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 the Windows legacy was constant. As I learned over every previous, and smaller transition, giving customers a little bit of the past—a compatibility mode or a way to opt out of changes—meant customers would take advantage it. The new product wouldn’t be new to most customers. With Microsoft’s decade-long commitment to supporting that new-old state, we would have been shackled to the very platform that was already in an anemic state—Windows and the APIs for apps, Intel and the ever-increasing transistor march, and an ecosystem of OEMs and ISVs focused elsewhere.There were five hot buttons I felt weakened our all-or-nothing bet. There was no quick fix for these, even in hindsight. Worse, each proved more early than incorrect. In technology, however as I have noted several times in this work, early is the same as being wrong. People will debate these even as I write them years later. I think we will always have fun doing so. I certainly will. It is the nature of engineering to forever debate the causes and decisions that led to failure.First, the Start screen clearly served as the emotional lightning rod for the release. It was, to some, as if we ripped the heart and soul from Windows. I didn’t see it that way, obviously. I saw a mechanism that had outlived its usefulness just as we saw menus and toolbars outlive their usefulness in Office, or even character mode decades earlier. Despite being there in the summer of 1995, I did not see the quasi-religious significance of the menu. I saw something that people had mostly stopped using—the taskbar, ALT-TAB, search, email attachments, and browser tabs replaced launching and switching programs. Tech enthusiasts, however, had many more programs, dozens of utilities, and elaborate custom configurations. I know because they sent us the screenshots in protest. I would posit today that most tech enthusiasts are using the taskbar and search to find and launch programs, exactly as we designed Windows 8 to work. I also think they would have been fine turning off their computers with the power button and would have survived not having shutdown on the screen all the time, though they would miss the chuckle from the timeless hilarity of Start -> Shutdown.Phone app screens grew to become the way computer programs are launched and managed. They take up the full screen and they are super easy to navigate, unlike the Start menu, which even with a mouse grew increasingly finnicky and awkward. Apple’s home screen evolved to be more like Windows 8, including search and an All Applications view. Windows ultimately evolved to become more like a phone screen and far less like the formerly beloved menu, but nothing would have appeased people at the time. Nothing, other than providing (an option, of course, everything is an option) the Start menu back for “non-touch” or “Intel” PCs or something arbitrary like that—a compatibility mode. We had compatibility mode—it was Windows 7.Second, the presence of the desktop in Windows RT, the version of Windows that didn’t run any existing desktop apps. Additionally, the desktop not being the first thing to pop up after starting any version of Windows proved to be “disorienting” in ways that were more reactionary than actual. From the first demo at All Things Digital when we were asked about “two modes,” I was not able to find the way to describe this feature. If a product requires explaining, it’s already lost.On Intel Windows, we wanted to remove a level of indirection and simply have a place to start. The desktop, with its cacophony of uses, had become a hairball. It did not roam between devices well (due to screen size and contents), and the slew of uses as a file cabinet, scratch pad, dashboard, and program launcher made improvement impossible. Alas, it was viewed as sacrosanct and another place where the world was changing but disproportionately less so for power users. The move to phones, browser apps, cloud storage, and multiple devices relegated the desktop for most. We were just too early.Third, on ARM we faced another challenge: Our own desire to ship meant we shipped a product that was knowingly incomplete. We simply had too many places to return to the legacy experience. Apple chose to hide those capabilities on the iPad until they were ready and perhaps that would have been a better approach for us too. We should recall that the iPhone shipped without copy and paste, and the iPad was literally a big iPhone with fewer built-in apps and no phone capability. We wanted to embrace the capability of the operating system without compromising quality, security, and so on. For example, the iPad had no files or file management capabilities, including using devices such as USB thumb drives, until 2017. We supported those out of the gate, but that sometimes required using the legacy desktop and explorer. We didn’t have time to build the WinRT file manager app we had already designed, as an example, or update everything in the Windows control panel. The vast ecosystem took time to move, but we had to begin a transition.Many believed omissions presented a weird modality or duality. Our explanation that this was always how Windows evolved failed to satisfy or reduce perceived confusion. Windows carried the DOS box and command line (and still does) and even .INI files, for those who cared, for decades—and it was widely used by tech enthusiasts and administrators alike—even for copying files! Having some of the old along with the new had always been the Microsoft way. It just seemed so inelegant compared to Apple.I, we, did not love that we had to do this. While we considered many alternatives, we didn’t have a better approach without taking forever to ship. The enemy of the good is the perfect. The industry was moving away from Windows, and we had to get in the game. That is decidedly different than Apple releasing a phone to a market that was far from settled and expected little from Apple which had nothing to lose. We had everything to lose and were losing everything.Fourth, there was one very significant reason we required the desktop and why it was not simply a bonus like the old command or DOS box.Office.The shift to touch, phones and tablets, and a modern operating system with new apps was much larger than any one of those individually. To decompose the strategy into components is to wield the technology buzzsaw or fall victim to taking on disruptive technology shifts like entrenched incumbents tend to when failing. To have a viable product, we needed to execute on all, simultaneously.These shifts happened all at once not because the PC did not take on each feature individually, but because the PC model itself could not possibly address the shortcomings that built up over years. Loosely aggregated features, engineered across adversarial partners, combined into a product was well-suited to the invention of the personal computer, but not the optimization of the experience. The idea that the PC could move forward into a new era by simply adding touch, or some new user interface features on top of what was there or adding an app store while still supporting downloading code from the internet, or even adopting ARM, each as a point solution was simply the old way of solving problems, the PC way.Surface RT was designed to be the epitome of productivity for mobile information work. We wanted Surface to be people’s primary work computer, the way they used a laptop (PC or Mac), but with all the reliability, security, battery life, and mobility of an iPad. To accomplish that we needed Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and (some would say) Outlook. The problem: I was not successful at evangelizing the new platform opportunity to the Office team. Let that sink in.The hallmark of Microsoft’s strategy had always been apps and platform, platform and apps, and if necessary, by force. Early on the apps were forced to work on Windows against their judgment, and then later Windows was forced to be good for the apps even when it thought Office was not the focus, and this see-saw continued for the benefit of the industry. It was like we had reached a point where both businesses were so entrenched that their own worldviews precluded a bigger, all Microsoft bet. Perhaps we reached a level of fatigue in cross-company bets after the Longhorn and .NET eras.When we presented the Windows 8 vision years before, I sat next to SteveB and friends from the Office team that were invited. It was during that meeting that we began to make the case that the new runtime existed to build new apps—new ways of working, focused on collaboration, sharing, tasks, cloud storage, and less on massive amounts of formatting, scattered document files, and so on. The collective questions were more about how to maintain compatibility for Visual Basic for Applications, third-party add-ins, and the Ribbon. We never bridged that gap. The whole product cycle, Office wanted to port existing Office to ARM and run it. The biggest irony was that the entire time the Mac Office team was busy building Office for the iPad, which is why it was ready to release on the heels of Windows 8. There are two sides to this story. The Windows 8 leaders knew both sides because we were previously the leaders of Office. There was a view that even that cross-pollination contributed to the challenges. Ultimately, there was a need for both the old Office and a new set of tools. Silicon Valley was hard at work creating new tools for information workers—modern, mobile, cloud, web, SaaS tools for productivity—while Microsoft continued to pay the bills with existing apps, even if they sold under the 365 cloud moniker for much higher prices.Office was part of a symptom, a fatal symptom, of having no WinRT apps, which was obvious. Everyone in the industry knows that if Microsoft is serious about something then Office will participate. If Microsoft was not serious, then there was no Office support. Desktop Office sent the clear message that Microsoft was not serious about WinRT. It didn’t matter what we said as our actions spoke louder than words. We had OneNote and some experiments. But without Excel, there was no WinRT. We had many debates in executive staff meetings about juicing the ISV ecosystem. That whole ecosystem was focused on the browser while still suffering from the strategy fatigue from Windows Phone 7 (and soon 8) and the failed Longhorn strategies. We needed Office. We got OneNote. I still love OneNote to this day.We chose not to build a phone first or simultaneously. Perhaps the entire platform strategy would have been different if we had indeed executed on the mythical plan of having a phone and first-party hardware out of the gate. Since that would not have finished perhaps until 2015, debating it at all might be irrelevant. By 2015 the world would be solidified around iOS and Android leaving little headroom for us, plus we would have had a couple of more years of failure of Windows Phone, services, and an aging Windows 7. Fans of Windows Phone will continue to debate and champion that legacy the way people fondly remember the Amiga or Newton, so this is one debate I intentionally avoid.And fifth, Windows RT and even Windows 8 were the product names. Many argued that any product without a traditional Start menu and full compatibility could not be named Windows. More would argue that naming Windows RT as we did, “confused customers” as to what would run where. That was true, but Windows had long had variants that came with limitations or exceptions: Windows NT, Windows CE, Windows Embedded, Windows Media Center, even Windows 2000, and most recently Windows Phone. All of these were confusing in some relative sense, but all were given time to rationalize the confusion.Should we have abandoned the legacy that was embodied in the Windows name? I certainly thought about that a lot. Here again, everything about disruption would have said absolutely name it something different. Heck, put the team in another building, get them new card keys, and so on like the Zune team did. That same theory also showed how no one ever does that because they look at the cost and effort, along with splitting all the energies of the company, and reject any such approach as heresy. As someone who grew up knowing that Windows NT or even Windows XP didn’t really run everything Windows 95 ran, I felt like we could pull it off. I was wrong. I don’t think a new name would have worked any better and would wager that any new name would have been cutesy and clumsy at the same time given Microsoft’s history. Then again, many chuckled at iPad too.There were a host of smaller reasons as well, some related to timing and others to just trying to get a product to market. The original Surface did not support LTE, which undermined our mobility and mobile chipset message. We chose a unique aspect ratio for the screen, which proved to just be wrong for productivity. SteveB pushed on this as he personally began to like eReaders on Android that had paperback book aspect ratios. We all agreed, but it was too late. The original Surface RT keyboard, the Touch Cover, was innovative but not productive. There were other software aspects as well, like my refusal include Outlook, which would reduce battery life by 1-2 hours simply because it wasn’t a modern app and had incomplete connections to our services backend. The lack of support for traditional group policy irked IT Pros who felt they needed to secure any device using invasive methods used on PCs. Those methods were battery draining while opening up a host of Win32 compatibility requirements. Modern mobile device management tools are far better than what IT did at the time, and we built those capabilities into the first release.I tend to look at the failures of the product strategy because that is where most of the focus sits. But I had failures in the go-to market as well. I am rather fond of pointing out that success and failure are elements of the 4 Ps of product, price, place, and promotion. In the case of Surface RT, we got the price right assuming we sold a lot of them, and surprised some people even in the face of super cheap Android tablets. We got the place, the distribution strategy, entirely wrong. The Microsoft Store retail team was insanely excited to have exclusive access to Surface, but there weren’t enough stores to sell the number we needed or wanted to sell. I was unable to make the math clear to leadership. We literally could not sell all we made even if the stores operated at multiples of capacity, 7 x 24. I begged and pleaded to expand distribution, and so did our partners, right up until the end. In the process we angered our Windows retail partners around the world. Then we had a whole bunch left over, and in 2013 Microsoft took an inventory write-off to complete the erasure of Windows 8 from memory. I remain convinced, perhaps naïvely so, we could have moved many more units had we opened the retail strategy. That would have allowed for the potential to iterate to a second and ultimately third version.No matter what happens, someone always said it would, and when a product fails those predicting that are quick to make themselves known. I admit I found it enormously frustrating to see the revisionist views appear, whether with the press or with people at Microsoft. President John F. Kennedy famously said, “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” I certainly felt alone in defeat. It is well-known that as a leader, a huge part of the job is to stand alone and absorb the defeat. I think I did that at least as well as making sure any successes achieved over decades were those of the team or specific individuals and definitely not mine alone.While our issues are quite clear in hindsight, they were also visible at the time which only serves to further the told-you-so reactions. Every technology shift had doubters focusing on some specific issue, or challenge, rather than seeing a complete package like all those people who said the Macintosh was not a real computer because of the mouse, or how the iPhone touch screen would not work. Had the iPhone failed, it is easy to imagine the self-congratulations from those who noted in their reviews the lack of copy/paste, missing Adobe Flash support, incomplete push email, or the new on-screen keyboard.I knew the feedback on each of the specifics, but also, and naïvely, hoped the whole system could be seen for what it was trying to do…and it would do if given a time and effort. The story of the ribbon in Office, one of the biggest and most successful UI reinventions undertaken in a product, was one filled with doubters inside Microsoft and outside as we discussed. Today some of those who were the most negative about the change even find themselves leaders in today’s Office.But why should people have been patient? They had the iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, and Chromebooks all to choose from. They were happy to use those and just stick to Windows for all the familiar legacy work.As we progressed to the October 2012 launch of Windows 8, a lot was happening that perhaps marred our ability to see clearly and, more importantly, collectively. It was an anxious time. We spent the summer in leadership team meetings gearing up for the yearly sales meeting ahead of a big launch year. The past ten years of flat stock price and lackluster product success had taken its toll.The difficulties with Windows Phone were compounding, despite poorly grounded optimism. Phone apps were not gaining traction and worse the hacks to gain apparent traction were backfiring, such as paying developers to write apps or adding apps to the store that were simply web sites. Fingers were pointing. With Surface, the question became: Should we build our own phone? Should we kick off a skunkworks project like Zune (that team was available) to build a phone? Would that truly address what we were seeing in the market? The phone was the next platform, a platform for the entire planet, and we were not even registering as a viable third place. The opportunity to align Windows and Windows Phone long passed and there was still no appetite to weigh down the phone strategy with a full Windows-centric approach. It was always as if the phone was on firm footing, and it just needed to borrow a bit more code from Windows. It was never on a path to success.The Windows Server team seemed to resist embracing the new Azure product, which remained organizationally distinct. In hindsight this proved reasonable as Azure came to be dominated not by Windows as hoped but by Linux. We were obligated to support them, so that was creating a lot of extra work for us, delivering for both the on-premises server and the new data center product. The enterprise server and server apps data center era, as we knew it, was over. It was archaic and unmanageable. Microsoft was barely able to keep its own Windows data center running. The future of the server business was the cloud, but our enterprise customers were strongly resisting, or more likely entirely unaware, of that fact. AWS was still almost entirely a Silicon Valley novelty. This made it easier to ignore.Our commitment to online services, what I saw as a key component of the Windows platform as we knew it, from communications to identity to storage, were all seen as cost centers despite the obvious need to own and build widely used cloud services across devices. A complete device experience required services extended to the cloud, built natively for the cloud rather than ports of existing Windows and Office servers. The device experience as we knew it to be was coming to an end without services.Microsoft’s transformation to an internet company—well documented as one of the most successful pivots of all time—turned out to be great for our revenue but lousy for our platform technology. The level of internet savvy across the company paled in