Microsoft Windows 11: Context, Analysis, and Outlook
Because PCs Are a Central Digital Device
Context
After years of semi-annual and semi-quiet Windows 10 updates, Microsoft is giving Windows a proper overhaul, along with a version number bump to 11. Windows 11 has compelling organizational, interface, and performance improvements, and will continue the pandemic/post-pandemic hardware buying cycle. Windows 11 also bolsters Microsoft’s other franchises, including Teams collaboration, Xbox and GamePass, Microsoft 365, Surface hardware, Microsoft mobile apps, its app Store, and the Azure cloud services powering it all. There are improvements for consumers and enterprises alike. About the only Microsoft business unit Windows 11 does not seem to impact at launch is HoloLens, and that’s just because Microsoft hasn’t revealed details on HoloLens 3 yet.
The fact that a Windows upgrade is fully supported across Microsoft shouldn’t be a surprise, except that, in today’s Microsoft, it is. Under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Windows was the anchor that tied the company’s applications and tools together – everything revolved around extending the Windows hegemony on the PC. During Ballmer’s tenure, Microsoft misjudged mobile, but made enough investments in cloud computing and enterprise that when Satya Nadella became CEO, he was able to realign Microsoft’s business around a more agnostic approach with cloud services and subscriptions at the core. Windows was still a valuable platform, and Microsoft even continued investing in its own Surface hardware to run it. However, Windows was no longer central to Microsoft – it couldn’t be, not if Microsoft’s services were to thrive in a mobile-first, multi-platform world.
Enter the pandemic.
Microsoft has obviously been working on some Windows 11 concepts and features for years, but the pandemic clarified the importance of multi-purpose personal computers with displays and keyboards large enough to work, learn, connect, create, watch, and play on. The PC is not necessarily the center of your digital life – smartphones remain essential – but it is central. During the pandemic, PCs also moved back to being individualized, not just one per household.
Windows 11: Features and Function
Operating system upgrades usually alternate between major interface or feature changes and less visible improvements for speed and reliability under the hood. Windows 11 does both.
In my testing of the first series of builds, the best feature of Windows 11 are new snap layout and virtual desktop interface tools. Windows 11 makes it easy to maximize your screen real estate, match on-screen layouts to different device states (docked, undocked), and customize app arrangements based on task. It even manages and remembers how you have arranged your workspaces across multiple monitors. Windows 11 remembers these layouts after changing states or sleep. Microsoft’s implementation here is so good that after only a couple of hours of testing I did not want to go back to Windows 10. Snap layouts in particular continue to improve my productivity weeks later as I have tested Windows 11 across multiple laptops, desktops, and convertibles. This is a key area where Windows pulls ahead of Apple’s latest MacOS and iPadOS systems.
Windows 11 is a lot cleaner and simpler, with a focus on, well, staying focused. A dashboard overlay with widgets aims to present information quickly without disrupting your main tasks. Touch, pen, and voice inputs are tightly bound to the OS, improving how they are accessed for different use cases and device types. However, the most obvious change that consumers will notice is the new placement of the Start menu and task bar. Anyone who has used a large monitor (or a Mac) can intuitively understand that centering the user experience is better than forcing users to move the cursor all the way to the bottom left corner. However, 25 years of muscle memory can be a lot to overcome, so IT managers may want to provide their employees with instructions on how to move the menu back to the left where their employees expect it to be (it’s easily configurable).
While preview builds may not be representative of final performance, Microsoft claims that just about everything on Windows 11 is faster: boot times, operations, and Windows updates are all improved/faster/more efficient. Core browser engine performance has been enhanced, with Microsoft’s Edge browser getting tweaks to be even faster, especially on low spec hardware. I have not done performance testing on preview builds, but I can confirm that even in this state Windows 11 runs quite smoothly on the x86 systems I’ve tried, including older, supposedly unsupported Intel hardware. Windows 11 can’t remove all Windows-on-Arm software incompatibilities, but the enhanced performance and broader Microsoft Store experience make the Surface Pro X2 feel like a real Windows machine and less of an experiment.
Windows 11’s productivity enhancements are nice, but the big draw for enterprise buyers will be improved security. Windows 11 is based on a Zero Trust security model, and requires PCs to have hardware-based isolation, Secure Boot, and Hypervisor Code Integrity built-in and turned on by default. The TPM 2.0 requirement prevents rootkit attacks and generates and stores cryptographic keys used for device and software authentication. Microsoft’s research shows that combining these features, along with Windows Hello and device encryption, reduces malware and ransomware attacks by 60%. Windows 11 is policy compliant, so should be easy for IT managers to deploy. We can easily envision corporate policies mandating Windows 11 not only for company-supplied PCs, but as a prerequisite for connecting employee-purchased laptops to corporate networks and apps as well.
Teams by Default
Microsoft Teams is integrated into Windows 11, along with OS-level access to mute and sharing your desktop from the task bar – no matter what app you’re using. Sharing your window while presenting is easier, too. Preloading Teams certainly improves Microsoft’s competitive positioning in corporate messaging apps, though the company promises that Zoom, Cisco, Slack, Google, etc. can use new Windows 11 APIs to remain competitive. While this undoubtedly gives Teams a boost in the enterprise, Microsoft has a lot of heavy lifting to convince consumers that Teams is the right tool for consumer video calls. Teams can be used to connect large corporations, schedule meetings, or work on shared code; it is vastly more complex than Zoom or FaceTime.
