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I'll be honest with you. When I first read Ed Bott's account of the introduction of Windows 10 S, my reaction was, well, horror. After all this time spent watching Microsoft get its mojo back , my first impression was that the ghost of Steve Ballmer was back and Windows RT had risen from the dead. But in the intervening week and a half, I've been looking more deeply into Windows 10 S , and getting a much better understanding of where S stands in the overall Windows ecosystem.
With the introduction of Windows 10 S, your options for buying a new PC just got more complicated. Here are the key differences you need to know about the many Windows 10 editions: Home, Pro, Enterprise, and more. When Windows RT came out, I brutalized Microsoft over what I considered an incredibly misleading and dangerous product.
I even wrote a day-in-the-life piece about how a misled customer bought a Surface RT machine thinking it would run Windows apps, and eventually had to return it. But Windows 10 S is different. The fundamental difference: The same hardware can run Windows 10 and Windows 10 S. That wasn't the case with RT. Also: Chromebook killer or the second coming of Windows RT?
The same machine can run both Windows variants. Let's summarize what makes Windows 10 S, um, special: Windows 10 S will only run applications you can download from the Windows Store. That's it. You can't install anything else. Today, that means no professional-level Photoshop or Creative Cloud. But some traditional Win32 applications have already been packaged up for the Windows Store.
Evernote runs, along with an Evernote extension for Edge. Slack runs. Photoshop Elements the consumer version of Photoshop is available in the Windows Store. So is Autodesk Sketch. Other applications, most notably the Office desktop apps and Spotify, are coming very soon to the Windows Store. Not all older Win32 applications will be ported, either because developers don't want to port them, or because the code base is too crufty. But you can expect many of the big players will be migrated, and that means real Windows applications - just in a more controlled environment.
On the other hand, S users can run the Edge browser and only the Edge browser. Chrome will never, ever be allowed to run on S.
For many of us, this alone would be a deal-breaker. But I'll come back to that. The key to Windows 10 S is that unless the app has been approved by Microsoft very much like Apple has done for years with iOS , it won't run. That's huge, because most of the older Windows apps - most of the apps we now run, in fact, won't execute on Windows 10 S.
From a productivity point of view, that's a drag. But from a malware and vulnerability point of view, locking out the old, much more vulnerable Win32 apps from Windows is a huge boon to security.
Windows 10 S is vastly, epically more secure than traditional Windows. While Windows has gotten more and more solid since the days of XP, its Achilles heal has been the apps running on it. Windows 10 S removes that vulnerability, wholesale. Windows 10 S also implements a consistent update mechanism for all applications, so if you're running an app in Windows 10 S, you'll be able to update it and keep it safe using one single interface.
You're no longer stuck with downloading and digging around to try to make sure everything is up to date. That, too, is a win for safety and security. For professional power users, locked-down systems like Windows 10 S and even iOS are anathema. We understand the need for security, but because we're so often stretching the bounds of computing, we need the full power and all the flexibility that a general purpose computer running Linux, Windows, or Mac OS has to offer.
Take even a simple example. My wife and I have a number of little 25 page-per-minute ScanSnap scanners. We use them to manage the large flow of paper documents we've been dealing with for work and family business. Unfortunately, the ScanSnap software also isn't in the Windows Store, so if you need to do bulk document scanning, S isn't for you.
At least not yet. But Windows 10 S isn't meant for us. By us, I mean all of us old-school professional geeks. We're the folks who manage all of this, use all the power we can find, do complex jobs, build very custom Rube Goldberg-level contraptions to meet certain work needs, and rely on the native flexibility of Windows, not to do stupid things mostly , but to get our jobs done.
We're not the target demographic for Windows 10 S. And that's where the horror I mentioned at the beginning of this column begins to give way to more of an, "Oh, yeah. That'll work. Here's the first big win in what Microsoft is doing. They're not forcing S down our throats. They're not taking away a fully functional Windows that allows the installation of non-Store apps and requiring just store apps. That would lead to a revolt. All they're doing is offering another type of Windows that you can choose to use or install.
In this way, Microsoft isn't alienating or knee-capping all of its professional users. We had this fear back when Apple introduced the Mac App Store.
We thought that all of the powerful apps, many of which defined the power-user Mac experience , might be squelched by the limits of the Mac App Store. Instead, some apps are sold through the App Store and others can be installed like normal. The Mac App Store is there, but it hasn't caused the disruption we feared.
That's because it hasn't limited our options. It just gave us another choice. This is what I've come to realize is the case with Windows 10 S. Yes, if you choose to run Windows 10 S, your options are limited. But if you're a power user, then you probably won't choose to use Windows 10 S. At least on your own machines. But for the machines you manage, Windows 10 S could be a blessing in disguise. I want you to think about three prototypical users and then extrapolate them to the user population as a whole.
First, there's my Dad. He's not around anymore, but in his day, he loved his Windows XP. He was a retired jeweler. He loved passing time surfing jewelry sites using IE. When I tried to move him off of Windows to a Chromebook, he put up a huge fuss.
He liked his Windows environment. But he was about as unsafe a surfer as there was. Even worse, jewelry, given that it's a business made up of small and valuable items, is rife with scammers.
The jewelry sites he visited, even those that were legitimate, were chock full of malware. As you might imagine, I had some messes to clean up. At one time, I found a key logger on his machine. The only reason that piece of malware hadn't transmitted his information was that there were so many other malware infections on the machine that they'd effectively strangled each other.
In this case, don't think of my dad as an elderly user. Just think of him, for the purpose of our example, as the force-of-nature family member who doesn't know or care about computer security issues. Then there's Anakin. Anakin is a student at our school. He, like many of the other students, grew up with digital technology and is used to fixing things and routing around problems and challenges. To him, a firewall or a security policy is usually a shared crack away from being a mere amusement.
The challenge with the Anakins of the world is trying to keep them safe, at the same time as trying to keep them honest. A classic example of where students routed around mobile device management was the LA Unified School District's iPad disaster. Very quickly, the students found an exploit, nuked their management profiles, and were free to surf wherever they wanted. While it is possible for Windows 10 S to be bypassed by installing, say, Windows 10 Pro, if the initial deployment policies are set up right, the students' machines could be configured to prevent booting from external devices.
If also managed by Microsoft Intune for Education , the MDM software would report any odd behavior, and admins could retrieve the Windows 10 S laptop and rectify the situation. Our third user is Hank.
Hank sells propane. He does it very well. He doesn't know or care much about computers, except that he likes Solitaire and he can enter orders and manage leads using whatever computer he's been handed.
There's one thing about Hank though. He has a super-power: when it comes to making sales, he can't be stopped.
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