comparison to Google and Facebook (yet the much-sought-after Yahoo rapidly faded). Little, if any, Microsoft technology or platform were part of the rise of these huge new powers. The only organic internet scale business was Bing, which continued to struggle, though ironically has today found a niche disguised as the anti-Google DuckDuckGo.Across Office, Windows, and Servers, the reality was our pricing power, distribution moat, and enterprise account relationships combined to provide comfort in the face of shifting platforms. The reality of business disruption was right in front of us. It was plain to see. Yet the business was apparently thriving, just as the classic book on disruption would predict.Despite the massive revenue success and great numbers, the technology story looked bleak to me. I felt alone in that concern. I sent a memo to the leadership. It was a plea to develop a point of view that these technology shifts implied that went beyond defensive—Without a Point of View, There Is No Point. I tried to argue that we had been lulled into a sense of complacency by having succeeded through the dot-com bubble yet ended up weak in every technology shift that followed. We were losing everywhere, except revenue. We did not have a platform, which as a platform company was a big deal. My memo, which turned out to be the last one I wrote, was decidedly a polemic meant to stir people up.I also wondered whether it even made sense to keep score, so to speak, with products and technologies. Maybe all that mattered was leading by business metrics like revenue, profit, and cash flow. There are worse things than being a huge money-making corporation.Leading Microsoft to reimagine Windows had been accomplishment enough for me. I knew what I had signed up for more than five years earlier. It was much more than even I had planned on. But it was time. Ultimately, I could not break the odd-even curse.After the October launch in New York, it was time to mark the end of my career with Microsoft. With great clarity, I knew it was time to use that resignation letter I’d been holding on to. One last meeting with SteveB, and some quick rounds across my direct reports, and then I hit send. Our split was undeniably mutual. I felt a sense of relief. Compared to leaving the Office team for Windows, I was much more certain this was the right decision. I was eager for a context switch.Once the decision was made, moving on immediately was best. I never wanted a big send-off. Quite the contrary. I had gone through two years or eight depending on how one counts of Bill “transitioning” (not that there is a comparison). Then there was the year transitioning through Windows Vista I experienced. I’d seen too many people stick around for too long, confusing the team and dragging their departure out.What I failed to understand, and deeply regret, was that in our collective haste to move on I left behind the most superb team, ready to take over and move things to the next level, but not prepared for what would actually follow. I was selfish and the people who gave the most to create the new Windows team paid for that.The “post-Sinofsky” unwinding of Windows 8, not just the product, but the organization and processes as well, became even more painful than market reception of Windows 8. I let the team and my best friends down. I left them to pick up the pieces I should have been picking up myself. The management above them failed to show them the respect they deserved. Nearly every one of them represented in these half-million words—the best leaders Microsoft created across every discipline—has left the company. So many of them are creators, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders in ways that Microsoft does not even participate today.BillG had always been fond of saying that tech companies have a remarkably difficult time leading as technology crossed generations. Leaders of each era might maintain scale, rarely evaporating, but losing influence and presence in the market. Technology analyst and friend Benedict Evans wrote:Every day of Windows 8 development, I worried about losing our audience of developers who hung on every word of not just what new features for Windows and Office were being shipped, but what code they could write, what business they could build, what customer problem they could solve by making a singular bet on Microsoft’s inventions to power them. I’d seen the relevancy of Office fade even while the business grew. Many companies have core fan bases, but Microsoft was blessed with people and companies building businesses on our technology, uniquely and singularly, and many of them moved on. Developers are not the end, but a means to a force-multiplying economic relationship with billions of people. I’d seen how easy it is in a large organization to find a bubble to hide out in—a bubble where our products are as popular and relevant as they once were.Paul Graham, fellow 1980s Cornellian, founder of the Y Combinator startup accelerator, and described as a “hacker philosopher” by author Steven Levy, wrote two essays on Microsoft that were rather prescient, if not spooky. They were written so early as to be easily dismissed or perhaps wishful thinking. In 2001, he wrote “The Other Road Ahead” a nod to the book by Bill Gates. In this essay he described the new Web 2.0 paradigm relative to the desktop computer. He aptly described the bubble Microsoft was in, that I was in, and we just didn’t know it:Back when desktop computers arrived, IBM was the giant that everyone was afraid of. It's hard to imagine now, but I remember the feeling very well. Now the frightening giant is Microsoft, and I don't think they are as blind to the threat facing them as IBM was. After all, Microsoft deliberately built their business in IBM's blind spot.I mentioned earlier that my mother doesn't really need a desktop computer. Most users probably don't. That's a problem for Microsoft, and they know it. If applications run on remote servers, no one needs Windows. What will Microsoft do? Will they be able to use their control of the desktop to prevent, or constrain, this new generation of software?The essay is long and well worth reading for its predictive powers. While not every technical point landed precisely as described, especially the iPhone and apps, it is a brutal read that was aptly ignored by us at the time. As if to double-down, in 2007 he wrote another essay “Microsoft is Dead” wherein he described what took place in the mid-2000s that killed Microsoft. This was just after Windows Vista when it was easy and rather popular to assert an end. That was because of Vista, however, not because of the four factors in his essay: Google, the desktop is “over”, broadband internet, and Apple OS X on new Macs. He concluded with a candid and brutal take:Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck. They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years ago.I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news.Despite Graham’s dire predictions, people continue to rely on Microsoft and bet on the company today. Microsoft is an enormous business. It is undeniably a different kind of leader, more a comfortable companion than a guide taking you to new places.It is popular to say that the operating system is no longer key, that the definition of a platform has changed, and that the battle is now above the OS. That’s a great rationalization, and as Jeff Goldblum’s character in The Big Chill said, “Don’t knock rationalization. Where would we be without it? I don’t know anyone who can go a day without two or three rationalizations.” The biggest business at Microsoft remains Microsoft/Office 365, and as valuable as email and video conferencing are (and as important as transferring the capital and operational costs to Microsoft in exchange for a huge price increase was too), the unique intellectual property in Office 365 that defies competition is Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These remain key tools used in daily mission critical work by perhaps 300 million information workers. Those people, at least 90 to 95 percent of them, rely on Windows to do that work, which is Microsoft’s second largest business.Bundling the new Microsoft Teams with the 365 service perfectly reflects this legacy approach, a well-worn strategy to support the existing business and pricing rather than risk building a new business and creating a new revenue stream. In this work I described the bundling of Outlook, OneNote, SharePoint in this same regard during the expansive period of enterprise software. Microsoft loved a good bundle. Customers did to. I suspect this time with Teams will end differently primarily because the computing world is in a different place and the requirement that customers settle for a bundled product is nowhere the same as it was in the early or middle stages of the PC era. Certainly, the macroeconomics of 2022 will provide a foundation for a bundle, but that has not proven sustainable.The virtuous cycle of apps and systems envisioned by BillG in the 1980s stands as the hallmark of Microsoft, but it is not growing in users and is not part of a thriving ecosystem. New customers aren’t coming to PCs with Office even at a rate to replace those that retire. Windows PCs are not benefitting from advances in a hardware ecosystem that transitioned to mobile. Developers aren’t building new software for Windows. The cycles have been broken.PC sales in 2022 will likely have declined 15-20% over 2021. Many will point to the economy or foreign exchange rates or length of a replacement cycle, or maybe even Apple’s inability to figure out its own product strategy. At some point the only conclusion is that the PC, like the mainframe, minicomputer, and workstation before it, was a mature and saturated market. There will be good years and not so good years, but the PC or PC server running Windows will never be the platform it was. Even if people develop new products on it, those products will not take advantage of what a new PC has to offer, which is the definition of a platform.The web and smartphones have assumed the role of the information platform for the world. This time is different, however. Together these two have touched every human on the planet. That hasn’t happened with any other foundational platform, to use the term broadly, in history except for perhaps fire. All the amazing, connected platforms from the 20th century reached their limits long before reaching every person everywhere, including rail, car, roads, airplanes, telegraph, telephone, television, electric grids, sewage, and more. Whatever comes along next will also be the greatest technology displacement in the history of humans as it will replace the internet-connected smartphone for every person on earth. That is going to be an incredible innovation.Craig McCaw, one of the earliest pioneers of mobile phones in the US via his namesake company and graduate of Seattle’s Lakeside School a few years before Bill Gates, described humans as inherently nomadic when it comes to the technology they use. He first made this observation with respect to mobile phones compared to land lines that tethered users to a wall. Technology is broadly adopted first when it meets their needs, and not before. Then over time when a product fails to meet their needs and something better comes along, they simply move on. Smartphones came along and when they became good enough, people simply stopped demanding new PCs.BillG once said to me of another legendary company facing challenges that things always seemed brightest before a precipitous decline. That’s what Windows PCs were facing. Windows 7 was peak PC the way Office 2007 was peak Office. Peak, not in terms of financial success, but peak in terms of influence, centrality, excitement, and general interest. Microsoft was in the midst of disruption, to use that overused phrase on more time. Not everyone agreed about where we were in the arc, and that was the problem.Either way, it was the end of the PC era.We knew that because we could read, watch, or hear about it all by swiping with a finger or by asking about it on that modern computer in our pockets or one of the hundreds of millions of tablets on sofas, in the back seats of cars, or in airplane seats. That computer was the reinvention of the PC. In no shortage of irony, the company that brought us this new computer was Apple—the company that for all practical purposes invented the PC in the first place.Windows PCs are never going to reach 500 or more million or more units a year as analysts had once predicted. The question was not how high sales would go but how low could they fall—peak PCs ended up being the Windows 7 upgrade cycle that resulted from a combination of poor demand due to Windows Vista, delays due to the recession, and lengthening PC lifetimes. A market of 300 million PCs is a fantastic business (about the same as 2007), but it isn’t two billion iOS devices in use or the more than three billion active Android devices. It certainly isn’t the growth opportunity of bringing PCs to every home and desk across emerging markets in Asia and Africa like we had hoped a year or two earlier.Did Windows 8 cause PC sales to decline because it was the wrong product for the PC? Or did the substitution of phones for PCs in the eyes of customers cause the decline in PC sales which made Windows 8 the wrong product? Years later all I can say with certainty is that those both happened at the same time, each correlated with the other. Importantly, would a more incremental and traditional release of Windows have really saved PC sales or even have spurred significant growth? Does anyone really think this today? I didn’t then and certainly do not today.Looking back, there are small things that I might have changed, though I can say with confidence that would not have altered the outcome. To date, no one has offered up a plan that would have had a better shot at helping Microsoft achieve the same level of impact and influence in this next era of computing. It makes for a fun column or Gedankenexperiment to explore the counterfactual, but I didn’t really have a way to do that in real time. There’s no A/B test in building Windows.Microsoft was going to be big for decades the same way IBM had remained significant, but it deserved its chance to earn a spot as influential and central a platform to computing as it had been originally. The most obvious answer is also the most difficult for me to accept, which is maybe there just wasn’t a plan. Maybe, unfortunately, where the world settled was inevitable. People moved on.It is easy to poke holes in this sort of logic. We were not caught off guard or in denial. This was not New Coke. We did not see that the youth market liked a slightly different PC, so we tried to tweak the PC to make it more stylish and appealing. Our strategy was similar to what Apple had done, though our approach brought our unique perspective. There was a clear case of parallel evolution, but Apple came to market first (again!) and there were many reasons to believe being second would have advantages, as had been the case for the PC, Windows, Word, Excel, Windows NT, Exchange, and so many other Microsoft success stories. That was not the case.When I look at the Tablet PC, Media Center, Windows Phone, or a host of other products, one thing is clear. Those products did not have the right substrate relative to how the market would evolve. There was nothing in those implementations that represented a first step in a progression to the products that did eventually dominate. It is fair to say the concepts were right, but the technical foundation was wrong because elements were simply not ready. Windows 8, in my biased view, had the right ingredients that were also market-ready.There is one exception to Windows 8 having the right ingredients, and I don’t know if the market gives Apple enough credit for what they have done. The Apple Silicon work is, at least for now, unparalleled. There was no likely outcome over the past decade that I think would have left Microsoft and likely NVIDIA in the position to compete with Apple Silicon, though a stronger Microsoft might also have influenced how Apple evolved. Apple Silicon was really in Apple’s DNA from the earliest days and was almost an inevitable outcome of the failure of Motorola, PowerPC, and then Intel to contribute to what Apple saw as its destiny. I look at that work and wonder how we might have responded because we most certainly would not have gone down that path. It was one thing to assemble the components and PC and bring it to market. It would have been quite another to have the audacity to create a chipset.Since leaving Microsoft at the end of 2012, I’ve spent many hours discussing and debating the specifics of Windows 8 with friends, former coworkers, current employees, start-up founders, reporters, and, well, people who are just curious. Most of the time is spent discussing platforms, ecosystems, and tectonic shifts that one faces after unimaginable success, at least when we’re not just tackling my favorite topic and the bread and butter of Silicon Valley, which is growing and scaling innovative companies and teams. There remains a desire, especially among the reenergized Microsoft community, for more about specifics on the perceived misdirected product choices. In many ways that discussion is both easy and impossible. It is easy because there are only a few things to point to. It is impossible because if the situation could have been so easily addressed by changing something that was so readily identified, then that would have made for a quick fix.Maybe wanting so much more for Microsoft’s products was the bigger mistake, more than changing the Start menu or breaking with legacy compatibility. That apocryphal Henry Ford adage about cars and horses was meant to point out that people express their needs relative to what they understand the possible solutions to be. Windows customers wanted Windows, a faster Windows, but they didn’t want something different…until they did.There’s an old USENET meme used to make fun of seemingly trivial problems by claiming something is the “hardest problem in computer science.” It might very well be that the actual hardest problem in computer science is a company reinventing its own successful computing product for a new era in a way that existing customers are willing and excited to use. The irony is that those same customers always seem willing, and excited, to jump to the next era of computing using products from another company. Maybe that is a net positive and it is nature’s way of restoring, even rebirthing, our technology foundation.The impact of Windows 8 and the way Microsoft chose to move on so quickly did have one important and chilling effect. Not only did so many people leave or were made to leave, but the culture that replaced them became risk averse and one that rewarded not failing more than taking risk. There was a fear of repeating a Windows 8, whatever that might have meant. For all the focus on growth and the ever-rising stock price, that meant growth of revenue more than new customers, scenarios, or business approaches. Soliciting feedback, voting on features, listening to customers, or creating products for all platforms are not substitutes for a point of view or strategic moat, as our industry has shown time and again—as counterintuitive as that might be.A decade has passed since Windows 8 and product releases from the company have done little to avoid the IBM fate, a fear of which BillG firmly implanted in my psyche.Half will read that and mock me for suggesting any of it and that explains all that’s needed to understand the failure of Windows 8. The other half will read that wondering who IBM was and when exactly they mattered. I started my career when IBM cast a shadow over every aspect of the technology industry and was fortunate to experience when Microsoft rose to that position. Bill instilled this very fear into all of us even before the internet or the split with IBM.Ibn Khaldun, an Arabic philosopher during the Middle Ages, wrote that in war “the vanquished always seek to imitate their victors.” In business it is often the other way around. The victors end up becoming what they vanquished, as victors inherit the same problems on a new technology and product base. It might take years, but creative destruction is just as certain to take place. My Harvard Business School friend and previous co-author Marco Iansiti once joked to me that the school considered rebranding disruption theory as physics or math, not simply theory.Despite how the product landed and then crashed, Windows 8 was the most committed, skilled, and brilliant Windows team ever assembled and it had one mission: to give the PC a new direction for a new world. Ultimately, under my leadership and management we failed to build a product that would change the trajectory of Windows or PCs. We failed, however, with elegance, grace, and an amazing group of people doing their most memorable and rewarding work. Unlike many failed efforts at Microsoft, we had remarkable execution. Like many failed efforts at Microsoft, we had the right ideas but the wrong timing. The Windows market wasn’t ready, but when it was ready, Microsoft was too late. Windows 8, therefore, was both too early and too late.Windows 8 was the last product to be made by Microsoft’s definition of hardcore software. Some will say that is a good thing. It is neither good nor bad, but simply is. It is how eras evolve and the torch passes from one generation to another.I was attracted to Microsoft by the level of product and technology acumen of every single person I spoke with all the way up the chain to the founder and CEO, the office with a door, the free drinks, and the Pacific Northwest. What really got me was what I saw as the true nature of hardcore software.To be hardcore is to be wildly optimistic about what can be achieved tomorrow while harshly pessimistic about what works today. Creating software is an art. It is computer science and engineering. It is inspiration, and perspiration. It is inherently individual yet relies on a team. Most of all, building software is a group of people coming together to conjure something into existence and turning that into a product used by billions.And that is Hardcore Software. 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

