Now that the free upgrade period for Windows 10 has run out, and it's clear that large numbers of people didn't want Microsoft's latest product or buy into its everything-cloudy vision even though they were literally giving the OS away and heavily promoting the whole strategy, it will be interesting to see what they try next.
It seems clear to me they've had the meetings and made the decision to ram Win10 down user's throats come hell or high water. They've given no indication that they regret the Win10 hard-sell or that it was any kind of mistake or misstep. On the contrary, they have doubled-down on the strategy and dismissed all objections along the way. The misuse of the red X to mean "OK" instead of "No" or "Cancel", breaking Windows Update so you could not block or hide the GWX are clear signs of their intent.
Win10 is the core of Microsoft's strategy to compete with Apple and Google. They want to become a marketing company and Windows 10 OS [Operating Spyware] is key to their long-term strategy. They want to shutdown support for all the remaining operating systems and push everyone onto Win10 as quickly as possible. The strategy is further revealed by their announcement that Cortana (and its associated collection of personal data and tracking) cannot be turned off in all but the Enterprise or Education versions of Win10, neither of which will be generally available.
My view is that this strategy will backfire. Win10 is not going to be installed in any business that needs high data security either for operations or regulatory requirements like HIPPA or the SEC, etc. The vast number of companies currently using Win7 aren't going to move to Win10 unless Microsoft reveals the scope of the spying and provides tools to shut it off without buying the Enterprise version. Everything will come to a head in 2020 when Win7 support is slated to end. At that point, I am planning on moving to Linux and I don't think I am alone. But what I do is irrelevant to Microsoft (essentially a consumer user of Windows) but what the installed base of business users of Windows choose to do will determine the future of Windows. It will be interesting to see who blinks first.
Or that the distribution owners don't decide, just because, to replace a WiFi driver because of evil Broadcom and leave Ubuntu users 6 months without proper WiFi support until the open source driver catches up in features.
This happened a few years ago, just check the Ubuntu forums for the not so happy users comments.
My suspicion is that investors are going to get nervous well before then, though, because if 10 is still looking like another Vista/8 then the strategy isn't going to work and Microsoft is at a serious risk of losing its market dominance no matter what else is going on. They would need new leadership in place in time to produce an acceptable alternative for the other half of the market before the end of Win7 support forces those people and organisations to make the hard decisions, very possibly at Microsoft's expense.
As of the cut-off this week it isn't looking like the "get everyone onto 10" strategy has worked so far, so my guess is Nadella has to come up with something new by probably next summer or he's done. It wouldn't surprise me if plan B has been in the works for some time and is announced in their next quarterly update, along with a positive spin on Windows 10 results that will objectively still show that roughly half their market didn't move to 10 even when they literally gave it away. I have no idea what sort of plan B would fit with Nadella's overall vision, though, and it also wouldn't surprise me if they keep doubling down on 10 and the cloud strategy.
I disagree that Win10 is a failure like Vista or Win8. I like Win10, I think it is better than Win7 (which I like a lot) and would upgrade in a second if Microsoft was more transparent on what data is being sent home under the rubic "telemetry" and they allowed me the ability to block or turn this off if I don't want to participate. The EU is already questioning the privacy concerns of Win10 and it seems likely that the US anti-trust division isn't going to stand around and do nothing. I am afraid that this time the Justice Department will break Microsoft up into separate companies due to their "unfair" advantage if they continue down this path.[1]
[1] Not a fan of the anti-trust laws, I think they are too undefined to follow ex ante and are used for political prosecutions ex post but this is the current legal status of the country.
It's the investors that will force the issue if anyone does, IMHO. Yes, often investors just follow the patterns and trends because that's where the money usually goes as well, but if Microsoft have any major institutional investors that are looking a bit deeper, I could see meaningful concerns being raised if the picture isn't looking a bit more healthy by 2-3 years before the Win 7 "deadline" arrives. If those concerns aren't then robustly addressed, I could see shareholders forcing through a change of leadership and strategy.
