Resiliency (Premium)

Quick: When you think about Windows, what's the first thing that comes to mind? I bet it's not security or resiliency. And yet, that's the message coming out of Microsoft Ignite this week, that security is the firm's top priority--left unsaid, that means it's not AI--and that Windows, despite all the horribleness of this past year, "remains a secure platform for [Microsoft's] partners, developers and customers."

Microsoft has been talking security--and, more specifically, Windows security--for decades, but if you're familiar with the history, you know that talk and reality often diverge wildly. Over the long term, Microsoft has consistently drifted away from its security promises, like a cat distracted by a laser pointer. And in more recent years, the quality of Windows has spiraled downward at an alarming rate. I recently made the case that the latest version, Windows 11 version 24H2, is the least reliable and lowest-quality version yet. Sadly, Microsoft has gone on to prove my point by introducing fixes for some of the problems that--wait for it--introduce new quality problems of their own.

I've tied my career to Windows for better or worse, so I find this all personally troubling. But there are bright spots, too, examples of good ideas and even good engineering, that suggest that there are, in some ways, two Windows. There is a set of underlying foundational technologies, which is managed by the Azure group now. And then there's the clown car that adds new end-user features to the product with reckless abandon. In the former, we see strategy and adult supervision. In the latter, we see a college freshman kegger that ends badly for everyone.

Rectifying these two sides of Windows is impossible. But it's difficult to take announcements about the foundational bits seriously when the user-facing group spends their days defacing this once-proud product with in-box tracking, advertising, crapware, and superfluous new features. Worse, they undermine the work done by the Azure group by not properly testing anything they create, and then they update the product too often and too chaotically. It's like Windows is bipolar , and we're all family members forced to deal with a schizophrenic personality we used to know and love.

With all that in mind, let's assess what Microsoft is saying about Windows "resiliency" this week at its annual Ignite conference.

And let's be fair about it. As noted, this part of Windows does good work. This is the group that created Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-In Security (ESS), a technology that elevates the security baseline of Copilot+ PCs and other modern PCs that utilize it far beyond that of a typical PC. It's the reason--or a reason--why Recall isn't just safe and secure, but also negates the issues the naysayers invented to undermine this feature. When Microsoft artificially inflated the hardware minimums for Windows 11, we scoffed, correctly. But in Windows Hello ESS and Copilot+ PC, we belatedly see...