In the lead-up to this week's Microsoft
presentation, everyone - including us - referred to
it as "the Windows 10 event," and of course the
consumer features of Windows 10 were indeed
detailed. Today, however, nobody's talking about
Windows 10.
That's a slight exaggeration. The specialist tech
press - including us! - is poring over the details of
Windows 10, exploring what Cortana on the
desktop, the Spartan browser and the new gaming
features will mean when Windows 10 ships. What's
more, Microsoft's decision to make Windows 10
free for the first year is justifiably generating lots of
column inches too, as analysts work out what this
means not just for consumers but also for
Microsoft's business model and its bottom line.
But all of that is overshadowed - not just in the
tech press and the mainstream media, but on
forums, Reddit, Facebook and Twitter - by
HaloLens and the Surface Hub.
This is inevitable and understandable, but it's
nevertheless not especially healthy.
More foundation than flash
In the BBC satire series The Thick of It, a
government minister tries to recover from an
earlier bungle by using a press conference to
announce that there's nothing new to announce.
His department has been doing the kind of good,
solid, dependable work that the press always
ignores in favour of attention-grabbing new
innovations.
The non-press-conference doesn't go well. That's
because however much we might tell ourselves
that we're good, meritocratic citizens who care
about the things that are really, truly important, we
are instinctively drawn to the new and to the shiny.
It's happening with the Windows 10 event too.
Windows 10 is actually a remarkably bold OS. It
might still prove a fool's errand, but Microsoft's
vision for a truly unified operating system across
mobile, tablet, desktop - as distinct from Apple's
dual-platform, cloud-linked strategy and Google's
the-cloud-is-the-platform strategy - is nothing if
not audacious.
Still, it sounds like business as usual, and not even
skipping a number does anything to make
Windows 10 seem like anything other than just the
latest in a long, drudging line of updates to
something that provides fundamentally the same
interaction paradigm that Microsoft introduced
nearly thirty years ago.
Even if it was called something new - a name that
signalled this was something daring - who would
get excited about it? It's an operating system.
Microsoft may well want people to love Windows,
but it's very hard to get the general public to
understand what an operating system is, never
mind summon up any strong feelings about one -
and if you're aiming for a positive strong feeling,
you've got an even tougher job.
Holograms, though? Holograms, we can get - and
can get excited about. Let's gloss over the fact
that what Microsoft showed off was only a
hologram in the way movies have done
"holograms" for years. This is cool, sci-fi-level
stuff.
And giant tablets? Even if we think they're a bit
daft, we understand what they are, and they look
good in a thumbnail for a news story on the front
page. The Surface Hub is new (or at least a new
iteration of an idea so rare that few people will
have seen one) and so it too is something to get
fired up about.
Windows, though. Windows is dull. Sure, Windows
10 might be wonderful. Indeed, this new Microsoft
has an encouraging energy about it, and there's
reason to think it might be. But few people get
seriously exercised about an operating system.
Good news is no news
Of course, the irony about that The Thick of It
scene is that, while the situation came about by
mistake (and naturally the press was furious about
being dragged to a non-announcement), the
principle was perfectly valid. Teach the media a
lesson: stop being obsessed with the new, and
respect the value of the well-executed, behind-the-
scenes work that everything else depends on. And
that's a pretty decent definition of an operating
system, wouldn't you say?
Yet here we are; Microsoft announces arguably its
most radical plan ever for arguably its most
critical product - and makes it free to boot - but
we're all talking about a toy that so far is no more
real than one of its own fake holograms. We ought
to be more impressed with bricks and mortar than
smoke and mirrors.
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