THE WINDOWS PEOPLE WANTED
To understand what’s good and bad about Windows 10 you have to understand what went wrong with Windows 8. Back in 2012 Microsoft made a bold and risky move reinventing its famous operating system by giving Windows a complete new user interface. While the Windows UI basically hasn’t changed since Windows 95, Microsoft believed what people do with a PC, the way they do it and the devices they do it with had changed drastically. Internet, e-mail, digital cameras, Facebook, Google, the cloud, iTunes, Spotify, smartphones… all this didn’t really exist in 1995 and it changed everything we do with a computer. So it was time to think about a whole new way to interact with a PC. A better way. A way customized for modern user behavior and present and future devices. Windows 8 was about to leave the past hard-line behind and rise to this challenge.
But did it deliver? Well, not quite. However the problem wasn’t the innovative approach, but the incompleteness in how they made this radical move. Handling Windows 8 would mean jumping around between the old and the new world, leaving users confused. Desktop was gone, but not really. Opening a traditional app would bring the old interface back, but not the whole thing. New gestures were optimized for touch with no (or just bad) equivalent for mouse and keyboard.
Obviously people didn’t like Windows 8. It was a confusing incomplete system with a mix of new but not thoroughly thought out ideas and remains of the old world which had been compressed and didn’t work the way people were used to. The whole OS was a mess and people blamed the bad user experience on the lack of the UI they had been used to and cursed everything new in Windows 8.
Fixing this problem could have been done in two ways: Continuing the chosen path, fully developing the new ideas and releasing a sophisticated Windows 9 which would make it worth for people to change some habits because it improves the way we work, play and interact with our PCs. Or turning around, bringing a quick hotfix Windows 8.1 to calm down the traditionalists, skip the whole idea with a modern Windows 9 and go straight back to a Windows 7ish (or Windows 95ish) System: Windows 10.
THE GOOD
_ UNIFIED & INTUITIVE: In Windows 10 the two worlds of traditional and modern Windows are finally unified in one interface. When you start your PC you see the Desktop and a taskbar with a start button. There you have the start menu with all your applications and settings as well as modern apps and live tiles. It makes sense, it is simple and intuitive. There aren’t any hidden menus which only come up with touch gestures or complicated mouse or keyboard shortcuts either. Everything you need is right there in your taskbar or in the start menu. Swipe gestures are optional, but mouse and keyboard input works good as well.
_ PERSONAL: As a result of the unique development process which let the community participate from the beginning and included their feedback along the way, Windows 10 is a really personal system that gives users lots of choices to individualize the system for their needs.
_ UNIVERSAL APP STORE: Having the same apps run on Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox might finally encourage developers to build apps for the Windows Store. Bringing the same app store to all of Microsoft’s platforms might solve Window’s app problem – eventually.
_ FUNCTIONALITY: With Cortana, Edge, the Action Center and the Xbox app Microsoft delivers really useful functionality and, even if some of these are still early stage (especially Edge) and lack some key functionality, brings additional value to both Windows 7 and Windows 8.
_ DESIGN COLOR: Microsoft also corrected some of the design mistakes from Windows 8. The dark themed taskbar looks great and live tiles in design colors in a more Windows Phone’ish way are a visual improvement over their ugly predecessor’s multicolored live tiles.
_ AS A SERVICE: Best about “the last version of Windows” is that this is just the beginning. With “Windows as a service” we can expect lots of improvements and new features as updates to Windows 10 go on. So the cycle of every second Windows version being a bad one should be ended, too.
THE BAD
_ DESKTOP: The Desktop is back in the center of the system. The only question is why?! Most people’s desktops are either completely empty or a chaotic accumulation of documents, folders and links that don’t fit anywhere else and that you can’t even find in the mess. Either way it’s useless. The Windows 8 start screen presented a clean and structured view of your apps, showing current information like new mails, upcoming appointments, updates from Facebook in live tiles which brought much more value to your home screen than the static and crowded Desktop.
_ DOUBLE ROUTES: Windows 10 lacks a clear structure where to find your content. Apps for example can be found in the start menu, pinned to the taskbar or on the desktop. Do we need three different places for our apps? At this point a “less is more approach” would have been nice.
_ CHARM BAR FEATURES: Admittedly the charm bar of Windows 8 was horrible to access with a mouse. But some of its functionality was kind of useful. The universal sharing button for example let you share content from wherever you were by your apps, like mail, Facebook, etc… I wish they had included some of the charm bar features in the new action center.
_ PEOPLE FOCUS: Another good thing of Windows (Phone) 8 was the people focus instead of app focus. Arranging everything people shared (on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype, via mail, messaging, etc.) in one place around them and giving users the ability to pin people to the start screen was a unique and neat approach which is now missing in Windows 10.
_ INCONSISTENCIES: Windows 10 is a much more homogeneous system than Windows 8 but there are still some inconsistencies. Settings for example still haven’t been completely transferred to the new look, still letting us change between the two worlds we know from Windows 8 now and then. Some new inconsistencies show up too (i.e. a different Cortana design in the tablet mode) which could have been avoided easily and leave an unfinished impression of the OS.
WRAP-UP
So is Windows 10 the best Windows ever? Actually: yes. Compared to Windows 7 it brings lots of improvements with new technologies and a modern design. Compared to Windows 8 it’s a much more consistent and intuitive OS that avoids many of its predecessor’s mistakes and gives us a much better user experience. The downside just becomes apparent if compared to the Windows that could have been.
Windows 10 could have been the perfect successor to Windows 7 in 2012. Keeping the same logic of UI people were used to for almost two decades while introducing new ideas like live tiles in a soft way. This way people could have learned over time that they don’t NEED the Desktop anymore and that they WANT the cool and helpful start menu to spread over the whole screen to they get even more out of it. But this chance is gone. Microsoft screw up with Windows 8 and thus we’re stuck in Windows 95 forever – because that’s what people wanted.
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