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Happy 2nd birthday, Windows 8 and Surface: Anatomy of a disaster

Heart of Windows 8 lives on in Windows 10

What went wrong?

Why did Windows 8 fail? From an engineering perspective it was a solid release – as you would expect from the same team that came up with the all-conquering Windows 7 – and it did perform as advertised, working well with both new-style touch apps, and existing desktop applications.

Users can accept major change, but only if the benefits are sufficient and obvious enough to give them incentive. Microsoft – desperately – needed a tablet operating system; but users already had one; an iPad or Android device. Those users who did come to terms with Windows 8 spend most of their time in desktop Windows, because that is where the applications are.

Microsoft failed to get compelling apps into its store at launch, and saw little improvement thereafter. The same factors which drive a successful platform – more apps, drawing in more users, creating a strong market for more apps – also operate in reverse.

The boldness of the Windows 8 experiment also looks in hindsight like stubbornness. The initial release made no effort to draw existing Windows users in; it was almost the opposite, thrusting them into the “modern” environment with few clues about how to get out of it. For some who knew and liked Windows, it could be a humiliating experience, especially for those with only keyboard and mouse; humiliation turned to anger and the new tiled user interface was deeply unpopular.

The Windows 8 Start screen

There is also something wrong with Windows 8 aesthetics. The pervasive Start screen is not beautiful, and the flickering Live Tiles make design consistency difficult. “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them,” said Steve Jobs of Apple’s OS X Aqua user interface; you cannot imagine such a comment on Windows 8, despite all the design research that went into “Metro”. These things count, especially in retail environments such as the ever-dwindling displays of laptops or Windows 8 tablets in airports, for example.

The “immersive UI” was sufficiently extreme that users had difficulty using apps and navigating the operating system. Users complained that the Wikipedia app had no search function; it did, but you had to make the Charms menu appear somehow, or know to press the Windows key and S together to bring up Search.

Since the launch of Windows 8, Microsoft has worked to bring back users. A Start button reappeared on the desktop in Windows 8.1, as well as window bars with close buttons in modern-style apps. Windows 10 goes further, showing new-style apps in resizeable windows on the desktop. “If Windows 8 had been like that …”, you may think; but for Microsoft it has been a painful journey.

Windows 8 fallout – and hope

Was Windows 8 a major disaster for Microsoft? Yes – though the company has still prospered, delivering consistently good financial results (not least yesterday) thanks to the breadth of its products, solid server and cloud performance, and the strong hold of Windows (although mostly in version 7) and Office in business.

The company hoped to compete strongly against the iPad and introduce an app ecosystem to rival that of Apple and Google, but Windows 8 failed in both these goals.

Another consequence is that Windows 8 accelerated the drift of developers and influencers (such as journalists) towards Macs. Corporate Windows development is still strong, but beyond that Macs dominate. Microsoft’s Visual Studio development tool runs only on Windows so this is a significant barrier to app development, though a Mac can run a Windows environment on a virtual machine.

Microsoft now embraces an “any device” policy and is delivering keys apps like Office for Apple and (soon) Android devices, accepting the decline in the Windows client.

All eyes are now on Windows 10, currently in preview. This looks superficially more like Windows 7; yet Microsoft is not discarding its Windows 8 technology. The heart of it, the Windows Runtime layer which runs sandboxed, touch-friendly apps, is even more important now it can run apps that appear to the user as desktop apps. The company is integrating its Windows Phone and Windows 8 app platform with a new Universal App model for Visual Studio, and a unified Store.

If Windows 10 is a hit, it will be because it refines and makes usable the bold changes that were made for Windows 8, and for which Sinofsky and his team will deserve credit. ®

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