As for what constitutes success for 10, it's hard to say objectively, but I suspect it will always be held back as long as the telemetry and forced update concerns persist. There's a certain part of the market -- apparently quite a substantial part, though it's hard to gauge exactly how much -- that really, really doesn't like those things. Given that 10 seems decent enough in most other respects and it does have some potentially useful incremental improvements over its predecessors even if it lacks any really compelling selling points, it seems like Microsoft could make the bad PR go away almost overnight if they just reverted to their traditional strategy by giving control back to their customers and being transparent and less greedy about the data collection.
However, this brings me back to the question of the new business strategy, because it seems shifting control and data back to Microsoft's hands are basically the things Nadella is all about. If customer resistance to that strategy is what is holding back more widespread adoption of 10 and limiting Microsoft's future potential, that doesn't look good for the current leadership team.
They want to move everyone to Windows 10. This does not involve shutting down support for anything else. The support periods are published a long time ahead, and as you say yourself, Windows 7 will be supported until 2020.
> Win10 is not going to be installed in any business that needs high data security either for operations or regulatory requirements like HIPPA or the SEC, etc.
You appear to have missed the fact that the US Defense Department has already starting moving four million users to Windows 10 precisely because of the advanced security. I know banks and other organizations that are moving, too.
DoD-Wide Windows 10 Rapid Deployment to Boost Cybersecurity By Cheryl Pellerin DoD News, Defense Media Activity http://www.defense.gov/-News-Article-View/Article/688721/dod...
> retail version that makes it difficult to turn all of these options off in a central location with clear settings.
Just type privacy in the search box and go to the central location that has very clear settings. It's called "Privacy settings".
It takes a minute or two, but it's not actually hard. (I'm now sorry I didn't time myself doing it.)
It also provides excellent control over which apps can use your camera and microphone, and you can block all of them.
You can go to "Speech, inking and typing" and click the button that says "Stop getting to know me" to turn off personalization. That page also has a link to privacy statements and a link to take you to Bing where you can delete any personalization info that has already been stored.
It looks pretty clear to me. I'd also be interested if you can explain how this is any harder in Windows 10 than it is in Android or iOS.
What you said was:
> Win10 is not going to be installed in any business that needs high data security either for operations or regulatory requirements like HIPPA or the SEC, etc.
How on earth do you think you were not talking about "the DoD, banks and other large orgs"?
If you're only talking about consumer versions of Windows 10, what is the point of mentioning HIPAA (it's not HIPPA) and the SEC? ;-)
By the way, the use of "M$" is childish and usually marks out 1990s bigots. It's not a good look.
When you walk around with a big red button on your forehead, you've got to expect people to press it.
http://federalnewsradio.com/defense/2016/03/army-crashes-dod...
Nah, I have worked with HIPAA compliant businesses before and as long as the data MS collects isn't (demonstrably) leaked to malevolent third parties they won't care. They upgrade to whatever MS tells them to upgrade and these kind of OS issues aren't discussed at all. They care about the privacy of the information they deal with directly but whatever the OS does under the hood it's assumed to be proper.
FYI, most IT companies don't know this but back in 2012 or 2013 the new HIPAA enforcement division issued a decree that HIPAA applies directly to any IT companies that service organizations that handle personal health data. Prior to that proclamation I was operating under a signed declaration with my clients that my business was not responsible for HIPAA enforcement or violations (I just fixed the computers). That method of limiting my exposure and liability, according to my lawyer, was no longer feasible and I could be hit directly with HIPAA violations and fines and they required onerous documentation and procedures when dealing with PHI. At that point, at significant cut to my income, I dropped all my healthcare/medical clients.
In the long run the regulatory agencies are captured by the regulated business and the requirements imposed are fairly sensible but by my guess is that we are at least a decade away from that regarding HIPAA especially considering its only now starting to be enforced with audits and fines.
Sure, some people could move to Linux, but it's unfamiliar and fairly unpopular, and a lot of people would rather have some familiarity and popularity to help troubleshoot rather than zero. Some people could move to macOS, which is more reasonable since it's more popular, unless they have software that needs Windows. The big issue there is, I hardly see anyone with an ultrabook or a high end desktop (that isn't being used for gaming). Windows users are used to cheaper computers, and a Macbook might be out of their price range.
