Hardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky (Audio Edition)

Welcome to the final installment of Hardcore Software. It has been an amazing journey in the 115 or so sections including bonus posts. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to those of you that have followed along the journey of the PC and my own growth and lessons. Thank you very very much.I have a few more bonuses planned, including a compendium of Microspeak and a bibliography of books and magazines that I collected. For paid subscribers I will be sending out an update on how billing will end and for “True Blue” subscribers please expect an email on receiving your compiled version of the work. It’s not too late to order that and also have access to all the old posts. I will also be filling in audio for the first 70 posts in early 2023.Hardcore Software describes a personal journey. It is also one that happened to coincide with the PC revolution—the early days all the way through the final days of the revolution. The PC still marches on, but it is different. The PC remains essential though is no longer central to the agenda of computing as it was. That is what I mean by the end of the revolution.This post is free and comments are turned on for all Substack users.Back to 107. Click In With SurfaceWindows 8 was a failure.Hubris. Arrogance. Lunacy. Egomaniacal. Pick any word to describe the product; it was likely used somewhere. No one knew, or felt, the weight of the product failure more than I did.Nearly every successful Microsoft product had survived our it takes three versions to get it right modus operandi. Esther Dyson, a technology investor and journalist, writing for Forbes in an article “Microsoft’s spreadsheet, on its third try, excels” said “It’s something of an industry joke in the software business that it takes Microsoft three tries to get it right. There’s Windows 3.0, Word 3.0, and now Excel 3.0.” She wrote that in 1991, reviewing the third version of Excel.No Windows leader made it through the odd-even curse of releases, certainly not three major releases of Windows from start to finish.My hope had been for a credible Windows 8 knowing we weren’t finished, which was standard operating procedure for new Microsoft products. We knew where we wanted to take the product over time—the hardware, the software, and the apps. But none of that happened. For reasons I still do not fully understand, for the first time I could remember Microsoft quickly and completely withdrew and actively erased Windows 8 in an almost Orwellian way—even Clippy preserved its dignity. I try to imagine what would have happened had Microsoft given up on Windows the first time, or Windows Server, Exchange, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. All of those took multiple iterations to find product-market fit, to win both hearts and minds.Requiring three versions was not a Microsoft thing. It is a product development thing. Even in a big company you must ship the first version—shipping a “V 1.0” (v for version) is always a miracle. Then you need to fix it and that was version 2.0. Then by version 3.0 not only does the product work, the sales, marketing, positioning, pricing, and more work. Product development is always a journey. Always.With years of hindsight including the new mobile market, the PC market, and Apple, many of the initial problems with Windows 8 were not nearly as egregious as much of the commentary made them out to be. Or maybe the commentary was right and what was egregious was not that we made a product that did what it did, but that we made Windows do those things? Or perhaps we simply did it all too soon? Or that we, surprisingly, lacked patience to get it right?There was commentary on me as a leader, as a person. I knew that was borne of immediate frustration and not enduring. That’s why I remained quiet and did not speak out in 2012 as I moved on to a new experience in Silicon Valley and working with entrepreneurs. I understood and even respected the emotion from where it came and the forces that produced it. Over time individuals who facilitated that commentary have since apologized directly. I was proud to be part of more than two decades of building products, processes, teams, leaders, and people—a culture—that were the highest quality, best equipped, and most talented at Microsoft in the PC era.The problems we needed to solve with Windows 8 and Surface were readily apparent, as I strongly believed the moment we shipped. Nothing anyone wrote about either was surprising or news to those of us who had lived with the products. The commentary on the severity of the problems, and how and what to fix, was debatable.Microsoft had become synonymous with the PC, but could it also reinvent the PC? That was what we set out to do. The problem was that the people who loved PCs the most weren’t interested in a new kind of PC. They wanted the PC to get better, but in the same way it had for decades—primarily, more features for tech enthusiasts and more management and control features for enterprise IT managers. They simply wanted an improved Microsoft PC from Microsoft—launching programs, managing windows, futzing with files, compatibility with everything from the past, and more like that. They wanted more Windows 7.Instead, they got a new era of PC, a modern PC, from other companies, and it would be called iPhone, iPad, Chromebook, or Apple Silicon Macintosh and they would be okay with that. Today in the US, Apple’s device share is off the charts relative to any past. Apple holds greater than majority share of phones. Macintosh is selling at an all-time-high 15-20% of US PCs depending on the quarter. As for the iPad, the device loathed by so many who believed thinking about tablets was the underlying strategic failure of Windows 8, Apple has perhaps 500 million active devices and sells about 160 million iPads per year, or more than half the number of PC sales. The business and personal computing market is no longer the PC market, but vastly larger, and the only position Microsoft maintains is in the part that is shrinking relative to the whole and on an absolute basis.The iPad is worth a special mention because of the tablet narrative that accompanied Apple releasing their product just as we started Windows 8. The iPad had a clear positioning when released—it was between a phone and a PC and great for productivity. It was an odd positioning considering it was precisely a large, but less featured, iPhone. Soon Apple would say the iPad was the embodiment of the future Apple sought. Since then, however, the iPad has been mired in a state of both confusion and poor execution. While taking advantage of the innovation in silicon and the undeniably impressive innovation in Apple’s M-series of chips, the software, tools, frameworks, and peripherals directed at the iPad have, for lack of a better word, failed. For all the unit volumes and significant use as a primary device, it has not yet taken on the role Apple articulated. I would not have predicted where they are today.Jean-Louis Gassée, hired by Steve Jobs and former leader of Apple hardware and later creator of BeOS, had this to say in his wonderfully reflective weekly newsletter, Monday Note:The iPad’s recent creeping “Mac envy”, the abandonment of intuitive intelligibility for dubious “productivity” features reminds one of the proverbial Food Fight Product Strategy: Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.In competition it takes the leader to drop the ball and someone to be there to pick it up. Whether Apple truly dropped the ball with respect to the iPad or not, it is certainly clear that Microsoft in a post-Windows 8 environment was in no position to pick it up. That is a shame as I think Apple created an opportunity that might have been exploited.Instead in the Windows bubble, as much as anyone might have wanted new features or improved basic capabilities, they wanted compatibility with all that had come before. Legacy applications, muscle memory, and preservation of investments were the hallmarks of Windows, not to mention the ecosystem of PC makers and Intel. Why question those attributes with a new release in 2012?There was a comfort in what a PC was already doing and refining that while leaving paradigm shifts to other devices was, well, comfortable. Many saw the PC as both irreplaceable and without a substitute. Like the IT pros who knew the Windows registry, they were comfortable with their mastery of the product even if the world was moving on.Unfortunately, what is comfortable for customers is not always so comfortable for the business. Without a dominant and thriving platform, Microsoft is like a hardware company or an enterprise-only software supplier—reliant on deep customer relationships, legacy product lock-in, pricing power, and big company scale to drive the business. Those can work for a time, and perhaps even bide time hoping to invent the next platform. IBM continues to prove this every quarter, much to the surprise of technologists who today don’t even know what IBM makes or does.Windows 8 was not one thing, and therein lies its main challenge. Windows 8 was not simply a release of Windows, some new APIs, and a new PC. Windows 8 was a paradigm—it could not be disassembled into components and still stand. If we had just built a Microsoft PC for Windows 7 that would not have changed the trajectory of the business, just as we have since seen with hardware efforts. We already saw how touch on existing desktop software didn’t deliver. Moving from Intel to ARM without new software or worse just porting existing software was running in place at best and taking focus away from worthwhile endeavors at worst.To shift the paradigm and to enable Microsoft to have assets and compete in some new way required an all-or-nothing bet. Everything we know about disruption reveals how companies do what they can to avoid those situations and try to thread the needle. I was totally guilty of aiming to avoid that.The temptation to cling, or leverage depending on perspective, to

Happy Holiday to those in the US. This is a special double issue covering the creation and launch of Microsoft Surface, an integral part of the reimagining of Windows from the chipset to the experience. To celebrate such a radical departure from Microsoft’s historic Windows and software-only strategy this post is unlocked, so please enjoy, and feel free to share. I’ve also included a good many artifacts including the plans for what would happen after Windows 8 released that were put in place. The post following this is the very last in Hardcore Software. More on what comes next after the Epilogue.As a thank you to email subscribers of all levels, this post is unlocked for all readers. Please share. Please subscribe for updates and news.Back to 106. The Missing Start MenuIn 2010, operating in complete secrecy on the newest part of Microsoft’s campus, the Studios, was a team called WDS. WDS didn’t stand for anything, but that was the point. The security protocols for the Studio B building were strengthened relative to any other in the entire engineering campus. Housed in this building was a team working on one of the only projects that, if leaked, would be a material event for Microsoft.WDS was creating the last part of the story to reimagine Windows from the chipset to the experience.When we began the project, it was the icing on the cake. After the Consumer Preview, it had become the one thing that might potentially change the trajectory of Windows 8.As Windows 7 finished and I began to consider where we stood with hardware partners, Intel, the health of the ecosystem, and competing with Apple, I reached the same conclusion the previous leader of Windows had—Windows required great hardware to meet customer needs and to compete, but there were structural constraints on the OEM business model that seemed to preclude great hardware from emerging.At the same time, the dependence on the that channel meant there was no desire at Microsoft to compete with OEMs. In 2010, the Windows business represented 54% of Microsoft’s fiscal year operating income and Office was 49%—yes you read that correctly. BillG used to talk about that amount of revenue in terms of the small percentage of it that could easily fund a competitor or alternative to Windows. The “Year of Linux” was not just a fantasy of techies but a desired alternative for the OEMs as well. So far the OEMs had not chosen to invest materially in Linux, but that could change especially with an incentive created by Microsoft’s actions.Like my predecessors, I believed Microsoft needed to build a PC.Building PCs was something BillG was always happy to leave to other people. In an interview in 1992, Bill said, “There’s a reason I’m the second-biggest computer company in the world…. The reason is, I write software, and that’s where the profit is in this business right now.” On the other hand, the legendary computer scientist and arguably father of the tablet concept, Alan Kay, once said, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”Microsoft was founded on the core belief that hardware should best be left to others. In the 1970s hardware was capital intensive, required different engineering skills, had horrible margins, and carried with it all the risks and downsides that pure software businesses, like the one BillG and PaulA had pioneered, did not worry about. With a standardized operating system, the hardware business would quickly consolidate and commoditize around IBM-compatible PCs in what was first a high-margin business that soon became something of a race to the bottom in terms of margins.Microsoft’s fantastic success was built precisely on the idea of not building hardware.BillG was always more nuanced. He and PaulA believed strongly in building hardware that created opportunities for new software. Microsoft built a hardware device, the Z-80 SoftCard, to enable its software to run on the Apple ][. Early on, Microsoft created add-in cards to play sound. PaulA personally drove the creation of the PC mouse, the famous green-eyed monster. Modern Microsoft built Xbox, but also Zune and the Kin phone.Apple built great hardware and together with great software made some insanely great products.To build hardware in this context meant to build the device that customers interacted with and to build all the software and deliver it in one complete package or, in economist’s parlance, vertical integration.Mike Angiulo (MikeAng) and the ecosystem had the job of bringing diversity to the PC ecosystem, a diversity that Apple did not have. This diversity was both an enormous strength and the source of a structural weakness of the industry. PCs in any screen size or configuration one might need could always be found or even custom built covering any required performance and capacity. If you wanted something like a portable server or a ruggedized PC for a squad car or a PC to embed in 2 Tesla MRI, Windows had something for you. Apple with its carefully curated line essentially big, bigger, biggest with storage of minimum, typical, maximum across Mac were the choices. Even a typical PC maker like Dell would offer good, better, best across screen sizes and then vary the offering across home, small business, government, education, and enterprise. Within that 3 x 3 x 5 customization was possible at every step. This is the root of why Apple was able to have the best PC, but never able to command the bulk of the market.The idea of vertical integration sounds fantastic on paper but the loss of the breadth of computing Windows had to offer was also a loss for customers. It is very easy to say “build the perfect hardware” but the world also values choice. One question we struggled with was if the “consumerization” of computing would lead to less choice or not. In general, early in adopting a technology there is less choice for customers. Increased choice comes with maturity in an effort to obtain more margin and differentiate from growing competition.One bet we were making was that Windows on ARM and a device from Microsoft was the start of a new generation of hardware. It would start, much like the IBM PC 5150, with a single flagship and then over time there would be many more models bringing the diversity that was the hallmark of the PC ecosystem.That is why we never built anything as central and critical as a mainstream PC, and never had we really considered competing so directly with Microsoft’s primary stream of profits and risking alienating those partners and sending them to Linux. The Windows business was a profit engine for the company (and still is today) and that profit flows through only a half dozen major customers. Losing even one was a massive problem.Microsoft had also lost a good deal of money on hardware, right up to the $1.15 billion write-off for Xbox issues in 2007. Going as far back to the early 1990s and the original keyboard, SideWinder joystick, cordless phone, home theater remote, wireless router, and even ActiMates Barney our track record in hardware was not great. Microsoft’s hardware accessories were at best categorized as marketing expense or concept cars. It was no surprise my predecessors backed off.Like the mouse, the sound card, and perhaps Xbox, I was certain that if we were to succeed in a broad platform shift in Windows that we would need to take on the responsibility and risk of building mainstream and profitable PC devices. We tried to create the Tablet PC by creating our own prototypes and shopping them to OEMs as proofs of concept. We repeated this motion with the predecessor to small tablets called Origami, same as we did for Media Center. Each of these failed to develop into meaningful run rates as separate product lines even after the software was integrated into Windows.OEMs were not equipped to invest the capital and engineering required to compete with Apple. As an example, Apple had repurposed a massive army of thousands of aluminum milling machines to create the unibody case used in the MacBook Pro. Not only did no OEM want to spend the capital to do this, but there was also no motivation to do so. Beyond that, the idea of spending a huge amount capital up front on the first machines using a new technology until a process or supply chain could be optimized was entirely unappealing even if the capital was dedicated.The OEMs were not aiming for highly differentiated hardware and their business needs were met with plastic cases that afforded flexibility in design and components. In practice, they often felt software was more differentiating than hardware, which was somewhat counterintuitive. The aggregate gross margin achievable in a PC software load was a multiple of the margin on the entire base hardware of a PC. The latest and coolest Android tablet was a fancy one made by Samsung, with a plastic case. The rise of Android, a commodity platform, all but guaranteed more plastic, lower quality screens, swappable parts, and the resulting lower prices.The OEMs were not in a battle to take share from Apple. They were more than happy to take share from each other. Apple laptop share was vastly smaller than the next bigger OEM making Windows laptops. Each OEM would tell us they could double the size of their entire company by taking share from the other OEMs. That’s just how they viewed the opportunity. The OEMs were smart businesspeople.Thinking we needed to build hardware, then building it, was one order of magnitude of challenge. Choosing to bring a product to mass market was another. Hardware is complicated, complex, expensive, and risky—risky on the face of it and seen as risky by Microsoft’s best customers.The Surface team, organized within the Entertainment and Devices division home to keyboards and mice, finished the first release of their namesake computer. It was a Windows Vista-powered table like the ones popular in bars, pizza places, and hotel lobbies in the 1980s when they ran Frogger. The new platform

This section was the most difficult to write. At least people look back favorably on Clippy. The Windows 8 Start screen lacks any kitsch or sentimental value. It was the wrong design for the product at the wrong time and ultimately my responsibility. This is not the story of the design. There are better people to write about the specifics. This is not a story of ignoring feedback or failing to heed the market, but a story of just what happens when you’re out of degrees of freedom. This is the story of the constraints and the rationale for how we managed a situation that we saw as a quagmire. The good thing about the Start screen was everyone had an opinion. The bad thing was most of those opinions were not favorable.Subscribers, only two more scheduled posts remaining. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

