Windows 10 Does Some Things Right

I am less than a week into using Windows 10 and I am not totally sure where I sit with it yet. The advertising before the roll out was very good – it got me interested and actually a little bit excited about a Microsoft product, and I didn’t think that was going to happen again … i won’t lie, i had kind of written them off.

For my work computer the whole process of installing it was really easy – I had the little icon on my task bar and I clicked on it a month and a half before the roll-out and it happily downloaded. It was a pretty slick download and I like the look of it.

For my home computer I had it set to automatic updates, which I thought meant it would install automatically, so I was trying to debug the fact that it hadn’t. The section of Microsoft’s website regarding the update is not particularly easy to navigate, and I got pretty frustrated and ended up nowhere thus far.

I have not discovered all of the functionality yet, but navigation-wise it is easier than Windows 8 was. I need to dig into it a little more. For developers it has some nice features, and for straight up browsing the notation functions are definitely something I can see leading the way. 14 Million installs in the first 24 hours is a pretty good statistic – it would be interesting to see if anyone rollbacks or switches out to something else after the upgrade.

Microsoft Brings Some Interesting Ideas To The Table

For the first couple of days Firefox and Google icons didn’t seem to be showing up, and Thunderbird is more glitchy than Hal 9000. I don’t know if this is just a compatibility issue that will get fixed further down the road as other companies learn to work with the new program, or whether there is a push within Microsoft to win people over to a totally Windows oriented system by making third party apps slower. That would be annoying but not entirely unusual. Thunderbird doesn’t allow you to set Google as the default search engine, and I am sure there are other companies that are doing this.

I think some aspects of the new Windows are going to be more use at work, and some are going to be more useful at home – once I get it installed there of course.

Obviously some people are Windows evangelists, just as there staunch Apple advocates, and the game is about winning over the open minded or the floating voters … Microsoft might finally have something that puts them well and truly on the playing field.