So for everyone who doesn't have the technical support options for Linux and doesn't have the budget for a Macbook or iMac, they're stuck with Windows. And someday they will have to upgrade, like it or not. Bad press doesn't really hurt Windows in the long run.
I agree with your points, However, the chance of Windows coming out is zero, unless you think Microsoft could simply rename Windows 10 to 11.
There is no team inside Microsoft working on Windows 11, as far as I can tell. The Windows team is working on improved versions of Windows 10, which seem to be appearing twice a year at the moment.
Any reader from the Windows team is, of course, welcome to comment ;-)
Either way, the naming is essentially arbitrary, so they can change it however they like. The same Windows code, which has a long history, is going to continue into the foreseeable future...
Eventually, yes, but not any time soon and not necessarily to Windows 10.
Our standard in my businesses (which are relatively small and in tech industries) is still Windows 7. We don't consider Windows 10 a viable option because of the forced updates and telemetry issues, so we'd be looking at alternative platforms if Microsoft decided to dig in. As things stand, neither of those situations looks like changing any time soon; I'm guessing we're not alone, since all of our suppliers still seem to assume Windows 7 by default on new machines, so it will be interesting to see how the likes of Dell put pressure on MS to deliver something they can sell at Windows 7 nears EOL.
In our case, Apple gear would be the most obvious switch today. It has viable alternatives for most of the software we need in most areas, and crucially, it already has much better options in some of areas that aren't available on Windows. The hardware itself is relatively expensive, but it's far less expensive than making the wrong choice of platform and a lot of the applications themselves are cheaper, so it's well inside the "acceptable business expense" range.
Our view is that going cloud-everything isn't the way forward for us, so we're not particularly interested in those kinds of alternatives. Other businesses will presumably have different needs and priorities, though, and certainly the cloud-based offerings are becoming more competitive with traditional desktop software in a lot of areas for those who can meet their requirements that way and tolerate the disadvantages. If you can move your essential business software to something Web-enabled then it doesn't matter what OS you're running, or potentially even what type of device you're using.
And of course if MS do leave a huge vacuum in the mainstream desktop/laptop OS category, someone will surely move to fill it, because there's still an awful lot of money to be made there. I doubt it would be anything like any of the current Linux or BSD distributions, but as we've seen with OS X, Android, SteamOS and others, you can build a lot on top of those platforms with enough resources in the length of time we're talking about here, and certainly there are several heavyweights in tech today who have those resources if they choose to make a move.
So you might be right about people having to upgrade eventually, but I think there are likely to be a lot more viable options by that time than you're allowing for here.
One of the biggest features of Windows in the small-medium business and even enterprise markets is backwards compatibility. If you're willing/able to give that up, you are free to switch anywhere. If you can't, you can't. You have to stick with Windows. I work at a major tech company and all of our laptops are Linux. But we also have Windows VMs because we're all required to run Microsoft Office. We're switching to Macs because we can run a non-Windows system but still have Office (with the exception of Visio, unfortunately).
"A lot more viable options" exist, except when you need Windows software. In which case, no more viable options will ever exist until a new version of Windows is released. The more likely outcome is Microsoft pushing Windows 10 Enterprise a little harder.
I agree about the importance of backward compatibility for Windows itself, but I think compatibility is becoming less compelling as a reason for businesses to stay with Windows. The dangers of lock-in are well understood and a lot of businesses have been changing their IT strategies accordingly for a long time.
For example, in the era of XP to 7 transitions a decade or so ago, Office was the de facto standard format for exchanging most information within and between businesses. Today a wide range of online services are used for communication, and the tools for importing and exporting Office files from other software are now adequate for many purposes, and it's unlikely either of those trends will have reversed by 2020 when 7 runs out of support.
As of today, my own businesses have only a couple of Windows-only applications left that we rely on for anything fundamental. They are also the biggest pain points in our whole software infrastructure, also supplied by huge developers that have been moving in customer-hostile directions in recent years, and they are also starting to face serious competition from other applications on other platforms. Whether shifting away from Windows forces us to drop those few remaining Windows-only applications or dropping the applications removes the remaining incentives to stay on Windows first, I fully expect that by 2020 we won't be sorry to see any of them go.