Looks like you and I hit a nerve here on HN. You are right though. Microsoft will be shipping Windows 10 with an incomplete version of their new Edge browser with the promise of adding critical features such as extensions in the future. Basically Windows 10 won't really be feature complete RTM for another 6 months. Even if Microsoft want to pretend it is ready now.
Edit: To clarify the "hit a nerve" bit, when I wrote this my post and agildehaus's were both down voted.
In some ways yes it is the same. However Photos isn't exactly the most important piece of software that comes with your OS.
Microsoft are trying to change how people think of their web browser. Edge is very important yet they are launching it without one of the biggest features needed in a modern browser, extension support.
But do you believe that more than 1% of web browser users install and use one or more browser extensions?
In 2013, this article[1] gave numbers of anywhere from 9% to 22% of users blocking ads, which requires an extension AFAIK. So, "yes". Even if those numbers are exaggerated due to skewed measurements, I'm pretty sure it's going to be more than 1%.
Edge supports Flash already, so if that's all that 90% of people use, it won't be a problem. And it's typically categorized as a "plug-in" rather than an extension, so I wouldn't lump it in with the extension functionality.
Not sure if it has Silverlight, but since we aren't streaming the 2008 Olympics and Netflix doesn't need it anymore I'm not terribly worried.
Just to clarify. MS said users of win 7 & 8 will be able to upgrade for free to win 10 within a year.
I believe I read somewhere that this will be MS's last release #. It will be a rolling release from here on out. I have not seen details on how they monetize that unless they switch to Apple's HW model.
Microsoft has stated that most of the money they make from Windows is from selling licenses to hardware partners. Of course, they are also starting to move into an Apple-like hardware model (though of course they still allow third parties to make hardware).
I think they are just wanting as many people as possible to switch to Windows 10 as fast as possible. They are doing this by giving it away for free.
After the year Windows will be monotonized the same way. As someone that always builds his own comoputers I jumped on the $29.99 Windows 7 deal which they offered the first 6 months and $39.99 for Windows 8 which was good for the first three months (Off the top of my head not needed to be accurate for arguement sake)
It's free for a year to upgrade and than back to business as usual.
They sell computers and mobile phones of their own design tailored for their own OS. The only difference is that they allow third party hardware and Apple doesn't.
> I think they are just wanting as many people as possible to switch to Windows 10 as fast as possible. They are doing this by giving it away for free.
I agree.
> After the year Windows will be monotonized the same way.
This doesn't seem to be consistent with their stated goals and the direction they've been moving in. The idea is that Windows 10 is the last numbered version of Windows, after that it will be evergreen. What upgrades are there to sell?
This is their chosen strategy though, that as of Windows 10 there will no longer be full major Windows versions. Instead it will be an ongoing rolling release of incremental changes.
From a developer perspective, this sounds like a support nightmare given the number of potential configurations that could end up out there with no clear way of identifying them.
Instead it will be an ongoing rolling release of incremental changes.
I genuinely don't understand this move by Microsoft. Of all the things you want to be stable and reliable over time, your basic OS and platform software has to be at the top of the list.
While dumping any responsibility to support software older than the latest release has obvious appeal for developers, evergreen software has mostly proven to be mediocre-to-disastrous from the user's point of view so far. For business users, it's also painful from an internal support point of view, for much the same reasons. And as you mentioned, for an OS or other platform software, anyone developing other software that runs on top of it also faces problems.
About the only thing this kind of constantly updating deployment model has been good for is getting security and stability patches out faster. This is beneficial, but that benefit is tempered by the "just ship junk and patch it later" philosophy that has become widespread at the same time. Many of those patches simply shouldn't ever have been necessary in the first place, but new releases are now routinely of such poor quality that many people just don't bother, and advice to wait until SP1 or the equivalent is common.
If I were Microsoft, I think I'd want my new flagship OS to be the stable, reliable, trustworthy antidote to Apple's broken-within-a-week operating systems[1], not something with the same reputation for constantly tweaking things as Chrome/Firefox, on-line SaaS apps, and the like.
