So today's the day Windows 10 is supposedly out. I say "supposedly" because I've had that little Windows icon sitting in my system tray since some Patch Tuesday back in the spring, nagging me to reserve my free upgrade, and as of about 4pm this afternoon my machine is still telling me it's "getting your PC ready" or whatever vague phrasing they picked. So much for launch day.
I get why they're doing it in waves. Rolling a new OS out to what, hundreds of millions of PCs at once would probably melt every CDN Microsoft owns, and given how badly some Windows launches have gone historically (Vista, I'm looking directly at you) I don't blame them for being cautious this time. But there's something a little funny about a company running a splashy press event, cutting over marketing to "Windows 10 is here," and then quietly not actually giving it to most of the people who clicked "reserve" months ago. My brother in law got his around lunchtime. I didn't. My desktop at work, which is honestly the machine I'd want it on first, hasn't even shown the download starting.
The reservation app itself (GWX, if you've seen the acronym floating around forums) has been sitting there since March doing basically nothing except reminding you it exists. I've had three separate people ask me what that little flag icon in their tray is and whether it's some kind of malware, which, fair question honestly, it does look sketchy. Microsoft could've explained that better. A tiny tooltip that just says "reserve your free upgrade" isn't really enough context for someone who isn't already following tech news.
What I am looking forward to, once it actually lands, is Cortana on the desktop and getting rid of the tile-heavy Start screen thing they forced on us with 8.1. I never hated the Start screen as much as some people did, but full-screen tiles on a 27 inch monitor never made sense to me, it's just wasted space for something that should be a menu, not a dashboard. The new Start menu is basically Windows 7's menu with some live tiles bolted onto the side, which sounds like a hack job when you describe it that way but from the preview builds I ran a few months back it actually works fine. Function over cleverness, which is not usually Microsoft's first instinct in my experience.
The other piece I keep hearing about is Edge replacing Internet Explorer as the default browser, previously known as Project Spartan while it was still in the Insider builds. I'm not going to pretend I'm switching my default away from Chrome anytime soon, my bookmarks and extensions are too deep in there at this point, but I'm curious enough to poke at it once the upgrade actually finishes on my machine. IE has been such a punchline for so long that almost anything new gets a little benefit of the doubt from me.
One thing I'll say for the free upgrade offer itself: giving Windows 7 and 8.1 users a full year to grab it at no cost is a pretty different posture from how Microsoft has historically priced new versions of Windows. Whether that's generosity or just Microsoft finally reading the room after 8's reception, who knows, probably some of both. Either way it's hard to be mad about free.
Anyway. I'll post again once I actually have the thing installed instead of just watching a progress bar that hasn't moved in forty minutes. If your reservation went through today and mine didn't, no hard feelings, I hope your Start menu is exactly as improved as everyone's been promising. Going to go refresh Windows Update one more time even though I know it won't do anything.