Microsoft just revealed their next version of Windows, and I have more questions than answers

So, it's official: contrary to what they'd said previously, Windows 10 will not be the last version of Windows that Microsoft releases. Windows 11 is definitely coming, it's definitely called Windows 11, and today we got a look at some of its sexier features.

First, the good ...

Windows 10 is very pretty. A lot of people, myself included, hated the flat, designed-for-touchscreens Windows 8, and while Windows 10 restored the start menu, it didn't fix the ugly look of the thing. Windows 11 was very clearly designed to mimic the much, much prettier Aero Glass UI of Windows Vista and Windows 7, and it's a huge improvement.

Gone, too, is the ugly "live tile" blue void that takes up space next to W10's start menu. Live tiles still exist, but Microsoft has renamed them to Widgets, and banished them to their own sub-menu; those who are interested can call up the Widget menu using the button on the task bar, and ignore it otherwise.

Windows Updates have apparently been improved as well, with smaller updates loading in the background, rather than shoving themselves to the fore and preventing users from doing anything else while the updates happen. They've also finally found a way to get some Android apps into the Windows Store, too, although it's the much, much smaller subset of Android apps that Amazon have on their app store.

... which brings us to the less-than-good ...

OS usage share stats for end-September (Yes, there actually is news to report.)

Okay, yes, I know, I said that I was all done following Windows 10's monthly crawl to parity with Windows 7. That declaration is looking to have been premature, however, since this appears to be the month when things actually got interesting again.

First, Windows 10 (WX) vs. Windows 7 (W7). Last month, WX looked to finally be on pace to equal W7 by November, to such an extent that even I was willing to posit that they might actually make it this time. That was then, though, and this is now, and in the now, WX has once again lost ground to its much, much older cousin. As reported by Wayne Williams at Betanews:

Usage share monitoring service StatCounter saw Windows 10 overtake Windows 7 back in February, and its latest figures put the new operating system on 50.07 percent, well ahead of Windows 7 on 37.2 percent.

Rival monitoring service NetMarketShare disagrees however. While Windows 10 gained significant share in August, at Windows 7’s expense, the latest figures, for September, show a reversal of fortune.

According to NetMarketShare, in September, Windows 10 went from 37.80 percent to 37.44 percent, a fall of 0.36 percentage points.

In the same time frame, Windows 7 gained 0.61 percentage points to sit on 40.88 percent, 3.44 percent ahead.

Based on last month’s figures, I predicted that Windows 10 would take the lead by November, or possibly as early as October, but that no longer seems to be the case. It's now more likely to be the start of next year, but we shall see.

In case you're wondering what that looks like, here's the graph from NMS:

W7/WX still leads everyone else by a large margin, but Linux now clearly leads the "everyone else" pack.

I'd previously pegged ±0.5% as the threshold for significance, which these changes just barely exceed. That said, it does mean that the "by November" prediction for WX/W7 parity will likely be missed for a third straight year, which has to be slightly embarrassing for Microsoft.

This development isn't nearly as interesting as the month's OS usage changes among Steam users, though.

Why not Windows 10?

Given that my recent foray into PC Gaming on Linux were... underwhelming, shall we say, some of my readers (yes, all three of you) may well be wondering why I don't just bite the bullet and switch to Windows 10 already. True, the "free upgrade" offer has ended, and Windows 10 will not cost money, but I was honestly always going to want more control over my PC than WX Home offered, which would always have meant a Professional license... in other words, Windows 10 was always going to cost me something up front.

So, why not just switch already?

It's a good question, and one which I've struggled a bit to answer myself this past week. Was I just being stubborn? Or did I still have concrete, valid reasons for sticking with Windows 7, while hoping that Valve and Steam Play would be able to solve the Linux gaming performance problem at some point during the upcoming year?

Today, though, I had a eureka moment, when I found my nebulous reasons for sticking with W7 suddenly crystallized into a single paragraph by Paul Thurrott. He was writing about Microsoft's decision to de-escalate some of WX's advertising bullshit. After downplaying the reversal as "not much of a win," he goes onto describe  Microsoft's approach to Windows consumers thusly:

Everything else that is still wrong about Windows 10 is still in the product and will move forward with version 1809.

In other words, the slippery slope I first warned about way back in 2012, when Microsoft quietly began its first sneaky advertising additions to Windows 10's predecessor, is still very much an issue. And has escalated over time. The ongoing and unnecessary compromises to Windows 10---rampant advertising, attempts at pushing users to Microsoft Edge, pre-bundled crapware, and more---continue unabated. There is no major software platform that is this hostile to its own users. [Emphasis added.]