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 software provided the cool demos for Windows 7 touch. Surface came about from a research project rooted in long term efforts around optics and display technology. The effort was productized as the original Surface, with Panos Panay (PanosP) brought in to help accomplish that from the peripherals group. Unfortunately, the commercial viability of the table was limited. RobbieB, the executive of the division (that also included Xbox and phones), was looking to offload the effort or better said make Windows pay for it.We would move the team over to take on our hardware challenge if we could figure out an arrangement that would not torpedo the Windows business. It was this step that put a halt to all previous projects.Managing what could become a first-party hardware effort from within the Windows team posed significant challenges, even obstacles. PC OEMs would rightfully become unglued if they believed the decidedly limited, information they shared with MikeAng’s ecosystem team about their plans was shared with other OEMs. If their information were to be shared with a first-party team, that was even worse. Some of the earliest concerns expressed to regulators about Microsoft had to do with the walls, or lack thereof, between different parts of the Microsoft ecosystem and competitive parts in Microsoft, for example, between Windows and Office, where Office might have an unfair advantage. I had no desire to further a conspiracy theory.JulieLar offered her own set of challenges, but almost the opposite in nature. She was concerned about having a first-party hardware team that acted like an OEM more than a part of Microsoft. She wanted our hardware to fully embrace, not mangle, the Metro design language. I hardly wanted a team that would embrace the economics of OEM, such as crapware and expensive accessories.Collectively we wanted a decidedly-non OEM to be our OEM.Both Julie and Mike spent a lot of time with Panos to help us all arrive at a structure and work process that was set up for success. Panos joined Microsoft in 2006, relatively recently, after working at NMB Technologies, an expansive 60-year-old Japanese maker of electronics components including keyboard switches and skateboard ball-bearings (that I used to pay top dollar for in high school.) The complexities for Panos in jumping into the thicket of Windows were significant, not to mention the delicate nature of first-party PCs. The concerns for all parties were legitimate.The idea of a whole hardware team moving over, rather than building one organically, was worrisome, but we did not have the time to start from scratch. By most any measure, the idea that in about 30 months we would have a new ultramodern PC built on all new components the industry had never used before by a team that had only made a table computer was crazy. Panos’s commitment to being part of the massive effort was not just significant but deeply sincere. He saw the opportunity the same way we did—a chance to reimagine Microsoft.Working for Mike, Panos would expand the team in every dimension. Hiring and growing engineers for hardware, firmware, mechanical, plastic, manufacturing, acoustic, industrial, and safety, with designers from graphical to industrial to packaging, along with all the support functions I neglected to mention in that long list. We even had to embark on some special construction in the buildings to account for the needs of the kind of equipment required to build a PC.WDS was formed in June 2010 just as we were beginning to code Windows 8. We did not even send out an org announcement mail, keeping with the secrecy of the project. The name “Surface” moved over with the team and would naturally stick with the device when we were ready to bring it to the public. For now, codenames and codewords were in order. Not just one codename, but an entire system of codenames. We had codenames for every part including unique codenames used for each vendor – part combination. There were codenames for every presentation. Over the course of the project, we maintained over 200 codenames. Why? The secrecy was to maintain our commitment to keeping information separate.It is worth noting, we were piloting ARM work on NVIDIA Tegra hardware and seeding any groups across the company with ODM-style tablets housing Tegra components. No one inside Microsoft lacked hardware for testing, evaluating, or betting on Windows on ARM.The next 18 months were the most remarkable sprint in hardware development I could have ever imagined. Panos built an extremely tight and remarkably talented team to deliver products in relatively short time. Everyone stepped it up to a new level. One of the most critical aspects of assembling this team was his direct manager, MikeAng, who created a cocoon around the team, isolating them from all the forces internally. Mike also mentored Panos on the product development methods used to create Windows while apprising him of the best ways to integrate with the software team to avoid thinking like an OEM—the key problem we set out to solve.One of the things that Mike had to do which was super valuable for the whole effort was to be the “vault” for information about Surface and information about the PC ecosystem. The two orgs, Ecosystem and Surface, could have absolutely no information leakage between them. In many ways, the integrity of the Windows business model was in Mike’s hands. It was easy to trust Mike since I’d worked with him since he joined Microsoft out of college, and his post-Microsoft career included becoming a lawyer, so I think it is fair to say he was the perfect person for this role. As we’ll see it was just a bonus that he was exactly the right kind of engineer for this role as well.The core of the WDS team had previously worked together, but the scale of their previous projects was small by comparison—everything was bigger in Windows. The team doubled from the early days of mice and keyboards to a broad range of peripherals and most recently Xbox consoles. Ten years in, Xbox was selling about ten million units a year (about 800,000 in 2021) and the business remained roughly break-even due to console margins. We had much grander aspirations.The story of the two devices, both tablet form factors, that became the first Surface PCs was one of incredible design and engineering efforts going through a remarkable series of iterations in an incredibly short time and then scaling to manufacture millions. It was also a blur. Creating a PC was new for me as well. It is not only fair, but important, to say that without the collaboration across Julie’s product team, JonDe’s engineering team, GrantG’s test team, and Julie herself, we would not have Surface. Jensen Harris (JensenH) and the entire UEX development provided an attention to detail on everything from the BIOS boot screen the on-screen keyboard, sound scheme, to the out of box experience that rivaled anything Apple did. It is one thing to build a reference PC within the walls of Microsoft—something done many times before. It is entirely another thing to deliver the innovation and scale of products that we did, and then bring it to a worldwide market.I cannot stress enough how much of a whole-organization effort Surface was.We did not set out to build what the industry was calling a consumer tablet or a tablet for consuming information and lightweight computing needs, as many, or just Apple, characterized the tablet market relative to the PC market. The world did not need more of that. Microsoft’s heritage and business rested with productivity, so the overarching goal was to create a PC that was great for productivity, creation, and mainstream information work. The PC would just happen to fit the current definition of a tablet, which was smaller than an 11.6” laptop and usable as a screen and a traditional laptop posture.To justify building our own hardware we needed a unique point of view.We believed that if we could build a tablet that worked fantastically well for the web and Office, while being ultra-lightweight and ultra-reliable, we could redefine the device that constituted the bulk of PCs used in school and work. One of our most significant challenges was that the narrative for new devices was a dominated by tablet, meaning a keyboardless slate focused on consumption. This created the situation that even if we achieved our vision technically, we had an enormous communications challenge.The first Microsoft device, code-named GT or Georgetown for no real reason, was a premium ARM tablet able to deliver on the promise of PC-style mobile productivity. The whole point of building hardware as a first party was to do what the PC ecosystem would likely struggle or simply decline to do, and ARM was first among the challenges faced. The PC makers had all been struggling to enter the smartphone market, and ARM required a significant amount of product engineering and investment that was inconsistent with the low-priced mindset. Besides, they were fully occupied with Netbooks and later Ultrabooks and seeing little success with smartphones. As described in section 101, those OEMs working with ARM were genuinely enthused and supportive, but somewhat like Detroit’s reaction to electric cars, the internal tension proved too great to create and bring to market ARM, at least for the launch of Windows 8.Whether premium implied premium price along with a premium experience was an ongoing debate. Typically, in hardware designs, manufacturers work backward from a retail price goal, assuming a certain BOM, margins, volume to manufacture (impacting the BOM or bill of materials), marketing and sales costs, returns, and so on. As product makers, this makes intellectual sense, but it frontloads so many constraints that rarely do great products emerge. I chose to start from the user scenario and see how far we could go and what we could get for what price, knowing that as we converged difficult decisions would arise.This was a point of constant discussion with SteveB, who—and this was not news or even unique to this project—favored low prices and high volumes. Gaining market share was always preferable and what had gotten Microsoft to where it was. I felt this time we needed to take a different approach—reimagine what a Windows device could be even if that meant we start at the high end, perhaps like Tesla was doing at the time with Elon Musk’s famously not-so-secret secret plan to iterate to a lower price with greater scale, funding that iteration with earlier high-priced products.Early in the process, Mike and Panos set the tone for the role WDS would play in the overall strategy for Windows 8. It was extraordinarily helpful. The mantra for the joint efforts of hardware and software coming together was expressed as, “our job is to build a stage, a stage for the operating system and software.” This fit well with the whole design for Windows 8 software, which itself was viewed as a stage for apps and user creations. The idea that every layer of the system was trying to get out of the way of the other layers above aligned entirely with the Metro design language, and also exactly what no one ever did, especially OEMs. This was in stark contrast to typical PCs and even typical OS iterations of the past, which felt the need to announce themselves whether via branding (those Designed for Windows or Intel Inside stickers, for example, that don’t even appear on Apple laptops because they drove Steve Jobs crazy) or via icons, popups, or notifications.We were not designing the hardware experience after the software experience (or before); rather, we were designing the hardware and software experience together—a reimagined experience.I tried to keep my own role in check. I’d seen many past hardware cycles within the company where there was so much going up and down the chain, so much approval, and so much tweaking by executives. Plus, it is crazy easy to have an opinion on a device and act like some enlightened big-shot executive. Panos’s experience with executives at Microsoft rightfully made him wary of me at first. Executives often had an outsized view of their contribution while underestimating the amount of work, backchannel, and eyerolling they caused. Advertising, pricing, user interface design, and feedback on hardware were places that executives easily meddled. And for that, teams suffered.I used a lot of different laptops. I bought nearly every iPad typing cover available (and there were dozens). I was a road warrior, so I was real-time testing. I used browsing, email, and Office a lot. I could have probably justified my own opinions, and many times I really wanted to, but had to resist the urge. I had asked Mike and Panos to pull off what by any measure would be a Herculean task. My responsibility was not to meddle.From my vantage point in developing the product, there were five inflection points in the design process—a high-altitude view since there were thousands of choices made in developing the product. At some level these were choices to be made or constraints. The project could have easily become impossible or careened off path with so many potential degrees of freedom. Anyone who looked at the typical roundup of PC laptop reviews for back to school or holiday was left browsing a dizzying array of specs, ports, dimensions, and component choices. It would have been easy to get lost in all these decisions to be made. Each one of those decisions is related to many others in an ever-complex set of linear equations to be optimally solved.The team picked these key points in the design process: chipset, the productivity posture, typing, materials, and peripherals.By establishing the initial platform of ARM and a sub-11” form factor many of the traditional “spec” issues of designing the device would fall out. But this understates just how many and how fast, Panos and team needed to put constraints in place—constraints that would maintain a point of view and deliver a product.The chipset was perhaps the most straight-forward choice for the team to make on technical grounds, though hardly without controversy or for lack of a better word politics. There was a good deal of pressure from the Windows Phone team and from some OEM partners who were still trying to build phones of their own (though on Android now) to go with Qualcomm. Qualcomm was viewed as a safe choice and the choice with the most intellectual property and lawyers to support that. On the other hand, the early hardware was far from ready to build a PC especially the graphics support which was so critical. It was the first taste of developing a product where the choices had implications beyond building the best experience. My own view from dealing with Qualcomm was that they were more concerned with the volume of devices we would commit to up front than with the quality or innovation we would deliver, even early in the process.The teams working across Windows porting to ARM were favorable to NVIDIA given the choices we had. In particular, NVIDIA was strongest on graphics which were key to the Metro-style experience. The underlying graphics chips mapped closely to our DirectX API and made developing device drivers supporting the animations and effects we needed with the performance we required as straight-forward as could be given all that was new. Aside from that NVIDIA was a joyful partner and great at working with ODMs to supply test hardware.Ralf Groene (RalfG) led hardware design efforts for WDS. He joined Microsoft with a classic design education and experience at several marquee design houses in Silicon Valley. If we were casting a movie for an industrial designer, Ralf would be perfect. RalfG and the design team were cycling through prototypes of sizes and overall form factors at an incredible pace. Engineering for productivity and typing fell to the design team, with a very strong collaboration with the UEX team to make sure the software could gracefully adapt to the presence or absence of a keyboard and trackpad.The kickstand was such an amazing choice. Yet I lack a clear recollection of the genesis of it, only that the moment I saw it I was convinced it was an inspired choice. Having a kickstand solved the main problem tablets had, which is how to keep using one when you wanted to put it down or more importantly to type. The kickstand could easily have been a gimmick but in fact it became an iconic element and one that served to further the point of view centered on the dual modalities of consuming content hands-free and full-time work on the go. The kickstand would have tradeoffs in real-world usability, especially with the larger devices to come later, but the for the first generation I felt it was exactly the tradeoff to make.The design team iterated with a kickstand, something that had been found on some early media players and phones. Should the kickstand be two small legs, one fatter leg, or something else? Should it support both landscape and portrait? The team settled on a full-width kickstand, almost a fold-out foot that provided a rock-solid level of stability. That stability came from a unique hinge design, created entirely by the mechanical engineers on the team. Opening and closing the hinge had the feel and robustness of a luxury car door, a German one of course. As the hinge closed the air dampening effect would give the motion a soft cushion with a nearly inaudible, but intentionally there, sound of luxury. I