Windows 10. Tomorrow's launch isn't the end of the road

The process of delivering and servicing Windows 10 will operate at a massive scale, with the potential to run as a continually updated set of services on a billion devices in two or three years.

The only ecosystem that comes close to this scale is Apple's combined OS X and iOS installed base. The Android ecosystem is probably bigger, but Google only runs the Google Play store and its own set of services. It doesn't deliver continuous operating system updates to those billion-plus devices.

With software at this scale, I expect there will be hiccups with Windows 10. Some will be annoying and frustrating, and the law of large numbers says even a small percentage of unhappy early upgraders will be able to make a lot of noise.

The nine-month-long Windows Insider program has done a decent job at its primary mission of providing feedback to influence feature designs and telemetry to measure and improve reliability. It's also established that those bugs can be fixed fairly quickly.

But there's nothing like shipping to millions of devices for the first time to discover the handful issues you missed completely.

The next two or three months should be interesting. We will read a lot of stories about bugs and problems in Windows 10's early days, you can be sure. I'll be monitoring forums and hearing from long-time correspondents (and even some new ones) via e-mail.

I've been documenting Windows 10's development through the Windows Insider program for the past nine months. Starting now, I get to monitor the public release of Windows 10 as well as what's coming up next.

Effective with the official launch, anyone who's been on the Insider program can bow and out and go back to the official release channels. You can also stay, and expect the next preview wave to start in a few weeks.

This Windows 10 milestone is important. For consumers and owners of existing PCs, it starts the clock on Microsoft's free-upgrade offer (only 364 days left!), and it also represents the first Long Term Servicing Branch release, not that very many Enterprise edition customers are going to opt in except for pilot projects.

Today's release is primarily about consumer markets and consumer devices. There's an enterprise case to be made for Windows 10, eventually. Those features will take time (a year, at least) and a lot of testing before enterprise customers are ready to consider deploying Windows 10 in any significant numbers.

But it's not the end of the road by any stretch of the imagination. With that thought in mind, here's my review of the first release of Windows 10.

It looks great, it works well, and it's good enough to satisfy the Windows 8 haters.

Windows 10 is not a complete repudiation of Windows 8, but it certainly downplays several of the signature features of Windows 8. The Charms bar is completely gone. A Start menu is built in, combining the general layout of the Windows 7 Start menu with Windows 8-style live tiles, which are smaller and confined to a restricted space on the Start menu.

The Start screen is gone unless you have a tablet, and even then the menu parts of the Start menu are still accessible.

First, to offer a high level of security, it uses the two-key method: users must have a private key and a public key. To send an email to someone, the sender must have the receiver's public key, which is published in a directory. The receiver then decodes the email using their private key, which is known only to them.

Such keys have been available in Germany for about 18 years. However, the agency that provides them charges about €100 for the service. Fraunhofer intends to remove this hurdle by providing keys for free.

The institute is making a no-cost app available on its website which will generate keys with a high-security key length of 2,000 bits. "The NSA can't break a key like that," Herbert said.