Mark Pickavance points out some obvious features that never made it to the all-you-can eat buffet that is Windows 10
Whenever a product like Windows 10 comes to fruition, those behind it create lots of lists highlighting the new features they’ve included.
These are good bullet points, especially for those that want to justify the upgrade or for journalists to provide a checklist for their readers.
However, as much as Microsoft will undoubtedly be pushing the line that Windows 10 is the best version of Windows yet, as it did with Windows 8 and before, that doesn’t guarantee that it’s perfect.
Of course, surely it’s the purpose of software to evolve, rather than be a de facto solution. Windows has got better, mostly, though it’s also much larger, more complicated and has something of a commercial monkey on its back.
Microsoft, however, must cannibalise previous customers to become new customers, and attract fresh Windows users to grow its business – something it’s done pretty effectively for the past 30-odd years.
Yet on occasion that magic eluded it even in its most successful product, because of directions the company has chosen to take it.
Windows 8 had major issues addressing lots of those people, mostly because it was built with a very specific vision that didn’t really embrace many of the existing customers.
That made many people wonder if Microsoft as a business had entirely lost the thread of what made Windows successful, as it yo-yoed through failure with Vista, success with Windows 7 and then failure again with 8.
What we know about Windows 10 is that it will be the final point release of this product line, with all future development morphing this product into its future form, in theory negating the need for specific Windows 11, 12 or 14 launches.
In looking at what Microsoft intends to deliver, and having been on this journey from the outset, part of me is mildly disappointed with what it’s come up with. Given the enormous resources and rich history, Windows must be the software application with the most human man hours allocated to it ever, and yet it’s flawed in ways that users will see each and every day.
Here are ten things that I feel should have been in Windows by now, but for a variety of reasons they weren’t included. Obviously, I’m writing this ahead of the official launch day, so it’s entirely possible that Microsoft has hidden some features away in the preview that it’ll roll out to surprise us all.
Bearing that in mind, here’s my wish list of ten things Windows should really have by now.
1. A Proper Backup!
I’m not sure what Microsoft’s problem is with users securing their systems, but from the outset it’s done almost nothing in this department and made the likes of Paragon and Acronis a small fortune in the process.
With Vista it did introduce a backup tool which, in theory, made an image of the PC that you could recover from. In Windows 7 this bordered on being useful, and then in Windows 8.x it seemed to make great efforts to both hide the tool and remove some of its better features.
One and possibly the only reason I’d consider getting and using a Mac is that Apple has Time Machine, a fantastic piece of software that allows you to secure both your system and your files effortlessly. Why can’t Microsoft deliver a version of Windows with something similar?
There seems to be some political issue with system builders who don’t want people zapping their machines back to their raw state and not buying a new PC because it all works well again.
After more than 25 years of Windows, isn’t it about time that we had one where backing up just happens and doesn’t require third-party tools and a technology degree to navigate?
Having tried to use the Windows 10 preview restore and the Windows 8.x one without any success in restoring a backup it created, the only conclusion I can make is that this is an area Microsoft seems unwilling to properly address for whatever ideological reasons.
Unfortunately, Acronis True Image 11 doesn’t support Windows 10, in case you wondered about that.
2. Modular Applications
Have you ever tried to take the hard drive from a dead system and pull the personal files off it onto a new one? Yes, it’s an almost impossible task, and you’ll never actually get the system back to how the old one was, even if you spent a month of Sundays on it.
That’s because Microsoft built an OS where applications can do pretty much anything they like, inserting registry values here, configuration files there and .dll files all over the show. As a result, there’s no modularity, where you can have apps on an external hard drive and then plug it into another PC and just use them.
This diabolical structural mess that allows the OS, apps and user data to mingle like drunken party guests is probably the worst aspect of Windows and has made the lives of IT people a living nightmare for decades.
With Windows 8 there seemed a chink of light with the Store, where once you used apps in it, they could be tagged to be automatically installed when you logged into a new computer. At least, that was the theory.
The reality is that the majority of Metro apps are useless, so most people don’t use them, and only now with Windows 10 are Windows 32 API apps coming to the Store. However, they’re not included in the auto install mode, and there’s still no means to move apps to an external store and then run them (or install them) from there.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Microsoft assumes that eventually the cloud will come along and avoid it having to create structure and organisation, because it’s got very little now.
Users want the OS, software and data to be fully plug and play, so you can quickly get a system configured just like your previous one, and the task of backing up is that much easier.
Whatever Microsoft brought us with Windows 10, it wasn’t this most badly needed of user friendly features.
3. An End To Forced Restarts
While I was working the other day on my Windows 10 preview system, I decided to change the Workgroup name to the one I use at home (not WORKGROUP). At that point, Windows insists that I reboot! That’s so poor in this day and age that it’s not even funny any longer.
But what’s amazing is how many things that Windows wants to do require a reboot – and sometimes multiple reboots for good measure. Why?
I’ll have a stab: sloppy coding that can’t track what the implications of changes have and so decides it’s easier to pass all these problems to the bootstrap engine to resolve.
