Doubling down on failure

Up to now, reactions to Microsoft's gimped OS, Windows 10 S, have been pretty uniformly negative. Its smaller footprint apparently does make it slightly quicker to start, but the app gap has not gone anywhere, turning the experience of actually working with the thing into an exercise in frustration. Worse, the market that Microsoft appeared to be targeting with 10 S, namely students and educational institutions, will not be buying Windows 10 S laptops this year, since the only one on the market, Microsoft's own, is prohibitively expensive, and the low-cost versions from Microsoft's partners won't be available to buy until well after the back-to-school shopping season has ended.

To call this a misfire would, I think, be to grossly underestimate how badly the Windows 10 S rollout has gone. The product is not useful, to anybody, and the market that Microsoft thought might be tempted won't even be considering 10 S for another year... a year in which these institutions will have bought even more deeply into the Chromebook ecosystem. But Windows 10 S, with its Windows Store requirement, i.e. requiring users to buy all their software again, but through Microsoft, this time... that really is Microsoft's vision of Windows' future, apparently, and they're not done trying to put it on users that have shown no interest whatsoever.

From Windows Report:

Microsoft just made it much easier for users to try Windows 10 S on all Windows 10 PCs. The company will release an installer for Windows 10 S that will allow users to install the OS on other versions of Windows 10.

This installer comes as a standard executable file, will download Windows 10 S, and then install it on your machine regardless of what version of Windows 10 you might be running. The only important thing is that you are not a Windows 10 Home user.

Microsoft also launched an official ISO for Windows 10 S the other week that offers users the opportunity to try out the operating system on a virtual machine or an actual hardware. This new installer, on the other hand, makes thing much easier and users can try out the latest version of Windows quicker now.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, asked for this, and nobody is going to care. Seriously, who is this for?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Windows single greatest strength is that everybody uses Windows, and has done so for decades. While I'm sure that Microsoft and Windows have their ardent fans, just like Apple & MacOs and Linux do, most of the people who use Windows do not actually care about Windows, per se. They adopted Windows because everyone else did, and they're sticking with Windows because everyone else is... and besides, all of the expensive Win32 software in which they've invested only runs on Windows, and who wants to buy all of that over again?

Apple was able to foist their "walled garden" App Store on iOS users only because there was no competing ecosystem, with a heavily invested install base, to compete against. Google was forced to add a Marketplace to Android because they were marketing to smartphone users who now expected an app store as part of the package, but who hadn't bought into Apple's yet. Smartphones were new, remember; there weren't decades of already-developed and backwards-compatible software to run on these new platforms.

Even so, Google still felt compelled to make their ecosystem more open than Apple's, and to support side-loading, which iOS didn't (and only barely does, even now).

Microsoft's Windows customers are just not in the same situation now, as early smartphone customers were then. Windows users are, for the most part, heavily invested in a Win32 "ecosystem" that's been richly populated by decades of software development. They're used to being able to comparison shop for their applications, buying them from whomever they please, benefiting from the lower prices that normally arises from that kind of competition for their business. Windows users have essentially zero incentive to ditch all of their existing software to buy everything again through Microsoft, even if doing so were a viable option... and it really isn't a viable option, because the Windows Store is a still wasteland of shit.

Microsoft desperately wants to convince users that Windows 10 S is something that they'll want, but it's doomed to fail, because nobody wants this. Releasing an installer that nobody will use for a product that nobody's interested in, is just doubling down on failure. It would almost be painful to watch, if we weren't used to it by now.