Stop Complaining About Windows 10

I've seen a lot of moaning about the Windows 10 Technical Preview, a beta OS which may or may not resemble the final shipped product. The complaints are almost identical to the complaints about Window 8.1 since Windows 10—from my experience—is almost identical to Windows 8.1 with very few unique tweaks.

I am not joining the chorus of kvetchers for one important reason. As long as the team at Classic Shell keeps doing its job to "fix" Windows 8 by retrofitting the Windows 7 experience on to the operating system, there is really nothing to whine about.

Fifteen million users have downloaded and installed Classic Shell, and those users have stopped complaining. I have zero issues with Windows 8.1 because of this software. I assume that the team will continue to develop this fix for Windows 10 when it finally ships.

Windows is mostly used in a corporate environment. If the IT department does not allow the installation of Classic Shell, then I can see a falloff in productivity as Microsoft continues to emphasize touch screens and full-screen apps, both of which are very stupid in most desktop environments. Navigation that promotes tiles over icons is not good either. My complaints about this are already out there, and don't differ from those saying the same thing.

It should be obvious by now that Microsoft does not care what you think. Plus, there are enough people, including my wife, who think that 8.1 is just peachy and Windows 10 will have a similar impact. It all kind of makes sense to her, she says.

Of course, I installed Classic Shell on her machine. It boots to the desktop. So there is that to consider.

Microsoft is constantly turning its back on its roots, jumping on newer, more modern trends, namely mobile devices. But think about it: Microsoft has never had any real roots except opportunism. In fact, opportunistic development is all the company has ever done well.

When Bill Gates and Paul Allen started the company it sold copies of a DEC-10 BASIC rejiggered for the 8080 microprocessor and the M.I.T.S. Altair computer. This BASIC became the key programming language for all the early machines that ran the CP/M operating system developed by Digital Research. Within a few years, Digital Research had invented a GUI called GEM. The ideas in GEM would be used by Microsoft to develop Windows. But first, Microsoft had to roll out MS-DOS, which was actually bought from Tim Paterson who cloned CP/M for 16-bit computers.

Microsoft took advantage of an opportunity to jump on the IBM PC bandwagon and supply the OS and cut Digital Research out of the picture.

Today, the threat of litigation would have probably stopped Microsoft in its tracks, but back then the company went full steam ahead, took over, and Windows became a cash cow.

Microsoft sees the tablet and phone as the opportunities and doesn't care if it feeds the cash cow stemming from the PC business, one of the largest markets in the world (albeit small compared to mobile phones).

The problem is, Microsoft plays its game best from a leadership role, or at least near the beginning of a ramp up—not from third place in a maturing market. Unless it can buy Apple or Google – a laughable concept – it will never catch up. There is no opportunistic moment in what Microsoft is currently doing.

Meanwhile, there is no serious interest in making Windows 10 the best desktop OS in the world. Microsoft's recent offerings are incredibly insincere and lackluster with zero focus on the desktop computer—all the emphasis is on the phone.

There you go: with all my complaining out of the way, I'll say it again: none of it matters. Not as long as Classic Shell exists to give Windows PC users what they actually need.

Hopefully, this will continue through Windows 10 and keep us all working productively for the next few years. Let's just hope upon hope that Microsoft does not get the bright idea to buy out the Classic Shell dev team. Microsoft will ruin its practical simplicity. Right now, things are perfect.