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Windows 10: Can Microsoft Get It Right This Time?
An anonymous reader shares this article about what Microsoft needs to accomplish with Windows 10 in order to make gains in the mobile market and everywhere else. "Later this week Microsoft will provide more details of Windows 10, most likely focusing on how the new operating system will look and feel on smartphones and tablets. According to Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft is likely to unveil a version of Windows 10 that's expected to work on Windows Phones and smaller Windows tablets running ARM and perhaps Intel processors. Microsoft will be hoping that by making it easier for developers to build for tablets and smartphones it can take some of its dominance of the desktop world and port that to the mobile world. That may help a bit, but will not in itself create the breakthrough that Microsoft wants: when it comes to mobile, Microsoft's Windows Phone is still a distant third in a two-horse race."
No.
They took the Windows 8 'core', upgraded it a bit, rejiggered some window effects, and re-added the desktop as primary for a desktop/laptop experience.
The only thing people hated about Windows 8 on a PC was the interface. If this gets rid of that it will not be as bad as Windows 8 which means they did something right...
It's not about mobile. Windows 8, as a purely mobile, touchscreen OS, was okay. No major complaints there. The problem was that Windows 8 on Desktops, or even laptops with a touchscreen, tried to enforce an extremely oversimplified interface onto desktop users. Then to add insult to that, they had two parallel paradigms (Windows and Metro) and half the settings are in one place and half in the other. The solution is simple: they have to support both. The reason is just as simple. Right now I'm using my Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro as a laptop. So I want it to behave as a full featured desktop OS with all the power, control, widgets, bells and whistles I need to do all the things I need to do. As soon as I flip the screen around into a tablet mode, I need to be able to use it as a tablet.
I pretty much am at that state now with some 3rd party software, although again, half the settings are in Metro and half in classic Windows. So it's not like it would be all that hard for MS to get this right. They've just done the same thing they've done over, and over, and over. They take a paradigm or design philosophy, and push one or two steps too far.
The other big issue with Windows 8 is it had to bridge the divide between classic laptops, and the next generation laptops that have touchsreens. Metro with only a mouse? Awful. They force that on people, and the users hated it. Personally, I've only ever ran Windows 8.1 on my own machine that also had a touchscreen, so it wasn't nearly as bad.
Better known as 318230.
Windows 10 will just be another spyware ridden OS, it wont let you uninstall OneDrive, the Camera app, or the Windows Store. It seems like it'll have at least 2 browsers again, at least 2 calculator apps, and default search is "Everywhere" (sending your search queries to MS).
Rather than each running app having a separate in-memory copy of a DLL, now if separate apps have the same DLL dependency, then there's only one copy in memory. Probably my favorite feature of Windows 8
Huh? DLLs are shared libraries. They've been shared between all applications that use them since 16-bit versions of Windows. The only time that wasn't the case was when you couldn't locate them at the same virtual address (win32 dlls are not position-independent code, because PIC is slower, so are statically relocated for a particular address), but in 64-bit apps DLLs are PIC and so that's not an issue.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
For $800 you must have been looking at the Surface Pro 3. I don't think an Android tablet is an apples-to-apples comparison. The Surface Pro 3 runs a full Windows 8 OS. It is basically a laptop without a permanent keyboard. The Surface 2 is more like $450. This is much closer to the price range you're talking about.
The real problem with Microsoft's tablet experience isn't the price of the Pro 3. I think it's a great piece of kit and compares favorably to a laptop for many usage scenarios. The problem is the Windows RT used on ARM phones and tables. Specifically, the Windows RT app ecosystem. There just isn't enough going on to make it a compelling platform.
Microsoft is great at making terrible decisions. They could have tried to capitalize on their their existing platforms with good market penetration to bootstrap a great app ecosystem. Instead, they wanted to have what Apple has. They wanted to control everything so they could milk it all for money. Unfortunately, they didn't offer any other reason to get developers and users to switch.
I can't see myself ever getting a Surface or Windows Phone. However, I probably will get my wife a Surface Pro 3 when her current laptop dies.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
MS has had this weird obsession with a single OS for all devices since forever. The first incarnations of Windows phones had the XP desktop crammed on them. The biggest impact they had was to keep the smartphone market small and dysfunctional until Apple and Google came along. Now they are trying the opposite tack and cramming a mobile OS onto the desktop and are wondering why people are staying away in droves.
Until they give up this obsession and make a mobile OS and a separate desktop OS, they are going to stay stuck.
Just throw classic shell on it, 8.1 is way better than 7. XP was great in it's day - as windows goes - It's day was just stretched a bit longer than it should have because Vista.
Not quite. Win8 (and by extension) Windows 10, still has problems where previously unified interfaces for controlling system behavior have been split between Metro/Modern apps and traditional windows.
One example: in Win7 I click the network icon in the notifications area and a small window pops up with the connections; I can then right-click a connection and select Status for information on what IP/DNS is currently assigned or Properties to get to its security information.
