We have arrived at a point where Microsoft no longer has a Windows division. To a generation of computer users, Windows was the product that defined Microsoft and defined our own relationship to technology. Now that defining product is a legacy, used by many but beloved by few.
In this article: Could Microsoft have done anything differently? This one is really just for hard-core Microsoft watchers.
Then in the next article: The Microsoft brand isn’t cool. How did Microsoft lose touch with consumers? That one will be more fun to read – I’ll make snarky comments about all the things Microsoft has done wrong on the consumer side for the last decade.
What could Microsoft have done to keep Windows relevant?
Microsoft does not have any presence in mobile devices. Roughly all the phones and tablets in the world are Apple or Android devices. It is commonly understood that Microsoft “missed” the mobile revolution.
I’m not convinced, for two reasons.
• Microsoft didn’t miss anything. It wasn’t good enough. Microsoft started working on an operating system for phones and tablets long before Apple released the iPhone. Its first incarnation of a mobile system, Windows CE, dates all the way back to 1996. Windows Mobile was the most popular smartphone software in the US in 2007 when Apple released the iPhone, which effortlessly blew it out of the water. It was rewritten as Windows Phone in 2010 and Microsoft spent the next few years trying frantically to get a toehold in the smartphone market (wasting more than seven billion dollars on a fruitless purchase of Nokia along the way), but Microsoft’s real failure was that it didn’t get it right when it had a clear opportunity before Apple ever stepped in.
• More important, though: Microsoft’s cultural focus on Windows means it could not have succeeded in mobile – period, end of story. In 2007, Microsoft’s entire identity was bound up in the belief that our loyalty to Windows and immersion in the Windows ecosystem would drive our preferences in phones and our choice of mobile devices. Windows Mobile and Windows Phone were explicitly designed to complement our Windows computers, which were supposed to continue to be our primary technology devices.
Our loyalty to Windows was shallow. Apple and Google discovered that we would embrace smartphones without any connection to Windows. Microsoft was not prepared to accept that in 2007. Microsoft’s Windows-centric world view meant it could not start from scratch to build a superior standalone mobile operating system that would be more compelling than iOS and Android. Microsoft kept trying to push a Windows- and computer-centric view of mobile devices long after the futility of that should have been apparent.
When it became clear that our iPhones and Android phones would have almost no synergy with our computers, Microsoft switched gears and has been trying to connect businesses to an ecosystem across mobile devices and computers built on the Office programs and Office 365 services. That’s been partially successful, although Microsoft’s mobile apps are seldom best in class.
The mobile failure is a big part of the story, but it seems obvious there is another gap in Microsoft’s lineup today. Unfortunately the same focus on old-school Windows would have made it impossible for the company to develop it when it was needed.
Microsoft needs another computer operating system. Not an operating system for phones! A second operating system for computers.
Windows is old.
The basic elements of Windows’ architecture were designed in the early 90s, before the Internet existed. Windows started life as an operating system for individual, non-networked computers. At its heart is the registry, a database with millions of entries that defines almost everything about your Windows sessions and most of your programs. The registry is a twenty-five year old legacy. It was introduced in Windows 3.1 in 1992 and became the basis of Windows computing in Windows 95 in 1995. To put that in context, remember that Windows 95 shipped without Internet Explorer and without enabling TCP/IP, the networking protocol that drives the Internet.
Microsoft has worked hard to make each new version of Windows compatible with earlier versions. The basic architecture of Windows has not changed. Recently Microsoft started syncing a very small bit of information online if you log in with a Microsoft account, but it’s a halfhearted effort that seems mostly to sync wallpaper. Most Windows and program settings are still stored on your hard drive in the hidden AppData or ProgramData folders or in the registry. Those folders can become quite large and are not synced.
The result is that Windows is hard to maintain and runs terribly on cheap computers. It needs a fair amount of power to run the OS and run programs, and each computer has to be set up from scratch with little or no assistance from settings and preferences held online.
Dream with me about another path.
Imagine that Microsoft had a version of Windows that was built from scratch to store everything online – all your preferences, all your program information, all your files. You could pick up any device and log in and within seconds you’d see your desktop, your files stored in OneDrive, your apps (which are installed automatically in the background), your browser bookmarks, your toolbars, your preferences. This would be a grownup, Internet-era version of “roaming profiles.” Logging off would remove all traces of your computer use, making it possible to pick up any laptop and use it freely – particularly important for schools. Laptops would need less power, making them cheaper. Battery life would be far better.
