Windows Is No Big Deal. That’s Huge.
I was surprised to stumble on the news that Microsoft is releasing a new version of Windows in a few weeks. I had no idea, and knowing stuff like that is my job.
Not so long ago, a fresh model of Windows software was a marquee tech moment. Now, a Windows debut is basically a nonevent. This shows technology has evolved from a succession of Big Bang moments to something so meshed into our lives that we often don’t notice it.
The last version of Windows as we knew it was arguably released in 2012. I was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal at the time, and my professional life that year was dominated by the unveiling of Windows 8 — including the anticipation, the strategy around it, and its eventual reception.
But that was basically the end of an era. New releases of Windows since then have become progressively less major. A significant reason is that personal computers are no longer the center of our digital lives. A new iPhone model gets a lot of attention — although it shouldn’t get so much — but a refresher to Windows doesn’t.
Still, the supremacy of smartphones is an insufficient explanation. Windows beginning around 2015 began to get regularly tweaked under the hood — just like Netflix, Facebook, and every app on your smartphone as well as the software that runs the phone itself.
