Folks have gotten used to Windows 10. Now Microsoft is pulling out the rug with a new version of Windows. When I heard of Windows 11, my first thought was that the disbanded Vista product team had staged an armed coup in Bill Gates’ old office and regained control of Windows. I haven’t installed Windows 11, although grandson Christopher has. He doesn’t like it.
I think Microsoft has something cooking in Windows 11.
Microsoft releases
New releases of Windows are always fraught. Actually, new releases of anything from Microsoft get loads of pushback. Ribbon menu anxiety in Office, the endless handwringing over start menus moving and disappearing in Windows. Buggy releases. It goes on and on.
Having released a few products myself, I sympathize with Microsoft.
Developers versus users
A typical IT system administrator says “Change is evil. What’s not broke, don’t fix. If I can live with a product, it’s not broke.” Most computer users think the same way: “I’ve learned to work with your run down, buggy product. Now, I’m busy working. Quit bothering me.”
Those positions are understandable, but designers and builders see products differently. They continuously scrutinize customers using a product, and then ask how it might work more effectively, what users might want to do that they can’t, how they could become more productive and add new tasks and ways of working to their repertoire.
Designers and builders also are attentive to advances in technology. In computing, we’ve seen yearly near-doubling of available computing resources, instruction execution capacity, storage volume, and network bandwidth. In a word, speed. 2021’s smartphones dwarf super computers from the era when Windows, and its predecessor, DOS, were invented.
No one ever likes a new release
At its birth, Windows was condemned as a flashy eye candy that required then expensive bit-mapped displays and sapped performance with intensive graphics processing. In other words, Windows was a productivity killer and an all-round horrible idea, especially to virtuoso users who had laboriously internalized all the command line tricks of text interfaces. Some developers, including me, for some tasks, still prefer a DOS-like command line to a graphic interface like Windows.
However, Windows, and other graphic interfaces such as X on Unix/Linux, were rapidly adopted as bit-mapped displays proliferated and processing power rose. Today, character-based command line interface are almost always simulated in a graphical interface when paleolithic relics like me use them. Pure character interfaces still are around, but mostly in the tiny LCD screens on printers and kitchen appliances.
Designers and builders envisioned the benefits from newly available hardware and computing capacity and pushed the rest of us forward.
Success comes from building for the future, not doubling down on the past. But until folks share in the vision, they think progress is a step backwards.
Is the Windows 11 start menu a fiasco? Could be. No development team gets everything right, but I’ll give Windows 11 a spin and try not to be prejudiced by my habits.
Weird Windows 11 requirements
Something more is going on with Windows 11. Microsoft is placing hardware requirements on Windows 11 that will prevent a large share of existing Windows 10 installations from upgrading. I always expect to be nudged toward upgraded hardware. Customers who buy new hardware expect to benefit from newer more powerful devices. Requirements to support legacy hardware are an obstacle to exploiting new hardware. Eventually, you have to turn your back on old hardware and move on, leaving some irate customers behind. No developer likes to do this, but eventually, they must or the competition eats them alive.
Microsoft forces Windows 11 installations to be more secure by requiring a higher level of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) support. A TPM is microcontroller that supports several cryptographic security functions that help verify that users and computers are what they appear to be and are not spoofed or tampered with. TPMs are usually implemented as a small physical chip, although they can be implemented virtually with software. Requiring high level TPM support makes sense in our increasing cybersecurity compromised world.
But the Windows 11 requirements seem extreme. As I type this, I am using a ten-year-old laptop running Windows 10. For researching and writing, it’s more than adequate, but it does not meet Microsoft’s stated requirements for Windows 11. I’m disgruntled and I’m not unique in this opinion. Our grandson Christopher has figured out a way to install Windows 11 on some legacy hardware, which is impressive, but way beyond most users and Microsoft could easily cut off this route.
I have an idea where Redmond is going with this. It may be surprising.
Today, the biggest and most general technical step forward in computing is the near universal availability of high capacity network communications channels. Universal high bandwidth Internet access became a widely accepted national necessity when work went online through the pandemic. High capacity 5G cellular wireless network are beginning to roll out. (What passes for 5G now is far beneath the full 5G capacity we will see in the future.) Low earth orbit satellite networks promise to link isolated areas to the network. Ever faster Wi-Fi local area networks offer connectivity anywhere.
This is not fully real. Yet. But it’s close enough that designers and developers must assume it is already present, just like we had to assume bit-mapped displays were everywhere while they were still luxuries.
