Please stop those jokes. Microsoft knows that it messed up. And it is sick. Sick of all your Windows 8 jokes. It would rather you forgot all about Windows 8. If it were a dictator, it would have gotten into the archives and would have erased all the mentions of an operating system that did the impossible. Make an already horrible operating system more horrible. Since it can’t, it is doing what any sensible mega corporation riddled with internal politics will do. It is releasing a follow-up. But since it knows that there is no escaping your Windows 9 jokes, it is doing something that you did not expect. It is calling the new operating system Windows 10. Don’t ask me why. Don’t even ask Microsoft why. Probably they don’t know either. Because they are still reeling from the shock waves caused by Windows 8. Windows 10 is called Windows 10 because, ‘drum roll’, it is called Windows 10.
It is understandable really that Microsoft wants to get as far away as corporately possible from the 8 catastrophe. According to the good people at Net Applications Data, half of the world’s computers are running on Windows 7. Another 24 per cent, yep, a quarter of all the world’s computers, are running on Windows XP. An operating system that is so old that anyone born on the day it came out is now probably in college. Windows 8 and its pain-relief update 8.1 together make up for just 12 per cent. That is less people using Windows 8 than those voted for Rahul Gandhi.
Microsoft, which probably by now is wishing that it never got into the software-making business, wants to remedy it all by turning the clocks back. To 2009 to be precise, when there was nothing in the world called an iPad and tablets were what we swallowed to feel better after watching a Sajid Khan film.
Without a doubt Windows 10 is a return to the past for Microsoft. While it rolls back some of the most grating aspects of Windows 8, it manages to keep the twisted philosophy that led to the conception of that operating system intact. It is the notion that one operating system should be able to run on every device, be it a desktop computer or a tablet computer with touch screens. This is in stark contrast to Apple’s strategy, of Macs running OS X and the touch-based iPads and iPhones running iOS, with which the company has found phenomenal success.
In the words of Microsoft itself, “Windows 10 will run across an incredibly broad set of devices- from the Internet of Things, to servers in enterprise datacenters worldwide. Some of these devices have 4-inch screens, some have 80-inch screens, and some don’t have screens at all. Some of these devices you hold in your hand, others are ten feet away. Some of these devices you primarily use touch/pen, others mouse/keyboard, others controller/gesture —and some devices can switch between input types.”.
Microsoft went down this road earlier with the Windows 8. This time round it is betting the experience will be different for its customers because they get ‘a tailored experience for each device’ unlike the 8 where desktop users with a mouse were forced to use the ‘Metro’ interface with live tiles that were more suited to a touchscreen. Tablet users with touch screens were forced to use a desktop interface that was more suited to use with a mouse.
Microsoft is betting that, that single expression, ‘tailored experience’ will make all the difference this time. Will it succeed? Will it make users’ lives easier? It is hard to tell. Apple has proved that the opposite strategy works. But no one has tried the one OS for all devices strategy before. And we will know if it works when Windows 10 ships in late 2015. Until then Microsoft would like you to stop those Windows 10 jokes.
Matham is a tech geek.
Follow him on Twitter @AdarshMatham
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