The other day, I mentioned that waiting to buy new technology makes sense right now. Today I’m going to explain why. Well, at least as it regards Windows.
Microsoft is not what it once was. This is, of course, all in a manner of speaking. The vast majority of the world still uses some form of the Windows operating system for day-to-day computing, and any erosion of that market share by Apple or the variety of Linux offerings is minuscule. (According to netmarketshare.com, February 2015 has all flavors of Windows garnering 91.57% of the market, Apple garnering 6.9%, and Linux nibbling on 1.53%.) Nonetheless, it’s been at least since the beginning of the 2000s since anyone has really seen Microsoft as the arbiter of anything, and its recent forays into touch computing has been a popular disappointment. Again, this is all in a manner of speaking. Combined, Windows 8 and 8.1 account for roughly 14% of the desktop market, while OS X 10.10 accounts for less than 4%. And yet, Windows 8 and 8.1 are seen as unmitigated horrible failures and utter disasters while Apple is seen as a juggernaut. (And Apple is, without a doubt, an astoundingly profitable company, looking realistically at a trillion dollar valuation in the coming years.)
Windows 8.x is seen as a failure because it has failed to unseat an operating system that came out in 2009. Even people who tolerate its clunky one-half touch, one-half keyboard & mouse interface should acknowledge that it doesn’t really excel in either realm. The truth of that forced Microsoft to essentially abandon the “8” brand and skip over “9” entirely to focus on “Windows 10,” which is supposed to be everything Windows 8.x isn’t, namely, coherent and easy to use.
I’ve been playing with the Technical Preview of Windows 10 on an old clunky non-touch laptop with a first- or second-gen Core i5 processor–I can’t really remember when I bought it, and it was outdated when I bought it–and it does go a long way toward making things a lot easier to use for people with keyboards and mice. You’d think it would be a bit more stable to use considering it’s really essentially just Windows 8.2, or perhaps Windows 8.3 and the underpinnings really shouldn’t be shaky. But, it’s a technical preview, so it is what it is; it’s a bit hard to complain about something that expressly says it might be a bit janky.
The Technical Preview program is part of Microsoft’s push to help people forget that 8.x ever existed, and now everything is built around Windows 10: it will run on desktops, laptops, tablets, 2-in-1s, the Xbox One, phones, embedded devices, and you could probably even put it on my old Zune HD if you tried hard enough. Depending on the form factor, the experience will be slightly different, but the underlying code is supposed to be the same. And that’s supposed to help with the huge problem with the touch-first environment: the fact that there’s a dearth of popular apps in the Windows Store, and those that are there can be terrible. The theory is that developers will develop for Windows 10 in ways they didn’t for 8.x. Time will tell; Microsoft keeps saying the apps are coming, but that’s what always gets said. But Windows 10 is exciting, and users of Windows 7 on up will be able to upgrade to it for free within one year of its release later this year.
The excitement associated with Windows 10, though, comes at a price. Free upgrade aside, what incentive is there to purchase a new computer right now if you know that in a few months hence everything will be different? The newest-gen Skylake chips are supposed to debut in August or September, and that could mean that the fifth-gen Broadwell chips go down in price. On top of that, even if the upgrade is free, and even if it is actually pretty easy to install Windows 10, isn’t it even easier to just buy a computer that doesn’t require upgrading just a few months after purchasing? (Given the learning curve associated with figuring out Windows 8.x, coupled with then having to unlearn everything and learn other things for 10, I’d say, yes, it is easier to just buy a computer that doesn’t require upgrading just a few months later.)
This is hardly revolutionary thinking, and it all adds up to creating incentives for people to simply wait until things get released. (Given the pace of the build releases for the technical preview, which feels somewhat slow, one might be forgiven for thinking that the fall release target might be missed; after all, when the notion of “Threshold”was first whispered about more than a year ago, the thought was it would be ready in time for Build in April. And that’s not happening.)
