A high percentage of the virtual product launches I have attended since March 2020 have involved executives declaring that they’ve built the perfect product for the new era of work and play brought on by the pandemic. On Thursday, Microsoft’s presentation introducing Windows 11 was no different. So when I had a post-presentation chat with Panos Panay, the company’s chief product officer, the first question on my mind was whether the new version of Windows was indeed deeply informed by things the company had learned since COVID-19 struck, or had the company really formulated its plans for the upgrade before the world went into lockdown?

“There were things in the works, but what happens is you learn as you go, and you adapt to the environment that you’re in,” Panay told me. “And ultimately, what I would say is that [the pandemic’s impact on how people use tech products] was a huge influence. But it was more around thinking about the hybrid workspace moving forward. We learned from the pandemic, and then we’re thinking about what’s next.”

But judging from Microsoft’s livestreamed presentation—which was bedeviled by technical gremlins—Microsoft hasn’t just recalibrated Windows 11 for the hybrid approach to work that people began talking about 16 months ago. Windows 11 is a continuation of a journey the company has been on since at least 2012, when it unveiled Windows 8.

The first version of Microsoft’s operating system to deeply reflect the post-PC trends popularized by Apple’s iPhone and iPad, Windows 8 boldly went where no version of Windows had gone before. But it turned out to offer too much raw, bleeding-edge change too fast for the large constituency of Windows users who weren’t seeking a radical departure from the keyboard-and-mouse-centric Windows of yore.

With 2015’s Windows 10 and subsequent smaller updates, Microsoft was still getting the operating system back on track as much as advancing it. And now—though it’s dangerous to leap to conclusions from a demo—the company seems to be pushing Windows forward in a way that plays to the platform’s strengths and won’t prove hopelessly disorienting.

Aesthetically, Windows 11 looks both modern and, well, Windows-y. In the demo, at least, it was almost as if the flatter, more spartan, phone-influenced Windows 8 design once known as “Metro” had never existed. And most of what’s new, from productivity tweaks to Auto HDR gaming mode, serves important, long-standing Windows audiences. The fact that everything Microsoft showed during its launch event was incremental rather than epoch-shifting was a plus, not a problem: Windows has almost always been served better by evolution rather than revolution.

Not your standard app store

When Windows 11 ships—it’s due by the coming holiday season—it will land in the midst of heated debate over how aggressively the companies that own software platforms should be able to manage them. But it will probably sidestep the worst of such controversies—unlike Apple, which has had to defend the tight control it wields over its iOS App Store in the courtroom and via public messaging as it comes under increasing scrutiny from legislators at home and abroad.

Given that Microsoft must wrestle with the same sorts of tradeoffs as Apple, why is it moving in the opposite direction?  “At the end of the day, we want you to be able to do what you want to do,” Panay says. “Go back to that mantra, ‘empower you to produce.’ Well, that means to get the apps that you want in a way that you feel is secure, but not in a way that’s closed.”

“I believe this is the first step to that next era of computing,” he said. “What I’m hoping, and we’re driving towards, is that fluidity and that adaptability when you’re moving from one place to the next.”

On the highest level, that’s not a significantly different vision than the one Windows has had since at least the dawn of Windows 8. It just turned out to be big enough to occupy Microsoft for many years through a fair share of twists, turns, reversals, and revisions.

As Panay says, there’s more to come. And thanks in part to changes wrought by the pandemic, a lot more Windows users might be ready for the vision than they were when Windows 8 came along.