The Inconsistency of Modern Microsoft
By: Mark Turner
Tags: Microsoft, Apple, Innovation, Satya Nadella, Surface Pro

So here then is my list of Microsoft’s inconsistencies based on the products I regularly engage with them on:

1) Always Connected Windows PCs

Back in December 2017, Microsoft and Qualcomm announced their plan to make PCs act more like smartphones and tablets, a program called “Always Connected PCs”. The strategy included a new Qualcomm silicon foundation for Windows (and a second shot at making Windows run on ARM chipsets), integrated wireless modems and a rebuild of Windows. These Windows on ARM machines, such as Microsoft’s own Surface Pro X, are certainly lighter, with no heating fans and come with SIM card slots but they actually fail to deliver on the basic premise of being always connected. In reality my SurfaceProX routinely goes to sleep and when the screen is off it switches powers down all network connections (wireless and WiFi), which I assume is to extend battery life. Although it wakes quickly the fact that the network connection takes a few seconds to restore means that these PCs are not replacements for the iPads they are competing with. An iPad is always ‘on’ and doesn’t go to sleep after a few hours. When the screen is off an iPad is still keeping apps awake and connected so they can send notifications and alerts and alert you to important updates. So an Always Connected Windows PC falls at the hurdle of actually being, always connected.

2) ARM app support

In 2020 Apple announced it’s plan to switch it’s entire Mac line to Apple Silicon (also based on an ARM architecture), and it followed Microsoft in needing to porting an operating system, developer tools and convincing thousands of developers to modify and redeploy their apps for the new silicon. Microsoft rarely gets credit for leading Apple (as it frequently does) but Apple has planned quietly and unleashed and executed it’s plan with the full weight of the company. Apple announced it’s ARM transition in June and by November was selling new Mac’s with their M1 chip, with broad developer support, backwards compatibility for legacy apps and by some benchmarks the new ARM Macs are beating the performance of Mac’s using Intel’s X86 chips and with huge gains in battery performance.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is now over 3 years into it’s Windows on ARM migration and has failed to migrate most apps from the Windows Store, most major games and even Adobe Fresco that was highlighted during the announcement of the Surface Pro X has failed to materialize. Most embarrassing however is that Microsoft didn’t have its own Edge browser ready for ARM, it took over a year to migrate it’s popular Teams app, there’s still no Xbox ARM64 app and even the pillar of Microsoft productivity — the Office Suite — only runs in 32-bit emulation mode on ARM. When Microsoft is asking third party developers to invest time and money into porting their apps to ARM it should be leading by example and have its own house in order. Apple is going two-feet in to it’s ARM migration and porting all of their various apps and services for the new OS and showing Microsoft how it should be done.

3) Preferential treatment for iOS and Android users

One of Satya’s best moves when he took over as CEO was to embrace users of other operating systems by releasing products like Microsoft Office for iOS and Android. It seems a world away now but at that time the full Office suite was not available on those devices, an attempt by Satya’s predecessor to hobble the competition and push people to Windows devices which of course did not work — it just annoyed users and potential customers. Ironically, Microsoft now seems to have flipped in the opposite direction and actively hobbles Windows users with apps inferior to those enjoyed on iOS and Android. Take for example the excellent Outlook app for iOS and Android — by the far most feature rich mail client for those devices with a frequent update cycle, features that are deeply integrated into the OS and advances like AI, unified mailbox and reading of your mail to you. And best of all, Outlook is free on those devices.

Now compare with Windows 10 where Microsoft offers users two choices in mail client— the free Windows Mail app which is an extremely basic mail which plods slowly along with 1–2 feature updates per year. Or Windows users can use the old legacy desktop Outlook app which is a glutinous hog of a mail client with Exchange integration features that date back 30 years. But the rub here is that Outlook for Windows is not free, it needs to be purchased as part of the Office subscription or, if you can still find it, a retail version of Office. Why would Microsoft do that? Make users of it’s own ecosystem pay for an inferior product when they provide a better version to competitors for free? I suspect that Microsoft could port that great iPad version of Outlook and provide Windows users with a modern mail client in parity with the blazing innovation that Android and Apple users benefit from.

4) All the small stuff

Microsoft should sweat the details, so we don’t have to. Why is Microsoft Office or Teams not in the Windows App Store so they don’t have to be installed separately? If Microsoft can design custom GPUs with AMD for Xbox, why don’t they offer better discrete graphics performance on Surface devices? With 20 years experience building Windows tablets — why is the taskbar still so unusable in portrait orientation mode? With complete access to my email, calendar and appointments — why do I have to ask Cortana anything? She should be telling me what I should be doing next, not the other way round.