Remains of the year laid bare as we flay July to December
Where were we? Ah yes… it was the summer of GitHub committers’ discontent – as many looked on in horror as Redmond swallowed it for $7.5bn in June. But things were about to heat up further…
Hayfever season began well for Microsoft as the giant took another potshot at Google and Apple’s device crown. Could the Surface Go take down Chromebooks and iPads? Or was another Surface RT disaster in the offing?
For the latter question, no – the Go is a far more capable device than Microsoft’s unloved Arm effort. However, the former is also more of a wait-and-see, since the Go represents the worst of both worlds. It lacks an Arm CPU, meaning battery life could be better, and while the Intel silicon assures better compatibility, performance hardly set the world alight.
We reckoned it was best to think of the £379 (excluding keyboard) device as more like a netbook – cheap, cheerful and categorically not upgradable. A hardware runtime for Office aimed at students, if you will.
The Go, of course, runs Windows 10 (in S mode, if you wish) and the OS turned three in July, descended from a Windows NT codebase that itself celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. All that elderly code is one reason for the current woes of the OS. Not that it stopped sales of PCs running the thing rising for the first two quarters of 2018. With the end of Windows 7 support looming, the upgrade cycle gave PC makers some respite from the gloom surrounding the industry.
For its part, Microsoft registered a colossal fiscal 2018, claiming more than $110bn in revenues. While Azure and the cloud were trumpeted, with $9.6bn being trousered, that bit of Microsoft that gets less attention these days, personal computing (including Windows), clocked up more, registering $10.8bn.
How did Microsoft celebrate the bonanza? By handing out its Teams collaboration platform for free and, er, increasing adjusting prices for pretty much everything else .
Oh dear.
And as for jumping ship? Penguinistas were horrified to see the German state of Lower Saxony follow Munich’s example and dump Linux in favour of Windows for a reported 13,000 users. Sometimes that Microsoft habit is hard to break.
While Microsoft embarked on a summer vacation, reports rolled in from users of Surface Pro 4 fondleslabs that a July update had left the pricey devices struggling with power.
Microsoft remained deaf to their pleas, with some users resorting to legal threats to have their precious gadgets restored to working order.
While the Surface Pro 4 incident might have been accidental, Microsoft swung the axe once more at Windows Phone in a far more deliberate fashion. This time it was the Microsoft Store, with a warning that no more app submissions for version 8.x of the platform would be accepted after Halloween and, by July 2019, app updates would stop.
Windows 10 Mobile lives on for now, but if you are still clinging to your beloved Lumia, the time really has come to bid farewell.
Although the original vision of Windows on mobile devices is well and truly dead, Windows on Arm is alive and kicking.
Performance on the first generation of devices wasn’t great (barely draining the battery but fully draining the will to live while waiting for Word to load), but the next wave of kit, based on the snappier Snapdragon 850 processor, made an appearance at August’s IFA. Intel could only look on nervously.
Users hopeful of a fresh Windows 10 to soothe memories of the April 2018 Update, and thinking that the ’09’ of 1809 might signify a September release, were disappointed to learn that the thing would be called the “October 2018 Update” .
In our naivety, we hoped the codebase had received more focus on quality. Certainly to the point where our suggestions for names such as “Crashy McCrashface” or “the one that won’t set fire to the world” would be made redundant. Alas, in a few short weeks we would be referring to it as “the Update of the Damned”, but that was still to come.