The previous section detailed the release of the Windows 8 platform, WinRT, for building Metro-style apps. In the reimagining of Windows from the chipset to the experience, we’ve covered all the major efforts. In this section, we will describe the latest in PCs that will contribute to Windows 8, which Intel called Ultrabook™ PCs We will also introduce the Windows Store where developers could distribute apps. The really big news will be the Consumer Preview or beta test for Windows 8 where millions will experience the product for the first time. It might surprise readers, just as with the Developer Preview, that the reaction to the product across many audiences was quite positive. Just how positive? And what in the world could the professional press and reviewers actually liked? And what did Apple’s Tim Cook have to say about all this?Back to 104. //build It and They Will Come (Hopefully)Following the //build conference we were feeling quite good. Not to belabor the point, but I recognize how challenging it is to take such feelings at face value given where the product ended up. In writing this and helping people experience the steps we went through at the time in sequence, my hope is that what comes to light is that we were not bonkers and in fact much of the industry was excited by Windows 8 as it emerged. Of course, there were skeptics and doubters, even haters, but as veterans of dozens of major products we’d seen this before and the volume for Windows 8 was not disproportionate. If anything, the excitement and optimism were higher. So where did things take a decidedly different direction? It was when after product emerged from the Developer Preview and a series of events including the widely distributed Consumer Preview, or beta, when millions of people would experience the product. The leadup to the Consumer Preview in March 2012 included some important steps in the process as well.New UltrabooksOn the heels of the //build conference in September 2011 Intel began kicking off an effort to reenergize the PC industry with a response to Apple, finally. Intel developed a series of specifications, financial incentives in the form of marketing and pricing actions, as well as supply chain activation to deliver on a new class of laptop. Intel called these Ultrabooks. We called them a blessing.Intel was best positioned to drive this type of advance. It was always difficult for Microsoft simply providing the operating system to dramatically alter the hardware platform, even though many thought by virtue of building Windows we held significant sway. We certainly had influence, but ultimately Windows was a wide-open platform which meant hardware to support any scenario was under PC maker control. The few times we had tried to tightly control hardware specifications, such as with Tablet PC and Media Center PC, did not go well at all. Worse, such controls angered not just PC makers but our fans as well who always wanted to build PCs on their own and experiment with hardware components.Unlike Microsoft, Intel had a unique ability to influence hardware specifications and their influence increased over time compared to Microsoft’s which waned over the years. Intel rallied the industry around Netbooks. While that was a failure, it provided a playbook that Intel could later follow. Before the Netbook, Intel almost single-handedly drove a consistent level of support for Wi-Fi with the Centrino line of chips, which bought both lower-power consumption and Wi-Fi to the standard business laptop. In these cases, and many others such as USB, SATA storage, integrated graphics, and more, Intel took on a broader role in determining components and building software drivers for Windows (and Linux) while making it easier for OEMs to adopt a complete platform.The efforts were not pure altruism. Intel would use these complete component platforms to steer OEMs to specific price points for chips as well as unit volume commitments. With those in hand, Intel could broadly advertise the platform using their massive Intel Inside advertising budget. These financial incentives were eagerly embraced by OEMs and a key part of their margin. Intel maximized its own margins as well by careful choice of CPUs in these platforms and enabling OEMs to upsell to even higher margin chips as appropriate.This dynamic is why competing with the new Apple MacBook Air starting in 2008 followed by subsequent models and then Intel-based MacBook Pros proved elusive. Conspiracy theorists would believe that Intel was slow-rolling competitive PCs just to keep Apple and Steve Jobs happy. I never saw any indication of such a dynamic. Rather, it just seemed like PC makers were basically fat and happy in their share battle with each other. They had little worry about the 3-5% of share Apple had especially because they viewed Apple laptops and their customers as high-end, expensive, and premium. The PC business was all about good price and great volume. Being a pound heavier, an inch thicker, and plastic made little difference. As Apple share among influential customers, especially in the US, increased, the urgency from Intel and PC makers changed.At the 2011 Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in Taiwan and in parallel with the //build Conference, Intel unveiled a new concept PC, the Ultrabook™. An Ultrabook wasn’t an actual PC from Intel, but a series of specifications or requirements for a PC to inherit the Ultrabook label, and thus the CPU pricing and broad co-advertising that came with it.Unlike Netbooks and Centrino, Ultrabook specifications were rather detailed and covered a broad set of criteria beyond even the components Intel provided. The tagline Intel chose was “Thin, Responsive, and Secure” which would be used quite broadly. Among the requirements to be part of this program, new PCs had to include:* Battery. A good deal of the platform effort was a new type of battery that was not yet used broadly on Windows PCs. Ultrabook PCs required non-removable Li-Poly batteries of 36-41WHr designed to fit around components and a minimum of 5 hours of runtime.* Storage and Responsiveness. While not required precisely, there was a strong recommendation to use solid state disk drives, SSDs, in Ultrabook PCs which would significantly improve performance. SSDs also made it possible to strongly recommend a wake from standby time of just 7 seconds, which for Windows PCs would be excellent at the time.* Chassis Design. For the first time, Intel specified what amounted to innovative chassis design. For laptops with 14” or larger screens, the chassis needed to be under 21mm and for smaller screens 18mm.* Screen. The Ultrabook specification included guidelines and requirements covering display selection as well, including detailed values for thickness, bezel size, viewing angles, pixel density, and power requirements. At IDF, Intel showed off displays from a number of display makers who were ready and able to supply screens.* Keyboards. Even keyboards, far from Intel’s expertise, received attention. Back-lights, spill resistant layers, key-travel and key shape were all specified in Ultrabook design. This was a significant departure for Intel and the requirements created the need for keyboard redesign for all laptops.* Sensors and devices. Intel even included recommendations for devices usually seen far off the motherboard including: 720p webcam, accelerometer, GPS, ambient light sensor and more.Intel really geared up the supply chain. This was crucially important during the huge ramp up happening with mobile phones where many suppliers were thinking of moving on from PCs. As it would turn out, Ultrabooks were the last gasp for innovative PCs.Ultrabook laptops would turn out to be the ultimate devices for the road warrior running Office. These even led to the standardization of HDMI connectors in conference rooms after decades of VGA/RGB connectors. Windows 7 had introduced the command Window+P to make it easy to switch thus ending the need for degaussing and rebooting PCs to project…mostly. The stellar work at the device and OS kernel level to reduce power consumption, improve boot time, and even the unique features for SSD storage all contributed greatly to a fantastic experience for this new form factor.Ultrabooks brought Windows hardware to the 21st century and were far more competitive with Apple laptops than we might have expected after waiting so long. In fact, Ultrabook PCs were downright cheap compared to Apple products. While most would retail for the magic number of $1,495 many could be had for the other magic number of $999. This compared to nearly twice as much for the similarly configured Apple laptops. All in all, this was a huge win for the Windows PC. Every PC laptop today owes its existence to this excellent work by Intel and the supply chain. A small benefit for tech enthusiasts and IT administrators was that the wave of Ultrabook standardization also made it possible to install Windows without requiring additional drivers to be downloaded from PC maker sites.Ultrabook PCs rapidly diffused across the ecosystem from the board room to executive teams to consultants and eventually to students. I remember a 2011 recruiting visit to MIT and Harvard and while I saw a lot (perhaps majority) of MacBooks, the PCs I saw were all newly purchased Ultrabook PCs with their sleek, un-PC-like aluminum cases.Many believed Ultrabooks would put a dent in iPad momentum. Once again, it is worth a reminder that Apple’s iPad was absolutely top of mind for the industry. The iPad was the holiday gift for 2011. Apple sold over 32 million iPads in 2011 and the tablet redefined the baseline requirements for a road warrior productivity computing. Apple, hoping to sell every Apple customer on an iPhone, MacBook, and a new iPad remained relentless in the distinct use case for iPad while also continuing to tout the iPad as the future of computing.It was this spike in demand for iPads that drove the diffic

Imagine building a computing platform that powers a generation. Now imagine taking the big step of building the replacement for that platform while the original needs to keep going for another decade or more. This is the story of unveiling the new Windows 8 platform for building modern apps, WinRT, at the first //build conference. The difficulty in telling this story is how everyone knows how the world came to view Windows 8. The developer conference of 2011 was a different story entirely. We still had to work through the big issue within the world of .NET developers and their extreme displeasure with the little we said about the Windows 8 developer story a few months earlier at the preview of the user experience. We had so much to share and were very excited as we made our way to Los Angeles.Back to 103. The End of Windows SoftwareThe iPad was out there and still had skeptics. Pundits continued to assert that tablets were not good devices for content creation. Techies saw it as a consumer toy for lightweight computing. This same thing had once been said of PCs, right up until they overtook computing. It was said of server PCs, right up until they overtook business workloads and cloud computing.Steve Jobs, at the 2010 All Things Digital D8 conference, reminded the audience that the iPad was just getting started and added, “I think we’re just scratching the surface on the kind of apps we can build for it. I think one can create a lot of content on the tablet.” By 2011, Apple was demonstrating increasing confidence in the path they had created with iPad. The iPad was already the preferred tool for the road warrior, the boardroom, and the back seat. The iPad and iPhone combined with the developer platform had become the most formidable competition Microsoft ever faced. As much as Android unit volumes concerned the Windows Phone team, there was no ignoring Apple. Some were deeply concerned about the tsunami of small Android tablets. Given what we went through with Netbooks, low quality devices, even in high volumes, concerned me less.The PC was moribund. The situation in Redmond became increasingly worrisome. This was despite our solid progress on Windows 8 and the interim Windows Phone release, Windows Phone 7.5.The chicken and egg challenge of platforms is well known. How does a platform gain traction from a standing start? Every platform faces this, but it is unusual for the established world leader to be wrestling with this problem. When I think of how the computer world had literally revolved around every utterance about Windows, it was downright depressing if not scary.The challenge the company faced was the dramatic loss of developer mindshare. Between web browsers, iPhone/iPad, and then Android, there was no room left for Microsoft. Win32 was legacy, a solid legacy, but a legacy. The latest efforts for Windows Phone seemed to have stalled at best. While there was a rhythm of press releases about app momentum for Windows Phone, the app numbers were tiny relative to Apple and Google and the app quality was low. Phone units were small too, meaning attracting developers was becoming more difficult not less.Every leadership team meeting provided another opportunity to debate the merits of using financial incentives to lure developers to the platform. And at each meeting I raised the reality of adverse selection that every competitor to Windows had learned over the past two decades. The Xbox team loved to talk about how much they spent on exclusives, but that was a walled garden world of intellectual property. In an open platform, once you’re spending money to win over developers, the least motivated developers show up with the wrong apps creating an awful cycle where paying developers attracts more of the less desirable developers building even more of the wrong apps. But not spending money seems guaranteed to lose if there’s no organic interest. This debate would become front and center with Windows 8 as we faced the same challenge.The concerns over the specifics of competing with iPad and Android tablets and how Microsoft and partners would respond occupied an increasingly concerned board. We had our plans for Windows 8, but the obvious question was could Microsoft do something sooner? In the summer of 2011, we were a couple of months from our developer conference in September and certainly less than 18 months from general availability of Windows 8. I assumed we could wait that long and knew we could not finish sooner. I also assumed there was no emergency product development that could finish something useful before then. That didn’t stop us from having a classic Microsoft hand-wringing series of meetings to attempt to cons up a plan. Time for yet another Gedankenexperiment as part of a series of meetings with some members of the board and others.We were not yet certain of the how or who of delivering ARM devices, particularly tablets, though by this point we had test hardware running and we were deep in potential designs for our own device. As a result, I was my routinely cautious self in an effort not to over-promise, especially to this group. I was, perhaps wrongly, determined not to get ahead of our own execution. Such a conservative stance was my nature but also not the norm or even appreciated. I was happy to talk about our developer conference and what was possible. The specifics required to answer when and by whom there would be a mini tablet running Windows were well ahead of where we were.I reviewed our progress on Windows 8, again. The problem seemed to be that we were not getting enough done nor was it soon enough. They were right. Who wouldn’t want more and sooner? From my vantage point, if we finished when we said we would it would be impressive and historically unique, even on the heels of Windows 7. How quickly people can forget the past. It felt like “more cowbell.”Shaving time off the schedule was discussed—it wasn’t a grounded discussion, just a wish. After that, Terry Myerson (TMyerson) and his co-leader Andy Lees (AndyLees) of the Phone team, shared the early plans for Windows Phone 8. Since Apple had made a tablet out of the iPhone, the natural question was, could we make a tablet out of Windows Phone? Of course, we could do anything (“It’s just software” as we said), but which phone and how soon?Some in attendance even asked if should do a “quick” project and build a tablet out of WP7 (or 7.5)? Could we take an Android tablet design and put Windows Phone 7 on it? Why not? Seemed so easy. None of these ideas could possibly happen. There’s no such thing as a quick project. The last quick hardware project Microsoft did was Kin, a poorly received smartphone.There wasn’t much I could do. From one perspective, Windows was suddenly the product that was holding us back and Windows Phone was the new solution to our tablet problem. Given what we were seeing in the market, Windows Phone apps, and the technical challenges of the platform, this was a ridiculous spot to land.Windows Phone 8, working with Nokia, introduced really big phones called phablets, pioneered by Samsung on Android. For a time, some analysts thought these larger phones would put an end to tablet demand because tablets were in between. Still, tablets continued to thrive for productivity and, as far as Apple was concerned, to become the future laptop. The iPad certainly thrived. It was the cheap Android tablets, the ones the Board was concerned about, that ended up on the trash heap with Netbooks.Ultimately, there was no tablet market, just an iPad market. The iPad run rate soon approximated that of consumer PC laptops. It was difficult for Microsoft to see the low-volume player as the real competitor, especially when it was Apple and the last time it was the low-volume producer it nearly died. Android was shaping up to be the Windows ecosystem on phones—high volume, low profit, endless fragility, device diversity (or randomness), and so on, but with a new OS, new OEMs, new business model, and new mobile developers who were making apps on the iPhone, though the iPhone apps always seemed a bit better.The Windows and Windows Phone teams would eventually go through a challenging period where in the middle of Windows 8, we on the Windows team learned that the Phone team had been taking snapshots of various subsystems of Windows 8 for use in the phone OS. This got the product to market but did not give us a chance to align on quality, security, reliability, and code maintenance. This wasn’t done in any coordinated or even transparent manner. Had we, Jon DeVaan and Grant George specifically, not intervened the company would have been set up for significant issues with security and reliability given we were not finished with the code and there was no process in place to manage “copies” of the code. Jon worked through a better process once the team got ahead of the issue. I had a super tense meeting with SteveB and the co-leaders of the Phone team about this lack of transparency and process and why it showed a lack of leadership, or even competence, on our part. In the new world of security, viruses, vulnerabilities, and more the company could not afford to be cavalier with source code like this seemed to demonstrate. This was all in addition to the lack of alignment on the developer platform as the Phone team made their early bet on Silverlight as previously discussed.More and sooner was a constant drumbeat throughout the Windows 8 development schedule. I was called to the carpet many times to explain where we were and why we were not finishing sooner. I was grumpy about doing that and I’m sure it showed. Schedules did not get pulled in or completed early. In the history of the company (and software), that never happened. We weren’t going to finish Windows 8 early. We would be fortunate to finish on time, mid-2012 plus two months to reach availability on new PCs.The leadup to the fall developer conference was a constant series of cris