"That's it!" I thought. "That's the reason!" It's not just WX's ongoing issues, which I could probably live with or work around, it's that Microsoft treats all but their largest Enterprise customers with thinly veiled contempt, most of the time, and has done so for years. Sure, maybe this latest half-hearted walk-back marks the beginning of a trend towards less bullshit in Windows... but I'm not planning to bet money on it.

Seriously, fuck Microsoft at this point. If Valve can get Steam Play working well enough to provide a moderately decent gaming experience on Linux (or, hell, SteamOS), I'll put up with some performance issues, rather than give Microsoft the satisfaction.

They're not going to make it...

Since I haven't been watching the monthly market share numbers as intently as I used to, I really didn't have the correct context in which to place this bit of news when it was first posted last week:

With the Windows 7 end-of-support clock slowly winding down to January 14, 2020, Microsoft is announcing it will offer, for a fee, continuing security updates for the product through January 2023. This isn't the first time Microsoft has done this for a version of Windows, but it may be the first time it has been so public about its plans to do so.

Windows 7 still has a large share of the overall Windows market, especially among business customers. Moving off older versions of Windows is a slow process, even with advance planning, for companies with multiple thousands of Windows desktop machines.

The paid Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESUs) will be sold on a per-device basis, with the price increasing each year. These ESUs will be available to any Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise users with volume-licensing agreements, and those with Windows Software Assurance and/or Windows 10 Enterprise or Education subscriptions will get a discount. Office 365 ProPlus will continue to work on devices with Windows 7 Extended Security Updates through January 2023.

[...]

This time around, the ESU program is being run out of Microsoft's Volume Licensing Unit and Core Windows Engineering "is producing these updates like a product," [Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365] explained.

"We want to encourage people to get off Windows 7, but we want to make it more than something punitive," he said.

This was the second move that Microsoft made in a direction of accommodating the "slow process" of operating system migration at scale; they also announced that they're slowing the pace of forced Windows 10 updates, which was another pain point for Enterprise customers.

Some businesses have complained that they need more time and flexibility to update Windows 10, and IT admins are tasked with ensure apps work with the latest update. Microsoft is releasing new cloud-based tools to ease app compatibility testing, and the company is also giving IT admins more time to update. All currently supported feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions will be supported for 30 months from their current release. The existing policy is 18 months, so this bump brings support closer to what IT admins were used to in the Windows 7 and earlier days.

Interesting, yes? Now for the context: Windows 7 (W7) doesn't just have a large share of the market. W7 still has over forty percent of the market, according to the latest numbers from NetMarketShare.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

Do you remember when Microsoft's vision for Windows 10 involved blocking normal program installation by default? When they had to make a big deal of the ability for users to enable "side loading," as if it was some sort of fucking gift that Microsoft were giving us out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than because Windows Store was a wasteland of shit that consumers wanted no part of?

They didn't stay backed down for long, though. It was only six months later that they were announcing Windows 10 S, a gimped version of the OS which didn't even allow the option of turning side-loading on unless you paid to upgrade from WX S to WX Pro. They ended up making upgrades free for the rest of 2017, because the Windows (later Microsoft) Store was still a wasteland of shit that consumers wanted no part of. Oh, and WX S was also unusably bad, because there were no apps for fucking thing.

Well, it turns out Microsoft still isn't done trying to force Windows users onto their horrible, horrible digital storefront for fucking everything, because they're trying yet again to do exactly that. Just, you know, not with people who've already switched over. No, it's only new WX users who'll get fucked.

From Tech Republic:

Windows 10: Get ready for more PCs that only run Microsoft Store apps by default

Microsoft is planning to update all versions of Windows 10 to incorporate S Mode, which will limit the machine to only installing apps from the Microsoft Store, according to a leaked roadmap.

Because of course they are. This has always been the plan.

Do you remember when WX was supposedly on pace to surpass W7 by November?

NMS's end-of-January numbers are out, and once again, WX has managed modest gains at the expense of Windows XP, while W7 and W8.1 remain mostly unchanged. And, no, WX still hasn't caught up to its nine-year-old rival.

