 Microsoft admits Windows 10 S was confusing. New S mode upgrades will be free. This is a great headline. I'm actually surprised they admitted that it was confusing. G generally just move on with things. But let's jump right to the blog post of the reference in this 10. So Windows 10 in S mode coming soon to all editions of Windows 10. Some of you may have seen discussion around plans for Windows 10 S on Twitter today, and given some additional questions I've received, I thought it might be helpful to share more about our plans with Windows 10 S. So I'm not going to read the whole article, but I'll leave you a link so you can read through if you'd like. But let's just give you a quick summary of what Windows 10 S is, and what I think Microsoft is trying to do based on what I'm reading. And then we've heard about this when I was at the Microsoft Defense last year. So the concept is, everything's Windows 10 now. That's the last version of Windows. And now they have Windows 10 S because they're creating versions of Windows 10. Now we have a lot of versions of Windows 10 already. So let's talk real quick about those versions, and we'll talk about how S fits into those versions, because essentially they're saying that for every version of Windows 10, they're also going to offer an S mode of Windows 10. So Windows 10 has what they may refer to as four different SKUs. So, well, there's actually more, but we're going to talk about these ones here. There's like sub versions as well that have different features. But for the most part, you're going to see home and pro is what covers the majority of your Windows 10. Some people have pro because they want to connect it to a domain. Now, there's always this confusion like there's more things in pro and yes and no. Do you get more things? A couple more things. We're talking about what you get. It's not a performance thing first. That's always the confusion. Unless, and it's always an exception, it's a performance issue if you have more than 128 gigs of RAM. You probably don't. But if you do, you're going to have to move over to pro. So that's like some of the questions people like, but I thought it just worked faster because it was pro. Like, no. Most of the features you get are like your remote app and remote desktop apps. Your ability to join domains, a hyper V if you're doing virtualization. So for the most home users, like the name implies, even if you're a gamer, home is perfectly fine. So you don't, unless you need anything in this no category, then, you know, like all the different virtualizations and different controls and lockdowns that once again, those only come into the enterprise and education editions in Microsoft app V, direct access to Vice Guard. There's a lot more security features that come with the enterprise and like the name implies, it's made for the enterprise market. Most of our business customers simply stop right here at pro that fits the majority of our business clientele that are using Windows 10 and it's fine for them. So this is kind of a comparison. Now where does Windows 10 S says you're, knows it's not in this list. So all the concept of Windows 10 S was to build a locked down version of Windows that would only run signed code. IE, what that means is you have Windows 10 with only the ability to run things out of the store as in you can't load programs on it. You can't just grab your favorite CD, not that anything has a CD player. So let's say grab your favorite USB install program or download a program that you found on the internet that looks cool and go, I wanna run this code. That doesn't work. That's where the problem lies with it. So is it secure and locked down? Sure, and if you only have to use apps that are available in the Microsoft store, because that's the concept here, we switch over to Windows 10. So as long as you want to run everything just out of the Windows store, you're fine. But let's talk about something in the Windows store. Let's look for Chrome. Oh, cool. Nope, I can get the Google Launcher. Well, this is a problem, what about iTunes? And I don't use iTunes, by the way, but I'm searching for it for a reason. So because of the way the Microsoft store works, the two most popular apps that people use is Google Chrome and iTunes, those are the two most popular apps. Of course, we can get Microsoft Office. So if I search for Office, I can find it. Hey, look, Office 365, OneDrive apps. So the Microsoft apps are there. Now from a concept of getting ransomware and things like that, I like the concept they're going with in terms of security. And the reason why this is very Linux-like. This is one of the differences between Linux and Windows, is you have a lot of untrusted sources you may be getting software from that have a potential for problems because you're just trusting each place you're downloading from, versus if you're running Ubuntu, for example. If it's in the Ubuntu repositories, or if you're a fan of Debian, Debian repositories, those are trusted sources for software, so you don't have to go to that many third-party places, and as long as you add them as a trusted source, that's what gives you that trust relationship. Now that's the concept Microsoft's doing, going, hey, just work with us to get it in the store, but there's a few policies that cause a hangup, including Google Chrome is one of them. Google Chrome does not work because they have their own rendering engine. Any browsers have to use the Microsoft Edge rendering engine. It's a complete lock-in. So that kind of lock-in doesn't set well with people. If Edge doesn't support a thing, that's it. Now, let's talk about security. I said the goal is to be more secure. And it did appear more secure because security researchers took all of three hours to bypass the security locks on their two-hacked computer. This is an older article. I didn't really do too much searching, but I'm sure there's been even more breaches and maybe even faster hacks for it now. So the concept is there, but it's still built on Windows and the Windows still faces, as they've called it, the long tail of legacy, which means there's a lot of that back support for things in there, and that's often what people leverage to gain an edge on this. So it's also gonna create a lot of printer problems because if the printer drivers aren't in the Windows Store, you can't load third-party drivers for devices or things because it only supports things gotten from the Windows Store or the Windows repository of drivers itself. So Windows 10S is any concept, but a lot of people who want to have more than a browser of just edge are gonna go, well, this won't work for me. You may as well at this point buy a Chromebook, because if you're not gonna be able to get to run the apps and all that, this is also a shift we're seeing in the market overall, simply because more and more people want that high level of security from an administrative thing. You don't want people loading random stuff, but as more things become web-based, it's becoming much less relevant. So the desktop and Microsoft may be losing some relevance in the desktop market because we're seeing this with the popularity of small things like Chromebooks because everything's so web-enabled and getting better that the desktop environments are becoming less favorable because of all the problems, the updates, and tying yourself to just one machine versus kind of the work anywhere I log into web portal. Matter of fact, one of the things I learned a lot about when I was at Microsoft is how much of their workflow is completely in a web base for the back end without loading apps on their computers. So even Microsoft internally is seeing the shift, so this is kind of to me almost like the death throes of the operating system world for Microsoft and that's also why they're doubling down on Azure because that's where the next revenue model really is and it's being proven out in the market that these apps get built and run there. So Windows 10S, the concept to keep a very locked down system, so some systems people may like it, but only if you can get those apps into the store. Now I know they're constantly trying to add more apps and more of the commonly used apps and business into the store, but obviously this, especially in like let's say small schools and things like that, what are they gonna do? They have to load software maybe for the robotics team. You're like, oh, these Windows 10S ones, you don't have an app that's in the store. Oh, you wanna code something yourself? Sorry, we only run store apps. You have to then get it published in the store and come back, so it kind of, it breaks all that. So I don't really, I get where they're going with it. I get the demand for security, implementing it this way with a very weak store. It's kind of like giving you a fun phone and not having an app market to support it. Oh wait, Microsoft did that. That's why we don't see Microsoft phones anymore, and this is the same problem. They don't have a developed ecosystem for their app market that has the most popular tools that people want loaded on their computers. Therefore, I don't know where they're going with Windows 10S, but Windows 10S, Neaton Concept, I don't know about implementation, so I just wanted to get you informed here on how it works, what it is, and the differences in different versions of Windows 10, including Windows 10S. So like I said, I'll leave links below to all this so you can read through this yourself and double check this little list of all the features in case you think you need one of these other versions. Thanks, if you like to count in here, like and subscribe.