A reasonable question to ask is “Why did Windows 8 need to create a new platform?” Not only did Microsoft have Win32, the tried-and-true real and compatible Windows platform, but the company had pioneered the .NET platform and with Windows Phone 7 extended that platform to phones with Silverlight. This post is my take on the history and how we ended up at this point. It takes us way back and shows how sometimes what emerges as a major strategic problem can trace its origins back much earlier than one might think. In the next section we will unveil the platform to developers at the //build conference.Back to 102. The ExperienceThe Windows platform and associated app ecosystem were sick. Across product executives we had a very tough time coming to grips with the abysmal situation. We definitely could not agree on when the situation turned dire or why or if it had. That meant doing something about it was going to be challenging.Some were so desperate for good news that they grabbed on to any shred of optimism. At one of the infamous Mid-Year Review (MYR) meetings during the development of Windows 7, a country general manager proudly presented their results of the annual developer survey designed to show what platform developers are coding for and the tools they use.  The head of the developer segment for India said they were seeing Windows rise to the top of the chart for the most interesting and targeted platform. Windows! Immediately the room woke up from its MYR-induced stupor. Questions and comments were flying, “What outreach did you do?” “Did you start in University comp sci programs?” “How did you use financial incentives?”The optimism was misplaced. The realty was even more bleak than a benign survey outlier, a common occurrence when compensation and corporate metrics were attached to surveys. There was no surge in Windows development. Nope, it was the opposite. India had become a favorite location for companies to outsource their legacy Windows software development. We weren’t measuring an uptick. We were literally measuring the final blow to the Windows development ecosystem as companies everywhere looked to place development out of sight and out of mind. I hate to say so, but it was obvious that’s what the data showed. Microsoft itself had incented teams to transition projects to India, and not often the most strategic ones as I had learned when we had to reconstitute the Windows sustaining engineering team.Through the 1990s and the rise of Windows, BillG hosted an annual dinner for the largest and most important Windows ISVs, the CEOs and founders of leading tech companies of the era. The dinner was always a star-studded affair featuring the legends of the industry including Philippe Kahn, Jim Manzi, Ray Ozzie, Paul and George Grayson, David Fulton, Fred Gibbons, Scott Cook and perhaps 50 more. These were the leaders of the new industry each presiding over companies with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of revenue. The companies built the tools from my earliest PC days: Borland Turbo Pascal, Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Notes, Micrografix, FoxPro, Harvard Graphics, Quicken, and more.As Windows won, ironically the health of these companies declined. There was a natural consolidation. Many were acquired, and their products slowly faded. Microsoft had its competitive products and the rise of Office, Visual C++, Outlook, and others certainly contributed. Microsoft’s singular bet on Windows and early success on Macintosh were factors as well.It was, however, the internet and the web browser that really changed everything. The above ISVs started their companies in the 1980s on MS-DOS or in the early 1990s on Windows. Anyone starting a company, particularly in Silicon Valley, in the late 1990s started as a web company. Many startups created enterprise software, though we tend to remember the rise of Yahoo, Google, and later Facebook.A look at the top software companies in 2010 read like a list of industrial giants more than pure play software. PwC published a list, Global 100 Software Leaders, that illustrated how the industry had changed. Among the top 100, there were only three that made tools or productivity software primarily aimed at Windows or Mac: Adobe, Autodesk, and Intuit. There were even more companies that built safety, security, or management tools addressing shortcomings of the PC: McAfee, Symantec, TrendMicro, Citrix, etc. Most of the companies were either transitioning or transitioned completely to web-based interfaces running against datacenter software.The real end of the ISV dinner happened for me in 1999. The Microsoft Business Productivity Group (BPG) led by Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia (BobMu) announced a deal to acquire Visio Corporation for approximately $1.5 billion, Microsoft’s largest acquisition at the time. Visio was a profitable company approaching $200 million per year in revenue and nearly $30 million in net income. Bob was my manager though I didn’t know anything about the deal.The Visio Corp. founders were the fantastic team of Jeremy Jaech, Ted Johnson, and Dave Walter. Jeremy and Dave had previously co-founded Seattle-based Aldus Corporation where Ted later led the engineering for Windows PageMaker. Aldus was acquired by Adobe in 1994.Visio was a wonderful product and from the very start engineered a strong affinity to Microsoft Office, often working jointly with us on marketing, sales, and even consistency of product design. The product, an easy-to-use diagramming application, pioneered many structured drawing tools we take for granted today such as stencils of shapes, the ability to modify shape geometry, and magnetic connectors between shapes. The company was headquartered in downtown Seattle when Microsoft didn’t even have offices across the bridge.Visio was the last poster child of the old ISV world left standing to have started out as a Windows software company. It was one of the first applications developed for Windows 95, a fact that was heavily promoted. Strategically it used everything Microsoft could throw at it from Visual Basic automation to data access APIs to OLE. Ted once joked with me that they would have used Clippy if we gave them the chance.Ted, who stayed on for a bit with Microsoft and then later returned to work on Internet Explorer (TedJ), was always candid about their journey. He was wonderful to talk with and had the experiences of a founder, which was something I sought out. His view was clear that the days of being a breakthrough independent developer focused exclusively on Windows were over. It wasn’t just the browser, but also the demands of building out an enterprise sales force and having a full product line exclusively devoted to being a Windows ISV. This was even before the rise of mobile.I had a few conversations with BobMu and SteveB over whether it was a good idea for the health of the ecosystem that we participate in the ongoing consolidation. I think they heard what I was saying as a resistance to the deal because I’d end up managing the team—that wasn’t it at all and I loved the team and product. Visio was a great addition to the Office family and brought a significant amount of expertise with a great team. For me, it meant the only remaining independent and relatively horizontal Windows ISV was Adobe. Should we buy them too? Then we’d be our own ISV ecosystem. It just didn’t seem healthy.On the other hand, it was inevitable. The Windows ISV world wasn’t what it was, but why?Microsoft wasn’t standing still while this decline took place. We struggled to build both a coherent strategy and execute effectively. It wasn’t a shortage of strategy, rather it was a combination of several strategies that ended up failing to reinforce each other and ultimately weakened the overall company strategy.At the core was Microsoft’s collective response to the internet platform—the browser and the server programming model. The Windows team fully embraced the browser as the future platform, pioneering and advancing HTML along the way. In the late 1990s, Windows even redesigned the Windows desktop to integrate HTML and browser technologies on to the surface of the desktop. Still there was no bridge between Windows and the web platform. Windows simply became a place to run a browser. In Windows 7, we finally took a step of relying on Windows itself for browser features when we integrated DirectX graphics that enhanced animation, video, and overall browsing performance. That came after Microsoft ceded the dominance it earned in an earlier era, unfortunately.This entire time, the Windows desktop API—Win32—went under-nourished, so to speak. It did not really matter because anything done in a new release of Windows would be ignored by ISVs unless it also worked on older versions of Windows. Enterprise PCs continued to run older versions of Windows longer than even the 3-to-5-year upgrade cycle of Windows and PCs were lasting longer as well. No ISV was willing to invest in writing code specific to a new version of Windows for what amounted to tiny marginal gains in functionality or features. Some teams released new features that ran on the installed base of older Windows, further reducing the perceived value of a Windows upgrade. This cycle of distributing new features for the old Windows installed base increased the complexity and fragility of existing PCs by designing implementations of system-level features to work in the context of multiple versions of Windows. It was a mess. Windows had turned into a distribution vehicle for features without a coherent platform strategy.The Windows Server team faced its own API battle distinct from the client side. In the 1990s the team developed high-performance and scalable web server capabilities such as Internet Information Server. This platform handily won the enterprise market that was buying servers to host web sites along with Oracle databases, Microsoft Exchange email, and corporate file servers. T

A challenge that comes with writing down experiences occurs when writing about events that readers lived through, have strong opinions about, and feel they know the full story. My purpose here is to share what we were thinking and doing at the time, how a broad set of people reacted, and then to offer my views of the reasons leading to the results. That is a way of saying this section is going to start with what we set out to do, not where we ended.Back to 101. Reimagining Windows from the Chipset to the Experience: The Chipset [Ch. XV]We set out to reimagine Windows, but it is interesting to ask what exactly the product is to most people. This helps us to understand the thoughts behind making a major change. We saw this in the changes to Office—we recognized the value of Office was not as many might have thought, the file formats or the old File|Edit|View|Tools|Window|Help menu structure, but rather the inherent capabilities and implementation of those capabilities. In that spirit, we looked at Windows and saw much more than the specifics of the Start menu or any particular expression of a user interface. Windows at its core proved to be a remarkably resilient operating system and our goal was to tap that resiliency to bring it new capabilities for a new world of customers.Fundamentally an operating system can be thought of as the software that allocates hardware resources, manages connectivity and devices, and defines the human to device interaction model. Beyond these technology distinctions Windows is also a culture of openness to developers and an ecosystem of partners that itself has proven resilient over time. Windows is no more one of those than a single feature or attribute above others.As both a participant in and later a contributor to the evolution of Windows, I find the transitions that the Windows product has gone through to be a case study in the “soft” part of software and in the flexibility of the product team to engineer transitions from one evolutionary stage to another. Consider just some of the transitions the Windows OS kernel or core operating system have undergone:* GUI transition. Windows itself was the product of a transition that many doubted could be made.  Could an entire OS be built upon the "shaky" underpinnings of MS-DOS in the face of Macintosh?  A remarkable amount of work went into the technology across the ecosystem, such support for 32-bit microprocessors, that made Windows 3.0 such a watershed product.  Yet underlying that, customers could still bring forward investments in all those applications and peripherals from MS-DOS.* 32-bit transition. The transition to 32-bits was one that required a vast amount of change and brought with it the introduction of "plug and play" and the ability to run more sophisticated graphical applications and games of unrivaled qualities. The introduction of Windows 95 was a watershed moment for the whole industry. While in hindsight it looks as though it was a sure thing, many at the time proclaimed it would be technically impossible.* Internet transition. Immediately after the release of Windows 95, the conventional wisdom quickly became that Windows would be replaced by a browser.  Yet few would have argued with the fact that the presence of Windows—the support for networking, the introduction of graphical web browsers on Windows, as well as the openness of the platform all contributed to the transformation of the world of information technology.  In 2010 we were just starting to see how the powerful graphics of Windows could bring standards based HTML5 to life in unprecedented ways. As we will see in the next section, the programming model and API of Windows was indeed still struggling.* Server Scale. As we continued to evolve the client (workstation) OS we were using this same OS foundation to power the datacenter.  With Windows Server we scaled the OS to support hundreds of computing cores and terabytes of storage.  And along the way we created this OS for multiple CPU architectures driven by the demands of server computing (Alpha, MIPS, Itanium, and 64-bit).  At each step most people believed that such flexibility was neither prudent nor possible.* Security and Reliability. Through the above transitions, there was an undercurrent that Windows was "aging" and that it could not transition to modern computing needs of much larger memory architectures, multi-core OS support, improved reliability, and much better security.  The introduction of Windows XP was a milestone in bringing our enterprise server and workstation OS to mainstream consumers.  Ironically, at the introduction of Windows XP many thought we had reached too far, and that the OS was more than people would need or could even afford to power. Throughout this transition the introduction of Windows Update enabled the OS to stay connected to customers, provide code updates, and distribute software on behalf of the ecosystem.These transitions were supported by consistently strong engineering efforts to refactor, rearchitect, and re-tune the Windows operating system. Windows also showed a broad set of efforts at the experience or user interface layer in the system as well. The various editions of including Windows Home, Windows Professional, and Windows Enterprise while often viewed as pricing and licensing efforts did in practice introduce a wide range of functionality tuned to different customer segments. Windows was able to reach up and down in complexity using the resiliency and flexibility inherent in the architecture.Yet, at the experience level Windows also struggled to achieve critical mass in several important areas even with the capabilities of the team and assets in the code. In Hardcore Software, we’ve seen the difficulties of creating tablet computers (Tablet PC), handheld computers (Windows CE), home entertainment (Windows Media Center), industrial devices (Windows Embedded), and most recently the ongoing development of smartphones (Windows Phone 7.)What is it about the experience layer that has proved so difficult for Microsoft? There could be many possible explanations. Was Microsoft too early when it should have been patient? Was Windows code simply the wrong starting point? Did we bring out good products but had inferior marketing, sales, and distribution? Some would point to one of more of these.I had my own theory and plan for trying something different.My view was that Microsoft relied too heavily on the notion of architectural layering and believed that experience could always be layered “on top” of the operating system. This computer science view drove nearly every discussion on how things should move forward. It was viewed as they key to architecting Windows for these different experiences while maintaining the shared code of the actual operating system.Microsoft systems culture (aka BillG) loved to believe that with the right architecture things in one layer could advance independent of another. I don’t think I could begin to enumerate all the times we debated issues that boiled down to me suggesting the abstractions are in the way while Bill insisted that great architecture would solve the problem. The counter was that I was failing to consider building a great architecture before addressing the problem. I was merely suggesting that we might end up spending 90% of the time on 10% of the problem.In my heart I am an “apps person” as I’ve noted many times. One thing that is conceptually different about apps from operating systems is that apps tend to be much less hardcore (or religious as some might say) about architectural layers while much more zealous about solving the customer problem even if that means breaking through well-considered abstraction layers. In an operating system there’s a general tendency to view the layers and architecture as goals the system must achieve and moving forward the layers enable advances and are deeply respected. Whereas in apps the layers and architecture tend to be the starting point while innovation and moving forward usually involve breaking those very abstractions.Each of the above attempts at expanding the experience of Windows were implemented with the explicit goal and architectural starting point of not interfering with the core of Windows. Importantly, the teams executed without organizational alignment across the Windows team or schedule. The essence of the former COSD division was to serve the main missions of Windows for desktops and for servers but generally favored the server mission for cultural and historic reasons. Whereas the Client division served the multiple experiences of Windows but did not generally prioritize experiences beyond the main client. To be clear I am not saying this was wrong at the time, rather it introduced tradeoffs that had side effects relative to other missions.This to me was the kind of decision made early in a project that is difficult to work around. The inability of the Tablet PC to fully embrace native Windows implementations or for Windows Phone to tap into the available power of the Windows operating system support for devices and connectivity were examples I’d personally experienced. As an apps person in the “two gardens” sense, the same way we needed Word and Excel to share code and align around everything from the use of the Windows registry to HTML to drawing code to user interface, we needed Windows to align around these expansions and changes to the experience.Windows was making a tradeoff at each of the junctures. There were two higher priority advances that needed to happen. First the work to transition from MS-DOS and 16-bit Windows to the full 32-bit operating system was an imperative that could not be compromised. Second, the need to continue to scale Windows up for the data center and to have a consistent client-server operating system was architecturally key. These were long term goals that were put in place and executed over at least two decades as discussed in 01

Welcome to Chapter XV! This is the final chapter of Hardcore Software. In this chapter, we are going to build and release Windows 8—reimagining Windows from the chipset to the experience. First up, the chipset. Then there will be sections on the platform and the experience. Following that, we’ll release Windows to developers and then the public. Then a surprise release of…Surface. There is a ton to cover. Many readers have lived through this. I’m definitely including a lot of detail but chose not to break things up into small posts. There are subsection breaks though.This first section covers the chipset work—moving Windows to the ARM SoC. Before diving right in, I will quickly describe the team structure and calendar of events that we will follow, both of which provide the structure to this final chapter while illustrating the scope of the effort.Back to 100. A Daring and Bold Vision This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

Hardcore Software has shared the vision planning process for five releases of Office and Windows 7. Though not detailed we followed the same process for two waves of Windows Live Services as well as Internet Explorer 8 and 9. Windows 8 went through this same process, though by now as a team we had become pretty good at it. This section details the resulting Windows 8 plan, The Vision for Windows 8. As part of that, I wanted to take a bit of a journey into the alignment between Windows Phone and Windows 8 and the challenges we saw there. In doing so, I will describe things from the Windows perspective and not delve into the specifics of running the Windows Phone project, which wasn’t my responsibility. Rather, I wanted to cover the challenges of two large projects within the context of Microsoft each trying to figure out what they needed to do. Since 2010-2011 when this took place, it is the strength of Apple’s approach of starting from a reinvented desktop operating system for the iPhone and building out from there that makes the events of this time strategically interesting. As I frame events, the key questions to ask would be “Should Microsoft have waited?” and “Would it have been ok to not be in market with any phone after Windows Mobile 6.5 until 2012 or even 2013?” At least that’s how I reflect on these times. The answers are not complete as the next chapter will also cover some important aspects of this in more detail, particularly the hardware and platform elements.This section could really be a chapter and isn’t for the faint of heart. Dig in and have fun because it covers a lot of ground that took place in a relatively short time.Back to 099. The Magical iPadWe never lacked clarity in what we intended to do—reinvent Windows for a new era. That meant a new experience, a new platform for developers, a new connection to services, and, yes, new hardware. Books about reinvention (or disruption) don’t tell you that you can’t just announce such intentions to the world. It turns there is the intention to reinvent and then a plan to build it, though when you decide to share a strategy is an entirely different matter.I was old enough to have personally lived through the creation of the term Osborne effect as it pertains to pre-announcing products. In high school I programmed my father’s Osborne he bought to keep the books for the family business. We’d been using the Osborne daily since it launched and thought about buying an upgrade for the business. Then Osborne founder and CEO, Adam Osborne, pre-announced the Executive, a fancier model with more memory and a bigger screen. The only problem was it was far from being done. The prototype product was shown in 1983. Customers held off buying the original Osborne long enough that the company went bankrupt before delivering the new computer.Apple faced a similar dilemma when it first transitioned from Motorola chips to PowerPC chips. The transition was announced in 1994. While it is difficult to tease out the impact of Windows 95 from the chip transition, Apple’s share of the Mac/PC market would steadily shrink for another decade, and decline significantly in absolute unit sales, until the next chip transition to Intel.Microsoft had long been relatively immune from pre-announcing products because the overall growth of the PC market combined with the breadth of the product line dampened any pullback in a single product. The PC needed an OS even if the next one was delayed. As we saw with Longhorn/Vista, businesses still continued to buy PCs in droves. That’s why many Microsoft products seemed to be talked about long before they were released. There was an added benefit to this early sharing, or as we called it openness, which was used to generate platform momentum. With nothing to lose, Windows itself benefitted from a solid 5 years of momentum building in the early days before Windows 3.0. Back then it was all just an industry norm.In our world, the Windows business had just survived the Longhorn mess and recovered with Windows 7. We now faced an entirely new market situation. Windows itself faced structural challenges—actual alternatives in the market in the form of phones, tablets, browsers, Intel-based Macs, and soon ChromeOS. At the very least, people could just stick with Windows 7, which was fine by us, except given new alternatives most customers would not even consider buying a new or additional PC, which was very bad for us.Every bone in the Microsoft body would cry out to begin evangelizing Windows 8 as soon as we had plans. We were going to build a new platform and evangelists wanted time to articulate the strategy so developers could weigh their alternatives. But doing so would also run up against Windows Phone 7 and the platform they were evangelizing. The lack of strategic connection between Windows and Windows Phone was obvious but at the time was fraught with difficult choices, especially in the context of competing with Apple.Then there was the biggest of all problems, again something they fail to mention in books. What if the big strategic bet we planned on making ran right up against our biggest partners and customers? The whole idea of advancing Windows without our partner Intel and the major PC makers Dell, HP, and Lenovo would be heresy, plain and simple. We are talking about Wintel after all. Not only were we planning on a chipset, but we knew we would offer something radical with respect to the actual computer we’d offer customers. Double heresy.As a result, the vision we created for Windows 8 was not specific in the broad communication about the role that alternate chip platforms, SoC or system-on-a-chip, or new hardware would play in the plans. By using the term SoC we could account for both ARM, the then UK company that designed the chips used in all mobile phones and tablets, and Intel who continued to work to develop a competitive SoC with their ATOM branded chips. While the engineering was well underway, the degree of the bet still needed a bit more data and experience to decide if we could execute specifically on bringing Windows to ARM. By using SoC, if the term leaked, we could always point to Intel’s latest ATOM chips as the goal. The cost of openly defying our own ecosystem and then failing to materialize would have been immense given the state of the PC market.As far as how these alternate chips would come to market, we had not yet decided on a complete plan. Would we go the standard route which was to evangelize to the OEMs as we did with Media Center PC and later multitouch support? Would we build a first-party demonstration device and use that as the basis of evangelism as we did with Tablet PC? Or would we commit to what was either unimaginable or incredibly dumb depending on if you were our customers/partners or BillG and design, build, and sell, our own new device? The vision would be silent on this. The plans were still being made and would be resolved just a few weeks after the product vision was communicated.With the iPad announcement described in the previous section, the pressure on everyone to respond was immense. For some the rise of Android was even more worrisome, primarily because of the history of Apple being less of a real threat. Google caused more consternation because it was growing so large so quickly in an area entirely new to Microsoft. Either way, even though Microsoft was the among the first to enter the smartphone market, by 2010 our share remained in low single-digits and would never get much higher.The app revolution underway in Silicon Valley was on the iPhone. And we were missing it. I learned this firsthand sitting in the pouring rain after a wedding in San Francisco in 2010, when everyone else was using a new iPhone app to summon a limousine late at night. It was my first experience with the UberCab on-demand car service, and we couldn’t summon one on my Microsoft phone as we became drenched. The app gap was just getting started. Every day it seemed like a new company released a new app for the new iPhone platform and none of that innovation was happening on Windows. I swear it felt a bit like what IBM must have experienced when everything new was on Windows and all that was on OS/2 was what they paid to have there.Windows and Windows Phone: Alignment?The Windows Phone Team was in the midst of the significant reinvention of the phone platform, originally code-named Photon, which became Windows Phone 7 or WP7. The fall 2010 release was more than six months from the rollout of the vision for Windows 8.There were many challenges in entering, or re-entering, the smartphone business. Bootstrapping an ecosystem was chief among them. Finding the right hardware partners proved difficult in the face of competition for those same partners from Android. There was also the challenge of building a differentiated product when the high-end was so solidly iPhone while Android seemed to cover the breadth of the market. To many reading this, the market might appear analogous to the evolution of the PC market, except Android has the role of Windows and the premium niche occupied by iPhone is much larger than the eight share points Apple computers achieved.WP7 faced several software challenges simply because the core operating system was so old. Support for the latest capabilities across graphics, networking, multicore CPUs, removable storage, and devices (such as the NFC reader required on Japanese mass transit) was becoming increasingly difficult to impossible, as was enabling the product to work worldwide across languages with complex characters and input methods. A hot topic on the heels of the product release was the rollout of 4G or LTE technology, especially in Asia, and the challenges WP7 had in building support in the operating system.When it came to synergy with Windows the developer platform was the key challenge. Windows Mobile, Microsoft’s original phone OS, supported a subset of the Developer Tools stra