once spent time in the lab with the mechanical engineer on the team amazed at just the complexity and number of choices that were considered in the design and fabrication of the hinge. It was a great example of how every small detail is vastly more complex than readily apparent.The beauty of the hinge and kickstand were that they reduced the thickness of the whole productivity scenario by quite a bit—the plastic cases of the iPad including Apple’s own cases were true compromises. The 2015 Folio, which added two layers of material in a complicated origami-folding design and later the 2018 Magic keyboard, which was just heavy at 600 grams or 130 grams more than the iPad itself, were both awkward. The latter keyboard added so much weight and thickness to the iPad that it was more practical to carry a laptop. Whereas Steve Jobs had to sit in a chair holding the iPad, with Surface one could hold it or flip out the kickstand and watch the move while enjoying popcorn, or having a video conference with the integrated HD webcam angled precisely enough so it would capture your head and not neck or below when placed on a table.Important for the productivity posture was the overall size. When working, a screen can never be too big, but when traveling a screen can never be too small. Finding the balance was super important. The math would work out super well to have a screen that was 10.6-inch diagonal but with a widescreen layout of 16x9, the typical HD or Blu-Ray numbers. At 1366x768 the screen was equally optimal for the new Windows 8 snap view to show two apps side-by-side—GT as a stage for Windows 8—and also to display movies full screen without the drawbacks of letterbox modification that consumers hated.There was quite a bit if a debate over 16:10 versus 16:9 aspect ratio and the possible screen resolutions. UEX favored the extra width of 16:9, though 16:10 offered more vertical space for productivity but could not support side-by-side apps. The availability of components and cost of using the UEX preference made it a tough choice. This was also an area where we were going against the iPad trend which picked a more traditional even old 4:3 aspect ratio used on NTSC TV and VGA monitors at 1024x786 which was also criticized in reviews for letterboxing widescreen video. The iPad was between wide screen video and the traditional trade book and Amazon Kindle aspect ratio of 3:2.From a supply chain and manufacturing perspective, the choice was more complex. The supply chain for screens was following the volume of all manufacturers combined. No single manufacturer could simply order a size not being used by others without committing to volume. In 2011 the dominant size for tablets was a 10.1” screen with 1280x800 resolution, a 16:10 aspect ratio. We saw the 1280x800 resolution as a waypoint, picked for price by the Android tablet ecosystem. It was neither good for productivity in landscape nor good for reading in portrait mode.We were deeply committed to having a screen that supported the side-by-side view of two apps in landscape. This came with a real tradeoff, however, in the usability as a pure tablet. In other words, even from the choice of screen we were optimizing for productivity. When used as a “reading tablet” the portrait mode orientation of 9:16 was particularly awkward. Reading with one hand holding the device was tiresome, like holding a college chemistry textbook in bed. Additionally, traditional laptops with 13” or 15” screens had moved in large numbers with Windows 7 to the 16:9 and 1366x768 resolution, indicating that resolution was an excellent design point for apps and would be around for years to come.The screen had two other technical issues to work through with significant impact on the experience. First, the core display technology for LCD screens was in the midst of a transition from MVA (Multi-Domain Vertical Alignment) to IPS (In-Plane Switching) with the latter being the newer technology. Going with the newer technology would be preferred as a basis for applying a touch sensor, but that further constrained the potential supplies and sizes.Second, the display panel would need an extra stage in manufacturing to attach a touch panel sensor. There were two approaches here as well. The standard approach, again for Android tablets, was known as air-bonding. In this technique the touch panel does not directly touch the underlying display panel leaving a small gap which eases manufacturing. Unfortunately, this also introduces parallax, an effect by which where you touch and where the sensor detects your touch do not always align in your brain. This is seen at check-out counters and ATMs which prefer the manufacturability and low-cost of this approach. While cheaper, it is a disaster for precision work on a PC. The newer approach, direct bonding, used by Apple and more premium tablets, directly bonded the touch sensor to the display. This was more expensive and had a non-trivial defect rate increasing costs as well.The way you know from the supply chain that you are asking for something difficult is that the price goes up and delivery goes further out. The suppliers, all singing from the same page, strongly encouraged a 16:10 screen with 1280x800. Their view was that this was the volume tablet resolution. After many trips and many meetings, we were able to secure a high-volume supply of the 10.6”, 1366x768, IPS, direct bonded screen. This was a tough choice and added early risk, but once you lock in a supplier as a volume partner risk finds a way of decreasing. I suspect over time even for the 10.6” screen we would have gone with a more comfortable aspect ratio, but by then we would have had more answers to windowing and productivity than we had with Windows 8. I’m getting ahead of myself.Productivity without a keyboard is not really productivity. We were not confused about this point as they were in Cupertino. Productivity without a mouse or trackpad, on the desktop, was not even possible. Because Windows RT had the desktop and desktop Office, a trackpad was required. The 10.6-inch diagonal screen would create a case with a 10.1-inch long edge, which by no accident was wide enough for a nearly full-size home row of keys for touch typists. This could be a huge advantage over the keyboard for the iPad, which was only 9.5 inches across, making a big difference in key size and spacing. Our screen size allowed for arrow keys and a row of function keys with the trackpad. These small differences bring a world of benefits when designing devices with which people have such intimate reactions. This is decidedly different than a desktop PC or even a large laptop. There’s something about a device that must be held that makes small decisions so much more important.The keyboard presented a unique opportunity to innovate to maximize portability. Panos himself personally an expert in mechanical keyboards and part of Microsoft’s own efforts in innovative keyboards was well-positioned to develop two keyboards we would introduce with GT.Fundamental to the keyboard was the idea that it would be faster and more accurate than touch typing on a glass screen and include a trackpad for precision, or “professional,” pointing as so many reviews of iPad noted was lacking. Since GT had a kickstand, the keyboard did not need to also serve as a redundant cover for the back but when folded to cover the screen would offer screen protection. The underside of the keyboard was covered with a layer of what I always termed northwest fleece with a soft woolen feel when carrying GT around in your hand.Our folding keyboard could make an easy transition from productivity and typing to reading or watching while lounging around. The keyboard itself was a touch-based invention from Stevie Batiche (StevieB), who was the resident scientist/engineer leading all things touch and display, and a genius. We would also add a very thin mechanical keyboard, one of the thinnest mechanical keyboards ever released to market. Our hearts would be with the touch keyboard at launch owing to its productivity and on the go scenario.StevieB’s ultrathin keyboard invention was essentially a touch panel with ever-so-slightly raised key outlines impressed on the panel. The electronics were created by laminating several layers of materials including a touch sensor and all the “wiring” together in a hot press machine—sort of a touch screen sandwich. The keyboard, called Touch Cover, was a mere 3.2mm and weighed only 7 ounces and under 200 grams. Given the dimensions of the screen, Touch Cover was able to incorporate a trackpad on par with many small laptop trackpads and a complete set of laptop keys including dedicated keys for Windows 8 charms along the top row, which also doubled as traditional PC function keys. In US English even the F and J keys had slight outward impressions for traditional typists to find the home row. There would be many skeptics about the keyboard when it came to typing proficiency. While there were many risks in the entire project, at the time Touch Cover seemed like the riskiest part of the project. It would be so immediately visible and open to snap opinions. The press that typed for a living were used to their preferred “feel” when it came to laptop keyboards, often a sore spot for just about every Windows laptop review.GT had a beautiful hinge and an incredible touch keyboard, but how to attach the keyboard posed another challenge. Because of the hinge the cover could not be attached to the back of GT, but that would be dumb anyway—adding weight with no purpose was what we saw on the iPad. Once again, the mechanical engineers had a go at the problem. They put magnets to work. Not just any magnets, but a series of magnets of exactly the right strength to support the device, even swinging it from the keyboard, while also easy to remove. The magnets did not just attach the keyboard to the tablet but they were the connectors for the signal and power. Attaching the keyboard had to perfectly align the connectors or it would not work.The magnetic keyboard was a more difficult to path to perfection and reliability. Upon first seeing it, just as most others, I was skeptical. Would it fall off? Would it properly align even when connected in a sloppy manner? Would flipping it around to use as just a tablet prove “goofy” or would it really work? Would Windows correctly enable the on-screen keyboard at the right time and get out of the way entirely when a keyboard was attached? Would it work just as well for the thin mechanical model?The process of connecting the keyboard to the device proved to be more than just reliable but something of a signature. The first time we showed the Surface to the team that would lead creating television commercials they immediately connected with the “click” sound the engineering team worked so hard to get right. That click would become the centerpiece of the initial campaign along with the profile of GT and the keyboard. A subdued version of a magnetic connector also with a click would be used for the very small charging adapter. Ironically, Apple’s pioneering MagSafe connector that was so popular on MacBooks was not used on iPad, which took its lead from iPhone for charging. Even today Apple continues to struggle with magnets when it comes to covers and keyboard cases for the iPad. The new 2022 iPad typing portfolio with a kickstand is kind of a mess.The removable keyboard provided several advantages. To compete in the “pure” tablet market the keyboard could be priced optionally and also be reviewed as an accessory versus required. It also permitted personalization by choice of colors since the laminating process was able to substitute any color materials for the back or front. The back of the Touch Cover could be customized in both material and look, for example corporate logos or art as we later offered. Finally, StevieB’s innovative touch panel was not restricted to keys and could be used to create any touch surface. Since it could be removed easily, we envisioned the potential to have specialized Touch Covers dedicated to specific applications. One example we showed early on was a synthesizer drum app mated to a custom keyboard. At a small, private event held one night in Los Angeles I even had a chance to watch actor/musician Zack Efron of High School Musical have fun with the prototype music generating cover.The materials choice for inner fame and device case were almost always where the OEMs made choices that were best for the bottom line—plastic provided low cost, light weight, rigidity, ample room for cooling, and agility across component and peripheral changes. This is where Microsoft’s ability to provide a significant investment could make a real difference in the final product. The engineering challenge with case materials is the triangle of cost, weight, and rigidity. Cost is not only the cost of the material, but the manufacturing cost of making the case, with all the curves, holes, and cutouts that make it a computer. Materials can be inexpensive and lightweight but too flexible to be durable—the screen is glass and needs structure to prevent it from flexing and breaking. Materials can be rigid and lightweight but cost a tremendous amount, such as ceramics used in fighter jets. Aluminum is lightweight and relatively rigid, but to bring the cost down Apple invested a huge amount of upfront capital in order to take blocks of aluminum and use mechanical milling to turn it into a PC.We needed the device to be as thin as possible and from the start we considered every fractional millimeter we could save.  We knew that bringing over Windows in one product cycle, including the desktop, would bring real challenges to our ability to compete with the nine hours of video playback possible on the iPad. We needed every available millimeter for battery. An innovation in materials could prove a game-changer.In research, the materials scientists became intrigued by a relatively new process of injection molding a magnesium alloy. Such a material was expensive and the manufacturing process complex, but the resulting parts were lighter than machined aluminum, extremely rigid and strong, and created by more flexible molding. At this point, the injection molding process had only been used for small parts such as watch frames or jet engine components, but the materials partner, Mike, and Panos’s team thought it possible to use for the much larger cases. The material could be readily colored via a permanent and robust vapor deposition process, which afforded other opportunities.MikeAng, a mechanical engineer by training and certified alloy welder, dove into the process, visiting the factory in Asia. He returned with movies of cases being injection molded that looked like scenes from 20th century industrial America—sparks flying, molten flows of metal, giant machine presses.Betting GT on this new process was one of the more uncertain aspects of the hardware design, and also very expensive, relatively. The high upfront costs made us all nervous. With any upfront cost, called NRE, or non-recurring engineering costs, the only way of justifying them is to make a lot of the product which spread the cost across many devices. That was certainly our intent.The material would get the name VaporMg, pronounced vapor mag. Finished in a smooth, so smooth, black-gray, the material was another manifestation of the collective efforts of design, materials, and manufacturing coming together. While we originally planned to make the entire case out of VaporMg, supply constraints resulted in a more traditional aluminum frame with VaporMg used more sparingly. While that resulted in a bit of increased weight, the resulting scaled manufacturing and cost reduction were a good tradeoff.There’s no doubt that VaporMg was the most extravagant choice in the whole project and one I felt the most over-extended in considering. In a big company with plenty of money, it is not uncommon to see branching out into new areas take on almost comically bad cost controls relative to industry norms. Without experience or baselines to compare and with all the excitement of “those other people doing this must be dumb” it is so easy to do this. Across the product, Mike, Panos, and team had extremely good controls and constant attention to the BOM, bill of materials, and NRE. Mike was a product of our frugalness in Office and brought that to this project and team. The VaporMg choice was one I felt we should go with even though it was so uncharacteristic for me or much of Microsoft.One thing we considered was that we could reuse the materials process and plant capacity with other OEMs and license it to them for whatever devices they wanted to build. The idea of acting as a source for various components was a step we considered for trackpads and touchscreens as well as we saw OEMs unwilling or unable to take on the NRE costs to create competitive laptops. Once again though, I probably failed to consider they also viewed such costs unnecessary when it came to their share battle competing with other OEMs more than competing with Apple.VaporMg was so strong that the team turned a standard GT chassis into a skateboard, on a lark. As a former skateboarder this thrilled me to no end. At one of the many press events hosted on campus offering a behind-the-scenes look at developing hardware, I skated around the lobby of Studio A. Not to worry, I was wearing a helmet though it was a borrowed bike helmet we located just for the photos. We snapped some photos that continue to live on. To further demonstrate the strength of the material, we showed off the drop-test machine that simulated dropping a tablet with different forces and angles and even directly on the kickstand—each time GT performed admirably. Protected by the Touch Cover, the combination felt relatively indestructible. The screen was securely protected without any extra casing on the back maintaining the thin profile and light weight.Finally, productivity for a premium laptops and tablets circa 2012 still depended on wires or more specifically dongles. Apple’s MacBook Air approach of wireless everything was conceptually great but practically a pain, certainly in the early days. Carrying around dongles to connect to projectors or to USB devices was annoying and error prone. As a tool for productivity, GT needed to show up at a meeting and get handed the slides on a USB drive, pop the drive in, launch PowerPoint, and then connect to a projector, or handle devices like microphones and speakers. As a stage for Windows 8, we had optimized this type of flow from a performance and user interface perspective—get to the user’s work product and get to work as quickly as possible.Mike and Panos framed GT as a device that should connect in the way people needed it to connect. GT had a standard USB port, standard audio output, and a mini-HDMI port in addition to the dedicated magnetic-charging connector. The USB port was rather tricky as it set a minimum thickness that was not an issue on the iPad that did not have a universal USB connector. The fat USB port was a bit ugly and some on the industrial design team referred to it as a “missing tooth” in an otherwise sleek profile. At one point we were so close to the standard for a connector we risked losing the trade group designation and permission to use the logo. This in addition to strong support in hardware and software for all the current wireless protocols for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth including support for wireless speakers and displays. This array of connectivity defined the soul of the device and shouted out point of view that the device was not a peripheral but a full computer.Power adapters had become the bane of my existence as someone who used a variety of devices at home and work and travel. It was still too early to have a standard connector—Apple was still using the wide pin connector, which was painful and finnicky despite