[1] For legal reasons, I would like to point out that not all Apple operating systems break within a week. In fact, the fastest I have seen a mainstream Apple device break in practice was approximately an hour after purchase, when iOS updated on a mobile device almost immediately, leaving the device so much worse than what the purchaser had previously tried out and thought they were buying that they took it straight back to the shop and demanded a full refund.
Businesses have had the ability to manage update deployments for a while now. Big Win10 feature changes will likely come in a service pack form or similar, with security fixes and minor updates using the same model they always have.
A business will typically test and verify updates before pushing then out to their employees.
Businesses which allow its users to perform updates directly from Microsoft already face the issues you describe. (Many updates can and have caused issues. Especially the occasional broken patch that gets rolled back shortly after release).
I can certainly see this being an issue for support companies. On the other hand, they will likely still have some form of versioning to base their support on. "Sir, please do XXX. You should see something saying Windows 10 Service Pack and then a number. Can you please tell me what that number is?"
Businesses have had the ability to manage update deployments for a while now.
Sure, but someone still has to test each update as it applies to each critical system or widely used standard PC configuration before giving the OK to roll it out across the organisation. If MS moved to releasing non-essential updates in an ad-hoc fashion, it seems inevitable that the result would be either a scheduling and resource management headache for corporate IT departments or (perhaps more likely) a general policy of not deploying non-essential updates at all by default in large organisations because the hassle of keeping up isn't justified. Corporate IT have enough to worry about already without someone potentially moving the goalposts on a daily basis.
I still don't see how what you are describing is any more or less of a headache than supporting Windows XP a decade after the first release.. it's still rolling updates, just with less intensive UI changes over that period.
The same goes for companies supporting Windows 7 today... they're using their own base, with cherry picked updates. It seems to me, that this would be easier to manage, than keeping up with rolling from xp/7/8/8.x etc.
I would be surprised if they would make such a gamble. The last thing they can afford is another PR disaster with Windows 10.
Right now, there is very little incentive for a user to move on from Windows 7 on an existing machine, particularly if it is not touch enabled. Now imagine if they hear that Windows 10 is riddled with bugs and doesn't work.
I prefer Win 8.1 to 7 any day. I spend 99.9% of my time in desktop mode and it's fine. I prefer it!
EDIT: I don't have many/any ongoing issues with bugs, and I even use Visual Studio CTP/RC on a day to day basis, without any major issues.
Microsoft do software _really_ well. The crap they have to get right on an ongoing basis is nothing compared to Google and Facebook, we should give them some credit.
It may not be perfect at this very moment, but it will get more polished as time goes on. It has to.
The carrot they're dangling is a free upgrade, so think I might take this gamble. I'm not a penny pincher, but even so I cringe at the thought of paying for operating system upgrades.
This opportunity won't last forever, so I'll start with laptops and work my way up.
But I strongly suspect after a year Microsoft will extend the upgrade indefinitely. The whole year limit only exists to accelerate Windows 10 upgrades (to add urgency to it).
It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to end the free upgrade program after that point. They've already sacrificed most of the private licence revenue by the majority of the people buying them already upgrading, so the remaining trickle after the year won't be significant.
But I might be wrong. They did end the Windows 8 $25 upgrade after a year for real. So we'll have to wait and see.
But why is a free upgrade a good thing? What do I get by upgrading?
To a power user you get lots of nice things. Hyper-V is fantastic from Windows 8. Explorer is also faster and locks a lot less files and folders (the "you can't delete a folder that contained pictures" bug in windows 7).
But to a common user, there is nothing better in windows 10, other than the fact that they need to relearn how to use windows. From a UI point of view, the only additions are multiple desktops, which is at best a featurette, and moving the search bar from within the start menu to the task bar, which isn't exactly a revolution. If you don't have touch enabled on your machine, which would be the common case for windows 7, upgrading to windows 10 is only going to be a hassle.