The launch of an innovative new product is always exciting. The launch of an innovate new product from a competitor is even more exciting. But what is it like when your main competitor launches an innovative new product at a moment of your own fundamental strategic weakness? That’s what it was like when the iPad launched on January 27, 2010. On the heels of the successful Windows 7 launch during a time when Microsoft was behind on mobile and all things internet and in the midst of planning Windows 8, Apple launched the iPad. Many would view the iPad (and slates and tablets) as “consumption devices.” Steve Jobs and the glowing press that followed the launch viewed the iPad as a fundamental improvement in computing. Whatever your view, it was a huge deal.This post is free for all email subscribers. Please consider signing up so you don’t miss the remaining posts on Windows 8 and for access to all the back issues. Back to 098. A Sea of Worry at the Consumer Electronics ShowFor months, BillG and a small group of Microsoft executives believed Apple was going to release a tablet computer. It had been rumored for more than a decade. Originally, tablet shaped computers traced their roots to legendary Alan Kay’s 1960’s Dynabook, plus there was that one on Star Trek. There’s a long-held belief among Trekkers that all Star Trek tech will eventually be realized. By 2010, Microsoft had a decade plus of Tablet PC experience, mixed as it was. With Windows 7 we brought all the tablet features into the main product instead of a special SKU, so every version of Windows could run effectively on any PC with tablet hardware, such as a pen and touch screen. What was different about the Apple rumors in 2010? What made us more nervous? Why, this time, did we believe these rumors about a company for which predictions had always been wrong? No one had predicted the iPhone with any specificity.Microsoft and partners had invested a huge amount of time, energy, and innovation capital in the Tablet PC, but it was not breaking through the way many hoped, such as how we visualized it in the Office Center for Information Work. The devices for sale were expensive, heavy, underpowered, had relatively poor battery life, and inconsistent quality. Beyond the built-in applications, OneNote from Office, and a few industry-specific applications pushed through by Microsoft’s evangelism efforts, there was little software that leveraged the pen and tablet. Many, myself included, were decreasingly enthused. BillG, however, was tireless in his advocacy of the device—and the fact that Apple might make one, and whatever magic Steve Jobs could bestow upon it, only served to juice the competition between companies and founder/CEOs. BillG remained hardcore and optimistic about the pen for productivity and a keyboard-less device for on-screen reading and annotation.To BillG a PC running Windows that was shaped like a slate or tablet seemed inevitable. For many of the boomer computer science era, the fascination of handwriting and computing on a slate had been a part of the narrative from the start. Over the past 30 years, few of the technical problems had been solved, particularly handwriting but also battery life and weight. Then came the iPhone and multitouch.That Apple would build such a PC was more credible than ever because of their phone, though by Microsoft measures the iPhone still lacked a stylus for pen input, something Steve Jobs openly mocked on several occasions. The possibility made us nervous and anxious, especially knowing Windows 8 was underway.Collectively, and without hesitation, many believed Apple would turn the Mac into a tablet. Apple would add pen and touch support to the Mac software, creating a business computer with all the capabilities of Office and other third-party software, and the power of tablet computing. The thinking was that a convertible device made a ton of sense since that allowed for productivity and consumption in one device. Plus, techies love convertible devices of all kinds.There were senior executives at Microsoft with very close ties to Apple who were certain of Apple’s plans and relayed those to Bill. Bill would almost gleefully share what he “knew” to be the case, using such G-2 to prod groups into seeing the opportunity for his much-loved tablet strategy.There were debates consuming online forums—rumors rooted in the Asian supply chain as to what sort of screens and chips Apple might be purchasing for the rumored product. Some thought there would be a “big iPod” and still others thought Apple would develop a product tailored to books, like the two-year-old Amazon Kindle. In other words, no one had a clue and people were making stuff up. Some were even calling it the iPad, not because there was a leak or anything but because it made more sense than iTablet or iSlate, and because at one point (in the late 1990s!) Microsoft had something in R&D called WinPad. The industry had not even settled on the nomenclature for the form factor, cycling among tablet, slate, pad, MID, convertible, and so on.This CNN story by Kristi Lu Stout from January 2010 detailed the history of tablet computers, including Apple’s own past going way back to before Macintosh. At least in the months prior to launch, zero people, to my knowledge, thought that Apple had in mind a completely novel approach. An aspect of disruptive innovation is how incumbents project their views of strategy on to competitors without fully considering the context in which competitors work. As much as Microsoft primarily considered Apple to be the Mac company that happened to stumble into music players and then phones, by 2010 Apple had already pinned its future and entire product development efforts to iPhone and what was still called the iPhone OS, which was based on OS X, the Mac OS, but modernized in significant ways.On January 27, 2010, at a special press event billed as "Come see our latest creation," Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad. I followed the happenings on the live blogs. This was one of the first Apple special events used to launch products, as the previous 2009 MacWorld was the last one in which Apple participated.The event took place starting with the reminder that Apple had become the world’s largest mobile device company, followed by Steve Jobs quoting, with a bit of a chuckle, an article from December in The Wall Street Journal, “The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.”As part of his build-up to introducing the iPad, he pointed out that in defining a new category, a tablet needed to be better at some important things, better than a phone or a laptop. It needed to be better at browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, and eBooks. Basically, everything other than Office and professional software it seemed to me—though this would come to be known as “creation” or “productivity” by detractors who would posit that the iPad was a “consumption” device. As we will see, the Microsoft Office team was already hard at work at bringing Office apps to the iPad.The launch event deliberately touted “latest creation” in the invitations, which I always thought was a bow to creativity as a key function. What many pundits and especially techies failed to appreciate was that productivity and creativity had new, broader, definitions with the breadth of usage of computers as smartphones. Productivity and creativity were no longer the sole province of Word, Excel, Photoshop, and Visual Studio. The most used application for creating was email and it was already a natural on the iPhone, only soon to be replaced by messaging that was even more natural.As the presentation continued Jobs delivered his first gut punch to the PC ecosystem in describing what such a device might be, as he set up a contrast for what the new category should do relative to netbooks.“Some people have thought that that’s a Netbook.” (The audience joined in a round of laughter.) Then he said, “The problem is…Netbooks aren’t better at anything…They’re slow. They have low quality displays…and they run clunky old PC software…. They’re just cheap laptops. (more laughter)”Ouch. He was slamming the darling of the PC industry. Hard.The real problem was not only that was he right, but that consumers had come to the same conclusion. Sales of Netbooks had already begun their plunge to rounding error.Jobs unveiled the iPad, proudly. Sitting in a le Corbusier chair, he showed the “extraordinary” things his new device did, from browsing to email to photos and videos and more. The real kicker was that it achieved 10 hours of battery life—a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo watching video on one charge, recharged using your iPhone cable. It also achieved more than 30 days of standby power and like a phone, it also remained connected to the network in standby, reliably downloading emails and receiving notifications. This type of battery management was something the PC architecture struggled endlessly to achieve. The introduction concluded with a series of guests showing specially designed iPad apps in the 18 months old App Store, now with over 140,000 apps.The eBook-specific apps really got under our skin given how much this had been the focus of many efforts over many years. Being a voracious reader, BillG championed eBooks for the longest time. Teams developed formats and evangelized the concept to publishers. Still Microsoft lacked a device to comfortably read books. Then there was Steve Jobs reclined on an iconic chair.Games were the icing on the cake of despair given Microsoft’s efforts on both the Xbox and PC.But there was no pen! No stylus! Surely, it was doomed to be a consumption device.Then they showed a paint program that could be used with the touch of a finger. They were just getting started.There was no productivity! Doomed, for sure. Then they showed updated versions of the iWork suite for the iPad. The word processor, spreadsheet, and presen

The planning for Windows 8 was moving right along. But something wasn’t right as we wrapped up Windows 7 activities at CES 2010. It was looking more and more like the plans and the way the ecosystem might rally around them would yield a watered-down result—it would be Windows and a bunch of features, or perhaps irreconcilable bloat. The way the ecosystem responded to touch support in Windows 7 concerned me. How do we avoid the risk of a plan that did too much yet not enough? Oh, and Apple scheduled a “Special Event” for January 27, 2010, just weeks after a concerning CES.Back to 097. A Plan for a Changing World [Ch. XIV]In early January 2010, I was walking around the show floor at CES the evening before opening day as I had routinely done over the years. CES 2010 was a mad rush to build a giant city of 2,500 booths only to be torn down in 4 days. This walk-through gave me a good feel for the booths and placement of demonstrations. It was just two months after the launch of Windows 7. Walking around I made a list of the key OEM booths to scope out first thing in the morning. It wasn’t scientific but visiting a booth had always been an interesting barometer and sanity check for me compared to in-person executive briefings. Later in the week I would systematically walk most of the show and write a detailed report. The next morning, along with the giant crowds, I made my way through a few dozen booths with the latest Designed for Windows 7 PCs mixed in among the onslaught of 3D-television controlled by waving your hands which garnered much of the show’s buzz.The introduction of touch screens was a major push for Windows 7 and there was genuine excitement among the OEMs to offer touch as an option, though few, okay none, thought it would be a broadly accepted choice. Touch added significantly to the price. With two relatively small suppliers for the hardware, OEMs were not anxious to make a bet across their product line. TReller, the new CMO and CFO for Windows, made a good decision to provide strategic capital to one component maker to ensure Dell would make such a bet.There were touch models from most every PC maker, but they were expensive—most were more than $2,500 when the typical laptop was sub-$1,000. For the OEMs this was by design. If a buyer wanted touch there was an opportunity to sell a high-end, high-margin, low-volume device. OEMs had been telling us for months that this was going to be the case, but it was still disappointing.Taking advantage of Windows 7, and wholeheartedly, were a sea of Windows 7 “slates” all based on the same design from the combination of Intel and Pegatron, an ODM. These slates were essentially netbooks without keyboards. They fit the new Intel definition previously described—MID or mobile internet device. They were theoretically built as consumption-oriented companions to a PC. They were shown reading online books, listening to music, and watching movies, though not particularly high resolution or streaming given the meager hardware capabilities. All of them were relatively small and low-resolution screens. To further emphasize the Intel perspective, they also launched AppUp for Windows XP and Windows 7, a developer program and early content store designed to support rights management and in-app purchase as one might use for books and games.The buzziest slate was from Lenovo, not a product announcement, but a prototype model kept behind glass at the private Lenovo booth located in a Venetian Hotel restaurant. The “hybrid slate” Lenovo U1 was a 11” notebook that could also be separated from the keyboard and used as both a laptop and a slate. As a laptop, the Windows 7 PC used a low-power Intel chipset, a notch slightly above a netbook. Detached as a slate, the device ran a custom operating system they named Lenovo Skylight based on Linux running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset. The combination weighed almost 4lbs. The Linux tablet separated from the Windows-based keyboard PC somewhat like the saucer section of the Starship Enterprise separated from the main ship. Lenovo built software to sync some small amount of activity between the two built-in computers, such as synchronizing bookmarks and some files. Economically, two complete computers would not be the ideal way to go, bringing the cost to $1000. Strategically for Microsoft this was irritating.Nvidia, primarily known for its graphics cards used by gamers, was always an interesting booth. Nvidia was really struggling through the recession and would finish 2010 with revenue of $3.3 billion and a loss of $60 million. As it would turn out it was also a transformative year for the company, and for one of the most legendary founders in all of the PC era, Jensen Huang. To put Nvidia in context, my very first meeting with Intel when I joined the Windows team in 2006 was about graphics, because of the Vista Capable fiasco. Intel was digging their heels in favoring integrated graphics and was not at all worried about how their capabilities were so far behind what Nvidia and ATI, another graphics card maker, were delivering, which Intel viewed as mostly about games. The rub was that AMD, Intel’s archrival, had just acquired ATI for $5.4 billion making a huge bet on discrete (non-integrated) graphics, which was what Nvidia focused on. Intel seemed to believe that the whole issue of graphics would go away as OEMs would simply accept inferior graphics from Intel because it was cheaper and easier while Intel improved integrated graphics over time, albeit slowly. A classic bundling strategy of “a tie is a win” that would turn out to be fatal for Intel and an enormous opportunity for ATI/AMD, Nvidia, and Apple. Intel could have acquired Nvidia at the time for perhaps $10-12B if that was at all possible.In their booth Nvidia was showing off how they could add their graphics capabilities to the Intel ATOM processor and dramatically speed it up. Recall, ATOM chips struggled to even run full screen video at netbook screen resolutions. With Nvidia ION it was possible to run flawless HD video. Nvidia made this all clear in a “Netbook Nutrition Facts” label that they affixed to netbooks running Nvidia graphics. This was a shot across the bow at Intel, but Nvidia had an uphill battle to unseat bundled graphics from Intel. Nevertheless, we were acutely aware of the strong technical merits of Nvidia’s approach, Jensen’s incredible drive, and the needs of Windows customers. This will prove critically important in the next chapter as we further work on non-Intel processors.More disappointing was how the OEMs chose to demonstrate touch capabilities in Windows 7. We provided OEMs with a suite of touch-centric applications, such as those demonstrated a year earlier—mapping, games, screen savers, and drawing, for example. We even named it Windows Touch Pack. The OEMs wanted to differentiate their touch PCs with different software and viewed the Touch Pack we provided as lame. Touch had become wildly popular in such a short time because of the iPhone, and the iPhone was a consumer device used for social interaction, consumption of media, and games.With that frame of reference, the OEMs wanted to show scenarios that were more like an iPhone. The OEMs were going to do what they did, which was to create unique software to show off their PCs. This is just what many in the industry called crapware or, as Walt Mossberg coined in his column, craplets. To the OEMs this was a value add and important differentiation. Worst of all, there was no interest from independent software makers who had dedicated few, if any, resources to Win32 product updates, let alone updates specific to touch that was exclusive to the new Windows 7. We never intended to support Windows 7 touch on earlier versions of Windows—something developers ask of every new Windows API. This compatibility technique we often relied on but was a key contributor to Windows PC fragility and flakiness, also referred to colloquially as DLL Hell as previously described.The overall result: Windows 7 provided no impetus for third party-developers, and we failed to muster meaningful third-party support for any new features, including touch.What I saw was a series of new OEM apps taking a common approach. These apps could be called shells in typical Microsoft vernacular, an app for launching other apps—the Start menu, taskbar, and file explorer in Windows constitute the shell. In this case, these new shells were usually full-screen apps that had big buttons across the top to launch different programs: Browsing, Video, Music, Photos, and YouTube. These touch-friendly shells did not do much other than launch a program for each scenario, the browser, or simply a file explorer. For example, if Music was chosen then a music player, created by the OEM or chosen because of a payment for placement, would launch to play music files stored on or downloaded to a PC. The use of large touch buttons was thought to give the PC user interface a consumer feel. The browser used part of Internet Explorer but not the whole thing, just the HTML rendering component; for example, it did not include Favorites or Bookmarks usually considered part of a browser. This software, as well intentioned as it was, would fall in the crapware category. This was expected, but still disappointing.In booths with mainstream laptops we were offered a glimpse into the changing customer views of what made a good laptop. The Windows 7 launch was just a short time ago, so most laptops had incremental updates, primarily with the new version of Windows and perhaps a slight bump in specs. Some show attendees picked up the laptops and grimaced at the weight and thickness—these machines were hardly slick. It had been two full years since the introduction of the MacBook Air and the PC industry still did not have a mainstream Windows PC that fit in the famous yellow envelope wielded on stage by Steve Jobs. The prevalence of Wi-Fi in hotels and workplaces had cha