Do you understand that I’m describing ChromeOS, the Google operating system that runs on Chromebooks? Google started from scratch in 2009 and delivered exactly that type of OS with the first Chromebook in 2011. A generation of students is growing up in Google’s ecosystem using Chromebooks in schools because they are cheap, easy to maintain, and easy to replace. As I said last year: “Chromebooks in schools are a mortal threat to the future of Windows. Kids using Chromebooks never become loyal to Windows and never learn reasons to prefer Office programs instead of Google’s online alternatives. If Chromebooks dominate in schools, the decline of Windows will be sharply accelerated in a single generation.”
A year ago Microsoft announced a mysterious new version of Windows aimed at education. I wrote an article speculating about whether “Windows 10 Cloud” (rumored to be the name) might offer true device independence by matching ChromeOS – built for lightweight, cheap, low-powered computers in an online world but with the familiar look and feel of Windows. Microsoft might have held onto kids in school if it had introduced a truly lightweight OS with visual similarities to Windows and a path to full-powered Windows computers as the kids got older.
I was sadly disappointed. Microsoft unveiled “Windows 10 S,” which is literally identical to Windows 10 Pro but with some useful parts blocked out. It runs badly on low-powered computers. It is difficult to maintain. For all intents and purposes, not a single human being in the world is running Windows 10 S. In particular, it has nothing for schools and its adoption rate in schools is effectively zero.
There were paths not taken by Microsoft – the mobile path, where Microsoft simply wasn’t good enough, and the hard path to a new operating system for a new online world, which Microsoft did not walk down. Windows lost our loyalty and Microsoft lost the consumer market.
Big companies do not give up easily. Microsoft has never stopped trying to make money from consumers. It has failed almost completely. In the next article, I’ll go through a pretty shocking list of ways that Microsoft has ruined its reputation with consumers.
I disagree about Windows not being able to succeed in mobile. It had a chance; it just botched it horrendously.
“Windows Mobile was the most popular smartphone software in the US in 2007 when Apple released the iPhone, which effortlessly blew it out of the water.”
^ This is the critical point in time. Apple could sell salt to the sea. The iPhone blowing Windows Mobile out of the water in sales isn’t the correct angle to look at this. Now, a smarter, more aware, less Ballmer company might have seen this coming several years in advance, but even at the point the iPhone launched, Microsoft still had a big, ahem, window to make their play.
Windows Mobile was functional and mature as hell. I had an HTC Touch Pro 2 with Windows Mobile 6.5. It still can do stuff that iPhones and Androids can’t. The iPhone was still a crawling infant, Android wasn’t even around, and Windows had a fully functional and understandable phone OS. Yeah, I said understandable, because it was Windows. It acted like Windows. Everybody has Windows. And it had a huge number of programs available back when Apple was just starting to populate the world with “apps.”
Now, Windows Mobile probably needed work under the hood work to streamline and update things, get better battery life, etc.. It needed a shinier coat of paint, and a more centralized place to get programs. However, it worked damn well. Most importantly, though, it was flexible. Again, because it was Windows. The geniuses over at xda-developers could make Windows Mobile do anything. They’d reskin it in ways that were gorgeous, easy to use, and orders of magnitude more functional than OG iPhone and Android.
Was Window Mobile going to kill the iPhone? No. It might have changed the trajectory of the mobile industry a bit, but the iPhone, especially with Steve Jobs still alive was going to bulldoze its own path.
However, it absolutely could have killed Android before it even left the womb, I think. The first few years of Android were an absolute mess. It was the Wild West. Dozens of manufacturers making phones and devices, no standardization, almost no control by Google, no clear winners and losers, unimpressive or downright crappy phones, the Play store just starting to get populated and also being a mess, and so much more. It took years for Android to take over the phone market, and it did it by sheer volume but also by culling most of the herd of manufacturers. Android was successful but also vulnerable because it was so different from iOS.
Well, you know what OS had a couple decades of history being the “every OS” for every type of hardware? Windows. You know what company had already had an infinite number of developers, a near-infinite number of well-known and respected programs, and a core of software that was an unquestionable addition to any computer including Macs? Microsoft. All Microsoft would have needed to do was lower its licensing fees to a reasonable rate, so that Android, a still mostly unformed blob of an ecosystem, wasn’t that appealing to work with for manufacturers even it was free.
