Some time ago, along with millions of others I upgraded both
laptops from Windows 7 to Windows 10. It all went well and Windows 10 seems
okay. Nothing special, but okay.
We only use the laptops for web browsing, storing photos,
composing blog posts, fiddling with a few spreadsheets, family history and so
on. As far as all that goes Win10 is no improvement on Win7. It isn't much of an improvement on Windows XP, at least for this rather average user.
In which case, where else can Microsoft take Windows and how
many people want to go there? I’ve read the stories about Win10 sending reams of behavioural information back to those keen folk in Redmond
but I don’t care much about that. We are spied on continuously, always will be
and may as well get used to it.
The problem is more to do with mature products because it
isn’t easy to see where else Microsoft can go with Windows. It’s over six years
since I paid them for my Win7 licence and a copy of Office but now we have two reasonably up to date systems and no motive to upgrade them further. Office is
old but does what we want.
For a mature product, value for money and reliability come
to the fore. We aren’t there yet, but for home computing there doesn’t seem
much further to go. Somehow Win10 seems to bring that home.
9 comments:
"In which case, where else can Microsoft take Windows and how many people want to go there?"
They'll invent somewhere else to take it. We can't see where that is yet, just as we didn't anticipate the need for driverless cars, smart phones, and videos. Nobody wants to go to this non-existent place yet, but they soon will, shortly after it starts to exist. Microsoft will get the first wave to migrate there by making them feel anxious if they are not there. The second wave will be forced to migrate there because they'll find that the stuff they already need won't work unless they are there. There will be a third category who Microsoft will write off as "elderly non-adapters" or somesuch, and ridiculing and pitying them will be part of the joy of being wherever it is.
I have stuck with windows through thick and thin but I'm done with it come next laptop buy, luckily Microsoft shares booming so I've made enough to migrate to apple and then some...happy days.
I agree with all that you say about Windows having been through XP, fine, 7, fine, Vista awful and 10 which was a free "upgrade" that apart from being slightly faster is almost identical to 7.
It could be that in practical terms OS have largely plateaued, not unlike the digital revolution in photography where most upgrades today only serve the pro photographer the quality level of sensors having been more than good enough for us plebs for some time, who knows it may well take another "big leap forward" for any significant change.
The thing with M$ is simple. They released WinME which was utterly shocking, then released XP. Understandably, XP was everything that ME should have been.
They released Vista (shudder) and once again, got it horribly wrong. Cue Win7 - everything that Vista should have been. Was it an improvement on XP? Meh, it certainly has its plus points, but overall performance really wasn't one of them.
Win8 (and 8.1) followed that, and like ME and Vista was a dismal failure. Along comes Win10 - pretty much everything that Win8 was supposed to be. Is Win10 an improvement over 7? Aside from the whole privacy shenanigans (which for me aren't overly concerning - I keep a close on eye on what it sends) it does perform marginally better (for me) than Win7 does, but there is a host of things I would like to see changed to be more like Win7.
But then, if I had the choice (I do, I'm just lazy) I'd rather run a Linux distro ;-)
Sam - they will, but a device to browse the web and run a few apps is looking more and more like an appliance. Microsoft's problem may be that this is what millions of us want and will demand.
Thud - I've been looking at Apple too. We already have an iPad and iPhone and they just work without fuss and that is all we want.
Wiggia - I'm sure you are right and OS have largely plateaued. I hope so because we need home computers as appliances - take it out of the box, switch it on and it just works.
Paul - I find Win10 marginally faster than Win7, but not amazingly so. I've thought about Linux, but I don't want to bother with technical issues these days and Win10 does look after itself very well.
Ah, you haven't noticed that their strategy is to convert to the "subsciption" model, which means that you pay every year to keep using something you thought you had already bought.
It's coming your way - "may as well get used to it", as you (somewhat lazily imho) have just stated yourself in the context of endless snooping.
WY - I'm not sure what I'd do about a subscription OS, but free competitors may make it difficult to launch. Unless the initial price is low enough of course.
I don't think there is much we can do about the snooping without a strong technical background. We use the internet or we don't - those seem to be the choices for most.
I ditched Windows 10 a few months after I upgraded.
Go get yourself Linux Mint for free. Inbuilt firewall etc and office. Plus its encrypted.
David - I've read about Linux Mint, but I don't want any issues with drivers etc. No doubt these are easily sorted, but these days I see computers as appliances.
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