2016 Was a Monster of a Year for Windows 10

Windows 10 is wonderful but controversial, and 2016 was in many ways a landmark year for Microsoft's last great desktop platform. This story is still being told, and the ending is unclear. But Windows 10 dominated my mind-share and coverage this past year. And any discussion of this product must by nature cover both the highs and the lows. There were many of both.

To be fair to Microsoft as well as the people who build this product, I will state up front that I am overwhelmingly and unhesitatingly a fan and enthusiastic user of Windows 10. I believe in the vision for this product, and that it meets the needs of a diverse user base across a wide variety of PC and device form factors.

That Windows 10 arrived during a transitional era of personal computing is no one's fault. And that our perhaps too deeply and interconnected world of social media, where everyone on earth can have a platform for their opinions---moderate, insane, or somewhere in-between---is likewise a matter of circumstance. But the volume of complaining that occurs today is at a level that has never been possible before, and we---me, you, Microsoft---are all still trying to adapt to this new reality. I naturally recoil at what I think of as the "everybody's a winner" mentality that pervades today, and I would ask all of you, all of us, really, myself included, to remember that noise is not the same thing as viable or valuable feedback. It's not the same as truth.

By which I mean, it's important to put these events in perspective. There is a lot of complaining about Windows 10 these days, but not all of it merits the attention and outrage---faux or real---that we've seen, either from individuals on Twitter, perhaps, or the publications that pander nonsense in a mad bid for page views.

The thing is, transitions like the one that is happening all around Windows 10 are difficult. They're messy, and they're uncertain. The heart, or core, of what Microsoft has done with Windows 10 is both pure and important. But Microsoft, a big company full of well-meaning people, I'm sure, can likewise make incredible mistakes. Mistakes of strategy. Mistakes of hubris. Just ... mistakes. And Windows 10 has been molded by both ends of this spectrum. By the good and the bad. By the yin and the yang.

And so when I look back on 2016, which I've spent an inordinate amount of time doing this past week, I can see both sides of this story. I have thought about how I might pull some narrative out of this, some pithy way to explain away it all, to make sense of the jumble of events through which we we all just navigated.

And I can't, not really. But what I can do is recap some of the stories I see through that fog, and hopefully this, collectively, will provide a clean picture of what happened to Windows 10. I see a few major stories. And then several smaller events too.

And it goes like this.
One billion? Not so fast
At a January 2015 press event, Microsoft's Terry Myerson infamou...