Windows 10

Just days after dropping the figures for the smartphone market, market researchers and analysts are putting the spotlight on the second favorite poster boy for shrinking markets: tablets (PC are still numero uno). But for the first time in a while, the narrative isn’t as clear-cut with winners and losers. The tablet market is now at a crossroads and its ultimate fate lies on how companies will wisely take advantage of the new opportunities that are given to them. And they better be smart because now, more than ever, the need for tablets, and the need to take tablets to the next level, is growing.

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Microsoft’s adoptions of a “Windows as a Service” strategy has so far been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it has ensured that Windows 10 users won’t need to wait too long for new features and, more importantly, critical bug fixes. On the other hand, Microsoft has been criticized for aggressively pushing users to update, often at inconvenient times. Those two sides will come crashing again in a few months as Microsoft starts reminding users to update their Windows 10 PCs or risk remaining unprotected in the scary world of connected computers.

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Microsoft tried, and tried hard it did, to corner both PC and mobile markets. It failed and is now practically left renting on its rivals smartphone platforms. That doesn’t mean, however, that it will have to settle for a less than ideal experience. Back its BUILD conference in May, Microsoft revealed its plans to seamlessly connect your Windows 10 PC and your phone with a “Your Phone” app. And now with its latest Windows 10 Insider Preview build (17728), it’s finally getting the ball rolling.

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Ask any Windows user about their biggest Windows complaint and it'll likely be this: the operating system tends to reboot at the worst possible time. Users have complained about reboots that interfere with work, delay school projects, ruin game night, and more. Microsoft is attempting to address these problematic update reboots using machine learning, enabling the system to better determine the right time to restart.

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Microsoft started in earnest to carve out its own app store platform back in Windows 8 and it was a disaster. Barely anyone paid attention to it, which also left its Windows RT variant devoid of actually useful apps. It tried again with Windows 10 and its Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and had more success. But now it might have a new problem it needs to deal with and fast. With the influx of new apps on its Microsoft Store, the company now has to face the reality that there are some who are ready to game the system to trick users, even to the point of getting them to pay for something.

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For years now, prophets of doom have been talking about the death of the PC. To some extent, they are right. The PC of old have gone the way of the dodo and today’s PCs have very little in common with them. Last week, both Gartner and IDC published numbers that, for the first time in six years, showed growth for the steadily shrinking market. And while both market researchers advise cautious optimism, it’s hard to deny the trend that their statistics show: the PC isn’t going anywhere.

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For the first time in the last SIX YEARS, PC shipment numbers grew worldwide. This is according to analysts at Gartner, who suggest that this year-over-year growth in global PC shipments is a temporary situation. This is all apparently due to the business world replacing all their old PCs with new Windows 10 PCs in a global trend. This trend will apparently fall off within the next couple of year.

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With its Surface line, Microsoft has stumbled upon an almost niche market of creatives and office workers who love to blend analog input with digital media. Some of those devices, like the Surface Studio, seem squarely aimed at artists and creators while the likes of the Surface Hub cater to work collaborators. Connecting those devices together is the Whiteboard app, now available for all Windows 10 PCs and, soon, on iOS and web browsers.

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Microsoft just revealed the Surface Go, its lightest, slimmest, and cheapest Surface tablet yet. Cheapest is relative only to other Surface 2-in-1s and it’s hardly iPad thin or slim. And that 9 hours of battery life doesn’t even hold a candle. With LTE support still coming later, it’s far from being the “always connected” experience Microsoft was singing about last year. It could have tried with a Windows 10 on ARM device but, if the Surface Go is to even make a dent in the market, there was really no other choice than to go with an Intel x86 processor.

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Adopting the slogan and strategy of “Windows as a Service” is admittedly one of the best things Microsoft has ever done for the operating system. Now in its third year, Windows 10 has already received five major updates, almost twice a year. Microsoft may have run out of names to call the updates but it isn’t losing steam. It has just released Insider Preview Build 17713 which, among other things, marks the final months before the release of “Redstone 5” in a few months.

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While the Surface Go makes quite a tempting proposition, some have unsurprisingly remarked that Microsoft is only trying to distract people from the real issue at hand. That issue is that Microsoft has reportedly postponed “indefinitely” its foldable Surface Phone and the Andromeda software that would run on it. Of course, they never really formally acknowledged the existence of either but neither did they say it’s completely done for. The latter sliver of hope may be what fans of the project have seen in a demo video that has nothing to do with Andromeda but also hints that it might still exist.

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Microsoft released the hardware I'd like to use with software like macOS, but Microsoft released the device with Windows 10 onboard. Apple won't likely release anything smaller than a MacBook Air with macOS onboard, ever - but I still want one. Or maybe what I want is top-notch hardware with a capable operating system without all the junk on Windows that only ever gets in the way of my everyday computing activities. I want something like Windows, but without the junk - I want something we'll call goOS.

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