What does ubiquitous high bandwidth connection mean for the future? More streaming movies? Doubtless, but that’s not news: neighborhood Blockbuster Video stores are already closed.
Thinking it through
In a few years, every computer will have a reliable, high capacity connection to the network. All the time. Phones are already close. In a few years, the connection will be both faster and more reliable than today. That includes every desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, home appliance, vehicle, industrial machine, lamp post, traffic light, and sewer sluice gate. The network will also be populated with computing centers with capacities that will dwarf the already gargantuan capacities available today. Your front door latch may already have access to more data and computing capacity than all of IBM and NASA in 1980.
At the same time, ransomware and other cybercrimes are sucking the life blood from business and threatening national security.
Microsoft lost the war for the smartphone to Google and Apple. How will Windows fit in the hyperconnected world of 2025? Will it even exist? What does Satya Nadella think about when he wakes late in the night?
Windows business plan
The Windows operating system (OS) business plan is already a hold out from the past. IBM, practically the inventor of the operating system, de-emphasized building and selling OSs decades ago. Digital Equipment, DEC, a stellar OS builder, is gone, sunk into HP. Sun Microsystems, another OS innovator, is buried in the murky depths of Oracle. Apple’s operating system is built on Free BSD, an open source Unix variant. Google’s Android is a Linux. Why have all these companies gotten out of or never entered the proprietary OS development business?
Corporate economics
The answer is simple corporate economics: there’s no money in it. Whoa! you say. Microsoft made tons of money off its flagship product, Windows. The key word is “made” not “makes.” Making money building and selling operating systems was a money machine for Gates and company back in the day, but no longer. Twenty years ago, when Windows ruled, the only competing consumer OS was Apple, which was a niche product in education and some creative sectors. Microsoft pwned the personal desktop in homes and businesses. Every non-Apple computer was another kick to the Microsoft bottom line. No longer. Now, Microsoft’s Windows division has to struggle on many fronts.
Open source OSs— Android, Apple’s BSD, and the many flavors of Linux— are all fully competitive in ease of installation and use. They weren’t in 2000. Now, they are slick, polished systems with features comparable to Windows.
To stay on top, Windows has to out-perform, out-feature, and out secure these formidable competitors. In addition, unlike Apple, part of the Windows business plan is to run on generic hardware. Developing on hardware you don’t control is difficult. The burden of coding to and testing on varying equipment is horrendous. Microsoft can make rules that the hardware is supposed to follow, but in the end, if Windows does not shine on Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer, and Asus, the Windows business plunges into arctic winter.
With all that, Microsoft is at another tremendous disadvantage. It relies on in house developers cutting proprietary code to advance Windows. Microsoft’s competitors rely on foundations that coordinate independent contributors to opensource code bases. Many of these contributors are on the payrolls of big outfits like IBM, Google, Apple, Oracle, and Facebook.
Rough times
Effectively, these dogs are ganging up on Microsoft. Through the foundations— Linux, Apache, Eclipse, etc.—these corporations cooperate to build basic utilities, like the Linux OS, instead of building them for themselves. This saves a ton of development costs. And, since the code is controlled by the foundation in which they own a stake, they don’t have to worry about a competitor pulling the rug out from under them.
Certainly, many altruistic independent developers contribute to opensource code, but not a line they write gets into key utilities without the scrutiny of the big dogs. From some angles, the opensource foundations are the biggest monopolies in the tech industry. And Windows is out in the cold.
What will Microsoft do? I have no knowledge, but I have a good guess that Microsoft is contemplating a tectonic shift.
Windows will be transformed into a service.
Nope, you say. They’ve tried that. I disagree. I read an article the other day declaring Windows 11 to be the end of Windows As A Service, something that Windows 10 was supposed to be, but failed because Windows 11 is projected for yearly instead of biannual or more frequent updates. Windows 11 has annoyed a lot of early adopters and requires hardware upgrades that a lot of people think are unnecessary. What’s going on?
Windows 10 as a service
The whole idea of Windows 10 as a service was lame. Windows 10 was (and is) an operating system installed on a customer’s box, running on the customer’s processor. The customer retains control of the hardware infrastructure. Microsoft took some additional responsibility for software maintenance with monthly patches, cumulative patches, and regular drops of new features, but that is nowhere near what I call a service.
When I installed Windows 10 on my ancient T410 ThinkPad, I remained responsible for installing applications and adding or removing memory and storage. If I wanted, I could rename the Program Files directory to Slagheap and reconfigure the system to make it work. I moved the Windows system directory to an SSD for a faster boot. And I hit the power switch whenever I feel like it.