If my phone wanted to reboot every time it installed an app or I changed my device name, then I wouldn’t use Android, because that would be silly and frankly annoying.
Windows needs to get out of its 1992 mind-set and start thinking like a modern OS, where reboots aren’t needed and there’s effective memory garbage collection that keeps it running smoothly for extended periods of time.
Like PC makers are addicted to crapware, Microsoft can’t kick the reboot habit because it needs to accept first that it has a problem.
Microsoft needs to go to ‘Reboot Anonymous’ and come clean about its addiction to cold starts.
Windows shouldn’t need forced restarts, because users certainly didn’t ask for them to continue.
4. A Smart Cloud Service
For all its faults, one of the features that Windows 8.x actually got right was its integration to OneDrive, which allows you lots of flexibility about how folders are replicated onto the cloud service.
However, one of the problems that people ran into was the placeholder concept, where you assumed that you had a file on your laptop, got on a plane and then tried to edit it. Finding that you didn’t have a copy of the file when it wasn’t downloadable was pretty frustrating.
However, Microsoft’s answer to that was to make it much less flexible and remove the placeholder technology altogether, like it worked under Windows Mobile.
Surely developing some way to negate the placeholder issue would have worked better than regressing the facility to something much less useful?
What it’s effectively done is relegated OneDrive to being the same as Dropbox – something that’s not likely to make people use Microsoft’s facility over the one they currently rely on.
Windows 8.x pushed the notion of a seamless cloud integration that Windows 10 just turns its back on like it wasn’t anything special. But OneDrive and how it connects to Windows 10 has other problems, not least the way that it stores some personal configuration features but not others.
For example, if you set a background on a Windows 8.x or 10 PC and then log into another, your background appears. But if you have a PC and you like the standard collection of system icons on your desktop, their appearance isn’t replicated at all.For this Windows user, having the icons appear on a new computer saves me a job, whereas I really couldn’t care less about the background.
What really needs to happen is that Microsoft needs to go through all the things you might configure on Windows and then decide (or let the user decide) which of them to sync through OneDrive – or ideally with any existing cloud service, including personal ones created by NAS boxes.
What’s somewhat mind numbing about all this is that for at least the last year or more the senior people at Microsoft have been banging on about the company becoming a ‘devices and services’ operation, and yet it can’t actually deliver this one critical service in a consistent and powerful way.
The objective of any cloud storage system should be to blur the lines between what you have locally and what’s stored centrally, and at this time what’s on offer here is actually very clearly demarcated.
I actually think this is a fixable problem, if Microsoft has the inclination to address one of the features where oddly Windows 10 isn’t as good as its predecessor.
5. Custom Touch Keyboards
If you do use touch (and I accept that most people don’t), then you’d like the tablet experience to be on par with that offered by Android and iOS. But alas, for whatever logical reason, only Microsoft is allowed to provide the touch input mechanism, so there’s no Swiftkey for Windows.
To a degree this is a continuation of Microsoft’s insistence on keeping certain functions exclusively for itself, as it did in Windows 8.x with the Metro browser capabilities.
The irony of these choices is that they were made mostly so that Windows 8 tablets had a uniform user experience and weren’t really intended to specifically limit the desktop environment.
This is probably a minor point, as the great touch revolution never actually came to the desktop PC like Microsoft expected, but it’s another reason why the tablet part of its plan appears to be faltering.
6. A Unified Personality
When tiles and ‘Metro’ apps got introduced in Windows 8, the PC effectively ended up with a split personality, where it wouldn’t recall what one part got told just minutes earlier on the other.
The best example of this was IE, where different apps existed on both the desktop and Metro sides, which initially didn’t share any information, such as what web pages you had open.
Some parts of the Windows multiple personality disorder have been addressed in Windows 10, but still there are plenty of places where there are things that are partly duplicated in each persona.
A classic example of this is ‘Settings’, which contains a subset of what’s also accessible in the classic control panel. It wouldn’t be too bad if the control panel contained everything, with Settings being less detailed, but it’s much worse than that.
There are features that are exclusive to either or merged with those that are common, as if some random selection process went on. Because of this, when you want a control or feature, you’re generally forced to look around both until you stumble into it.
Fans of Windows 8 might well argue that you could just search for it using Bing, which technically you can do. However, as a default, if you put ‘regedit’ into the search of Windows 10, it will bring you a selection of web pages talking about Regedit rather than the app on your computer. You can alter this tendency, if you can find the controls to stop it searching the web by default.
Windows 10 goes some way to joining the two sides of the tablet/computer interface, but it’s far from a unified and complete model, and it relies on the user to know where everything is located most of the time.
During the preview phase, the whole menu structure and placement of features has changed continually or evolved, depending how charitable you are.
I just hope that Microsoft doesn’t keep doing this on the released version, or finding controls is going to become even more challenging than it already is.
Windows needs one place to change settings, ASAP.
7. A More Selective Installation
On my test platform is the latest version of Windows 10, with what is the normal complement of applications that Microsoft has determined are important to all users. And that’s a problem, because a significant number of them are entirely redundant on that system for a variety of reasons.