Welcome to Chapter XIV. This is the first of two chapters and about a dozen remaining posts that cover the context, development, and release of Windows 8. Many reading this will bring their own vivid recollections and perspectives to this “memorable” product cycle. As with the previous 13 chapters and 96 posts about 9 major multi-year projects, my goal remains to share the story as I experienced it. I suspect with this product there will be even more debate in comments and on twitter about the experiences with Windows 8. I look forward to that. This chapter is the work and context leading up to the plan. Even the planning process was exciting.Back to 096. Ultraseven (Launching Windows 7)In the summer of 2012, I was sitting across from BillG at the tiny table in the anteroom of his private office on the water in Kirkland. The sun was beaming into my eyes. In front of me was one of the first boxes of Microsoft Surface RT, the first end-to-end personal computer, general-purpose operating system, and set of applications and services designed, engineered, and built by Microsoft. In that box sat the culmination of work that had begun in 2009—three years of sweat and angst. After opening it and demonstrating, I looked at him and said with the deepest sincerity that this was the greatest effort and most amazing accomplishment Microsoft had ever pulled off.Later that same week, I had a chance to visit with Microsoft’s co-founder, Paul Allen (PaulA), at his offices at the Vulcan Technology headquarters across from what was then Safeco field. I showed him Surface RT. I previously showed him Windows 8 running on desktop using an external touch monitor. At that 2011 meeting he gave me a copy of his book Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft and signed it. Paul was always the more hardware savvy co-founder, having championed the first mouse and Z80 softcard, and had been pushing me the whole release of Windows 8 on how difficult it would be to get performance using an ARM chipset and on the challenges of hitting a low-cost price point. Years earlier, Vulcan built a remarkably fun PC called FlipStart, which was a full PC the size of a paperback novel. Surface RT with its estimated price of $499, $599 with a keyboard cover, and a fast and fluid experience, resulted in the meeting ending on a high note. I cherished those meetings with Paul. I also shared with Paul, proudly, my view of just how much we should all value the amazing work of the team.What I showed them both was the biggest of all bets. While not “stick a fork in it” done, by mid-2012 Microsoft seemed to have missed the mobile revolution that it was among the first to enter 15 years ago. In many ways Surface RT set out to make a new kind of bet for Microsoft—a fresh look at the assumptions that by all accounts were directly responsible for the success of the company. Rethinking each of those pillars—compatibility, partnerships, first-party hardware, client-computing, Windows user-interface, and even Intel—would make this bet far bigger and more uncomfortable than even betting the company on the graphical interface in the early 1980s. Why? Because now Microsoft had everything to lose, even though it also had much to gain.With Windows 7, we knew we had a traditional release of Windows that could easily thrive through the full 10-year support lifecycle as we had seen with Windows XP. Windows 7 would offer a way to sustain the platform as it continued to decline in relevance to developers and consumers, while extracting value from business customers with little incentive to change.Microsoft needed a new platform and a new business model for PC makers, developers, and consumers. The only rub? Any solution we might propose wasn’t something we could A/B test or release pieces at a time experimentally. Windows was the standard and wildly successful. It wasn’t something to experiment on.While the company was 100 percent (or more) focused on Windows 7, we had started (drumroll for the codename please) Windows 8 planning five months earlier. We had the next step, a framing memo from me first. Then we had a planning memo from JulieLar, ready to go as soon as we all caught our collective breath after the release—no real time to celebrate more, and certainly no downtime.Technology disruption is often thought of at a high level along a single dimension, but it is far more complex. Consider Kodak’s encounter with digital photography, Blockbuster’s battle with DVD-by-mail, or the news business’s struggle with the web. Great memes, sure, but one layer down each is a story of a company facing challenges in every attribute of their business, and that is what is interesting and so challenging.Digital photos were more convenient for consumers, that was true. But also, the whole of Kodak was based on a virtuous cycle of innovation developed by chemical and mechanical engineers, products sold through a tightly controlled channel, and an experience relying on a 100-year-old tradition of memorialized births, graduations, weddings, and more. At each step of technology change to digital images, another major pillar of Kodak was transformed, sliced, and diced in a way Kodak could not respond. The magical machinery of Kodak was stuck because not one part of its system was strong enough to provide a foundation. Kodak didn’t need to also enter the digital market. The only market that would come to exist was digital. The only thing that made it even more difficult was that it would take a decade or more to materialize as a problem, and that during that time, many said, “Don’t worry. Kodak has time.”While figuring out what to do next for Windows, we saw Blackberry facing a “Kodak moment.” Blackberry was not just a smartphone, but a stack of innovations around radios, a software operating system optimized for a network designed for small amounts of data consuming little power, a business model tuned to ceding control to carriers, and a keyboard loved by so many. In 2009, Blackberry still commanded almost 45 percent of the smartphone market, even though the iPhone had been out since 2007. That led many to find a false comfort in the near term and to conclude Blackberry would continue to dominate. Apple’s iPhone delivered a product that touched every pillar of Blackberry, not only Blackberry the product but Blackberry the company. Sure, Apple also had radio engineers, but they also had computer scientists. Sure, Apple also worked with AT&T, but Apple was in control of the device. And Apple was, at its heart, an operating system company. Blackberry had some similar elements up and down the entire product stack, but it wasn’t competitive. At its heart, Blackberry was a radio company. Blackberry seemed to have momentum, but market share was declining by almost 1 percentage point per month.The smartphone, iPhone and Android in particular, was disrupting Windows. Though, not everyone thought that to be the case. Some said that phones did not support “real work” or “quality games.” The biggest risk to a company facing disruption is to attempt to dissect disruptive forces and manage each one—like add touch or apps to a Blackberry with a keyboard. The different assumptions and approaches new companies take only strengthen over time, even if eventually they take on characteristics of what they supplant. The iPhone might never be as good as the PC at running popular PC games, but that also probably won’t matter.I’d lived through graphical operating systems winning over character mode, PC servers taking over workloads once thought only mainframes could handle, and now I found myself facing the reality that browsers could do the work of Windows, relegating Windows to a place to launch a browser and not even Microsoft’s.Every aspect of the Windows business faced structural challenges brought on by smartphones. Compounding the challenge, Apple was competing from above with luxurious and premium products vertically integrated from hardware to software. Google, with Android and Chrome, was competing from below with free software to a new generation of device makers. The PC and the struggling Windows phone were caught in the middle, powerless to muster premium PCs and unable to compete with a free open-source operating system.The browser had already shifted all new enterprise software development away from the hard-fought victory of client-server computing. Anyone who previously thought of building a new “rich client” application with Visual Basic or some other tool was now years into the transition to “thin client” browser software. The Windows operating system was in no way competitive with smartphone operating systems. The way to develop and sell apps had been reinvented by Apple. The Win32 platform was a legacy platform by 2009, the only debate was how long that had been the case. A legacy platform does not mean zero activity, but it does mean declining and second or third-priority efforts.The partnership between the Windows operating system and hardware builders had fundamental assumptions questioned by Android. OEMs supporting Android not only received the source code but were free to modify it and customize it to suit their business needs. That was exactly what Microsoft fought so hard against in the DOJ trial. The touch-based human interaction model developed by Apple and the large and elegant touchpad on Mac were far more approachable and usable than what was increasingly a clunky mouse and keyboard or poor trackpad on Windows. The expectations for a computer were reset—a computer should always be on, always connected, never break or even reboot, free from viruses and malware, have access to one-click apps, while easy to carry around without a second thought. That supercomputer in your pocket is connected to built-in operating system services providing storage, backup, privacy, security, and more. Like Kodak, many said to slow down, that change would not happen so quickly. Many said we could “add

In the era of “boxed” software release to manufacturing was a super special moment. The software is done, and the bits permanently pressed onto a DVD disc. That disc, the golden master, is then shipped off physically to duplicators around the world and then combined with another artifact of the era, a box or in the case of Windows 7 a plastic anti-theft DVD contraption. While Windows 95, the excitement of computing and the newness of internet set a high-water mark for launch events, the completion and launch of Windows 7 was a major worldwide business event. The industry was looking for optimism as we emerged from the Global Financial Crisis and the ensuing slump in PC sales. Windows 7 was just the ticket and the launch would prove to be part of a massive uptick in PC sales or as some hoped a return to ongoing up and to the right curves. But could that really be the case?Back to 095. Welcome to Windows 7, EveryoneThe months after the PDC were extremely intense. We had set out to promise and deliver, but the success of the PDC had managed to inflate expectations. These were not false expectations—the use of the product was widespread and broadly satisfactory. That success is what raised expectations. PC makers, Wall Street, OEMs, and enterprise customers knew the product to deliver and were not just impatient.We made a significant number of changes from M3 to beta. With our improved engineering system changes were made in a controlled though collaborative manner. Each change was discussed by many people and then the code change reviewed—no holes punched in the wall. With each passing day it was more difficult to make changes while we aimed for stability of the beta. The most important thing about shipping a beta is not that it is perfect but that it ships in a known state. If something isn’t right that’s okay, as long as it’s known. In the case of Windows 7, we knew work and bugs remained but were highly confident that millions of people would try out the beta and have a great experience.That methodical crawl to beta went on for weeks, each day making fewer changes and calmly making it to sign-off. Then it was time to ship the beta.On January 8, 2009, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, SteveB announced the availability of Windows 7 Beta. The venue and the announcement from the CEO made this a significant worldwide event. It was covered on CNN, BBC, and more. That was exciting and even felt a bit like old times for a moment.I watched from back in the green room because we were getting ready to turn on the web site for download and had no idea what to expect. While the internet was old news, downloading a gigabyte DVD image was hardly routine, especially from home and not something the internet was yet equipped to handle reliably.To have some sense of control, we set a limit of 2.5 million downloads. Back then, before everyone had gigabit internet at home, a massive gigabyte download was something that would stress out the internet. As the keynote was going on we watched downloads begin. They quickly reached our limit while the keynote continued. A few calls to Redmond and we removed the throttle and began to rewrite our press releases with ever-increasing numbers. We extended the beta downloads through the end of January and had many more millions of installs than downloads as the download made it to all sorts of alternate and backup sites. We also learned a lesson in distributed computing that day.For the beta we issued unique product registration keys which became the scarce resource. We soon removed the limits on activating those keys as well. While the download site was structured to choose 32- or 64-bit along with locale to then generate a key, many figured out the URL that went directly to the 2.5GB download and passed that along. We just didn’t want to be overwhelmed with Watson and SQM data so capped the release at 2.5 million. That was silly but at least we received an indication of the excitement. There was a lot!Every day we tracked bugs with Watson and observed usage with SQM. Hardware vendors were providing updated device drivers that were anxiously downloaded by millions of testers, many seeing new drivers arrive automatically by Windows Update. More new PCs would arrive to be qualified. More legacy hardware would be retested. More of the over 100,000 apps in the wild would be checked for compatibility. More enterprise customers would tell us that they were anxious to deploy Windows 7.Many reviewers chose to review the Beta as though it was final or at least something regular people might care about. It would be easy to gloss over this but for me it was an important part of promise and deliver. It had been a very long time, perhaps never, when a first beta for Windows was considered broadly usable and also had customers asking if it was okay to deploy even more broadly. Promise and deliver.David Pogue, hardly a fan of Windows, practically filled an entire page of The New York Times with his review “Hate Vista? You May Like Microsoft’s Fix” where he concluded “For decades, Microsoft's primary strategy has been to put out something mediocre, and then refine, refine, refine, no matter how long and no matter what it costs, until it succeeds. That's what's exciting about the prospect of Windows 7. It's Windows Vista - with a whole heck of a lot of refinement.” Microsoft was back to making sure it got products right.In The Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg said in another front page of the business section review “Even in beta form, with some features incomplete or imperfect, Windows 7 is, in my view, much better than Vista, whose sluggishness, annoying nag screens, and incompatibilities have caused many users to shun it. It's also a serious competitor, in features and ease of use, for Apple's current Leopard operating system.” He also posted a video review as part of some of his more recent work creating video reviews.All we needed to do was finish.By July 13, 2009, build 7600 was pronounced final and signed off on by GrantG and DMuir, the test leaders for WEX and COSD.Windows 7 was ready for manufacturing.July 9, 2009 was also my 20th anniversary at Microsoft and the team help me to celebrate by dressing like me—jeans, v-neck sweater, t-shirt. At least I was predictable.Shortly thereafter at a sales kickoff in Atlanta, the annual MGX, we surprised the global field sales force and created a media moment when SteveB, KevinT (COO), and I held up a “golden master” DVD (a gold DVD), symbolically signing it as we announced that Redmond had signed off on the Windows 7 RTM build. It was a release that 10,000 people worldwide had contributed to and would likely end up on over 1 billion PCs. It was complete with another photo of me looking uncomfortable celebrating with SteveB on stage at the sales meeting. The sales meeting was always a country-mouse/city-mouse moment for me.Just as soon as that excitement was over, Microsoft announced what turned out to be the worst earnings in corporate history with a 17% drop in quarterly revenue in July 2009 the end of the fiscal year. The tough part was we knew this was coming while we were on stage, which made our celebration much less about the past and more about hope for the future. While many would blame the economy or Vista and some would even cite the recently announced Google Chrome OS (the predecessor to the Chromebook), the truth was much more secular in nature. PC makers were struggling on the bottom line as the 40 million netbooks as exciting as they were lacked profit. The astronomical rise in netbook unit sales discussed in the previous chapter led many to assume a bullish future. In fact, netbooks masked a secular decline in PC sales. We would know more as the year progressed as new PCs were sold with Windows 7 during holiday season 2009.After the celebration, the team collectively exhaled. It was August and time for vacations, but we didn’t have a lot of time to waste. Come September, we had to get the team fully engaged to plan what was coming next or it would be a massive effort to regain momentum.Our team of administrative assistants outdid themselves with a wonderful ship party held on the activity fields in Redmond. In contrast to other Windows events, I would say this one was less eventful and even comparatively subdued, but still enormously fun for the team. We had custom cakes and cupcakes, tons of food, family-friendly games, craft beers contained to a two-drink limit within an enclosed area, and even Seattle hometown favorite The Presidents (of the United States) as the special musical guest. They took their popular song “Cleveland Rocks” and wrote the lyrics as “Microsoft Rocks.” I still have a bootleg recording of that.The competitive issues we were facing weren’t going away. The organization was about to change and clarify responsibility for dealing with those.Launching Windows 7We had a fantastic foundation to build upon and all we needed to do was deliver an odd-even result—meaning a good release after the Vista release—and each of our core constituencies would breathe a sigh of relief. Looking outward, however, it was obvious the world was a very different place than when we started Windows 7. It was not clear any of those constituencies or even our own team were prepared.There was still a product to officially launch, but not before some realignment at the top of the organization.Bill Veghte (BillV), who had started at Microsoft right out of college and had overseen Windows 7 marketing through to launch planning, decided after two decades with the company that he wanted an opportunity to run a business end-to-end and announced his intention to depart Microsoft. After a transition he would join Meg Whitman at Hewlett Packard. With that, SteveB wanted to put all of Windows under one leader and asked me to do that. He really wanted to elevate the job title which I pushed back on because of the way Microsoft was structured (and re