the super nice magnetic connector. GT created an ultra-skinny magnetic connector. I was, however, much more interested in the power brick. I could not stand the typical PC that had a three-foot cord to the PC, then a brick, then another three-foot cord to the wall. It turned out people in Japan disliked those too and Yodobashi Camera came to the rescue with an aftermarket model, a single 2 meter cable with a brick at one end with folding prongs. I stocked up on those. I really wanted GT to have an adapter with simple folding prongs. I wanted this so much I didn’t even bother to ask about non-US plugs. As a constant traveler, I was also cursed with hotel rooms with too few outlets. Back then I almost always had to unplug a lamp which usually involved moving furniture around. I often traveled with an after-market phone charger that had an extra pass-through outlet to charge a USB device. I needed this because PC USB ports did not charge when the PC went into standby, which I usually discovered at 6 a.m. local time.Okay, so I meddled once after complaining one too many times.One day RalfG invited me over to the studio and brought me through dozens of models for power adapters. I knew as soon as I got to the studio that Panos was managing me, but in a way that was entirely okay given how close we’d become. As we walked from 3-D model to model, I opined and envisioned about what it would be like in a hotel room. They explained to me all sorts of stuff about thermals, tolerances, UL standards, and even patents. One company had a patent on prongs that folded into power bricks! I picked the smallest adapter with folding prongs and a built-in USB charger. I like to think this was another iconic choice. It was not. It was merely useful. Ultimately, GT did not have a USB port on the charger but did have folding prongs. The second device had the USB port I wanted on a slightly higher-powered charger.From the project start we had been considering a second device. Early on, Mike had suggested to me that the team could build a desktop all-in-one using a screen with the next generation touch panel technology from the Surface table running an Intel processor. This device was the concept for a follow-on or successor to Surface table. It was a beautiful device. The prototype followed the same lines and hinge as would appear much later after many iterations as the Surface Studio all-in-one.We really wanted to showcase desktop productivity, especially the all-in-one form factor, which had no presence with PCs. Apple made all-in-one Macs as their desktop Mac and those, as with iPads and MacBook Air, made their way into every movie, high-end retailer, and boutique office setting. An all-in-one with the GT premium aesthetic could put Windows in those spots too.PC makers finally decided to wed the displays they were making with the laptop parts they made to create all-in-ones competitive with Apple iMac. Windows 7 saw a broad introduction of low-cost and reasonably performant all-in-ones, which was great to see.The arrival of PC all-in-ones and the reality that the next generation screen technology was not ready, especially in a large size and at scale led to us abandoning the all-in-one product. A good deal of work had gone into the basics of developing an Intel PC, which presented us with an opportunity.Standing around the now defunct all-in-one prototype, we discussed the idea of creating an Intel-based GT with the Surface BOM, or a derivative of it. At first, I thought this was entirely against the spirit of the project as it would simply compete with our OEM partners and cause more of a rift than not. At the same time, I’d been so happy with the progress we were making while equally aware of the limitations customers would see in ARM-based Surface. The early prototype tablets like the \build Samsung had the promise of being great tablets for using and testing Windows 8 apps while also working as platforms to build those apps or use any existing x86 Windows development tools.Would the existence of a Microsoft-branded Intel device help address customer concerns, or would it create more confusion? Would OEMs see such a device as an inspiration, or would it further annoy them? What would Intel think?I had many concerns about forging ahead with an Intel-based PC coming from Microsoft. It did not seem prudent. Frankly, it felt more like an extra poke at OEMs when our main goals were embodied in the ARM-based device. What could we offer uniquely as a stage for Windows 8? The Ultrabook investments were ongoing, but Intel’s specifications called for them to be large-screen devices for Intel-specific channel strategies. Everything that was a tablet or Netbook-like computer, less than Ultrabooks, on Intel was running low end chips that had mediocre performance on Windows. What if we mated mainstream laptop chips, Intel Core, to the GT form factor? We would have an ultraportable Intel-based Windows 8 device in an ultra-convenient Netbook-sized package. There was nothing like it in market, an ultra-portable Ultrabook.The team took this as an opportunity to up-level all the specifications from GT. More of everything including a full HD screen, faster USB, support for dual monitors, bigger battery, more memory, and storage, and by default it would use the Type Cover with mechanical keys. We were super confident in the Touch Cover, but we saw in early usage that it did not have the throughput for a full-time professional user on this professional-oriented device. We weren’t going to be religious about it and quickly adapted.The up-leveled GT could in fact contribute something that would help enormously to smooth over the risk of building hardware. We could offer a super high-quality pen experience, exactly what BillG wanted. Since the device would be more portable, resembling a typical paper notebook, lighter than scarcely available Tablet PCs, it might prove to be the ultimate pen-based notetaking device. The fact that we could focus an Intel SKU on the pen and handwriting and deliver a size that the OEMs were not considering provided a reasonable justification in favor of the device plan. The up-leveled GT filled an obvious gap in the whole ecosystem lineup.Why did we not put a pen on GT? The power draw and thickness of another layer added by the current state-of-the-art pen digitizer would impact the competitiveness with iPad. Prioritizing the ARM device to be competitive with hardware specs of the iPad was a key factor, and a good tradeoff for us to make. Given my own reticence about the pen it was also an easy tradeoff, though I had to repeatedly defend it with BillG.This was enough positive and with MikeAng we considered or gamed out how the OEMs would respond to an x86 device. Our main point was that the OEMs were focused on Ultrabooks in order to gain the advantages of Intel pricing. Our device would fall outside Ultrabook specs and thus prove more innovative and less part of the crowded Ultrabook space.From my perspective, I viewed the device as an objection handler. It was a way to signal to the market that Windows 8, the x86 product, was well-suited to playing in this new world. Instead of a focus on ultra-mobile and all-day battery life, the focus was on power and all the needs of professionals in an ultra-mobile package. This reflected the early reviews of Windows 8 and the challenges we were having with the tablet narrative as put forth by Apple and reviewers.GTX, or Montlake, was the code name for this second device. It looked bit like a puffed-up GT. Unlike GT, GTX would have all standard Windows PC components from the chipset to the BIOS to storage and RAM. It would also have a fan, and to mitigate that the team developed innovative cooling slots all around the device to keep internals from overheating or creating a hot-to-the-touch exterior. By virtue of it being Intel based, GTX had noise and heat that GT did not, and had about half the battery life more typical of the real-world numbers being seen for the first generation Ultrabooks, about 4-5 hours, compared to the 9+ hours we would see with GT.GTX was about three months behind GT. I was clear that GT was the priority should trade-offs in any dimension be required. By the time we announced GT we would announce that GTX would be available three months later. For many that gap felt amateurish compared to the most recent Apple launches which had announced new devices on a Tuesday for sale on a Friday. As we know now, that was not the long-term norm for Apple nor was it how the iPad, Apple Watch, or other devices launched since. Nevertheless, Apple was doing everything right at the time so as agile as I thought we were, it was still less than was expected of us.By the early spring of 2012, the manufacturing team started making small runs of test devices. It took months of work to scale up an assembly line, and it was expensive to make devices in any quantity for testing. Plus, everything was top secret. We had made about 1,000 test ARM devices partnering with NVIDIA, which were being used mostly in labs. They were also shared with teams across Microsoft contributing to WOA under the strictest security protocols. We never had enough of these test machines for everyone who might have wanted one to just check out, but we had enough to build the software across Windows, Developer, and Office. These devices cost over $1,000 each and were great to have but decidedly test machines. I was still using our NVIDIA test device, but, as with anyone who knew about GT, I was anxious.Time was passing both slowly and quickly. We were closing in on finishing the Windows 8 software schedule, August 2012, which meant time was slow as each day fewer and fewer code changes were made. GT, however, was getting close to the point where it was time to commit to manufacturing. Spinning up a line means you want to ramp it to full capacity and not stop, otherwise we’d just be burning cash.Surprisingly, there were absolutely no leaks. Even across Microsoft no one suspected anything, certainly not first-party hardware. With Windows 8 RTM approaching, the overall messaging for our reimagining point of view would start to diffuse through Microsoft. That meant talking about hardware. At a regularly scheduled Board Meeting I was asked to provide an update on Windows 8. As the code was essentially done and we had broad disclosure already there was little to do but assure the Board that we were on track and to discuss the worries we all collectively shared. The Board, however, had not yet seen the final GT hardware. In many previous meetings we discussed ARM and the strategy, including building first-party hardware, and I had previously shown demonstrations using the NVIDIA testing prototype. My sense was that the gravity of the decision to make first-party hardware had not really sunk in—the general view of “competing” with our OEM partners was still viewed as a challenge, especially because the Windows Phone Team had tried to create a phone but ended up partnering with Nokia, before later acquiring the company.Whenever I spoke with the Board, I was always excited to show the progress of our product—so long as we were ready to, and it would not be over-promising or confusing. I would almost always drive a demo myself casually and without much fanfare—not only was this more authentic, but it also permitted a more casual interaction. With GT I did just that. At one point I just pulled it out of my bag and began to show it off just as we had been doing in incredibly limited ways. The pitch was easy because it was what we had aimed to build. Promise and deliver.The Board and Steve, however, were much more focused on the big decision to sell first-party hardware and the bottom-line impact to the overall Microsoft P&L and earnings. I think the Board was still smarting from the Xbox write-off five years earlier. This ended up being the discussion, which seemed awkward to me as we had articulated this as the strategy from the start of the project. At the meeting, I was starting to get the feeling that I had in 2001 when we suddenly backtracked on the fully-baked Office.NET product plan. Only this time I felt I had laid all the groundwork and had discussed this at several other meetings. In hindsight, I suppose it was the reality of seeing the actual device and that we were delivering that made it all seem that much more real.There was a tense discussion about the costs, especially the hundreds of millions of dollars to build out the final assembly capacity and the balance of creating enough units to keep the cost down by spreading the non-recurring costs over as many units as possible but not too many that we’d flood the market. One thing I had done specifically was not play any games with the budget or expense approval. Many projects at Microsoft spent a lot of money by spending a little bit at a time so as not to exceed an executive’s approval limit. My whole career, with the help of CollJ, I kept my spending authority artificially low. The spirit of my mentor JeffH was always looking over my shoulder reminding me it was Microsoft’s money and not mine to spend. This meant SteveB had to approve all the spending and we would have to have the discussion up front. At the end of the meeting when the Board asked the final approver question, there was no doubt in my mind. At the same time, strategically and from the perspective of how well we had executed there was no doubt. I was accountable for the result and was certain we should move forward and said as much. SteveB and I would have several more discussions, mostly centered on the price point and volume before he hit approve on the invoicing tool.Before the first public showing, I wanted to show the device to PaulA. Paul was an early advocate of Microsoft building hardware and had several forays into leading-edge hardware through his Vulcan innovation company. I brought a device over to his office near the stadium used by the Seattle Seahawks. As someone who said he believed the old saying about those serious about software building hardware, Paul was excited to see what the team had accomplished. We spent most of the time in a deep discussion about hardware manufacturing, the bill of materials, and how Microsoft would scale the business. Paul’s Vulcan had built an ultra-portable PC powered by a novel Transmeta chip, which aimed to be Intel-compatible and consume less power. He was profoundly connected to the challenges of making hardware and at the same time agreed on the need to do so.We set a date for a public unveiling in mid-June 2012. Just two weeks before at the All Things Digital Conference, we wanted to make sure one reporting team got a bit of a preview, only one team. I was using my Surface RT all the time, but not in any public places, and essentially handcuffing my messenger bag to me. D10, the 2012 conference, featured Apple’s Tim Cook, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and a host of top-shelf guests, including SteveB, but no Windows demo, Phew.We prepared to give a brief and private demo at the conference. We did not schedule any time but instead sort of set up a bit of an ambush outside on the terrace of the show’s green room. I messaged show co-host Walt Mossberg and asked if we could find 15 minutes between his on-stage interviews to show him and Katherine Boehret something very cool and secret. He was intrigued and they both of course agreed.JulieLar and I would meet them and provide a surprise sneak peak of Surface. This was the first showing to anyone outside the Microsoft “tent” to see it. I grabbed my top-secret messenger bag from the hotel safe and met Julie and our audience of two backstage.I offered a brief lead up, reminding them of the Windows 8 vision and goal of reimagining Windows from the chipset to the experience. I then took out Surface RT from my bag and said, “So, we built a computer.”We showed them all the bells and whistles. And they were, at least by my account, speechless for a more than a brief moment. We just smiled while they took turns handling the fully functional sample.Then they had a lot of questions. How much would it cost? What would the OEMs think? What was the battery life? When would it come to market?Wait…would it even come to market? Katherine asked if it was a prototype or one of those PCs we built to encourage better PC design. We assured them that this was going to market as a first-party device.Walt asked about one of his most significant issues with Windows PCs, the prevalence of crapware—that software added by PC makers to “enhance the value” by offering trials, advancing PC makers extra hardware (such as buttons to launch specific software), and other add-ons that you probably don’t want but significantly impact performance. On this topic I was extremely confident in answering. The whole point of creating Surface was to show the marketplace what the very best Windows experience could be. Little did I know just how difficult it would be to maintain this seemingly obvious point of differentiation.While I had many fun moments described here in Hardcore Software, this surprise for a team I respected so much was one of the highlights. I wish I had a photo of the moment.Invitations were later sent out for a mysterious event in Los Angeles with no hints of what to expect and little notice. The venue was a Hollywood production facility, Milk Studios. More than 200 press, financial, and industry guests made their way to the sound stage the morning of June 18, 2012. Some were still complaining about the short notice, the time, the location, and the lack of detail.On stage, SteveB introduced Microsoft’s move to hardware, emphasizing that we would not let barriers between hardware and software prevent us from innovating and serving customers. At the end of his section, he unveiled Surface, not the keyboard or the kickstand or any specs. It was the CEO photo op lending all his gravitas to the event.The stage was small but had been designed with a runway making an intimacy possible, which would become a hallmark of Surface events. The risers were beveled at 22 degrees, the same angle as the kickstand.As I looked on, I stepped through the demo in my head for the 1,000th time. I had my Surface RT in hand with the screen polished as bright as a signal mirror, using a trick the team had of buffing with hand sanitizer and a microfiber cloth. As Steve was finishing, I touched the power button like I was supposed to and noticed the slightest little screen twitch. I brushed it off.Rookie f*****g move.I walked out on stage, as excited as I could ever possibly have imagined. About 10,000 people had worked on what was about to be shown for the very first time. Microsoft had never done such a surprise announcement before. We had never spoken to a room of people without pre-briefing them. Everyone was on edge.Proudly, after making my way down the narrow runway, I announced Surface, a stage for Windows 8.Two minutes and thirty-one seconds into the presentation, I was showing the new Internet Explorer. As I touched the screen for the audience, nothing was moving.I muttered “Oops” and skipped backwards up the runway to the demo table and grabbed the backup. What felt like ten minutes was nine seconds, the longest nine seconds of any demo I had ever done. Who crashes the hardware during a reveal we practiced two dozen times flawlessly? Me. The guy on stage who should have swapped out the machine when the screen twitched. I could physically feel Mike, Panos, and the demo team backstage cringing.Then the teleprompter went out too.I kept going. In a bit of stage craft, I introduced the magnetic connector and a nice cover with smooth fabric on the outside, jokingly referred to as “Fine Northwest Polartec®” (it was just nylon), an innovation as well. I attached the cover with a memorable click—that great work of the mechanical team.I posited to the audience: Why shouldn’t we do something more than