With Windows 10, Microsoft corrects the problems it created

#Windows10#Software–With Windows 10, Microsoft corrects the problems it created– First released almost three years ago (and updated to 8.1 a year later), Windows 8 was a bet that didn’t pay off. Bold – or brash – design decisions and a fundamental shift in UX led to a very slow uptake of the OS, and we're now just days away from the release of its replacement.

Windows 10 comes at a difficult time for Microsoft, but although it too makes grand design revisions to the current formula, this time, it’s fixing problems, not causing them

The strange thing is, Microsoft has found itself in this situation before. In July 2009, Vista (then the company’s current OS) was installed on just one in five Windows PCs, while the outdated XP accounted for about two-thirds.

Fast-forward to today, and you have almost the exact same story. Windows 8 and 8.1 have a combined share hovering around the 19 percent figure, while Windows 7 stands at around 66 percent. It’s staggering how similar a predicament the company is in.

You could point to any number of reasons for why upgrades have been so slow this time around. Perhaps the most pertinent is that PC sales are weaker than ever, and existing users don’t feel compelled to make the switch. When it came to designing Windows 10, Microsoft began with where it went wrong: the Start screen.

For 17 years, the core of Microsoft’s OS was the Start menu. It slowly evolved from a simple gray list in Windows 95 to a highly customizable dual-column affair in 7. Then came Windows 8, and the jump to a full-screen menu with Live Tiles. It was a control system built with tablets and touchscreens in mind, and the plan was for users to ditch the old desktop programs and switch to full-screen, modern apps – the sort that work perfectly on both laptops and tablets.

For those without touchscreens, the basic tenet was supposedly the same as Windows 7: Press the Start key on your keyboard, and either move your cursor to (or type the name of) the thing you want to open.

But this switch to a full-screen menu was more than just a visual makeover to make selecting things on a tablet easier.

Design isn’t just about the way something looks; it’s about how you use that thing, and the Windows 8 switch set “traditional” laptop and desktop interaction back 22 years.