Those features may be good or bad.
As a computer and software engineer by choice, I enjoy fiddling with and controlling my own device. Some of the time. My partner Rebecca can tell you what I am like when a machine goes south while I’m on a project that I am hurrying to complete with no time for troubleshooting and fixing. Or my mood when I tried to install a new app six months after I had forgotten the late and sporty night when I renamed the Program Files directory to Slagheap.
At times like those, I wish I had a remote desktop setup, like we had in the antediluvian age when users had dumb terminals on their desks and logged into a multi-user computer like a DEC VAX. A dumb terminal was little more than a remote keyboard with a screen that showed keystrokes as they were entered interlaced with a text stream from the central computer. The old systems had many limitations, but a clear virtue: a user at a terminal was only responsible for what they entered. The sysadmin took care of everything else. Performance, security, backups, and configuration, in theory at least, were system problems, not user concerns.
Twenty-first century
Fast forward to the mid twenty-first century. The modern equivalent of the old multi-user computer is a user with a virtual computer desktop service running in a data center in the cloud, a common set up for remote workers that works remarkably well. For a user, it looks and feels like a personal desktop, except it exists in a data center, not on a private local device. All data and configuration (the way a computer is set up) is stored in the cloud. An employee can access his remote desktop from practically any computing device attached to the network, if they can prove their identity. After they log on, they have access to all their files, documents, processes, and other resources in the state they left them, or in the case of an ongoing process, in the state their process has attained.
What’s a desktop service
From the employees point of view, they can switch devices with abandon. Start working at your kitchen table with a laptop, log out in the midst of composing a document without bothering to save. Not saving is a little risky, but virtual desktops run in data centers where events that might lose a document are much rarer than tripping on a cord, spilling a can of Coke, or the puppy doing the unmentionable at home. In data centers, whole teams of big heads scramble to find ways to shave off a minute of down time a month.
Grab a tablet and head to the barbershop. Continue working on that same document in the state you left it instead of thumbing through old Playboys or Cosmos. Pick up again in the kitchen at home with fancy hair.
Security
Cyber security officers have nightmares about employees storing sensitive information on personal devices that fall into the hands of a competitor or hacker. Employees are easily prohibited from saving anything from their virtual desktop to the local machine where they are working. With reliable and fast network connections everywhere, employees have no reason to save anything privately.
Nor do security officers need to worry about patching vulnerabilities on employee gear. As long as the employee’s credentials are not stored on the employee’s device, which is relatively easy to prevent, there is nothing for a hacker to steal.
The downside
What’s the downside? The network. You have to be connected to work and you don’t want to see swirlies when you are in the middle of something important while data is buffering and rerouted somewhere north of nowhere.
However. All the tea leaves say those issues are on the way to becoming as isolated as the character interface on your electric teapot.
The industry is responding to the notion of Windows as a desktop service. See Windows 365 and a more optimistic take on Win365.
Now think about this for a moment: why not a personal Windows virtual desktop? Would that not solve a ton of problems for Microsoft? With complete control of the Windows operating environment, their testing is greatly simplified. A virtual desktop local client approaches the simplicity of a dumb terminal and could run on embarrassingly modest hardware. Security soars. A process running in a secured data center is not easy to hack. The big hacks of recent months have all been on lackadaisically secured corporate systems, not data centers.
It also solves a problem for me. Do I have to replace my ancient, but beloved, T410? No, provided Microsoft prices personal Windows 365 reasonably, I can switch to Windows 365 and continue on my good old favorite device.
Marv’s note: I made a few tweeks to the post based on Steve Stroh’s comment.
The main losses are control, agency, ownership.
Of the hardware: It’d DRMed up the yin-yang (much of the “11” requirements are for presence of a TPM), so you no longer own the hardware you paid for, since you no longer have the keys required to make it go.
Of the software, OS and apps and everything, it’s all elsewhere.
Of the content, for if the cloud fizzles on you, the documents go *poof* too. You said you wrote something? Good luck proving it to anyone.
I accidentally stumbled on this post because I’m doing a bit of due diligence on two deskjets 890C being given away for free “because they don’t work with windows 11”. The hardware is fine. The protocol is well-documented, I stumbled on the programming manual a few minutes before. There’s support in ghostscript, the pcl3 driver explicitly mentiones this printer model. The cartridges are relatively cheap and long-lived. The driver software is mature. But it doesn’t work with windows 11 because microsoft chooses to shed support for the hardware you own, including pheripherals, for entirely selfish reasons.
