Windows 10

This one's for the geeks.

July 29, 2015

It’s hard to believe that Windows 10 is ten years old today.

Frankly, I don’t really remember much about the release of Windows 10 despite the fact I was a working programmer at the time.

I left the Windows world when Microsoft was forcing the move to Vista. I didn’t like Vista, hardly anyone did.

The one memory I have about Windows Vista is how everyone online complained about having to constantly affirm they wanted Windows to do a certain thing. Microsoft claimed that they were making the OS more secure in part by making the user approve more actions. This claim was allegedly based on user feedback from XP users not unlike Microsoft’s alleged research that lead to the Ribbon Interface¹. What users wanted was a more secure operating system, with most of that security working silently in the background.

Vista, then, was starting to look like that abomination of an operating system that everyone tried to forget, Windows ME.

Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista, had a curious feature: Unix graybeards came out of the woodworks to praise 7!

I never understood this phenomenon. My best guess was that Microsoft had finally laid down the law about how user directories should be laid out and it was similar enough to *nix directory structures that graybeards could find their way around the OS.

I never for a moment believed that graybeards were suddenly giving up the command lines for Windows, nor did I think there was a sudden acceptance of Windows or Microsoft. Perhaps there was some article that circulated on a BBS that said “if we don’t at least tacitly embrace Windows, we could lose our position in the IT world”, and so graybeards praised the product from Redmond.

Windows 8 was emotionally ME 3.0. But at that point, I didn’t care. I didn’t like the new, inconsistent coat of paint Microsoft had used to put lipstick on its bloated pig. I converted to Macs in 2007 and have never looked back. And I was fortunate enough that I didn’t have to use Windows 8 professionally.

If Windows 8 was Windows ME 3.0, Windows 10 was Windows XP 3.0: it was refined and stable. I recall Mac people mocking Microsoft for calling their new operating system Windows 10 as if Microsoft had finally joined the X² naming scheme³. Microsoft announced that they would be moving to an infinite version number numbering system and were mocked for copying the Mac’s versioning number system.

The only other feature of Windows 10 I paid even a modicum of attention to was Windows Subsystem for Linux or WSL. Instead of having to use a bunch of kludges to get *nix like software working on Windows, there was now a way to install Linux directly or at least get Ubuntu compatible apps to run on Windows natively⁴.

I don’t know when I had the thought, but it was within a year or so of learning about WSL I concluded that Microsoft was going to slowly replace the NT kernel for a *nix based kernel. I had a buddy who was quite chummy with people in Redmond and he assured me this would never happen. I think it still could, though ten years and another major operating system later and it still hasn’t happened.

My strongest evidence for the possibility is that at one point, Microsoft was the largest Unix vendor vis-a-vis Xenix. And it made sense to me that if Microsoft were to kill the NT Kernel, there would be a lot more compatibility with software across the board and it would simply Windows development.

Then again, what’s the killer app on the desktop these days regardless the operating system? I’d argue that would be a web browser⁵.

Either way, Happy Birthday to Windows 10.

Photo by Terry Granger on Unsplash

1. Microsoft claimed that they did user interface and user experience research in which they (rightly) concluded that bigger click targets allowed for easier access to clickable things. Where Microsoft then fucked up was arguing that instead of making buttons the same size in their new menu system dubbed “Ribbon”, they would make the more often used functions’ buttons bigger so they would be easier to click on. What this ultimately did was make people not be able to find the functionality they needed and instead resort to having to search through menus or worse–search for the location of the functionality online.

2. There is fierce debate as to whether OS X was pronounced “O-S Ten” or “O-S-X”. I recall Steve Jobs preferred “O-S Ten”.

3. In fact, it wouldn’t be until after Steve Job’s death that major version numbers of macOS nèe OS X would change from 10.x to 11 and upward with each new release of Apple’s desktop operating system.

4. Perhaps this should be “natively” inside air quotes; I never really looked into how WSL worked. Is it kernel level support or a clever VM/hypervisor/or shem not unlike Docker Desktop for macOS? Either way, it was first-party supported meaning that whatever was being done, Microsoft was the one doing it and guaranteeing it work work.

5. I used to argue that image editing software–at least professional level tools like Photoshop or Illustrator, video editing software of almost any stripe and IDEs were the remaining killer desktop apps. At the very least, they are apps you want a beefy machine to run them on and you don’t want to be network bandwidth constrained.

I know that image editing software can run in a web browser these days, but I haven’t tried it. I’m sure you can edit video in a web browser as well, but I still think that’s something you want to do client side.

IDEs are trickier. They can run in browsers. Hell, there’s an argument that Visual Studio Code is a web browser. But as soon as you start having a project of more than a student project size, you need those local resources either for syntax highlighting (mostly for memory consumption), fast file switching or for builds, especially in compiled languages.

It seems like there was an accounting software package that was stubbornly staying client side, either Quicken or QuickBooks. Since I don’t using accounting software, I’m going to leave this one to Grok which tells me that both still exist as Desktop app for at least some of their work.

Finally, we need to recognize that modern OSes come with a lot of built-in software. For example, macOS comes with Contacts and Calendar apps that syncs to the phone–well, to iPhone, anyway, via iCloud. Curiously, Microsoft never had a standalone contacts or calendar app: both were contained inside of Microsoft’s email program, Outlook.