Clicking the network icon on Win10 does the same thing as Win8: giant Metro panel covering a large portion of the screen, most of it wasted in "Airplane Mode" that I have no use for, and right-clicking the connection only has options that are more at home in a cellphone than in a desktop OS: estimated data usage, metered connection, forget this network. Clicking "View Connection Settings" opens another Metro-style "PC Settings" window that is designed for touch, so OS standards like right-clicking don't work.
http://i.imgur.com/8Csqe77.png
In short, it's still trying to integrate two different UI designs, and it still doesn't work. It's not as terrible as Win8 at it, but it's still in plenty of places to be annoying. It's also very inconsistent in what gets a Metro panel and what doesn't.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I have a Surface Pro and while it's nice it's still clunky as hell, Windows 10 will not fix this because honestly Windows is 100% crap for a touch interface. The software and OS are not designed for touch and therefore will be clunky.
Windows 10 for laptops.
Windows Touch for touch devices.
Stop trying to unify the two because IT WILL NOT WORK. windows 8 sucks horribly on a laptop but works nice on a tablet. windows 10 is awesome on a laptop but SUCKS on a tablet. (Yes I tried living with it on my surface pro for 4 weeks. it sucks as much as windows 7 does and windows 8.1 does when using non touch apps)
So unless they fire all their management and design teams and start over with people that understand that the two ecosystems are different and need to remain separate nothing will change.
Proof that your touch UI and OS is crap when your users of your flagship device use a mouse and keyboard with it most of the time.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why should I waste my time with Windows 10?
Why? Well, if you want to run Windows Applications :-)
And it's Windows 7, I haven't even looked at Windows 8.
Short Answer: No, you should not upgrade.
Long Answer: If you're interested in kernel side stuff, like most OS releases kernel changes are incremental. Here are a few :-
0) Secure Boot - With a chained OS boot you can be sure (well, its microsoft :P ) that your kernel mode components have been cryptographically verified. IIRC they started using this 10 years ago with the xbox 360. Ofcource the 360 security was promptly broken after people figured out how to patch the firmware, but I still think it is a nice-to-have feature.
1) Client side Hyper-V runs all OSs, including host OS on a thin hypervisor with minimal performance impact (Intels SLAT tech)
2) Native USB 3.0 , I've found that on Windows 7 third party usb 3.0 drivers are a hit/miss in terms of maximum performance.
3) Stricter LFH (Low fragmentation heap) Internals (guard pages, less determinism, etc) -Result - You're better guarded against buggy drivers and potentially malicious kernel mode components.
4) Newer API for driver mem alloc (NonPagedPoolNx) - IIRC windows kernel components have switched to using this. Result - Stability boost, Security boost - all kernel memory objects are in non excutable mem, etc
5) Uses Intels new-ish RDRAND instruction for a higher quality random number gen as the basis for ASLR
Correction. The "Modern" tiled interface didn't frustrate users "transitioning to Windows 8". It is simply bad. Horrible. The worst UI in the history of Windows, and since that history includes Windows ME and Vista that's saying quite a bit. It would be more appropriate to say that the UI in question is what PREVENTED the transition of users to Windows 8--not because they couldn't figure it out, but because they simply deemed it garbage.
Most of the complaints I hear about Window 8 come from people who've bought a new PC, booted it up, and have no freaking clue how to use it. 'WTF?' they say, 'I thought this thing ran Windows?'
Not trying to start a flame war, but what would companies use instead?
This is exactly the problem, and I'll underscore it with an inquiry to anyone who echoes the grandparent post...
Amongst the reasons Exchange is as readily used as it is, isn't because Exchange itself is some awesome piece of software. Exchange is part of a bigger ecosystem that incorporates a few major pieces:
--ActiveSync - and more to the point, ActiveSync support from billions of phones and tablets.
--Active Directory - single sign-on through Outlook from a domain user, and the reverse: creating a mailbox also creates a user in AD.
--Outlook - a mail/contact/calendar/task client that has a handful of competitors that excel in one area or another (IMO Zimbra coming pretty close), but still a program whose replacement will require a barricade on the door to keep out the execs who wish to use their torches and pitchforks.
--Self-Hosted - Gmail and company don't count.
I've seen plenty of great answers to one or more of these solutions. I'm a fan of the super-easy-to-use-and-manage IceWarp, but the Icewarp mail client is lacking pretty notably. Google is great if you're okay with them having your mail (many are), but unless there's an on-site version of Gmail, it's not a fair comparison fight. Univention makes a pretty good PDC replacement, but using for its mail server isn't the greatest and mobile device support is lacking. Zentyal and ClearOS are also great for small environments, but scaling becomes a problem.
So, to those who say "Exchange Sucks", I say "fine. Show me a better system that satisfies all of the above criteria, and I will be MORE than happy to take a long, hard look at it." I don't like Exchange, or its CAL structure, either...but "worst except all the rest" seems to apply here.