Quality, Quality, Quality (Premium)

Microsoft’s Windows lead Panos Panay appeared virtually at Computex 2022 and had some interesting things to say about Windows 11 and the PC.

Panos, whose official title is, incredibly, Executive Vice President & Chief Product Officer, can be seen sitting at a desk, presumably in Redmond, alongside Nicole Dezen, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Device Partner Sales. The discussion: the new era of the PC and how Windows 11 is empowering people in a hybrid world.

Here are some key takeaways, but only from what Panos said.

(Almost) one year of Windows 11
Microsoft “launched” (really, announced) Windows 11 in late June 2021 and then shipped it just three months later. So it’s obviously time for a victory lap.

“Let’s talk about the momentum,” Dezen begins.

“I think the whole team has been, it’s like this combination of feeling[s], you know, honored but really humbled by the customers’ reaction[s] to Windows 11,” he said when prompted about what has surprised him the most. “The energy is palpable. Again, from a data standpoint, people are accepting the upgrade offer at twice the rate we saw for Windows 10.”

That is an incredible number that I have trouble with.

With Windows 10, the upgrade offer was highly anticipated and desired because its predecessor, Windows 8, was so horrible. But Windows 11 is being compared to Windows 10, which was high quality. So this seems dubious to me, and I can only assume that it's a minimal slice of data related to an initial wave of enthusiasts. It seems … literally impossible given the relative situations.

“Windows 10 had that great moment,” he said, dismissively. “But Windows 11 in its moment, next to it, you know, that’s where the team, it gets a lot of energy, because it knows we’re kind of driving in the right direction for our customers every day.”

Read: you shouldn’t expect any meaningful updates to Windows 10 going forward.

Business adoption of Windows 11
“Businesses right now, they’re adopting Windows 11 faster than we saw in any previous version of Windows,” he claimed.

Again, I have problems with this. I cannot believe that businesses are adopting Windows 11 faster than they adopted Windows 7, which arrived in the wake of Windows Vista. It’s literally impossible. My guess here is that he’s comparing the literal number of business users instead of the percentage, and that the market is now just bigger than it was in 2009. There’s no other way to believe this quote.

Quality of Windows 11
Another dubious statistic from a company that lives and breathes telemetry data.

“[Windows 11] has the highest quality scores,” Panos says. “Here’s the most important thing for our team. Quality, quality, quality. People using it are finding the quality in the product, which has just been awesome. That also translates to product satisfaction. It is the highest product satisfaction of any version of Window...