The original iPhone was feature complete, in that the features it shipped with were complete.
Whether it had all the features it could have done is another question. However that misses the point - the goal was to set the bar for a fully touch-screen interface, not compete on feature lists.
And it was earth shattering. That one product launch was the catalyst for a huge amount of change – our entire computing landscape has been shaken up, previous incumbents are dead or dying, new industries have been created and billions of dollars of value has been created and destroyed.
The current Win10 builds are not even close to having the polish iPhone 1 had. There's all sorts of inconsistencies and screwed up stuff. Hell, just clicking on search settings doesn't even work (in true JS style even; it just does nothing, no error, no response).
OTOH, coming from Win8, where it's so much worse, Win10 is an improvement. After running I for months, a friend asked what was new. "Well they undid the Metro app fiasco, more or less. And console windows are now resizable. Font rendering is blurry in half the OS. And most settings are messed up and unusable until you manage to get into the "legacy" settings dialog. And uh... That's it?" Yeah they added a weak attempt at some new window management, but nothing super usable.
Anything is better than Win8, but Win7 users are not going to enjoy it. They'll probably prefer the old shell, with the new kernel extensions.
Anybody who thinks Windows 7 is better than Windows 8.1 needs to get a new monitor or their eyes checked. Also if you update to the latest Windows 10 build, released this weekend, it fixes the search/start menu launch stuff. I am running 8.1 and Windows 10 in a virtual plus several users are already running 10. Blurry fonts are the app makers problem, just like Apple.
Uh blurry apps include all the Metro stuff, IE/Sparta, etc. It's because MS is abandoning pixel snapping in lieu of "more accurate" subpixel positioning. This approach only works well on high DPI or large fonts. It sucks compared to normal ClearType at smaller (<13 pt) sizes.
Users are gonna be hard pressed to list the advantages of 20 over 7. Console windows suck less. Start menu is back. Task manager is better. Lots of under-the-hood stuff, sure. But day to day? I've been using Win10 for months and can't think of anything. (Virtual desktops, maybe... Their implementation seems clunky compared to others I've used.)
Unless you're into metro apps and like the junk ridden store, what's the killer app? What's the huge win in upgrading?
I stopped buying games by EA and Ubisoft about 5 years ago for this very reason - shipping incomplete & buggy software with the mentality "we'll patch it later". In EA's case, those patches didn't even materialize a lot of the time.
I take it from your comment that they're still up to their old tricks... I'll continue my boycott of EA and Ubi
I used to love gaming on my PC, and today I have far more disposable income I'd be willing to spend for top quality games. Sadly, I haven't actually bought (or pirated) a AAA title on PC for probably a decade now. The last few I had were great fun until they crashed or otherwise fundamentally failed at just the wrong moment, at which point all that enjoyment would instantly evaporate and just leave me in a bad mood instead. And every AAA game I'd bought in the last year or two before I gave up was like that. Throw in almost ubiquitous DRM/anti-cheating software doing unknown and potentially very bad things to my PC behind my back these days, and I'm very sad to say that PC gaming just isn't attractive to me any more.
That reminds me of the win8 release. I got it after preorder on release day, installed it immediately, hit update and got something about 350MB of updates. WTF, on release day???
After 2 weeks I switched back to Win7 (which was a lot of work, because I didn't think of making a backup before, because I didn't believe what a pice of sh*t it could be).
The RTM pressing is usually sent out a couple months before the "release date" ... Even then, XP was probably one of the worst at release, and wasn't really okay until SP1, and good until SP2, but people forget that. Vista was pretty bad too.
The only version of Windows in my mind that worked really good out of the box was Windows 2000 (not ME), and even that had a conflict with some piece of software (cd burning program iirc)... Also, they removed the in-memory database between the final RC and release, which irked me to no end.
I didn't really start using Windows 8 until 8.1, I touched a few machines (that didn't have touchscreens) with windows 8 early on and it sucked, server 2008 over RDP was worse... 8.1 with classicshell isn't bad.