While it is incredibly fun to do a first demo of a big product as described in the previous section, there is something that tops that and even tops the actual release to manufacturing. That is providing the release, actual running code, to a product’s biggest fans. It was time to welcome everyone to Windows 7 and put the code that the team had been working on since the summer of 2007 out for the world (of techies) to experience.Back to 094. First Public Windows 7 DemoSeattle summers are notoriously difficult on product development. After a long spell of clouds and rains, the beauty and long days of Pacific Northwest summers arrive, neither are particularly conducive to coding.Summer wasn’t why I ended up here, but it certainly had an impact on me. On my first visit in 1989 during a dismal February, I saw the outdoor Marymoor Velodrome down the street from Microsoft and thought, this is going to be great. On TV it didn’t look as difficult to ride as I eventually learned it was. I sort of rode it exactly one time and that was the day my bicycle arrived from Massachusetts.But alas, product development demands don’t end even with 15 hours of daylight.It was going to get busy for the Windows 7 team. Our planned schedule called for the third development milestone to be complete by the end of summer 2008.We were making progress, but the schedule was slipping. The code was getting better every week, but the overall game of schedule chicken that often plagued a large project was an historical concern. This was our first time as a new team going through this part of a product cycle. While we had a good deal of positive progress building a team culture, Windows was notorious for groups betting against each other’s schedules and being less than forthright with their own.When HeikkiK was running the Office 95 ship room, he declared that everyone should be working to finish first, not simply to finish second to last. We needed to get to the end of the milestone as a team working together without looking for one group to blame, since it is never one group. JonDe and I had this same concern.Everyone spent the summer installing daily builds on every PC we could. At one point, I must have had eight different PCs between home and office and was installing on all of them nearly every day. Every night I was installing a new build at home while doing email and other routine tasks. Even though my home “service level agreement” called for no beta software, an exception was made for Windows 7.I was working at two performance extremes. I went to Fry’s Electronics and built my own “gamer” PC from the best components. I spent big bucks on a newfangled solid-state desktop drive (not common at the time), a crazy graphics card, fast memory, and the most ridiculous Intel chip available. I installed Windows 7. I was blown away by the speed (as well as the noise and wind emanating from the mini-tower). Starting Word or Excel seemed instantaneous. Boot took low single-digit seconds. It reminded me of the first time I used a hard drive on my father’s Osborne computer and how much faster it was compared to floppy disks. I used this PC when I sat at my desk at work, which wasn’t often as I was always walking around the halls.At the other end of the spectrum were Netbooks. To the degree I could, I had taken a fancy to the Lenovo Netbook, the IdeaPad S10, and carried it with me everywhere especially at my favorite breakfast place (Planet Java) or lunch place (Kidd Valley) where I did a lot of Windows 7 blogging. Every Netbook was close to identical on the inside, but the Lenovo had a good screen and a rugged exterior. I modified mine, replacing the spinning hard drive with a then non-economic solid-state drive to better emulate future laptops like the MacBook Air. It was my primary PC for writing blogs posts, email, spreadsheets, and browsing, and the like, which was most of what I was doing. When we finally got to the Professional Developers Conference, this was the PC I held up with a bright yellow “I’m a PC” sticker on it, stickers marketing created in a jiu-jitsu move embracing the blowback from the Apple TV commercials.I was constantly on the lookout for memory consumption and the number of running processes, the signs of bloat in Vista—fewer processes and less memory were better. Each process was a critical part of Windows. The number of processes had soared with Vista, and each had overhead in complexity and performance (in contrast to Linux, Windows processes were much more substantial and important to track.) Windows 7 was making impressive strides in reducing memory usage and process complexity. It served to make me feel connected to the engineering of Windows 7 and reminded me of counting bytes and seconds back in the day. I snapped screen shots of the Windows Task Manager and would bug JonDe and AlesH every couple of days.Each day booting into a new build and seeing the progress was a great day. Each day revealed a crisis or challenge, but as a team everything continued to move forward.Even though I was mostly an observer, the effort to improve performance was some of the best work of the release. It set a tone for making progress, but also for the ability of teams to work together. The conventional wisdom was that Windows Vista was inevitable and unavoidable as capabilities were added and the product grew which could not have been prevented. Windows 7 disproved that theory.By midsummer, we had to slip the schedule based on our progress through M2 and M3. Originally our goal was to finish M3 and have a full beta in time for the previously scheduled Professional Developers Conference, PDC, in Los Angeles. We weren’t where we needed to be, so we took about an eight-week slip. The build at the PDC would officially be pre-beta, terminology we just made up. This would be our last slip. JonDe and I were privately relieved at the degree of the slip, but frankly the team was excited to be clearly on track, relatively, for the first time in many years. Depending on your experience or the context, eight weeks can seem huge or literally nothing. It was nothing.SteveB sent a memo to all of Microsoft outlining some of the work to date for the whole of the fiscal year. The company had made a lot of progress on many fronts. The topic that had occupied a great deal of discussion, and was a good portion of his memo, was Google and competing with it on the consumer front and the potential relationship with Yahoo. SteveB also described the emerging cloud strategy, and the fact that more would be shared on that topic at our upcoming PDC.Fiscal year 2008 was quite a year for Microsoft. Revenue broke $60 billion and operating profit grew 21 percent to $22.5 billion. The numbers were incredible. Still, the concerns about the PC and catching up on consumer services dominated Wall Street’s view. This memo was one of the early communications in a strategic shift to the cloud platform and you can feel the push-pull between cloud and the traditional model in the technology descriptions. It’s important to say that it was still super early in the journey to the cloud for enterprise computing and the topic was not top of mind for customers, especially as the financial crisis began to take hold. In fact, the feeling that the cloud was architecturally inferior to private data centers was by far the most common customer belief. Their future enterprise computing model was a data center running servers using virtualization. In 2008, the idea that there would be something of a new cloud operating system was mostly a view held inside the halls of Google.In the memo, SteveB announced that KevinJo was leaving to be CEO of Juniper Networks, and that JonDe and I, along with Bill Veghte (BillV) leading marketing, would report directly to Steve, a reporting structure that remained in place through the release without issue. This was a standard and expeditious way to handle a managerial change at this stage of a big product. Incidentally, Satya Nadella (SatyaN) had recently moved to manage Search and ads in March 2007 and would also report to SteveB in a similar move.In the lead-up to the PDC we began blogging publicly about Windows 7. With the focus on tech enthusiasts, IT professionals, and the trade press, I created a blog called Engineering Windows 7, or e7. An extension of how we thought about blogging for Office 2007, the blogs were the primary first-party communication channel for the product. We authored long and detailed posts, thousands of words, about the implementation choices we were making and how we measured progress. We offered tons of data to describe real-world Windows use (often my favorites posts). I authored posts but also introduced posts that other team members wrote, each expressing the design point of view and rationale. Many generated a great deal of dialogue and discussion and became news stories themselves. There wasn’t really a Hacker News yet for Windows coverage, but the comments sections of many stories read just like Hacker News would have read. Tech enthusiasts loved to dispute the data provided then just as today.While to some press the blogging came across as a carefully crafted corporate message, nothing was further from the truth. We were simply blogging. The posts did not go through any corporate machinery or apparatus. They were as authentic as they could be. And the tradition worked so well that after the PDC it became a significant part of the communication of Windows going forward.There were two relevant industry announcements that at any other time would have caused a great deal of distraction. The PC world was entirely focused on the PC, to the exclusion of the world of mobile phones, and, to some degree, browsers were still distinct as a challenge to Windows because they still ran on Windows and had yet to incorporate much beyond rendering text and graphics. Yet both phones and browsers would have announcements that would radically al

In an era of huge software projects with a zillion new features in every release, there’s little more exciting than the first public demos. Such demos are also incredibly stressful to pull off. In addition to all the work to just get the code to demo-ready condition, there’s a lead-up to public disclosure, briefing reporters, and aligning partners. The first demo of Windows 7 was all those things and more, because we’d (or just I) had been so quiet for so long. This is the story of unveiling at least one small part of Windows 7 along with my own personal screw up along the way.Back to 093: Netbook ManiaThe second of three development milestones for Windows 7 was originally scheduled to end on March 26, 2008 which was eight months after the project start, Vision Day. We ended up finishing on May 9, which was a slip of 44 days. For any massive software project, this was fantastic. For Windows, it was doubly so.It was even better than that. The new organization was starting to take hold. The product was emerging. The team was executing. We were building what we committed to build, and it was working. The “daily builds” were happening and by and large the team was running Windows 7 every day.After two years in this role leading Windows, I finally felt like it would be OK to emerge and talk about what comes next. It is difficult to put into words the constant gnawing, sick-to-my-stomach feeling up until now wondering if we would deliver. We had definitely promised but for nearly 20 years I had seen leaders across the company say “the team is feeling good” or “we’re making good progress” or “the milestone is complete” only to see the project unravel or simply recognize it was never actually raveled.For months I had been under immense pressure from OEM partners, our OEM account managers, enterprise account managers, investor relations, Intel, retailers, not to mention SteveB, and many more to just articulate a ship date or some plan. Hardly a week went by without receiving a forwarded email detailing the costs of not disclosing what we were up to.Yet I was perhaps irrationally concerned that I would put something out there only to have to recant or adjust what was said. Many told me I was being overly cautious. Many said that it is better to open up communication and worry about having to correct it later. I just couldn’t shake the concerns. I felt Microsoft had one chance to make up for the issues with Vista.Many perceived the Windows team was trying to become more like Apple and close off all discussion of a product until the moment it was announced. This was not the case at all. Windows is a different product, as described previously, and to bring it to market requires a huge ecosystem of support and that invests time and money. There’s no way to surprise the market with Windows because an entire industry needs to know about it, prepare, and execute to bring new PCs, peripherals, and applications to market.For months, Roanne Sones (RSones) and Bernardo Caldas (BCaldas) on the Ecosystem team had been in deep technical discussions with partners about what would come next but had not yet committed to a timeframe. Any hints of a specific schedule (or business terms such as SKUs or pricing) would immediately make it back to the business side of the house and then to SteveB’s inbox. Even topics such as if there would be a 32-bit release (versus moving the ecosystem to 64-bit only) would have had broad implications for PC makers (and Intel). We had to walk a fine line between being excellent partners and creating an external news cycle that impacted partners as much as us. We knew that release dates were the most likely to be leaked, and the most damaging. Finishing a product with a giant, hovering countdown clock had dogged many past Windows releases. Yet, the partners needed time to prepare, and we were closer to finishing than starting. Windows 7 would soon be fully disclosed with the OEMs.When asked in any forum, we said our goal was to release Windows 7 “within three years of Vista.” We were intentionally vague as to whether that meant release to manufacturing, available for enterprise download, first PCs in the United States, or some other market. Effectively, this gave us a buffer of about three months. And yes, that was sneaky, but it was the one concession I made to disclosure. I really hated that all people cared about was a date when a product was so much more than that. I understood, but still.Then, in April 2008, BillG gave a speech, and inadvertently in one small part some believed he implied that Windows would finish in the following year. The press, who were there to hear about international finance at the Inter-American Development Bank meeting, ran with it and suggested Windows 7 would be ready much sooner than the previously planned three years from Vista. In fact, a year from April 2008 was sooner than our published schedule. That was not going to happen. Explaining that inaccuracy without stating the ship date was impossible.It wasn’t just that Bill said the next Windows would arrive “sometime in the next year or so.” He also expressed his enthusiasm in what was certainly meant to be a throwaway line but came across to a tech industry desperate for any news when he said “I’m superenthused [sic] about what it [Windows 7] will do in lots of ways.”We were close enough to completing the milestone that it was time to plan on officially talking to the press, who would be happy to talk off the record while also helping us to reduce the amount they would need to absorb all at once when it was time for stories to be written. In parallel the Ecosystem team began working with OEMs and ODMs on the detailed schedule and on software drops.Our first stop, as it had been with every product I worked on since Office 95, was Walt Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal. Our meetings had become somewhat of a routine, perhaps for both of us, though by no means easy or predictable—I usually prepared an overly large amount of data to demonstrate how people were using our products out in the wild and hoped to both inform him while pushing for some positive recognition. Sometimes, yes, I went a bit overboard on the data. Walt was staunchly independent and would never say if I was persuasive, but he was always thoughtful in his questions and comments.By this time, Katherine Boehret was joining Walt when he visited. She started with The Wall Street Journal out of college. By 2011 she had her own column called This Digital Solution, and also worked with Walt and Kara Swisher on the All Things D Conference (ATD). Katherine and Walt together were a formidable audience. They were both deep into products with their own unique perspective and would put up with absolutely no spin or marketing. They were advocates for their readers and strident in their desire to see PCs live up to their ease-of-use potential and played no favorites.This meeting, about a month after BillG’s speech, had a dual purpose. We wanted to at least try to diffuse some of what they had no doubt perceived (rightfully) as a mess with Vista without throwing Vista under the bus, while also setting the stage for Windows 7. If all went well, we might even secure time at All Things D that year for a quick Windows 7 demo at the end of an already scheduled BillG and SteveB joint interview.It was stressful. It was Walt. And Windows 7 was not fully formed for reviewers yet. Joining for the meeting or parts of it would be Julie Larson-Green (JulieLar) for Windows, Dean Hachamovitch (DHach) representing Internet Explorer, and Chris Jones (ChrisJo) discussing Live Services.Meeting in a conference room in building 99 with a half dozen demo laptops on the table, I started with our usual printouts of data, showing them an overview of Windows Vista in market. Walt’s earlier review of Vista called it “maddeningly slow even on new, well-configured computers.” Katherine’s writings had been a bit less harsh, but not by much. I had to at least try to change their minds, but neither Walt nor Katherine was impressed. I took the time to talk about the landscape of PCs being sold and what was going on with laptops and Netbooks. In reviewing the original Asus Eee PC, Mossberg concluded it was a “valiant effort, but it still has too many compromises to pry most travelers away from their larger laptops.” That led to a hot topic for all reviewers, but especially Walt who had praised the MacBook Air: When Windows would see a MacBook Air competitor? Walt, JulieLar, and I had discussed the MacBook Air at the Apple launch event months earlier.My lack of an answer on behalf of PC makers was not satisfactory for them, or me. As described previously, the PC makers were much more focused on inexpensive devices like Netbooks and not eager to take on Apple or the premium PC market.Browsers were much discussed in the late 2000s, though not the one from Microsoft. We didn’t know it at the time but in hindsight it would be fair to assume they had been or were soon to be briefed on the forthcoming Google Chrome browser that shipped in late 2008. Still, Walt and Katherine wanted to know about Internet Explorer and privacy, a hot industry topic among a few, but especially them. We were woefully behind Firefox on core browsing capability, but we had a fantastic story to share about privacy features that DHach and team had developed, including blocking “tracking cookies.” We showed them how mainstream sites, like The New York Times, were doing a poor job communicating to users how much information was being shared and with whom, but with only vague permission or even disclosure. We did not go as far as offering ad-blocking which many tech enthusiasts would have appreciated, but we did plan on releasing and showed a “Do Not Track” feature.During development, a series of meetings with lobbyists from the advertising industry discussing the Internet Explorer privacy features had led to veiled threats about anticompe