Your PC is an Xbox Now
Windows has long had an advantage over the Mac in PC gaming, but it was never a primary focus for Microsoft. That has changed, and not just because of the huge jump in Xbox gaming revenue during the pandemic. When Satya Nadella first became CEO, investors demanded that Microsoft sell off the Xbox franchise. However, Nadella recognized that while the economics of console gaming typically require losing money on the box, gaming is the perfect use case for a company that combines hardware, software, development tools, cloud services, and subscriptions.
Rather than sell off Xbox, Microsoft bought game studios, built cloud gaming infrastructure, and invested in expanding its subscription services. Windows gaming is even better for Microsoft: it doesn’t have to lose money on the initial hardware, and then it gets to sell high-margin controllers and Game Pass subscriptions. Windows 11 adds new Xbox gaming features like Auto-HDR and direct storage; Game Pass and xCloud game streaming is not new for Windows 11, but Microsoft marketing can be forgiven for using the new OS to heavily promote it.
Windows Store is Good Now?
Microsoft has tried to use its App Store on Windows to improve security (and collect rent), but the Store has long been missing key apps due to a vicious circle of technology mandates limiting what apps could be submitted, developer reluctance to Microsoft’s payment terms, and consumer apathy to the resulting poor Store experience. With the Windows 11 Store, Microsoft is trying to cut through this knot by expanding the types of apps that can be listed in the store including Win32 apps and browsers; improving discoverability, and providing developers with the ability to use their own commerce engine with no revenue cut going to Microsoft. For example, Adobe can now list all of its apps in the Microsoft Store and fulfill payment on its own.
Android Apps on Windows?
The splashiest addition to the Windows Store was also the most unexpected: Android apps! This is potentially useful in a few areas, notably mobile social apps that don’t have PC or even fully-featured web options. However, Android apps on Windows is still mostly just a gimmick. Android apps do not transform Windows into different use cases, and this is not a first step towards Windows on smartphones.
The technical implementation of Android on Windows 11 is fairly sophisticated, but the user experience is almost comical: it involves Amazon’s App Store on top of the Windows App Store. Amazon’s App Store is missing many key Android apps. Microsoft’s endorsement and installed base should exceed Fire tablet sales by orders of magnitude, and that would ordinarily encourage developers to add their apps to Amazon’s App Store. However, many key Android apps are not in Amazon’s App Store for a more fundamental reason: Amazon’s App Store does not use Google’s services. Google Play is about more than listings and billing; there are also a host of APIs and connected Google apps (like Maps and notifications and sync and app updates) that lock Android app developers into the Play Store. These apps are unlikely to ever appear in Amazon’s App Store, and even if the user sideloads the APK, parts of the app will be broken.
What’s Not in Windows 11
The Your Phone app carries over from Windows 10, but there are no new mobile integration features in the new OS. There do not appear to be any new hardware-specific features in the OS for next generation Surface devices; Microsoft continues to treat its OEM partners on a level playing field with its internal hardware division. The update process has been improved, but not completely overhauled: it still updates the OS rather than replacing it with a new version in the background like Google’s ChromeOS. Microsoft was also relatively quiet about Windows 11 for AR and VR applications, but HoloLens already runs a version of Windows on Arm, and the next generation HoloLens is expected to be announced in the near future.
Windows 11 is (Primarily) for Your Next PC
Note that the stock image Microsoft has on its press page is of various laptops and convertibles - not desktop gaming PCs
Microsoft has been so good about ensuring backwards compatibility with its OS releases that people forget that not all software upgrades are backwards compatible. Windows 11 isn’t a clean break from the past, but Microsoft is setting minimum requirements for security and performance that will exclude many PCs. Most laptops from at least the past couple of years should be meet Microsoft’s Windows 11 thresholds, but older laptops and even many current desktops will not.
On the security front, the main issue is the TPM 2.0 chip that Windows 11 requires for security. This encryption and secure key storage device and software combination is almost uniformly found on laptops – even laptops several years old – but it is often absent on desktops, especially on hand-built enthusiast PCs where sourcing a TPM 2.0 chip is challenging today even if the motherboard supports it. This presents a problem for some of Microsoft’s most vocal early adopters, and Microsoft compounded their ire by providing an upgrade check tool that initially provided no feedback on why a system was incompatible.
TPM has been a standard for over fifteen years, and TPM 2.0 was originally supposed to be a Windows requirement back in 2015 (it ended up optional for most versions). There are tech channels like Linus Tech Tips that are providing guidance on how to exploit loopholes in the Windows 11 beta program, but there are solid security reasons to require TPM 2.0 hardware, and Microsoft needs to close these loopholes in the production release. It is more important to ensure that Windows 11 is uniformly secure — for enterprise and consumers alike — than to appease eager upgraders. Microsoft has promised support for Windows 10 through 2025; it is not abandoning anyone.
With Windows 11, Microsoft is also requiring minimum hardware configurations that are designed to ensure consistently speedy performance. This makes sense, and is a necessary component of any OS update. The Windows 11 storage and memory requirements are easy to meet with almost any general purpose PC, but the processor choices can seem somewhat arbitrary. (Again, this situation was made worse by poor communication during the Windows 11 announcement; originally, Microsoft provided no specifics on what was/wasn’t supported.) Some devices that fail the processor requirement, like Microsoft’s own Surface Studio, can run the Windows 11 preview release just fine (this report is being written on one). For the production version, Microsoft ought to flag lower performant systems but allow consumers to make their own call on whether to install it.
While Microsoft is making it easy to test drive Windows 11 on any hardware that qualifies (and some that doesn’t, at least for preview purposes), the final version will ship first only on new PCs. The upgrade version is scheduled to arrive at some point in 2022. Microsoft has been clear about this release strategy from the outset, but it may want to reinforce that to avoid subverting expectations.
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