Windows 10: What an expert says about it....

Casting around for some expert opinions on Windows 10, hoping to confirm or reject my own conclusions of it, I came across this two-page article.

This gives us a look "behind the curtain" as seen by someone whose business it is to keep his ear to the ground and his eye on the bouncing ball at Microsoft, among other places, and whose opinions are credible.

I dug this up from the airless wastes of cyberspace because I've been testing "Wonderful Windows Ten" (let's call it 'Windows X' for now, so its later derivatives can be 'X1', 'X2', 'X3', and so on...) since November 15th, 2014, and I'm not nearly as dazzled by it as I thought I'd be. Microsoft is hyping it as "The best Windows ever" and I'm thinking "Where have I heard that before?"

And the answer is, during the promotions for Millennium, XP, Vista (Ugh!), and Windows 7. Not so much for Windows 8 and its "Service Pack One" called Windows 8.1 because both of those had/have their problems with customer acceptance because of what the market perceived as radical innovations that confused users because we all resist "reading the directions". We're all basically know-it-alls who think because we can tie our own shoelaces, that means we could write a thesis on in-flight refueling of supersonic aircraft or something.... So may I remind us of what Will Rogers said about this: "It's not the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we do know that ain't so."

Generally speaking, Windows 10 is a "work in progress" which for the most part  works alright. That new replacement browser 'Edge' however needs more work. I've tried several times lately to use it for doing this blog, and it just isn't able to display all the page elements and controls well enough to be useful. It shows only part of this text-editor, with most of the control buttons missing, and on the two occasions when I could get it to show enough of those to start writing something, it then displayed its text for review as a jumble of HTML commands mixed in with the body text - a total mess that nobody can accept. And it hasn't improved yet that I'm aware of. So forget that. Using any other browser with Windows 10, such as Firefox or Chrome, everything works OK. I also tried Opera, and I like it, but it tends to crash periodically with Windows 10, and that can be a definite nuisance, especially so because when it works, it kicks the hell out of anything Microsoft has available.

Do I like Windows 10? I can take it or leave it. I don't have to say nice things about it because I have no connection to Microsoft other than being one of their millions of volunteer testers. I think it's inevitably the future of Microsoft, but I also think they need to do a lot less talking about it, and a lot more work on fixing its glitches before they turn it loose on the unsuspecting unwashed masses of expectant but hesitant users. 

This idea of "fly it while you build it" needs a lot more work before it flies reliably enough to meet most users real world expectations. "The Best Windows Ever" is still the one you're using right now, and if you're having problems with it, do a Google Search for answers, or read back through this blog for the helpful hints I've discovered. Windows 10 is not yet ready for "prime time".