When Apple announced that the iPad Pro would continue to run iPad OS, while Macs run macOS, some experts criticized the decision. Microsoft’s suite of lightweight Windows alternatives, which would now include Windows 10X, should put an end to the idea that launching a lightweight version of Windows under the same “Windows” branding might make sense.
Microsoft didn’t share enough about Windows 10X for us to be completely certain what it was, but a few specific features were known. Windows 10X wouldn’t run Win32 apps at first (containerized support was supposed to be for a post-launch update), and it would be a streamlined, lightweight version of Windows 10 meant to compete in the market for Chromebooks. Microsoft was rumored to have canceled the operating system as various PC OEMs preferred the flexibility of standard Windows 10 over the limited capabilities of Windows 10X.
This is not a new problem. When Microsoft launched its original Surface products, one of them was an ARM device, the Surface RT, built around Nvidia’s Tegra 3. The Surface RT ran Windows RT, an ARM variant of Windows 8. The Surface RT had several flaws, but the most significant, at least as far as consumers were concerned, was the lack of x86 compatibility. People bought Windows RT hoping they could run Windows x86 programs. When they couldn’t, they turned it over en masse.
Microsoft never completely abandoned the idea of a lightweight version of Windows. Several years later, he tried a different approach. Windows 10 S was intended to be a restricted version of Windows 10 that would appeal to the education market. Like Windows RT, it couldn’t run Win32 x86 apps, only apps downloaded from the Microsoft Store (although for different reasons). Coverage of Windows 10 S has almost always focused on its limitations rather than what Microsoft hoped to do with it. Microsoft eventually said it would phase out Windows 10 S, citing customer confusion, in favor of an “S mode” that would similarly restrict apps but would otherwise be part of Windows 10. All work done on Windows 10X should now be integrated into Windows 10 as well.
Windows 95 launch party
Whenever Microsoft tries to release a version of Windows that doesn’t provide the features that Windows users expect, customers get confused. I don’t know if this was as much of a problem for Windows Mobile or Windows Phone – maybe the size difference between a smartphone and a desktop computer helped users realize that the two products weren’t compatible. This has been an issue for all device categories since Windows RT. The handful of ARM systems you can buy on Windows today come with x86 available through emulation.
Microsoft has a really fundamental problem. It obviously wanted to offer a more targeted product to appeal to a handful of markets, but it has no way of presenting such systems as better value than standard Windows when the breadth and depth of the Windows ecosystem has always been marketed as the operating system’s greatest strength. Unlike Apple or Google, Microsoft has spent decades telling its customers that a Windows computer is a Windows computer. “Working on the same files at work or at home!” was a real selling point for Windows PCs in the early 1990s.
The “Windows” brand enjoys tremendous brand awareness, but it also bears the brunt of decades of customer expectations. There’s a catch in all of this: the best way for Microsoft to convince OEMs and customers that Windows 10X is a separate and better product from Windows 10 for specific markets is to create new features and capabilities unique to the system. operation. However, the more unique features and capabilities Microsoft creates for Windows 10X, the less it will look like Windows 10 and the less customers will want it. The more customers expect support for legacy Windows features and capabilities, the more the new product should resemble the original.
Microsoft maintains a handful of differences between each of its operating system SKUs, but the company has spent decades unifying the Windows codebase behind the scenes. Windows 10 Education already exists, so all Windows 10X products also designed for education should have copied its education specific features and integrate them into the Windows 10X design scheme. Microsoft may have decided that it would be easier to offer a subset of Windows 10X options in a future update to Windows 10 or Windows 10 Education, in particular.
The multi-OS brand model seems to be winning
There are too many differences between Google, Microsoft, and Apple to properly compare their operating system and device development strategies, but the decades-long advantage at least gives us a meaningful window on which to compare their performance. . Both Google and Apple have created new operating systems to serve new markets – Google with Android and ChromeOS, Apple with macOS/iOS/iPadOS (although the distinction between the latter two is weak). Microsoft sought to expand its Windows desktop brand into other markets.
Of the three, Microsoft has had by far the least success in creating new markets for its operating systems. Its efforts to create differentiated products around low-power ARM devices failed in 2012 and are seeing very modest success at best in 2021. Windows 10 S has confused customers. Windows 10X apparently wasn’t flexible enough for OEM tastes compared to Windows 10, i.e. it wasn’t enough like Windows 10. Apple and Google have had much more success managing different customer expectations across two families of operating systems than Microsoft.
Apple, of course, may one day offer a tablet with macOS – we’re barely trying to say the company won’t. But we’d be surprised if Apple called it an iPad. Cupertino seems more likely to bridge the compatibility gap by highlighting how Macs with Apple silicon can run iOS and macOS apps on the same system than by bringing macOS itself to the iPad. Google has had better luck with fewer headaches maintaining Android and ChromeOS as separate projects than Microsoft has had by releasing a single alternative version of their existing OS with a more restrictive enabled by default. Obviously, there will always be an internal conversation about whether a new product should launch a new brand name or be tied to an old one. Nine years after the launch of Windows RT, it’s hard to argue for carrying out future projects with the Windows brand.
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