WX gained, of course, from 32.93% to 34.29% (+1.36); W7 ticked down, from 43.08% to 42.39% (-0.69); W8.1 ticked down slightly, from 5.71% to 5.56% (-0.15); and XP slid the most, from 5.18% to 4.05% (-1.13). Except for W8.1's, all of these results are above the ±0.5% "noise threshold," but WX's gains are not enough to encompass the losses of W7, W8.1, and XP. Some of those former Windows users are going elsewhere.

Where are they going, you ask? By the looks of it, Apple. Windows' overall market share slid from 88.51% to 87.79% (-0.72), while MacOS grew its overall market share from 9.02% to 9.95% (+0.93), propelled by MacOS X 10.13 (from 3.53% to 4.46%, +0.93). An overall decline in Windows' user base probably isn't something that Microsoft want to see; yes, WX gained more than a percentage point to start the year, but the fact that those gains are mostly coming at the expense of the 16½ year old XP, rather than the market-leading W7, can't be good news, either.

Windows 10 can still be had for free, weeks after they claimed to have closed the last free-WX loophole

BTW, I've just decided to start abbreviating Windows 10 to "WX," which is both shorter and consistent with GWX branding already used by Microsoft. For brevity and consistency, I'll also be using "W#" for earlier versions (i.e. W7, W8, W8.1), and simply adding the appropriate suffixes for other flavours of WX when needed for clarity (WX-Home, WX-Pro, WX-Core, WX-S, etc.).

It took Microsoft until two full weeks after their Dec. 31st deadline, and change, to finally close the Assistive Technologies loophole, which allowed users to upgrade to WX for free if they were willing to say that they used any kind of Assistive Technology... up to, and including, hot keys. You might thing that the end of the last of the Microsoft's officially free WX offerings would mean the end of stories about how you can still get WX for free.

Well, you would be wrong. Check out the "most relevant" result that Google News returns for "Windows 10."

Yes, that's Forbes, with yet another piece on how WX can still be had for free, now two weeks after the last free WX window was allegedly closed.

Windows 10 was free for a year after launch for anyone who had an older version of Windows. For those who missed this transition period it was possible to get an upgrade right up until the end of 2017, a loophole Microsoft has now closed - although it wasn't much of a loophole, as the company knew all about it.

However there are other ways to upgrade to Windows 10 that don't involve getting the upgrade assistant from the official site.

Yes, apparently this has always worked... meaning that this also isn't much of a loophole, since Microsoft clearly also knows all about it, i.e. working as intended.

It's unclear as to why this works, but if you have a product code for an old version of Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 you should be able to enter this into a copy of Windows 10 and get an activation. You will be given access to the version of Windows 10 that matches the original product key. So Windows 8 Pro will get Windows 10 Pro, while Windows 8 Home will get, you guessed it, Windows 10 Home.

Hmmm.... so it's possible to upgrade from W7-Pro to WX-Pro? It's a shame the GWX app didn't work the same way; I might have been tempted to switch.

Right about now, you might be wondering why Microsoft would still have a WX upgrade left open that's large enough for an auto-truck to drive through? Well, Microsoft themselves are pretty quiet on the issue, but Forbes' Ian Morris has some ideas:

As I pointed out in my article about the closing of the accessibility loophole, I don't think Microsoft really cares about end users getting free upgrades. It makes more money from OEM sales of Windows 10 on new laptops and revenue from corporate users than the slender pickings of home users. Indeed, Microsoft makes more money - and more margin - on selling cloud offerings these days.

Windows isn't a cash cow when it comes to home users, so I suspect there's a lot of give built into the system.

Which makes a lot of sense, actually. It's just a shame that Microsoft are being so disingenuous about it all. I mean, they could easily partner with PC-OEMs to promote new PC sales ("Get the most out of Windows 10 with the latest AMD/Ryzen hardware!"), while also continuing to let tech-savvier users upgrade for free if they still want to... and without the fucking hard sell, this time. Because, honestly, the hard sell of the GWX campaign was a big part of the continued appeal of W7, which culminated in Microsoft simply switching over users who didn't take active steps to avoid the unwanted "upgrade," even after they'd repeatedly refused Microsoft's malware-laden Home version of WX.

Hell, Microsoft even have a better product to give away than they did a few years ago, with more features and (crucially) better privacy protections, and even better privacy tools due to be added to the platform in a couple of months. And if I can also use my W7 Professional license to upgrade to WX-Pro, rather than the gimped Home version, to gain even more features and even better privacy tools... when, that becomes one hell of a sales pitch, doesn't it?

So, what's the problem?