The Windows team was plugging away on Windows 7. The outside world was still mired in the Vista doldrums. Then in the summer of 2007 there was a wakeup call in the announcement and shipment of a new type of computer from upstart Asus, called a Netbook, a tiny laptop running Linux and a new chip from Intel. Would that combination prove to be a competitive threat or a huge opportunity for a PC world fresh off the launch of the iPhone?Back to 092. Platform Disruption…While Building Windows 7When a project like Longhorn drags on, the business is going to miss important trends. The biggest trend in computing in 2005-06 was expanding the PC to the rest of the world, something Microsoft and others called “the next billion” as the existing computing model reached approximately one billion of the world’s 6.5 billion people.To outfit the next billion, many believed a new type of computer was needed. They were right. Many places where we would have liked to bring computers to the next billion lacked reliable electricity, air conditioning or heating, constant high-speed internet connectivity, and often had dusty environments as in Africa and much of Asia where I happened to have some of experience.At the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, the lab’s founder, spearheaded a project called One Laptop Per Child, OLPC, that launched at the Davos forum in 2005. The rest of the world would come to know this as the “$100 laptop” at a time when most laptops cost about $1000 or more.The price of $100 seemed absurd given that was less than an Intel processor and only marginally more than Windows, and that was before the rest of the hardware. Therefore, the initial designs of the OLPC would ship without commercial software from Microsoft or hardware from Intel. Instead, partners from anyone but Wintel lined up to help figure out how to build the OLPC. Almost immediately, Microsoft and Intel were blocked out of the next billion.The resulting device, a product of some extremely fancy, perhaps fanciful, industrial design was a key part of drawing attention to what became known as the OLPC XO-1. The device featured several technical features that were aimed at solving computing needs for children in remote areas while also addressing the goal of ultra-low cost. The software was open source with a great deal of influence from historic MIT projects aimed at learning computing and programming. The effort even created a non-profit where people could go to a web site and donate the price of a device to have one distributed. The OLPC XO-1 was so cool looking that many people wanted one for their own use, right here in the US. The rollout and communications were exactly what you’d expect from the Media Lab—exciting and broadly picked up.Microsoft through the Microsoft Research team and Craig Mundie (CraigMu) leading advanced technology spent a great deal of effort attempting to insert Windows into this effort. The company made progress but at the expense of causing some well-known members of the OLPC project to resign once it became clear that proprietary software was involved. Microsoft for its part would embark on the creation of a version of Windows that was ultra-low cost and stripped of many features as well, called Windows Starter Edition.If there’s a theme in this work, both from Microsoft and MIT, it is that the core idea was that to bring computing to the next billion, products would need to cost less out of necessity and therefore they would need to do less and be less powerful. Often in the process of doing this the products would also go through transformation to make them easier to use, because apparently that is something required too. This is a fundamental mistake made time and again when addressing what the financial and economic world call emerging markets. Individuals in emerging markets do not want cheap, under-powered, or worse products. They certainly do not need products that are dumbed down. In technology, there is really no reason for that as products do get less expensive over time. Yet in the immediate term companies get stuck with their existing price structures and economics. And people in emerging markets are not less smart, they simply do not have access to the money for expensive products. I saw this dozens of times visiting the internet cafes in the most rural and economically disadvantaged parts of the world where students had no problems at all using a PC connected to the internet.Microsoft would really get stuck in China where the limiting factor wasn’t hardware. People were buying huge numbers of PC components and simply assembling their own desktops that were on par with anything available from Dell or HP. They weren’t running Linux or Open Office, they were just pirating Windows and Office. The Windows team (I was still in Office) created a whole group to strip down Windows XP and add a shell to make it “easier” for emerging markets, again a dumbed down product. These changes to software were as much as way to make products favorable to the new markets as they were to make the product unfavorable to existing customers. Eventually, Microsoft came up with a plan to offer Windows plus Office to emerging markets, and China, governments for a very low price, so long as the computers were purchased by the government. At $3 per license this sounds like an incredible deal, but in all honesty was not that different from prices in many developed markets.Still, the idea that the next billion required much lower priced computers, and somehow the rest of the world did not, would not go away. The need to serve this market drove the next wave of innovation from Microsoft and Intel, much more so than serving existing markets.As Intel was mostly left out of the OLPC project, at the Intel Developer Forum in Fall 2007 they announced a new line of microprocessors with at least some emphasis on making lower cost computers for an expanded market. Intel demonstrated this processor in what is called a reference design, a PC made by Intel as a way to influence their customers to build similar PCs. The Classmate PC was a pretty cool looking laptop somewhat influenced by the Apple iBook, which brought the rounded edges, colors, and translucency of the iMac to a laptop form factor. Some would say the iBook itself owed its design lineage to the Apple eMate, based on the Newton, and sold to education markets in the 1990s. As a reference design, the PC shown could support a variety of screen sizes, storage capacities, and more, so long as it ran a new Intel low-power chip.Also showing off the new chip in the 2007 Intel Developer Forum was the Asus Eee PC—that’s a lot of e’s, which stood for “Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play” according to the box. The Eee PC was the first Netbook. It was also one of the smallest computers on the market. While there were many previous attempts at super small computers, such as the Sony PictureBook and Toshiba Libretto, there were years earlier and premium priced. This form factor and price were unique at the time. The first Eee PC 701 had the most minimal hardware specifications in any PC around and ran customized Linux and OpenOffice. It also had several games and entertainment apps.The laptop was physically tiny as was the keyboard at 8.9 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches and under 2 pounds. It had a 7-inch display running at 800x480 pixels. For storage the Eee PC had only 4 GB of solid-state disk (like an iPod) and just 512MB of RAM. The price was $399 when it finally made it to the US, though the initial reports were it would cost $189-$299. It is worth noting that the same Intel chip was also available at retail stores in a laptop with a 14” screen, 80GB drive, a DVD drive, and 2GB RAM for about the same price. This reality would not distract from the cool factor or that it fit in any messenger-style bag.The software load was kind of a mess, at least I thought so. The hardware, however, caught the attention of tech enthusiasts who were quick to turn the Eee PC into a tuner platform, looking to modify and replace components. Soon, modders were replacing the storage or adding more memory. There were web sites popping up devoted to modding the Eee PC.The device sold quite well through the holiday of 2007 and that got our attention. So did the fact that modders were doing their own work to strip down Windows XP (from 2001) and squeeze it on to a 4GB system. One such modder was Asus itself which came to us wanting to officially modify Windows XP. There were three problems. First, they wanted Windows XP to cost the same as their Linux, which was $0. Second, they wanted to remove a bunch of XP just to make room on disk. What they wanted to remove was simply anything that took up space. It was kind of a free-for-all that reminded me of what enterprise customers did to Windows 3.x and Office 4.x back in the 1990s to squeeze on to 20MB hard drives.The third problem was significant. Windows XP was done. We were over it. It was already seven years-old and we released Vista months ago. Vista was our bet. There was definitely no way Vista could be squeezed down, first of all. Second, Vista just went through the Vista Capable mess where the basic version of Vista became tainted in market and these chipsets were good enough only for Vista Basic.If we began selling XP again for Asus, then we would have to offer it for every Netbook. And if we offered it for Netbooks then what would stop OEMs and ultimately customers demanding it for every PC. Suddenly it was looking like a roll back of Vista, especially if we participated. We didn’t really have a choice. Either we would lose the sockets to Linux, the modders would continue to pirate XP and hundreds of thousands of computers would be running a Frankenstein build of XP which already had tons of security problems, or we could suck it up and let the OEMs sell XP.It turns out Intel was in a bit of the same situation. They were starting to worry that OEMs would want to make many

Welcome to Chapter XIII! In this chapter we build Windows 7 and bring it to market. We start with all the forces that were shaping up to “disrupt” Microsoft (in the now classic sense) including the launch of the iPhone, cloud computing, consumer internet services, and even the perception of bloat (in Windows this time.) Each of these on their own would be significant, but they were happening all at once, while we were rehabilitating the team, hoping to ship on time for once. To add to the chaos of the moment, these forces appeared during the largest runup of PC sales, breaking 300 million units, followed by the biggest risk to PC sales growth driven by the Global Financial Crisis. A lot was going on competitively, setting the context in which Windows 7 would be built and launched. I thought about competition a great deal, so there is a great deal in this section.Back to 091. Cleaning Up Longhorn and VistaThe days of competing head-to-head with our own past releases or with vaguely similar products were over. Windows faced outright substitutes, and they seemed to be working.The Windows 7 team was progressing through engineering milestones M1, M2, and M3 with the energy and momentum increasing along the way, all while computing underwent radical changes at the hardware, platform, and user-experience layers. Everything appeared to be changing at once, just as we were getting our mojo back.Microsoft’s products and strategy were being disrupted. We just hadn’t, or perhaps couldn’t, come to grips with the reality.These disruptive forces appeared over the course of developing Windows 7, each one taking a toll on Microsoft’s platform value proposition. Each contributing to a small but growing chorus of changing times that started with the iPhone.The iPhone was announced in January 2007, six months before Windows 7 Vision Day. The phone didn’t yet have an app store, an app SDK, didn’t run a full desktop browser, lacked push email for Exchange like a Blackberry, and even omitted basic copy and paste. Nobody at the time thought this phone was relevant in a competitive sense to personal computers. Heck, it even required a personal computer for some tasks.Nobody except Steve Jobs.We didn’t know the extent the competitive dynamic would shift a year later, creating a true and unforeseen competitive situation, an existential threat, for all of Microsoft.I attended the iPhone launch event (rushing to it as it was the same week as CES that year) and walked away with a lot to think about for sure. It was easily one of the most spectacular launch events in the history of computing in my lifetime (after Windows 95 and the 1984 Mac launch and its toaster-size computer with a bitmap display that talked). Steve Jobs said one thing that proved to be incredibly important, with long-term implications overlooked by many [emphasis added, my transcription]:We have been very lucky to have brought a few revolutionary user interfaces to the market in our time. First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we’re going to bring multitouch to the market. And each of these revolutionary user interfaces has made possible a revolutionary product—the Mac, the iPod, and now the iPhone. A revolutionary user interface.We’re going to build on top of that with software. Now, software on mobile phones is like baby software. It’s not so powerful, and today we are going to show you a software breakthrough. Software that’s at least five years ahead of what is on any other phone. Now, how do we do this? Well, we start with a strong foundation.iPhone runs OS X. [applause]Now, why, why would we want to run such a sophisticated operating system on a mobile device? Well, because it’s got everything we need. It’s got multitasking. It’s got the best networking. It already knows how to power manage. We’ve been doing this on mobile computers for years. It’s got awesome security. And the right apps.It’s got everything from Cocoa and graphics and it’s got core animation built in and it’s got audio and video that OS X is famous for. It’s got all the stuff we want. And it’s built right into iPhone. And that has let us create desktop-class applications and networking, right.Not the crippled stuff that you find on most phones.This is real, desktop-class applications.Most reviews mentioned it, but it did not take up nearly as much airtime as the touch screen. In fact, the absence of support for Adobe Flash in the iPhone browser seemed to even undermine this important fact for most. This important fact was the technology underlying the iPhone—the use of the full operating system was a massively strategic, risky, and difficult choice. Using OS X enabled Apple to gradually enable many Mac features over iterative development cycles, knowing that the code already worked. Apple could do this because it had bigger ideas for how it would break compatibility with the Mac and a bold new model for supporting developers to build third-party software. From the very start, the iPhone was destined to be a complete PC, only rebuilt bit by bit with a modern architecture and API. Not only did the iPhone bet on ever-improving mobile bandwidth as many criticized at the time, but it assumed mobile processors and storage would at least reach parity with the personal computer. In other words, from the very start the iPhone had a truck engine. (This reference will make sense in Chapter XIV.)Windows had been taking the opposite approach which was to base the mobile platform on a nearly decades-old version of Windows, stripped down even, with thoughts though not goals of perhaps of catching up to the current desktop Windows by adding new code over time. The incredible challenges this decision introduced will become readily apparent, but only with the release of a new Windows phone operating system to compete with the iPhone. The diverging paths of Windows for mobile and laptop/desktop had been cast years earlier.That summer, I lined up at the AT&T store at Pacific Place in downtown Seattle and picked up my black 4GB iPhone. Who needed 8GB on a phone? Some PCs were shipping with 4GB of storage and all of Windows XP. At the time of the launch announcement, I was quite skeptical of the touch keyboard and said so in an internal mail thread, pointing out if touch screens would work then Windows Phone had already tried and mostly failed. I had been a hardcore Blackberry (and later Palm Trēo) user since before general availability in the late 1990s. I was as much a CrackBerry addict as anyone. Some of the many Windows phones had a stylus like a Palm (or Apple Newton), but I never warmed to those and thought handwriting with a stylus was as dumb as Steve Jobs said at the launch. Within a few hours of having the phone (and a browser!), my worldview changed, especially about touch and especially about the evolution of operating systems. Even lacking copy and paste and relying on the slow AT&T 2G mobile network, you had to really try hard to not be impressed.I remember emailing the co-founder of Blackberry and asking when there would be a full browser and in a long back and forth thread, he tried to convince me of the implications on battery life, lack of capacity on the phone network, and even the lack of utility. While months earlier I might have been sympathetic, I was now staunchly on the other side of this debate.Inside the company, the iPhone went largely unnoticed outside of small pockets of people, and of course the phone team. Not because it was not a breakthrough product, but because it did not fully connect to our corporate mail service, Microsoft Exchange, as it was configured and permissioned by Microsoft’s IT group. Only those of us running on the testing servers, dogfood, were able to use an iPhone for email, and even then it had no support for our much-loved rights-managed email and Microsoft directory. There was a significant debate over whether maintaining this capability was good for self-hosting and competitive knowledge or bad for supporting competition. It was also about this time that support for using Blackberry was disabled. I put up a huge battle over this only to delay the inevitable. Making it difficult to fully host on competitive products was short-sighted but impossible to stop, even as a senior executive. This was done to “eat our own dogfood” even if the result meant truly innovative and competitive products would only receive cursory use.While SteveB’s comments around the iPhone launch have become something of an historically bad take as he somewhat mocked the high price, it is crucially important to understand that he as much reflected as simply shared the collective viewpoint of the entire PC industry, and most of the mobile industry. Collectively, nearly every party underestimated the ability for Apple, with no experience in the mobile industry, to deliver a hit product while also resetting the norms of the mobile carrier business model—the same carriers that Steve Jobs described as “orifices” during an interview two years before the world knew about the phone.The two fundamental assumptions of the PC industry that guided it to nearly 300 million units a year were low prices with consumer choice and a horizontal layering of hardware and software. This business model and technology architecture together enabled the PC. For all the struggles between OEMs, Intel, Microsoft and more, the success was indisputable, especially relative to the Apple model of premium price, limited choice, and a vertically integrated, single supplier.Before the iPhone, the mobile phone seemed to be coming around to the PC model, with the Windows phone appearing to make progress against Nokia and Blackberry with many PC OEMs using a Windows phone software license to offer low price and choice to customers. Jobs would take this good news and make it appear bad by showing how Windows Phone was fragmented across phone makers, not a single OS. That drove the Windows Phone team crazy, par

Whenever you take on a new role you hope that you can just move forward and start work on what comes next without looking back. No job transition is really like that. In my case, even though I had spent six months “transitioning” while Windows Vista went from beta to release, and then even went to Brazil to launch Windows Vista, my brain was firmly in Windows 7. I wanted to spend little, really no, time on Windows Vista. That wasn’t entirely possible because parts of our team would be producing security and bug fixes at a high rate and continuing to work with OEMs on getting Vista to market. Then, as was inevitable, I was forced to confront the ghosts of Windows Vista and even Longhorn. In particular, there was a key aspect of Windows Vista that was heavily marketed but had no product plan and there was a tail of Longhorn technologies that needed to be brought to resolution.Back to 090. I’m a MacEarly in my tenure, I received an escalation (!) to “fund” Windows Ultimate Extras. I had never funded anything before via a request to fund so this itself was new, and as for the escalation. . . I had only a vague idea what Ultimate Extras were, even though I had recently returned from the Windows launch event in Brazil where I was tasked with emphasizing them as part of the rollout. The request was deemed urgent by marketing, so I met with the team, even though in my head Vista was in the rearview mirror and I had transitioned to making sure servicing the release was on track, not finishing the product.The Windows Vista Ultimate SKU was the highest priced version of Windows, aimed primarily at Windows enthusiasts and hobbyists because it had all the features of Vista, those for consumers, business, and enterprise. The idea of Ultimate Extras was to “deliver additional features for Vista via downloadable updates over time.” At launch, these were explained to customers as “cutting-edge features” and “innovative services.” The tech enthusiasts who opted for Ultimate, for a bunch of features that they probably wouldn’t need as individuals, would be rewarded with these extra features over time. The idea was like the Windows 95 Plus! product, but that was an add-on product available at retail with Windows 95.There was a problem, though, as I would learn. There was no product plan and no development team. The Extras didn’t exist. There was an Ultimate Extras PUM, but the efforts were to be funded by using cash or somehow finding or conjuring code. This team had gotten ahead of itself. No one seemed to be aware of this and the Extras PUM didn’t seem to think this was an issue.As the new person, this problem terrified me. We shipped and charged for the product. To my eyes the promise, or obligation if one prefers, seemed unbounded. These were in theory our favorite customers.The team presented what amounted to a brainstorm of what they could potentially do. There were ideas for games, utilities, and so on. None of them sounded bad, but none of them sounded particularly Ultimate, and worse: None existed.We had our first crisis. Even though this was a Vista problem, once the product released everything became my problem.The challenge with simply finding code from somewhere, such as a vendor, licensing from a third party, or something laying around Microsoft (like from Microsoft Research), was that the journey from that code to something shippable to the tens of millions of customers running on a million different PC configurations, in 100 languages around the world, and also accessible, safe, and secure, was months of work. The more content rich the product was, in graphics or words, the longer and more difficult the process would be. I don’t know how many times this lesson needed to be learned at Microsoft but suffice it to say small teams trying to make a big difference learned it almost constantly.And then there was the issue of doing it well. Not much of what was brainstormed at the earliest stages of this process was overly compelling.With nothing particularly ultimate in the wings, we were poised for failure. It was a disaster.We set out to minimize the damage to the Windows reputation and preserve the software experience on PCs. Over the following months we worked to define what would meet a reasonable bar for completing the obligation, unfortunately I mean this legally as that was clearly the best we could do. It was painful, but the prospect of spinning up new product development meant there was no chance of delivering for at least another year. The press and the big Windows fans were unrelenting in reminding me of the Extras at every encounter. If Twitter was a thing back then, every tweet of mine would have had a reply “and…now do Ultimate Extras.”Ultimately (ha), we delivered some games, video desktops, sound schemes, and, importantly, the enterprise features of Bitlocker and language packs (the ability to run Vista in more than one language, which was a typical business feature). It was very messy. It became a symbol of a lack of a plan as well as the myth of finding and shipping code opportunistically.Vista continued to require more management effort on my part.In the spring of 2007 shortly after availability, a lawsuit was filed. The complaint involved the little stickers that read Windows Vista Capable placed on Windows XP computers that manufacturers were certifying (with Microsoft’s support) for upgrade to Windows Vista when it became available. This was meant to mitigate to some degree the fact that Vista missed the back to school and holiday selling seasons by assuring customers their new PC would run the much publicized Vista upgrade. The sticker on the PC only indicated it could run Windows Vista, not whether the PC also had the advanced graphics capabilities to support the new Vista user experience, Aero Glass, which was available only on Windows Vista Home Premium. It also got to the issue of whether supporting those features was a requirement or simply better if a customer had what was then a premium PC. The question was if this was confusing or too complex for customers to understand relative to buying a new PC that supported all the features of Vista.A slew of email exhibits released in 2007 and 2008 showed the chaos and tension over the issue, especially between engineering, marketing, sales, lawyers, and the OEMs. One could imagine how each party had a different view of the meaning of the words and system requirements. I sent an email diligently describing the confusion, which became an exhibit in the case along with emails from most every exec and even former President and board member Jon Shirley (JonS) detailing their personal confusion.The Vista Capable challenge was rooted in the type of ecosystem work we needed to get right. Intel had fallen behind on graphics capabilities while at the same time wanted to use differing graphics as part of their price waterfall. Astute technical readers would also note that Intel’s challenge with graphics was rooted deeply in their failure to achieve critical mass for mobile and the resulting attempt to repurpose their failed mobile chipsets for low-end PCs. PC makers working to have PCs available at different price points loved the idea of hardline differentiation in Windows, though they did not like the idea having to label PCs as basic, hence the XP PCs were labeled “capable.” Also worth noting was that few Windows XP PCs, especially laptops, were capable of the Home Premium experience due to the lack of graphics capabilities. When Vista released, new PCs would have stickers stating they ran Windows Vista or Windows Vista Basic, at least clarifying the single sticker that was placed on eligible Windows XP computers.Eventually, the suit achieved class-action status, always a problem for a big company. The fact that much of the chaos ensued at the close of a hectic product cycle only contributed to this failure. My job was to support those on the team that had been part of the dialogue across PC makers, hardware makers, and the numerous marketing and sales teams internally.The class-action status was eventually reversed, and the suit(s) reached a mutually agreeable conclusion, as they say. Still, it was a great lesson in the need to repair both the relationships and the communication of product plans with the hardware partners, not to mention to be more careful about system requirements and how features are used across Windows editions.In addition to these examples of external issues the Vista team got ahead of itself regarding issues related to code sharing and platform capabilities that spanned multiple groups in Microsoft.The first of these was one of the most loved modern Windows products built on top of Windows XP, Windows Media Center Edition (WMC, or sometimes MCE). In order to tap into the enthusiasm for the PC in the home and the convergence of television and PCs, long before smartphones, YouTube, Netflix, or even streaming, the Windows team created a separate product unit (rather than an integrated team) that would pioneer a new user interface, known as the 10-foot experience, and a new “shell” (always about a shell!) designed around using a PC with a remote control to show live television, home DVD discs, videos, and photos on a big screen, and also play music. This coincided with the rise in home theaters, large inexpensive disk drives capable of storing a substantial amount of video, camcorders and digital cameras, and home broadband internet connections. The product was released in 2002 and soon developed a relatively small but cultlike following. It even spawned its own online community called “Green Button,” named after the green button on the dedicated remote control that powered the shell’s 10-foot user interface.The product was initially sold only with select PCs because of the need for specific hardware capabilities. Later, with Windows Vista (and Windows 7), WMC was included in the premium editions. The usage based on both sales and the t