cover the screen? To oohs and aahs, some gasps, and then applause, I extended the cover to reveal the full multitouch keyboard. At least that worked I thought.The main reveals were complete. Phew. I made it through the crash. Backstage the team was despondent but also worried about how I would react. I was so disappointed in my failure to switch devices. That it happened at all still nags at me a decade later.MikeAng then came on stage and flawlessly demonstrated the Intel-powered GTX, newly named Surface Pro, including writing on screen with a pen. I know that made a certain person back in Redmond very happy. Mike then introduced Panos. Panos detailed the team culture and design process: RalfG, StevieB, Pete Kyriacou (PeteK), Brett Ostrum (BrettO), and so many featured in a video Panos showed before a deep dive on all the technologies in the product.We concluded and then opened up an area offstage where the press could experience the device. Despite my troubles on stage, letting them see the device in action proved the right call. It wasn’t a free for all, but it was something.As the press and guests filed to the open area, one of the best in the business stopped me. By all accounts hyperventilating, Joanna Stern then of ABC News had just one question, “How did you keep it a secret?” I like to think we got more done than that, but that was a remarkable accomplishment for Microsoft. Some inside the company would be critical of the secrecy, specifically critical of me, but especially for Surface the nature of the business required it. The test hardware running essentially the same componentry was available to all participating teams.With the product in hand, I started to use it more regularly. Just after the show I made it a point to use it on my regular places around headquarters. I had a photo snapped while eating lunch at Kidd Valley, my favorite protein and low-glycemic index spot right by campus.One of the most useful traits of Surface running Windows RT was how even if something failed it took only a few seconds to restart the device and get back to where I left off, especially while under development. That made it more worry-free than a Windows laptop, as we expected and designed for. It was also so fast to resume from standby, and the Metro Mail app connected to Exchange was constantly fetching email even when in standby.When AnandTech’s  Anand Lal Shimpi reviewed Surface at availability in an extraordinarily detailed and in-depth review of almost 9,000 words, the conclusion was just what we hoped to achieve.I don't believe Surface is perfect, but it's a platform I can believe in. What I'm most excited about is to see what happens after a second or third rev of the design. [. . .]If you're ok being an early adopter, and ok dealing with the fact that mobile devices are still being significantly revved every year, Surface is worth your consideration. If you've wanted a tablet that could begin to bridge the content consumption and productivity divide, Surface is it.My first day of work I could not even get a PC the size and sound of a small refrigerator to connect to a network and run reliably. How far we’d come. I held in my hand a PC that could survive a 10-foot fall, rebooted in seconds, running the best software Microsoft ever created, weighed under 2 pounds travel weight, and easily connected everywhere. I could not be prouder of the work the team had done.Over the summer as the product wound down we began planning for what would come next. This almost sounds crazy with all that was going on. We had created a machinery for delivering products. It was incredible to be part of. To think that just five years earlier the team, mostly the same team, had just struggled for six years to create one release and we created two releases on time, with none of the stress and strain relatively speaking, and with very high quality. We needed to keep moving.Windows 8 was a 1.0 release. Perhaps by many accounts it was a 0.9 release, at least for the reimagined part. The Win32 and Intel part of the release was incredibly solid. It was indeed Windows 7 plus more. The team knew we had set out on a multi-year, even decade journey. I knew we would need to operate completely differently.There would not be a Windows 9 next. In a very short time over the summer, we organized and began planning on “Windows Blue” which is a name I picked to signify it was not another big release. We had a lot of finishing to do. Microsoft never got anything right in the first version, or even the second. We needed to move the team to think about acting with precision in a timely manner so we could, in Microspeak, crank out a release every year.We created a vision and a schedule for a release to finish in one year. The entire goal of the release was to refine everything from RTM. Refine the platform. Refine the user experience. Refine the core built-in applications and service connections such as SkyDrive and Outlook.com. Decide on a long-term Surface roadmap. The list was very long. Above all we’d fix the things that were so obviously not complete, such as requiring a trip to the desktop to use files or change a PC setting. And yes, we would pay close attention to the reviews as they came out. Though I can say even today, we would not have planned on a full retreat, a redo, or a reset.Microsoft takes three versions to get things right. We grew up with that reality. The world was moving ahead with or without us. We were determined.On August 2, 2012, Windows 8 went to manufacturing. We finished 120 days late from our original schedule. The Surface assembly line went into operation. We had a fantastic event on campus. Once again the administrative assistant team outdid themselves.August was always a busy month at Microsoft. The field sales organization held their annual rally/strategic coordination meeting with almost all of the global staff. Microsoft usually held a company meeting around that time. There was also a Wall Street event or shareholder meeting. These events are the rhythm of a large corporation.August/September 2012 was also when the company came together to get behind Windows 8. For all the concerns and issues raised as the product progressed, there was an electricity and a sense of excitement. People had seen the doldrums for the past decade. People had seen PC numbers declining. People had seen Microsoft lose in mobile, fall behind Linux, and not yet have a role in cloud computing. While the financials the company was putting up were fantastic by any measure, the buzz was gone. More than a buzz, the company wasn’t a leader. The company wasn’t, for lack of a better word, relevant. We all believed, and genuinely hoped, Windows 8 would offer a chance to be the industry leader again, not just the biggest company, but the most relevant company.At both the global sales meeting and the company meeting we presented Windows 8 and Surface. The global sales meeting told the story of Windows 8 and why it could win. The field of course were worried about the missing Start menu. I shared some usage data comparing how the Start screen compared to the Start menu. Rather than trying to jam all the functionality into a tiny corner of the screen we showed how people saw the information from Live tiles and made full use of the screen, all maintaining familiar positional memory and muscle memory. It was just one point but the kind of message you send to the field that says, “we heard” and here’s what we consider to be the case. It was not spin. It was what we believed.What I remember though was not apologizing for the Start screen, but the absolutely incredible and over-the-top reception just when I walked out on stage. I have never felt so much gratitude from 30,000 people all at once. I got to stand there, head bowing, absorbing that gratitude for the team back in Redmond. I stood on stage to applause for nearly a full minute. Humbling doesn’t begin to describe the feeling. I couldn’t say it enough at the time, but I can once again say thank you to the global field team for that welcome and appreciation on behalf of the team. It was so genuine, so unexpected, and just so wonderful.Just a week later we gathered at the Key Arena in Seattle for the company meeting. While much of the message was the same as MGX, this was headquarters and that means it was mostly the product development groups and company staff. They wanted to see the long version of everything. We did everything to deliver. We had the biggest hardware lineup of Windows 8 PCs MikeAng had ever assembled. PanosP came out and “debuted” Surface once again. Tami Reller walked everyone through all we had done to bring the products to market. We had an amazing and relaxed time. Once again, the reception was just over the top. It was amazing.We had one more surprise even after all of this. One of the many great joys of being part of creating Surface was the chance to work with a creative team in Hollywood who would bring Surface to television and web advertising. The team was headed by movie producer Andrew Panay, brother of Panos. He assembled a team of creative people to write, visualize, and direct the television spots, the sound stage for the launch event, a worldwide street art campaign, and a plethora of other materials. Andrew was already a seasoned film producer (Wedding Crashers), and their early ideas and pitch made it easy to decide to collaborate with the team on a whole new approach. Andrew, with his keen eye for talent, brought in the director Jon M. Chu to create the marquee television debut for Surface, called Movement. The commercial featured the iconic “Click-In” sound, the hinge action, colorful touch covers, and a troupe of talented au courant dancers. Astute viewers and frequent travelers would later recognize some of the dancers from another well-known spot from Chu, the Virgin Atlantic safety video. Chu would later direct G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Crazy Rich Asians, and In the Heights among his dozens of credits.We debuted the spot not only for all of Microsoft HQ, but for SteveB as well. Steve did not like surprises, but I had a strong feeling he would love this commercial. It was high energy like Steve, and it sold hard on the attributes of Surface. It was cool. It was hip. It was, well, everything Microsoft was not.Steve, MikeAng, Tami Reller, Panos, JulieLar, and some others stood by the green room looking on to the full venue of 20,000 or so employees as the lights went down and the commercial debuted. The arena and SteveB went bonkers. Score another awkward high-five moment for me and everyone within a 20-foot radius. The commercial was a moment. The campaign went on to win awards in the advertising world as well, something that Microsoft had not accomplished in ages.Both events really demonstrated that Microsoft’s headquarters personnel were excited, optimistic, supportive, and a great many were direct contributors. Certainly, we had not experienced anything like that in the past decade of Microsoft.For the October launch, the Microsoft Store team secured New York City’s Times Square, for a Surface and Windows 8 block party celebrating the opening of the new flagship Microsoft Store. The launch event itself was in an enormous hall downtown. It was filled to capacity. For me personally it would be mostly anticlimactic like all launch events usually were.Walking around Times Square that night among thousands of people at our own party was crazy. But my mind was not there. I was thinking about what was going to appear with reviews and more. The plan was to only sell Surface RT in Microsoft stores. I was thinking about how we would sell all the Surface devices we built. Our plan was to sell exclusively through only the few Microsoft Stores. I did the math on that, and it was scary. I worried about the aggressive pricing of $499, or $599 with Touch Cover. I was thinking about the Start screen. The desktop. The App Store. The Windows team. Windows Blue. All those people who had done so much, given so much, done such a fantastic job.I loved this company. I was also exhausted.About a year before that big launch, I wrote an email that I would deliver on my last day of work at Microsoft. Unsent then, I knew it would go out in the not-far-off future. I stored it in my email drafts folder and held onto a printed copy, undated and unsigned, in an envelope in my Windows logo Timbuk2 bag along with my Surface tablet and my 16 pages of printouts of the vision, staffing, budgets, product reviews, compete info, and the dev schedule that I always had with me. I told nobody about that letter.I wrote it after a big debate at a cross-division executive meeting over the degree to which Windows 8 would be designed to sell other parts of Microsoft—how many of those colorful Metro tiles would be pushed to customers, not because each was a good product choice but because we wanted to sell them something else. I was being excessively principled, as I was known to be, believing in the primacy of the customer experience. I believed others were being too flippant with our role as a platform provider and a significant reason why we could make a better PC for customers. “It is not the user’s PC, it is our PC,” one exec opined. “Sure, it is crapware, but at least it is our crapware” and “We fought the DOJ so we could own the screen” others chimed in.Product cycles are emotional roller coasters. Anyone who has ever gone through one knows there are dozens of times when it just gets to be too much. The more seasoned one becomes the more one knows never to do anything precipitously. I knew it was time for a change. I intended to get through the launch. The plans were in place.I was spent.Equally clear to me was that the company was spent too. Microsoft needed to do things differently, without me.On to 108. Epilogue: The End of the PC Revolution 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

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 difficult conversations with the Microsoft Office team about the role of Office on Windows 8, specifically Windows 8 on ARM processors, including the ARM device we were developing in-house that was quite secret at the time.Old OfficeWe always knew going into Windows 8 planning that developing a new platform and new API meant also enlisting the support of the Office team. This was not some innovative thinking on our part, but literally the Microsoft playbook from the founding of the company.A platform cold start requires a huge leap of faith from the consumers of the platform. The best way to seed interest in the platform is to have flagship applications that can be demonstrated to other developers to get the flywheel going. Cool apps on a platform attract more app developers which lead to cooler apps. Sometimes this is even labeled “killer application” though I think that is a bit dramatic since it doesn’t kill but brings life to the platform. Having Lotus 1-2-3 on MS-DOS, Microsoft Excel, Aldus PageMaker, and also Microsoft Word on Macintosh cemented that platform. Excel and Word were crucial to validating Windows and even to Microsoft’s ability to complete building Windows for significant applications. Ultimately Office on Windows 3.0 proved to be a tipping point for Windows. In a turn of fate, Windows also proved to be critical to the success of Office as a productivity suite. Microsoft not only came to define this virtuous platform cycle but benefitted itself with Office.Platform shifts offer a unique moment when all bets are off, and the new leaders can emerge. It is why Bill Gates was so tuned in to creating and betting on platform shifts and why Silicon Valley always seems to be seeking out these moments. Recall from the earlier section 011. Strategy for the 90s: Windows, that platform shifts can be so dramatic that even within a company people decide to quit over them. My first manager and programming legend Doug Klunder (DougK) famously left Microsoft in the early 1980s over the strategy change to build a Macintosh spreadsheet rather than ship the MS-DOS spreadsheet that he had built and was certain would beat Lotus 1-2-3. That spreadsheet and Doug’s recalc invention (minimal recalc) formed a core part of Microsoft going forward and Doug later returned.As discussed previously, many describe nefarious means to the rise of Office on Windows compared to Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect among other leading MS-DOS productivity tools. Within the leaders of MS-DOS applications, none prioritized Windows above all other platforms. Instead choosing to nurture their existing MS-DOS successes and character-mode user experiences. Microsoft uniquely bet on Macintosh and then Windows, perhaps because it lacked the mega-successful MS-DOS applications business the others possessed.  Nevertheless, Microsoft bet and bet big and bet early. The rest is history.Little did I and the other leaders on Windows 8, all of whom had previously worked on and led Office, realize how the tables would turn. Here we were at the start of Windows 8 knowing that we would be introducing a new platform and fully aware of Microsoft’s own playbook. We knew it would take convincing but at least for me I failed to fully internalize just how difficult it would be for Microsoft to collectively make a bet on a new platform.At the Windows 8 Vision Meeting, I sat next to Steve Ballmer and the guests from across the company, including the leaders of Office. We showed Office running in the prototype sketches just as we showed Office running in January 2011 on ARM at the CES show and then later at //build. The Office everyone knew and loved running in the desktop. It was right then at the Vision meeting that SteveB leaned over to ask me about Office for tablets and the new platform.I said, definitively, that we had a huge chance to build a new kind of Office application for this new world of mobility, tablets, touch, and more. It wouldn’t be like the current Office, and it wouldn’t be like browser Office—the project started back when I was in Office. We had a chance to define the new user interface paradigm for this new style of productivity, much as how Office came to define the user interface paradigm for mouse and keyboard.We had many conversations with the Office team throughout building Windows 8. Our goal was simple—convince the team to build a new kind of app for the new Windows 8 platform. We did not want to port the existing apps to Windows 8 any more than we wanted any ISV to do that. Microsoft’s own experience with the first version of Word for Windows, a legendary mishap caused by trying to port code from one platform to another, was enough of a lesson to create institutional knowledge of the risks of doing that. Even the early releases of PowerPoint on Windows suffered from the difficulties of trying to port from Macintosh. Many might remember the difficulties Microsoft had with Word 6.0 for Macintosh which did not fully embrace the look and feel of Mac and disappointed.The world changed a great deal with iPad and web browsers. The historical strengths of Office focused on fine grained document control for printing gave way to multi-player (a recent nomenclature for multi-user) collaboration, sharing, and online consumption, and considerably less demand for formatting. There would be ample opportunity for a new type of application. Perhaps if we collectively developed that, we thought, we could avoid the pressure to provide Office per se for Windows 8, which we knew would be a massive undertaking for a new platform, even futile.Office was eager to experiment with OneNote, which was supporting mobile, browser, and more and was widely praised for an innovative experience in an important scenario. Doing something more significant was proving a challenge and a bit frustrating for us. In order to understand the situation, it is important to recognize the situation Office found itself in in 2010 and what really drove strategic choices.Historically, the biggest factor in weighing choices for Office has been the maintenance of the value of the overall bundle (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and the Access database) and with that the pricing. Key to maintaining that value was compatibility with “full Office” meaning the complete feature-set of desktop Office. In other words, when sales and marketing were confronted with either a lower-priced or less-featured variant of Office the response was to focus on backward compatibility for dealing with old files and email attachments from anywhere, on the familiarity with the user interface, aka the Ribbon, and on the value of the bundle.  