COMMENT Microsoft Windows and Devices boss, Pavan Davuluri, has shed light on plans for the flagship OS. Voice, touch, and pen control will all be part of a multimodal future, alongside a raft of inevitable AI features.
Microsoft’s Windows IT Pro channel interviewed Davuluri. While we’re not sure many Windows IT Pros, having to deal with fleets of Windows 10 devices that have to be upgraded, will care about some of the early questions (“What’s your favorite emoji?”), he did provide insights into how the Windows experience will evolve. Voice, vision, pen, and touch are set to become more pervasive, “just like we use mouse and keyboard.”
He said, “I think we will see computing become more ambient, more pervasive, continue to span form factors, and certainly become more multimodal in the arc of time.”
If you’re getting a sense of déjà vu, you’re not alone. It’s been 13 years since Windows 8 was released to manufacturing with the touch-optimized user interface Microsoft was convinced its customers needed. The new version was significantly different from its predecessors and users in general had a negative reaction to it.
This writer stared with horror at previews of Windows 8 – was Microsoft really going to do this? – but the company pushed on, and the fact that the full-screen Metro interface was swiftly ditched in later versions of the OS tells its own tale.
The same arrogance that gave rise to the Windows 8 user interface has perhaps not entirely left Microsoft, even if the motivations might differ. Windows 8 was all about touch-first and a reaction to the tablet form-factor. Now it’s more about shifting hardware and showing the company’s significant investment in AI is justified.
Do users really want to control their PCs with touch and pen, and irritate co-workers by barking orders at the operating system in an open-plan office? Or would they prefer the “tremendous investment” that Davuluri spoke about go into dealing with Windows’ current shortcomings and bugs rather than into piling on more features to justify you buying a Copilot+ PC or a Windows in the Cloud subscription?
Or perhaps, just perhaps, it could invest a bit more of that cash in Quality Assurance.
Windows 8 was memorably a catastrophic misstep for Microsoft in terms of the user experience. It did away with the familiarity of Windows 7 in favor of something that hinted more about Microsoft’s fears of missing the boat on touch-first tablet designs than it was about users and their needs. It was like Microsoft forgot how its users worked.
Davuluri spoke at length about Microsoft’s ambitions for AI in its operating system (we’ll spare you a list of them – AI fatigue is very real), but the words “Quality” and “Testing” were missing from the interview.
A hint of what is to come can be found in Windows Settings, where users can describe what they want to do, and the operating system will attempt to follow their instructions and execute accordingly.
What could possibly go wrong?
And that favorite emoji? “our little rocket that’s going up and to the right.”
The host replied: “It’s probably when we did something great! Shipping a great feature!”
The jokes really do write themselves. ®