If you’re unlikely to join a domain and be in an office environment, there are whole chunks of Windows that will never be used. And home users are also unlikely to want OneNote or, if they don’t have a webcam, the camera app.
One can fully understand that Microsoft likes to promote its own products, but surely an installation routine that asks initially what the main purpose of the computer is and then customises things accordingly would be preferable.
This is especially important if you intend to put it on a machine with limited storage, where superfluous items might make all the difference.
Those expecting Windows 10 to turn the tide of Windows’ ever expanding waistline are therefore probably going to be disappointed. Although many of my missing items probably won’t turn up soon, a more selective installation routine is probably likely with the Enterprise edition, when that makes an appearance.
8. The Presumption Of User Opt-out
Since the arrival of the internet, users have been fighting a losing battle against those who want their data, usually without asking properly for it.
I’m not sure why asking people to sanction their information being used is such a contentious issue, but one might assume that if half the people declined these invitations, then the data gained might not be as useful.
Windows 10 makes all sorts of not very friendly assumptions about how freely you’d like your data splashed around when you review the privacy settings. The submenu would be better titled ‘No Privacy’, because the default setting lets apps have access to your advertising ID, check your web content URLs, intercept your typing and pass on what languages and other personalisation info they have.
Be foolish enough to use Cortana, and your email will be checked to see who you communicate with and even work out the relationship between those people and you.
Those who are of the opinion that the default should be to disable the dispensing of user information aren’t going to be pleased with this latest attempt to turn user data into a commercial resource.
9. A Proper Start Menu
No, surely not! Having told everyone with Windows 8 that the Start menu was ‘old school’ and that it wasn’t coming back, it came back. Yet – and this still boggles my mind – Microsoft managed to make such a pig’s ear of returning a feature from Windows 7 that it actually beggars belief.
I’d contest that every alternative Start menu, like Start8 and Classic Shell, is better than what Microsoft took three years to come up with, and they both were available before Windows 8 was out of preview.
In this respect, Microsoft seems to be acting like one of those clothing shop assistants, who decides what ‘works best’ for you and entirely ignores requests to see certain items in your size.
What users actually wanted was the Windows 7 Start menu back, pure and simple, but Microsoft just couldn’t bring itself to do that one simple job. Instead, it had to make it very inflexible, so you can’t pin apps to the main part of the menu, and very large even when you don’t use any of the tablet icons.
It’s possible to manually shrink the menu, and you’re forced to do that, because it won’t size itself according to what’s on it at all.
If I’d asked a software engineer to make this menu, based on what went before, and he came up with what went into Windows 10, he’d get a D- score.
The menu in Windows 10 is either the result of developer petulance or complete ineptitude – the choice is yours as to which it is.
10. A Vision
Some people will read this article as just me having a free shot at Microsoft or even as just an antidote to the mainstream media’s reaction to anything that the company does when they’re not fawning over Apple.
But I’m a Windows user too. I’d like this product to move forward in a way that builds on the past and yet reveals an exciting and interesting future.
My problem is that for all the changes between Windows 7 and Windows 10, the way ahead seems more opaque, not less.
For all my nine prior missing things, there is the critical tenth that dwarfs the rest, that being a vision of what Windows wants to be when it’s remarkably long and convoluted adolescence ends.
Windows 8 demonstrated a dream but sadly a terribly misdirected and presumptive one, which really put the skates under the company. Windows 10 does relatively little to address the underlying question about where Windows goes next, other than to hope that people like it and, after the free period is over, buy it.
The closest thing I’ve seen to a vision from the company is Hololens, a product that at first looked amazing and revolutionary, but which now seems to have been effectively scuppered by the fiscal bean-counters and those who insisted that it must be a computer in its own right and not cabled to a powerful PC.
Much of what Microsoft has done since Windows 8 appeared seems to be designed mostly to distract people rather than galvanise them into a cohesive customer base. Unless it can come up with and, even more critically, communicate a projected strategy for Windows that doesn’t involve making much of feature few will use, then the future looks rather bleak.
And the bleaker it looks, the less inclined people will be to invest their time in learning how to get the most out of Windows, and the more likely it becomes that they’ll focus their attentions elsewhere.
8 Things I Really Wish Microsoft Left Out…
1. Cortana: Most people don’t talk to their phones and probably don’t want to talk to their PC to use Bing either.
2. The Modern UI: Amazingly wasteful of screen space interface.
3. Virtual desktops: Linux has had this for decades, and Microsoft’s version is very clunky by comparison.
4. Xbox connectivity: I’m not buying an Xbox One to play games with extra lag.
5. Automatic updates: if it makes a big mess testing an update and releases a PC crippler, people won’t be able to stop it installing.
6. Two browsers: One IE is bad enough, but the fact it’s now competing with itself using Edge is just bonkers.
7. Wi-fi Sense: Shares you wi-fi password with people on Facebook. Is that really a good idea?
8. Continuum: Window Phone is effectively dead, so it’s largely pointless.