By 2010, the Office brand came to represent the Ribbon user interface, the full Office feature set, and support for documents and custom Visual Basic solutions that existed across thousands of enterprise customers.Office continued to face somewhat acute challenges to the business from Google Apps (previously Google Apps for Your Domain, often colloquially called Google Docs, more recently G Suite, today known as Google Workspace.) Google pushed Google Apps relentlessly through the incredibly successful Gmail launch, something we would do with Windows Live and the Office browser-based applications. Google Apps was making real progress in the academic market, where the product was usually free. Small business was also adopting Google Apps owing to the push via Gmail and the easy use of the apps after registering an email domain with Google. Most importantly, enterprise customers under budget pressures following the Global Financial Crisis also began to consider Google Apps. Use of a difficult economy to put price pressure on Microsoft was something I’d experienced through every downturn since the Gulf War. Customers not only had the option of Google Apps, but they could also maintain full compatibility with Office by simply sticking with the Office they already owned and not upgrading, putting the Enterprise Agreement renewal in jeopardy. Losing even a single deal had the appearance of a “share shift” and a series of 3 deals would likely be followed by industry analyst quotes or even press releases from Google, and suddenly there was a trend.The presence of this competitive threat made offering anything at all new seem risky. A new product would call into question the value of “full Office” and certainly anything priced at app store level pricing would draw attention to the nearly $200 per year Office was receiving in enterprise agreements, which today could be over $40 per month for Office 365. With a few thousand Enterprise Agreement customers, taking on this kind of product challenge was a level of risk that the Office team was not going to be comfortable with all that easily.Office for Mac, long mostly out of sight and out of mind, had become a lot more interesting of late. Back when I was in Office and following the release of Mac Office 4.x and Windows Office 95, the legendary deal between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates was struck. Most recall this deal through the lens of antitrust and Microsoft throwing Apple a life preserver just as Steve Jobs returned to a company on the brink of bankruptcy. Microsoft indeed paid apple $150 million in exchange for patent rights which would ensure the end of litigation between the companies. In exchange, Apple also received a commitment to Macintosh and that Office would continue to support the platform. It was then we (in Office) created the Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) staffed at 100 engineers to start. The goal for us was to stop kidding ourselves about doing a great job of cross-platform support and let the Mac team focus on Mac and the Windows team focus on Windows, with judicious code sharing as the MacBU, staffed with Office engineers, deemed necessary. From that time forward, August 1997, the Mac team went merrily on its way as did Windows.Each of the subsequent leaders of MacBU were deeply connected to Apple, and discretely so. The business relationship required that. Most of Mac Office was sold not through Microsoft’s typical enterprise accounts but direct to individual customers. As Apple’s new retail stores scaled, the sales of Mac Office through that channel quickly became the primary means for Apple customers to acquire Office. MacBU found itself somewhat beholden to Apple for distribution, price support, and even launch PR. In exchange, MacBU dedicated its efforts to being a fantastic client of the Mac OS as it evolved. Such support had become increasingly difficult as Windows and Mac diverged and then as Mac became a diminishingly small part of the overall business, unlike the 1980s when it was more than half the business. The deal created a win-win for Apple and Microsoft, not to mention Apple customers.Part of the relationship between MacBU and Apple included early access to Apple technologies under development, exactly as Microsoft had done for Windows with leading vendors. By offering this, Apple hoped to garner MacBU support for the latest platform technologies. The transitions Apple made to the new OS X and then later to Intel processors all but required Office to be present from the first days of availability. Apple knew this. MacBU knew this. Our industry knew this. It was the way platforms worked.As part of this work, MacBU also began to migrate the Office code base from the older Macintosh operating system APIs to the new OS X APIs called Cocoa. As previously mentioned, Apple had a different way of evolving the OS compared to Microsoft. Apple not only strongly encouraged ISVs to move to new APIs, but it also obsoleted APIs thus requiring ISVs to move. Sometimes with their big code bases, the important ISVs would slow roll these moves. Adobe was (and remains) legendary for its slow pace of adoption. MacBU tended to be nimble, due at least in part to the ever-present connection in the Apple retail stores. Plus using the latest was a pretty cool thing to do in the Mac community.As Apple’s new tablet came into existence, MacBU had to decide what to do to support it long before the general public or anyone else at Microsoft was aware of the project. To its credit, MacBU guarded Apple trade secrets just as Apple would have hoped. No one outside MacBU was aware of this project. Apple lobbied the team to make Office for iPad. Part of the promise was that the new iPad APIs were reasonably close to the OS X APIs and the work would not be crazy, taking advantage of the migration to Cocoa.Of note, this was decidedly not an approach taken by Windows 8. Apple had already spent a generation modernizing the APIs for the iPhone and pushing ISVs to adopt more modern approaches for Mac. In other words, they were way ahead of Microsoft.It was not quite so simple though. Apple threw a few wrinkles in the mix. First, Apple had put a good deal of effort into its own suite of Mac apps, called iWork, which were direct competitors to Office. This proved frustrating for Microsoft and also provided leverage for Apple. If MacBU didn’t follow an Apple strategy, Apple would for its own iWork.Second, iWork was cheap. At the early days, iWork cost $79, substantially less than Office which usually sold for $150 but up to $280 with Mac Outlook. MacBU was no happier about a low-priced competitor than Windows Office was, but this was especially problematic because of the first-party nature of this competition. Whatever MacBU offered for the future tablet was going to need to be price competitive or face a real uphill battle.Related to this, the iPhone app store already demonstrated that pricing for apps would be much lower and much less favorable (to ISVs) than selling boxes of software at retail. Few apps sold for more than $9.99 and all had a perpetual license for as many devices as someone owned. That was not close to the level of pricing (and margin) to support the MacBU R&D commitment, especially without significantly more volume.Third, the iPhone OS and by extension this future tablet would not initially support “full Office” for all the same reasons that Windows 8 would not be able to. The security model, the user experience, and even the setup and distribution tools all were substantially less functional or at least different enough. Simply porting Office to the tablet was no more possible for MacBU than it was for Windows Office supporting Windows 8. Maintaining the complete meaning of the Office brand—and the name—along with the price point would be impossible. The concerns over pricing, cannibalization, and the Office brand on the new Apple tablet mirrored those of the Windows Office team. Still, unlike the Windows team, the Mac team began investing in the new tablet and by the time we were deep in discussions about Office and Windows 8 there was substantial progress on Apple’s new tablet OS. I did not know this at the time, but once the iPad was announced I was made aware.This created an awkward situation. If there was indeed a new, or a port, of Office for iPad but not an equivalent product for Windows 8, Microsoft would look confused at best or dumb at worst. MacBU was caught between its own business needs and the strategic needs of Apple while the Windows Office team was caught between its business needs and the strategic needs of Microsoft overall.Meanwhile the Windows Office team was doing great work retargeting Intel-based Office to run on ARM processors. This was not trivial or zero work but was super well-understood. Much like Windows NT, Office had for a long time been insulated from the specifics of chipsets and instruction sets. So long as the compiler could generate the right code and the Win32 APIs were available the effort was straight-forward. Going as far back as the January 2011 CES meeting, Office had native builds of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for ARM using Win32 and these were important to our demonstrations of SoC support.Our plans, however, did not include making the Win32 API available to third parties on ARM. As described previously, the Win32 API for apps presented many challenges on ARM including power management, security including viruses and malware, and full integration with the Metro user experience such as contracts for sharing information. Outlook was particularly problematic when it came to its power usage due to all the background processing. After a decade of fine tuning, the power profile for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were excellent, far better than most all Windows software.We intended to provide the desktop for working with files in Windows Explorer along with the traditional control panel for settings. Admittedly, this would prove to be the source of more confusion than convenience. Still the situation was not unlike that of the MS-DOS command box on Windows to some degree, especially on the non-Intel versions of Windows NT.The bigger problem would be how an ARM device would require a keyboard and mouse to use desktop versions of Win32 Office apps as well as the Windows desktop itself. While all ARM devices would support a keyboard and mouse, not all would have one readily available as some would be pure tablets like the iPad. The Office team introduced some user interface redesign to better support touch, but at a fundamental level Office required a mouse and keyboard for any sort of robust usage.After a series of difficult conversations culminating in an executive staff discussion we arrived at an end-state where we would ship Win32 desktop versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and Metro-style OneNote. It is not without irony that I reflected on the fact that OneNote exists because we (in Office, me and others) made a bet on the Tablet PC edition of Windows when the team building the OS failed to demonstrate user interface mechanisms or scenarios for how or when a pen could be used for word processing or spreadsheets. Not only did we feel we had ample user interface metaphors we also believed we articulated the type of platform changes around touch, cloud, and mobile that could be incorporated to build a new and unique productivity tool.When it came down to it, the Office team did not want to invest in a subset of Office, reduce the brand value proposition for the apps because they would lack support for Visual Basic and other enterprise features, or take on the risk of developing something entirely new. The biggest challenge for Office on iPad would prove to be the same as many other existing ISVs faced, the iPad app pricing and licensing model. Office was early moving customers to Office 365 and on Mac the business was still the $150 perpetual license. There was no way to charge that much for apps on iPad at the time, especially with Apple apps priced at $9.95. The App Store rules would prove complicated for Microsoft as well, who would not want to cede subscription revenue to Apple. I’m sure there were many discussions with Apple that I was not part of.Ultimately, the Microsoft Office team had the same choice to make for the iPad as it did for Windows 8 but chose one way for the iPad and the other way for Windows 8. It was the same type of platform choice faced 30 years earlier when the Microsoft Apps team faced building a spreadsheet for MS-DOS or for Macintosh and then Windows.I obviously understood all these reasons deeply from my own first party experience. At the same time, the company’s choice felt to me like the most conservative approach we could take at a time when we needed to be taking on more risk. The company was going through a difficult period and was getting beaten up for the risks it was taking by investing across search, gaming, web, and because of the inability to get ahead on smartphones and browsing. Reducing risk to Office at a time like this is what can happen when a company sees defending the existing business as the top priority over what could viewed as innovation or new opportunity. Platform shifts are extremely difficult for the existing leaders, and Office was a leader on both Mac and Windows.On ARM devices the lack of Metro-style Office (also called Office for WinRT) would prove even more confusing to the market because it would appear as though we were holding back key platform capabilities by not making it so simple to port applications to the desktop. We knew there would be little interest in providing native ARM applications from third parties who would have to go through all the effort to port and support when there were plenty of Intel-based systems out there for their customers to use. Most desktop applications for sale that were under active development were also the kind of tools that required high-end PCs and were not optimized even for laptops, applications such as those from Adobe, AutoDesk, Dassault, and the like.Apple provided iWork for the iPad from the initial launch of the iPad in 2010. They used the iPad as an opportunity to purpose-build tablet apps. By 2017, iWork was free across all platforms. Apple had nothing to defend and only benefitted from the effort to support the platform, so I suspect this was all relatively easy for them to do.During that executive staff meeting we had the difficult discussion about the existing iPad apps for Office as well. In this case, the same concerns expressed about Office for WinRT existed for Office for iPad. The only difference was that Office for iPad was well on its to being done by late 2011. The team was concerned about what to call the apps, the lack of Outlook for iPad as they had only built Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and the feature differences between the apps on iPad and Windows. Outlook would follow many years later, based on an acquisition of a Silicon Valley startup. Office settled on a business model where the apps were free for existing 365 subscribers or a $99 in-app purchase. Non-subscribers could use the apps to view, but not edit, documents. It would be messy and frustrating for customers who were searching the Apple App Store for “Word” and “Excel” in huge volumes and finding nothing from Microsoft.Collectively we agreed that it would be embarrassing for Microsoft to have tablet apps first on iPad and then never on a Windows PC. The subset of Office apps would be released for iPad in March 2014. In 2021, Microsoft released an all-in-one app called Office, which supported each of the apps in a single download as well as Microsoft’s cloud storage, OneDrive.The world was waiting for validation from Office for the new Windows 8 platform and would only see that through OneNote, which was a nice addition but not the killer app that platforms require. While I am certain there is no one aspect to Windows 8 that contributed more than any other to the market reception, the lack of Office designed for Windows 8 was a top issue.Big Windows 8 Consumer PreviewThe march of external Windows 8 milestones continued.After the //build conference that was so energizing we held an event highlighting the app store that would be part of Windows 8. We held the event in San Francisco and ran through the economics of the store and the opportunity for developers. Antoine Leblond (Antoine) led the entire event as he’d also led the team building the store from scratch.The Windows Store was another part of the whole of Windows 8 that went from a blank slate to complete offering in the span of the release. By the end of 2011, just months after the //build conference we already had the store up and running and soon developers were able to exercise the app submission and approval process. As with the WinRT API we had the process and tooling well-documented. There were no major hiccups, and the store did what we needed it to do and did so gracefully.From the time of the Store event through the broad beta test, the marketing and evangelism teams worked tirelessly to onboard developers of all sizes and get their apps into the store. Going from 17 sample apps from interns and the apps built by the Windows team (Mail, Photos, Calendar, Contacts, and more) to hundreds of apps available just after beta including many first-tier consumer apps was a huge accomplishment.The final major event for all of Windows 8 was to release the broad beta test. Normally we would not have a special event for a beta but given the huge change and major effort involved in releasing a new platform we chose to use the massive mobile telephony industry meeting, Mobile World Congress (MWC), in Barcelona, Spain to announce and make available the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. This would be a downloadable release available to anyone right after our press event on February 29, 2012.MWC was also the big event for Windows Phone and usually where there were big announcements. The 2012 show was between phone releases, with Windows Phone 7.5 already in market and Windows Phone 8 still under wraps for an end-of-year launch coincident with Windows 8 for PCs.Therefore, the big news for Microsoft would be the broad beta test for Windows 8. We were excited. So far, while there were questions and certainly challenges, primarily bootstrapping the new platform, we’d seen positive results from developers, launched the Windows Store, and the product was solid. The Consumer Preview was a refinement of the Developer Preview, with no major strategic changes from the release less than six months earlier.The event was only for press held in a jam-packed tent of about 200 people. We were feeling pretty good about the planned presentations. While there was no strategic news, we had made over 100,000 product changes since the developer preview.Our primary message was the complete Windows 8 story: the operating system, apps, the Windows Store, and PCs and peripherals that would shine on Windows 8. While the world was fixated and obsessed about tablets, we continued to emphasize our message that computing devices were converging. Mobile