So you can no longer trust that pheripherals continue to function either. You’ll just have to buy new. That’s quite the opposite to the upside you’ve just been gushing over. Instead of relying on your own printers, better pop over to the printing shop down the street?
Again, it’s out of your hands. What an upgrade.
Upgrades look different from the users and from the developer. An honest developer often has to make changes that look bad from the user’s standpoint but add technology that enables future advantages. I wish it were easy to appease both development and the the user base, but it’s not. The evolving W11 model has long term benefits,and I also acknowledge W11 model has its clunks, thot they’ll wash out. Eventually. Sooner would be better.
I agree that most individuals do not need corporate style protections that Windows 11 provides, but not much is really being forced on them and eventually all users will benefit.
If you don’t like W11, move to Linux. I use it about half of my time. It’s gotten friendlier to users. Between LibreOffice, Google, Microsoft, and Zoom, the functionality has nearly converged.
Cloud issues are important, but I have had no trouble setting up a stash of my valuable docs on an air-gaped drive stored in a brick in my yard.
I use both Windows and Linux. I would be hard to pressed to argue for the superiority of either. They are different, but both powerful. I use Word because my publisher prefers it. Why fight?
I don’t want to fight; for most purposes, LibreOffice is fine.
Of the tech giants, Microsoft and IBM are my favorites, who have both been whacked hard by the regulatory agencies, but everyone to their taste. We have to move ahead.
Best, Marv
Keeping you honest, IBM does still sell Operating Systems but only with their (what used to be called) mainframes and mid-range systems. I don’t remember what the mainframe OS was called – MVS? I think IBM also still sells its version of UNIX called AIS, but also offers Linux on some of its systems.
Desktop as a service is exactly what Google has done so successfully with Chromebooks and “Chromepucks” (small computers that have external displays, keyboards, and mice). They really have it dialed in – they’re the dominant player in K-12 education because they do such a good job of remote management.
As I understand it, Windows365 is a desktop that runs in a web browser, not the same “take over the entire machine” like a Chromebook. Thus there’s still a lot of overhead for the user to get the native OS running, securing it, the web browser, and (I can foresee) a lot of confusion about what’s running on the “boot” OS and what’s running on the “cloud OS”.
The Chromebook / Chromepuck approach makes a lot of sense if the apps that you need work with it. I have (pay for) Office365, but use it very little because Google Docs is so good for my day-to-day text processing needs. For Windows365 to take off, Microsoft has to figure out to “appliance-size” Windows like Google has done with Chromebooks.
Hi Steve! All good points!
This post slipped out of control. I started it aiming for something less than half its length, but it grew on me, and threatened to keep growing. So I chopped it off without going in number of directions I wanted to write about. Your points reflect that.
IBM still does sell operating systems. I should have phrased that differently. They still sell OSs for all their machines, but around 1990 they started to focus Linux based OSs ported to their hardware rather than developing substantial new features for their proprietary systems. I remember hearing that the AS400 OS was to be IBM’s last proprietary OS. This was about the time they declared themselves to be a service business rather than a hardware and software business. Their acquisition of Redhat in 2019 reflects those decisions.
You are quite correct about Google providing desktop as a service with Chromebooks and they have been successful at it. And it’s more than K-12. My daughter now attending law school is happy with her Chromebook and the Google suite as are most of her colleagues.
I don’t use Google Docs much myself because I use Office365 heavily and I can’t get along without many Office365 features. Word templates and styles are examples. My publisher, Springer, insists that all manuscripts in progress are submitted to them using elaborate Word templates that they supply. Using those templates, the ms I submit to them is almost identical to the printed book. The standards committees I used to work with also used elaborate Word templates for formatting standards. That got me used to elaborate templates and I can’t work without them anymore.
For enterprises, Chromebooks don’t make it easy to install and support their proprietary custom apps. Azure Windows Desktop and Windows 365 provide for that, but they assume an enterprise IT team managing the desktops, which cuts out small business and individuals. I don’t use Azure Windows Desktop or Windows 365, but I know folks who do. I am under the impression it can be run through a browser or through an installed virtual desktop appliance.
My prediction is that Microsoft soon announce a virtual desktop service for individuals and small businesses that will give the appearance of running Windows 11 and Office 365 on legacy hardware. I expect some limitations on what can be installed on these virtual desktops, but still giving end users some control.
Something that excites me: the future possibility of including quantum computing in Windows. Microsoft could do it if they take the direction I predict.
Good to hear from you. Marv