Advertising is much more difficult than just about everyone believes to be the case. In fact, one of the most challenging tasks for any executive at any company is to step back and not get involved in advertising. It is so easy to have opinions on ads and really randomize the process. It is easy to see why. Most of us buy stuff and therefore consume advertising. So it logically follows, we all have informed opinions, which is not really the case at all. Just like product people hate everyone having opinions on features, marketing people are loathe to deal with a cacophony of anecdotes from those on the sidelines. Nothing would test this more for all of Microsoft than Apple’s latest campaign that started in 2006. I’d already gone through enough of watching advertising people get conflicting and unreconcilable feedback to know not to stick my nose in the process.Back to 089. Rebooting the PC EcosystemHardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.“I’m a Mac.”“And, I’m a PC.”The “Get a Mac” commercials, starting in 2006, changed the competitive narrative overnight and were a painful gut punch welcoming me to Windows.They were edgy, brutal in execution, and they skewered Windows with facts. They were well done. (Though it always bothered me that PC Guy had a vague similarity to the late and much-loved Paul Allen, Microsoft’s cofounder long focused on science and philanthropy.) Things that drove Windows fans crazy like “no viruses” on Mac were not technically true, but true in practice because, mostly, why bother writing viruses for Macs with their 6 percent share? That’s what we told ourselves. In short, these commercials were devastating.They probably bumped right up against a line, but they effectively tapped into much of the angst and many of the realities of PC ownership and management. Our COO and others were quite frustrated by them and believed the commercials not only to be untrue, but perhaps in violation of FTC rules.They were great advertising. Great advertising is something Apple seemed to routinely accomplish, while Microsoft found it to be an elusive skill.For its first twenty years, Microsoft resisted broad advertising. The company routinely placed print ads in trade publications and enthusiast magazines, with an occasional national newspaper buy for launches. These ads were about software features, power, and capabilities. Rarely, if ever, did Microsoft appeal to emotions of buyers. When Microsoft appeared in the national press, it was Bill Gates as the successful technology “whiz kid” along with commentary on the growing influence and scale of the company.With that growing influence in the early 1990s and a business need to move beyond BillG, a huge decision was made to go big in advertising. Microsoft retained Wieden+Kennedy, the Portland-based advertising agency responsible for the “Just Do It” campaign from Nike, among many era-defining successes. After much consternation about spending heavily on television advertising, Microsoft launched the “Where do you want to go today?” campaign in November 1994.Almost immediately we learned the challenges of advertising. The subsidiaries were not enamored with the tagline. The head of Microsoft Brazil famously pushed back on the tagline, saying the translation amounted to saying, “do you want to go to the beach today?” because the answer to the question “Where do you want to go?” in Brazil was always “the beach.” The feedback poured in before we even started. It was as much about the execution as the newness of television advertising. Everyone had an opinion.I remember vividly the many pitches and discussions about the ads. I can see the result of those meetings today as I rewatch the flagship commercial. Microsoft kept pushing “more product” and “show features” and the team from W+K would push back, describing emotions and themes. The client always wins, and it was a valuable lesson for me. Another a valuable lesson, Mike Maples (MikeMap) who had seen it all at IBM pointed out just before the formal go ahead saying something like “just remember, once you start advertising spend you can never stop. . .with the amount of money we are proposing we could hire people in every computer store to sell Windows 95 with much more emotion and information. . .” These were such wise words, as was routine for Mike. He was right. You can never stop. TV advertising spend for a big company, once started, becomes part of the baseline P&L like a tax on earnings.The commercials were meant to show people around the world using PCs, but instead came across almost cold, dark, and ominous as many were starting to perceive Microsoft.  That was version 1.0. Over the next few years, the campaign would get updates with more colors, more whimsy, and often more screenshots and pixels.What followed was the most successful campaign the company would arguably execute, the Windows 95 launch. For the next decade, Microsoft would continue to spend heavily, hundreds of millions of dollars per year, though little of that would resonate. Coincident with the lukewarm reception to advertising would be Microsoft’s challenges in branding, naming, and in general balancing speeds and feeds with an emotional appeal to consumers. Meanwhile, our enterprise muscle continued to grow as we became leaders in articulating strategy, architecture, and business value.In contrast, Apple had proven masterful at consumer advertising. From the original 1984 Superbowl ad through the innovative “What’s on your PowerBook?” (1992) to “Think Different” (1997-2000) and many of the most talked about advertisements of the day such as “C:\ONGRTLNS.W95” in 1995 and “Welcome, IBM. Seriously” in 1981, Apple had shown a unique ability to get the perfect message across. The only problem was that their advertising didn’t appear to work, at least as measured by sales and/or market share. The advertising world didn’t notice that small detail. We did.Starting in 2006 (Vista released in January 2007), Apple’s latest campaign, “Get a Mac” created an instant emotional bond with everyone struggling with their Windows PC at home or work, while also playing on all the stereotypes that existed in the Windows v. Mac battle—the nerdy businessman PC slave versus the too cool hipster Mac user.The campaign started just as I joined Windows. I began tracking the commercials in a spreadsheet, recording the content and believability of each while highlighting those I thought particularly painful in one dimension or another. (A Wikipedia article would emerge with a complete list, emphasizing the importance of the commercials.) I found myself making the case that the commercials reflected the state of Windows as experienced in the real world. It wasn’t really all that important if Mac was better, because what resonated was the fragility of the PC. There was a defensiveness across the company, a feeling of how the “5% share Mac” could be making these claims. I managed a bit of a row with the COO who wanted to go to the FTC and complain that Apple was not telling the truth.Windows Vista dropped the ball. Apple was there to pick it up. Not only with TV commercials and ads, but with a resurging and innovative product line, one riding on the coattails of Wintel. The irony that the commercials held up even with the transition to Intel and a theoretically level playing field only emphasized that the issue was software first and foremost, not simply a sleek aluminum case.While the MacBook Air was a painful reminder of the consumer offerings of Windows PCs, the commercials were simply brutal when it came to Vista. There were over 50 commercials that ran from 2006-2009, starting with Apple’s transition to Intel and then right up until the release of Windows 7 when a new commercial ran on the eve of the Windows 7 launch. Perhaps the legacy of the commercials was the idea that PCs have viruses and malware and Macs do not. No “talking points” about market share or that malware targets the greatest number of potential victims or simply that the claim was false would matter. There’s no holding back, this was a brutal takedown, and it was effective. It was more effective in reputation bashing, however, than in shifting unit share.One of the most memorable ones for me was “Security” which highlighted the Windows Vista feature designed to prevent viruses and malware from sneaking on your PC, called User Account Control or UAC which had become a symbol of the annoyance of Vista—so much so our sales leaders wanted us to issue a product change to remove it. There’s some irony in that this very feature is not only implemented across Apple’s software line today, but far is more granular and invasive. That should sink in. Competitively we all seem to become what we first mock.Something SteveB always said when faced with sales blaming the product group and the product group blaming sales for something that wasn’t working, was “we need to build what we can sell, and sell what we build.” Windows Vista was a time where we had the product and simply needed to sell what we had built, no matter what.The marketing team (an organization peer to product development at this time) was under a great deal of pressure to turn around the perceptions of Vista and do something about the Apple commercials. It was a tall order. The OEMs were in a panic. It would require a certain level of bravery to continue to promote Vista, perhaps not unlike shipping Vista in the first place. The fact that the world was in the midst of what would become known as the Global Financial Crisis with PC sales taking a dive did not help.Through a series of exercises to better come up with a point of attack the team came up with the idea that maybe too many people were basing their views of Windows Vista on hearsay and not actual experience. We launched a new campaign “Mojave Experiment” that took a cin

The word ecosystem is often used when describing Windows and the universe of companies that come together to deliver Windows PCs and software. Providing a platform is a much trickier business than most might believe. Bringing together a large number of partners, along with their competitors, who might share one large goal but differ significantly in the tactics to use to achieve it is fraught with conflict. The Windows ecosystem had been dealt a series of painful blows over the years resulting in a loss of trust and collective capability. Where partnerships were required, the ecosystem had become a collection of…adversaries…or direct competitors…or conflicting distribution channels.Back to 088. Planning the Most Important Windows EverIn the summer of 2007 six-months after Windows Vista availability as we rolled out the Windows 7 product vision to the entire team, the press coverage for Vista began to get brutal. I say the coverage, but this is really about the customer reaction to the product and the press simply reflected that.Then the OEMs, large public companies with shareholders and quarterly earnings, started to do something almost unimaginable. They began to speak out about the problems with Vista. In a widely covered interview in the Financial Times discussing quarterly results, Acer president Gianfranco Lanci lashed out at Vista, saying the “whole industry is disappointed with Windows Vista" and stated that Vista had stability problems and he doubted that Microsoft would remedy the issues within the next six months. He went on to suggest that customers really wanted Windows XP knowing that in just a few months XP would be discontinued. Much of what he said in public, the OEMs had been telling us in private.I had been in my role for more than a year and still did not have much to say about what was coming next. How could I? We just didn’t know and all my experience with customers told me that claiming I didn’t know would not be acceptable or even credible. Still, pressure was mounting to show progress.The Windows (or PC) ecosystem is made up Intel, PC makers (the OEMs), and creators hardware components and peripherals known as Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs). OEMs accounted for the vast majority of Microsoft’s extremely lucrative Windows business. IHVs were the key ingredients the OEMs counted on for innovation. Intel, provider of CPUs and an increasing portion of the main componentry, was the most central in the hardware ecosystem as half of the legendary Wintel partnership.Suffice it to say ecosystem was in an unhappy and untrusting state after years of product delays along with a series of feature, product, and pricing miscues. The delays had been extremely painful to OEMs and Intel, who counted on a new release of Windows to show off new PCs and drive growth in PC sales. IHVs had critical work to do enabling new PCs. They had to build software drivers that enabled new hardware that was compatible with the new features of Windows (such as 64-bit Windows or new security features). They also faced the increasing complexity of maintaining drivers for old versions of Windows as the time between releases increased and customers demanded new hardware support on both old and new platforms. The rise of Linux was spreading the Windows ecosystem further as demand for Linux support increased. Fractures were everywhere.Intel contributed an increasingly larger portion of the PC, much as Microsoft continued to add features to Windows. With Centrino® for example, Intel added WiFi support directly to the components they provided to PC makers. This greatly expanded and standardized the use of WiFi in laptops. Intel was in the process of broadening their support for graphics as well, continuing to improve the integrated graphics chips they provided to PC makers (this was a particularly sore spot with Vista.) Intel was able to better control pricing of their components, encourage specific PC designs, and shift PC makers to various CPU choices using a combination of pricing actions and co-marketing arrangements. Originally these “Intel Inside” advertising efforts were a huge part of how PC makers selected and marketed different models and lines of computers and was enormously profitable for Intel.Microsoft’s relationship with Intel had not been particularly happy, going way back to the 1990s when Intel began to embrace Java and other cross-platform technologies. Recently, however, the rise of Linux was viewed by Intel as a large opportunity, while Microsoft perceived it as a competitive threat. What Microsoft used to perceive as a moat, device driver support for Windows, was rapidly fading due to active efforts by Intel to support Linux to the same degree. The specter of desktop Linux seemed to be held back by just a few device drivers should Intel support them, or so we worried.There was also a complex relationship between enterprise customers and Microsoft when it came to Windows. From a product and feature perspective, Windows was making increasing bets on the kind of features businesses cared about, such as endpoint control, reliability, and management. Microsoft did not always want to give away those features for free to retail customers where they might not apply. The fact that these features existed caused OEMs to consider ways to add them to the base Windows they sold, feeling that the base Windows was under-powered.  In other words, features Microsoft added to premium editions of Windows simply served as starting points for features OEMs might look to provide with their own software on top of the basic editions of Windows, increasing OEM margin.The response to the increasing gap between consumers and enterprise was another reason for OEMs to embrace, or at least appear to embrace Linux. At the very least, OEMs began to ponder the idea of selling PCs with free Linux and letting customers pick and choose an operating system on their own as a backdoor way to avoid the Windows license for every single PC. Microsoft did not want OEMs selling PCs without Windows when Windows was destined to be on the PC anyway, as that would only encourage piracy. This “Linux threat” was not as empty as the state of technology would have indicated as OEMs were actively starting to offer Linux on the desktop, especially if they were offering it on Server already. Some markets, such as China, which already had enormously high piracy pursued this path aggressively.From the least expensive PCs for the budget conscious to the fanciest PCs for gamers, the Windows product and business depended on these partners, and vice versa. Any business book would tell you just how big a deal the Windows ecosystem was, as would anyone who followed the antitrust actions against Microsoft.We needed to reboot the relationship with and across the Ecosystem. Doing so would be an important part of the planning process and run in parallel with planning the Windows 7 product.The perspectives, insights, and data from hardware and OEM partners were only part of the input to the planning process. Another part was the usage data from tens of millions of Windows users. What features, peripherals, and third-party programs were used, how often, and by which types of customers. Vista had done excellent work to incorporate the performance and reliability measures of the system, especially for glitches like crashes and hangs, but usage data was inconsistent across the system. As we would discover, this data was not readily available or reliably collected across the whole product. We knew we would need as much as we could for Windows 7 and certainly down the road, so we began in earnest to implement more telemetry across the product during the planning for Windows 7. This data would form a foundation for many discussions with OEMs.The feverish pace and tons of work over the six months that followed the re-org tackled an expansive set of potential areas and distilled them down to a product plan, the Windows 7 Vision. That six months would bump up against not one but two OEM selling seasons during which the OEMs would not get the news about “fixing Vista” they were hoping for. The planning memo came out in December 2006 even before Windows Vista availability. That timing, however, would be too late to impact the February selling season. The July 2007 Vision was too late to become requirements for PCs for back to school in August or September of that year. Even though PCs would not ship with Windows 7 for quite some time, every selling season we missed would make it frustratingly difficult for those PCs to be upgraded to Windows 7. This was a problem for every part of the ecosystem including Microsoft.The relationships were difficult, but more importantly the quality of work across the ecosystem was in decline. Communication was adversarial at best.Mike Angiulo (MikeAng) joined from Office and began an incredible effort at rebuilding the relationships with OEMs. Mike was not only a stellar technologist, but a strategic relationship manager, having grown up as a salesman within his future family’s business. He was also a trained mechanical engineer who rebuilt and raced cars, a natural-born poker champion, and an IR-pilot who built his own plane.He recruited Roanne Sones (RSones) to lead the rehabilitation of the relationship with OEM customers. She was a college hire from Waterloo’s prestigious systems engineering program who had joined Office five years earlier. Having worked on projects from creating the Office layperson’s specification, to synthesizing customer needs by segment, to analyzing usage data across the product, Roanne brought a breadth of tools and techniques from Office to the OEM problem space. Also joining the team was Bernardo Caldas (BCaldas) who would bring deep insights combining usage data, financial modeling, and business model thinking to the team.Roanne quickly learned that a big part of the challenge would be the varying planning horizons the O