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Windows 10 turned 10 years old this week. It's a bittersweet birthday, as it marks the beginning of a steady march toward a forced retirement that will kick off with the official end of support on October 14, 2025.
For a computer operating system, time is measured in something roughly equivalent to dog years, and by that measure, 10 years is an eternity. Windows 10, you are old.
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To mark the occasion, I went back and read some of my coverage of Windows 10 in its first five years, starting with my initial review, "Windows 10: A new beginning", and continuing with the annual report cards I wrote on each successive anniversary. My last report card was in 2020: "Windows 10 at five: Don't get too comfortable, the rules will change again."
The early years
Windows 10 had one job: erasing the memory of Windows 8 from the minds of hundreds of millions of Microsoft customers. It succeeded at that task, becoming Microsoft's most widely used product ever. But the road to that success was anything but smooth.
It's hard to remember now, but those first five years were absolutely chaotic. Windows 10 was still running on smartphones and small tablets. Microsoft was begging developers to write Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps.
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Two years after Windows 10's debut, Microsoft became obsessed with 3D technology, stuffing the so-called Windows 10 Creators Update (version 1703) with tools like Paint 3D and (I am not making this up) the Mixed Reality Portal -- tools that Microsoft delivered to every Windows 10 PC and that no one ever used. It was a complete disaster.
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