

Put simply, we already have a way forward for Windows 10. It’s called S Mode, and with just a little tinkering, it can simply become what we now think of as Windows. There’s no reason to fork the platform with other variants, and this system should work fine across both Intel/AMD- and Qualcomm-based PCs. In fact, having a warning about emulated x86/x64 app installs on Windows 10 on ARM-based PCs makes tons of sense to me as well.

So let’s not mourn Windows 10X. It never made sense. But S Mode? Yeah. That can work.