Instead they killed Windows Mobile, spent the next three years writing Windows Phone 7 from scratch, and used a closed ecosystem exactly like Apple but without the tens of thousands of apps Apple now had. In those three years, Android got its foothold and became Windows on mobile with all the flexibility and presence that makes Windows dominate PC OSs. And Windows decided to become impossibly-behind iOS, banking entirely on its name to somehow break in and take over the market.
Windows had a chance to be Android which is itself Windows on mobile. By utilizing its own Windows “capital M” Mobile. It’s one of the most monumental failures in tech history.
I think there’s a lot of truth in what you say (and thanks for taking the time to write it down). And we’re basically saying the same thing, which is that Microsoft missed an opportunity to be the alternative mobile OS in a world that apparently can only support two choices. There’s a story to be told about how MS failed and Google succeeded. My overall point was just that Microsoft wasn’t good enough, but that has layers of meaning and I don’t know the details. It goes way beyond the UI, although that’s part of it – the first iteration of Windows Mobile overestimated the importance of being consistent with Windows on PCs. That turned out to have no resonance with consumers at all.
There was also the consumer perception that Microsoft was not “cool,” which continues to this day. And I can only assume that MS just wasn’t effective at convincing developers and manufacturers to work with it. Google came up with the right combination of carrots and sticks to get developers on board, and MS didn’t. It’s interesting that today the situation is reversed in enterprises – MS is proving endlessly inventive at getting enterprise business and Google is flailing.
Thanks!
I’m in my 50’s so I don’t like my personal information on the cloud. Call me paranoid. I gave Chromium Os a try on my laptop, but I wasn’t entirely impressed. Perhaps Chrome Os on native architecture is better, but its still web based, which I dislike. I also bought a $400 windows laptop, but only because I needed a computer urgently – like right then an now. It is essentially useless. Too slow, wants to update constantly and complains that there is no space left on the drive for the updates anyway. Moreover, I had to delete most of my own programs for the same reason. What a load of crap! I now have an external 2TB usb drive with Linux Mint on it (with Mac Os window dressing because it looks cool, but costs way less). A few tweaks of the BIOS and I can boot into all of my computers using the same drive. Even my cheap windows PC runs beautifully with it! Windows is just too much of a pain to use, Apple is overprices, Chromebooks are web based (see above) and tablets are a waste of time for useful work.
For the average person, who is not a office/business power user or a software developer or someone in the creative graphics side or someone doing GIS, I recommend a Chromebook. What I’ve found, and my mother-in-law, is a good example is that they buy over-priced Apple laptops to use Gmail and browse Facebook and buy stuff on Amazon. For people who don’t have $400 and only occasionally check their emails I recommend the computers at the public library.
The odd thing I’ve found about Chromebooks for non-technical people is that printing is still too hard to set up. It almost requires buying a new printer with cloud support built in – the workarounds for older printers are too hard for lots of folks. Otherwise – well, I’m typing this on my Chromebook. (grin)
So, in overall, they are a great budget option if you’re looking for basic stuff. Got it! Thanks for the heads up. I usually target refurbished Windows Laptops that are easily serviceable. That’s when I’m looking at budget options at least. However, I still feel like a Chromebook would be a great lightweight choice compared to my bulky Core i5 Windows Laptop which is full of I/O ports that I’ll never use on the road.
I never had the chance of even touching a Chromebook. Are they seriously that good for the price?
A colleague just told me a story yesterday about a client who bought a $400 Windows laptop and is having a miserable experience. The slowness is so severe that it is essentially unusable. The combination of Windows with an underpowered processor and slow hard drive is deadly, just like always.
I just got to my desk after reading my mail and the New York Times on a $400 Chromebook. It woke up and showed my desktop instantly when I opened the lid. Browsing is fast. My bookmarks and browsing history sync thru Chrome, LastPass gets me into web services, and media plays without a stutter. That’s almost everything I want from my third device. A Chromebook can’t replace my desktop or Thinkpad X1 Yoga when it’s time to do serious work – but it is a wonder and a delight for times when I just need something quick and cheap.
The Asus Flip C302 is a bit old now but it’s still one of the best options, high quality with no compromises. Chromebooks cost almost nothing. Try one!