platforms were rapidly gaining capabilities and in many ways such as power management and sensors surpassing Intel-based PCs. On the other hand, Intel-based PCs had a quality resurgence with Ultrabook specs and Windows 8 would bring touch capabilities and proper apps to Intel PCs with touch screens. I would always emphasize that we expected traditional laptops to incorporate touch screens and remind people that at some near future all their screens would have fingerprints.Julie Larson-Green (JulieLar) and Antoine Leblond had a series of demonstrations including the Windows 8 experience and many apps that had been submitted by developers to the store. The progress in just a few months on the Windows Store and third-party apps was a positive sign for the platform overall.Mike Angiulo (MikeAng) and I showed off a very exciting and broad range of Windows 8 PCs from small tablets through a giant Perceptive Pixel 82” touch screen, the kind used on CNN for election night. The emphasis was on how Windows scales across the form factors and price points all with a single operating system.Following the conclusion of the event a press release went out detailing the availability of the Consumer Preview for download. Within less than a day, the release was downloaded a million times. The Windows team back in Redmond was more ready than we were at the Windows 7 beta, standing by for the download traffic. Everything went smoothly.The press coverage of the event and importantly the reviews for the release were quite good. I know as you read this, you must be wondering if I had too much Cava in Barcelona. How could professional tech reviewers possible like Windows 8? They did. I swear. In the first couple of days, we had over 250 first looks and reviews. Nearly 70% of them scored over 110 on the PRIME score measuring overall tone, where 100 is neutral. There were 4 perfect scores at 200. Only 13% were scored 90 or less, and this is during an era where Microsoft typically averaged 90 on most product launches.Like the Developer Preview, across mainstream media, tech enthusiast press, and even broadcast we received an incredible volume of positive to effusive comments. I sit here today writing this and I know readers must think there is either highly selective editing on my part or some sort of conspiracy to rewrite the past. I can assure you it is neither. In writing Hardcore Software, I made it a point of researching and rereading much of the contemporary press for every product, even Windows 8 product reviews.We spent two weeks on the road with the press doing briefings and dozens of outlets received the Samsung tablet from //build and the near final Consumer Preview release. Unlike most previous Windows releases we did not run into technical problems, but rather I received quite a bit of private communication expressing positive impressions and almost a surprise at the combination of radical and yet comfortable the Windows 8 experience seemed to be. Once the release was available, reporters started to comment in their reviews, blogs, and even tweets:“Brace yourself, Windows users. Microsoft’s operating system is poised for stunning, dramatic change.” —Christina Bonnington of Wired“By the time the final version ships later this year, it’s clear that Windows 8 is going to be a remarkable, daring update to the venerable OS. It is a departure from nearly everything we've known Windows to be. You will love it, or hate it. I love it.” —Mat Honan of Gizmodo“In short, Windows 8 is elegant, dynamic and beautifully created.” —Jeremy Kaplan of FoxNews.com“It’s an interface that’s girding itself to compete with the iPad as much as the Mac, even though it’s not an iPad knockoff.” —Harry McCracken of TIME“Windows 8 is evidence that the old tech company is quite capable of bold moves and impressive innovation.” —Michael Muchmore of PC Magazine“One thing is knowable now: With Windows 8, Microsoft has sweated the details, embraced beauty and simplicity, and created something new and delightful. Get psyched.” —David Pogue of The New York Times“Don’t confuse the friendly interface with superficiality. This is Windows and can do all the things we’ve come to expect on a Windows PC.” — Wilson Rothman of MSNBC.com“The first beta of the next-gen operating system is eminently touchable, definitely social, and maybe just a bit sexy.” — Seth Rosenblatt of CNET“Overall, I’m extremely impressed with the next version of Windows – the features, the new ways of interacting with a tablet, and the potential of it all.” —Joanna Stern of ABCNews.comEven the first apps available in the Windows Store were receiving positive feedback. The quality of the apps available in the store was quite good. This was very early in the mobile apps era. This makes it difficult for most to think back to how relatively basic the software was at the time. Android apps were notoriously flakey and while there were huge numbers of iOS apps, most did not do very much. In evaluating the first apps from the Windows Store, Joanna Stern of ABC News (a new beat after moving from The Verge) tweeted “First impression: the apps I see for Win 8 are already 100x better than the ones for Honeycomb or ICS [Ice Cream Sandwich, the code name for the next Android release]. Very exciting.”Techmeme and Google News (which was the new cool place to look for headlines) were filled with coverage and positive headlines. Google News registered over 9,200 stories from the sources it crawls. This was our first Twitter-centric release and Windows 8 had almost 200,000 tweets in the first 24 hours, at peak there 20,000 per hour. It might not seem like a lot, but the Twitter-verse was relatively small in 2012, at just over 100M.One of our perfect score reviews, a 200 PRIME and 5 on message pickup, came from David Pogue at the New York Times. Pogue was no fan of Windows and was super well-known as an author and expert on Apple products. He wrote books on all the major systems and devices but was always a bit grouchy when it came to Windows. I had flown down to San Francisco to meet with him and pre-brief on Windows 8. He gave me an earful and I was quite concerned about the pending review. I wanted to share a bit of what the review had to say:It’s a huge radical rethinking of Windows — and one that’s beautiful, logical and simple. In essence, it brings the attractive, useful concept of Start-screen tiles, currently available on Windows Phone 7 phones, to laptops, desktop PC’s and tablets.I’ve been using Windows 8 for about a week on a prototype Samsung tablet. And I have got to tell you, I’m excited.For two reasons. First, because Windows 8 works fluidly and briskly on touch screens; it’s a natural fit. And second, it attains that success through a design that’s all Microsoft’s own. This business of the tiles is not at all what Apple designed for iOS, or that Google copied in Android.. . .Swipe from the right edge to open the Start menu (with Search, Share, Devices and Settings buttons). Swipe from the left to switch apps. Swipe in and back out again to open the app switcher. Swipe down to open the browser address bar.If you have a mouse, you can click screen corners, or hit keystrokes, to perform these same functions.These swipes take about one minute to learn. On a tablet, I can’t begin to tell you how much fun it is. It’s evident that Microsoft has sweated over every decision — where things are, how prominent they are, how easy they are to access. (If you have the time, watch the videos to see all of this in action.). . .But one thing is knowable now: With Windows 8, Microsoft has sweated the details, embraced beauty and simplicity, and created something new and delightful. Get psyched.I want to be sure to capture both the grief he gave me in person and what he wrote in the review. Many reviews indicated that there could be potential for some to have difficulty using the product or even wanting to make a change, though the reviewers themselves did not express the difficulty. When it came to expressing the weaknesses of the Consumer Preview, Pogue said:The only huge design failure is that Microsoft couldn’t just abandon “real” Windows completely — desktop, folders, taskbar and all those thousands of programs. So on a PC, hiding behind this new Start screen is what looks almost exactly like the old Windows 7, with all of its complexity.In other words, Windows 8 seems to favor tablets and phones. On a nontouch computer like a laptop or desktop PC, the beauty and grace of Metro feels like a facade that’s covering up the old Windows. It’s two operating systems to learn instead of one.. . .Look, it’s obvious that PC’s aren’t the center of our universe anymore. Apple maintains that you still need two operating systems — related, but different — for touch devices and computers. Microsoft is asserting that, no, you can have one single operating system on every machine, always familiar.The company has a point: already, the lines between computers, tablets and phones are blurring. They’re all picking up features from each other — laptops with flash memory instead of hard drives, tablets with mice and keyboards. With Windows 8, Microsoft plans to be ready for this Grand Unification Theory.It’s impossible to know how successful that theory will turn out to be. Windows 8 is a home run on tablets, but of course it has lost years to the iPad. (The Zune music player software was also beautiful — it was, in fact, the forerunner to Windows 8 — but it never did manage to close the iPod’s four-year head start.)This is as perfect as a review can get. As a note, the scoring of reviews is done by a separate research and data team at the PR agency and it as scientific as one could be at the time. Like an Olympic sport they do not like to give out perfect scores as it makes their job more difficult down the road.Even Wall Street got in on the positive sentiment. Normally I would not have paid any attention at all to a financial analyst view on product design, but the analyst community had become part of the cycle around an ever-expanding Apple and an ever-shrinking Microsoft. Citi research department reported the following on March 11, 2012, in a report I received:We continue to view windows 8 as a positive catalyst - Inputs since the Feb 29th Community Preview (beta) have continued to be positive with developer and IS momentum appearing to pick up. We continue to expect general availability of win 8 devices around Sept / Oct with ARM devices likely later (although MST and OEM goal remains coincident). Given long-term secular concerns, share gains in tablets or renewed momentum in the PC market in 2H should be positive catalysts for shares. We acknowledge that the stock has a tendency to "fade" post release and thus we believe stock performance beyond that depends on tangible success of release.What about the negative stories? There were some, just not that many. In fact, most of the truly negative stories were about specific features in the release. For example, one reviewer noted that ARM Windows 8 would not include Outlook, another bemoaned the lack of support for old-style enterprise management tools instead opting for modern mobile device management, and another was concerned about a keyboard change to the diagnostic boot sequence.When there were negative stories, they did indeed carry the themes alluded to in the Pogue review. For example, Dan Acerman at CNET wrote in a review titled “Does Windows 8 diss the PC?”:According to NPD Group, PCs are still the largest category for U.S. consumer technology hardware, selling $28 billion worth of desktops and laptops in 2011 (a 3-percent drop from 2010). Tablets and e-readers nearly doubled from the previous year, to $15 billion, but that was mostly on the continued strength of Apple's iPad. If you take iPad (and Android) out of the equation, interest in Windows tablets is still tiny. It will no doubt grow under Windows 8, but mostly because it has nowhere to go but up.So just remember, while watching everyone pinching, swiping, and tapping their Metro interface tablets and convertible laptops over the next several months in product demos, the real work is, and will continue to be, done on traditional laptops (and, yes, desktops) for a long time to come.From our perspective this notion of “two in one” was quite similar to the review of Windows originally in how it was first used as a way to simply run MS-DOS applications in character mode. The two decades of seamless Windows compatibility across 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit perhaps created an expectation that compatibility was always essentially transparent.Over the course of the Consumer Preview millions of people would download and test the product. Many would write blogs, tweets, and record YouTube videos about their experience. Almost immediately, developers began to hack away at Windows and introduce utilities to bring back their favorite look and feel from past releases. All of this was perfectly normal. We’d seen this before in every release of Windows.  One competitor took time during their own earnings call to comment on Windows 8, which frankly was quite surprising. What he had to say would definitely become a meme for the record books. In the call, a financial analyst asked the following question of Apple’s Tim Cook:I was wondering if you can talk about how you think about the markets for tablet and PC devices going forward. I think you've been fairly clear about saying that you believe that tablets will eclipse PCs in volume at some point. And I think you've also said they're somewhat discrete markets. There seems to be a lot of work, particularly on PC-based platforms, towards trying to combine the PC and tablet experience going forward in part because Windows 8 will be able to -- is a touch-based operating system as well. Can you comment about why you don't believe the PC or the Ultrabook and tablet markets or your MacBook Air and tablet markets won't converge? Isn't it realistic to think in a couple of years we're going to have a device that's under 2 pounds with great battery life that we can all carry around and open as a notebook or close up in a clever way and use as a tablet? Can you comment on why you don't think that product might not come or why you believe these markets are separate? (Tony Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC., Research Division)Tim replied as follows:I think, Tony, anything can be forced to converge. But the problem is that products are about trade-offs, and you begin to make trade-offs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn't please anyone. You can converge a toaster to a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user. And so our view is that the tablet market is huge. And we've said that since day one. We didn't wait until we had a lot of results. We were using them here, and it was already clear to us that there was so much you could do and that the reasons that people would use those would be so broad. . . . I also believe that there is a very good market for the MacBook Air, and we continue to innovate in that product. And -- but I do think that it appeals to [somewhat --] someone that has a little bit different requirements. And you wouldn't want to put these things together because you wind up compromising in both and not pleasing either user. Some people will prefer to own both, and that's great, too. But I think to make the compromises of convergence, so -- we're not going to that party. Others might. Others might from a defensive point of view, particularly. But we're going to play in both.This was aimed squarely at our positioning of devices converging. It would be several more years before Apple would add a keyboard and a trackpad to the iPad Pro. Apple would then iterate over several releases trying to add different types of advanced app launching and window management, while continuing to add support for devices such as external storage, third-party microphones, etc. These were all supported on Windows in all form factors, including on ARM devices. Still, as all the reviews noted, Apple had a giant head start on the incredibly successful iPad, while Microsoft and Windows had the PC all but locked up. At least for the time being.If I were to be a bit delusional, I might think that Windows 8 had Apple a bit concerned. That would be crazy since in all the years I worked and competed with Apple I never knew them to care very much at all what Microsoft did outside of supporting the Mac. Instead, I would definitely give Apple credit to sticking with their narrative and strategy. They stood to benefit enormously if they could at once convince their Mac customer base that they also needed an iPad while also convincing the world that the iPad was the future of productivity computing.As it would turn out, Apple digging in along this line would prove to be extremely good marketing as well. By continuing to define tablets as a separate category and the future while they had a two-year head start, they made our attempt to message a different narrative extremely difficult. Many of the difficulties discussed in the next section relate to Apple’s success at defining the iPad as both distinct from PCs and also the future. That left us little room to have a device that was able to do both. The toaster-refrigerator metaphor only made that clearer.If we fast-forward, we can see how Apple stuck with this positioning while also making things very difficult for themselves. Given the chaos surrounding iPadOS 16.1 when it came to advancing software and the complexity of the iPad line, including the add-on keyboards, a strong case could be made that Apple has so far mismanaged the opportunity they created. Unit sales remain spectacular but perhaps less as a mainstream computer and more as a specialized device. Time will tell.During the first week of the release, we had over 1.6M activated testers and easily surpassed what we saw with the incredibly successful Windows 7 beta test. The Windows Store and WinRT notification platform were seeing numbers in the millions as well. We were receiving usage data from these users and were able to analyze what they were experiencing in terms of quality, reliability, and feature usage. This was an incredibly successful wide-scale beta test.We had months of decelerating bug fixing and a giant matrix of hardware and software compatibility to test. But that paled in comparison to the dramatic change in tone and tenor we faced, suddenly and almost out of the blue.Where do we start?On to 106. The Missing Start Menu 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

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 crises external to the development team but going on all around. It was stressful at the executive level for strategy reasons. Every meeting, every mail thread, every new online story was just more worry for us.It was stressful at the team level because we had asked the Windows team to pull together most of the company for the release.In particular, we wanted to fix—yes that is the right word—the schism of the past decade that had replaced what was once lockstep strategic coordination, the Win32 strategy, between the Windows and Developer product groups. The Windows team most accountable for success of the new platform was DEVX, the Developer Experience, and the counterpart to the UEX team. DEVX was led by Aleš Holeček (AlesH) in engineering, Linda Averett (LindaAv) in program management, and Yves Neyrand (YvesN) in testing. The breadth and depth required of this team was in every way as great as the user experience.Just as Windows 8 designed a new and modern experience, we designed a new and modern new platform to go with it. This platform was designed with the intent of growing to the future Windows platform for all apps across all form factors and devices.Prior to releasing to the public, we called the platform “Modern Application Model” and later the “Windows Runtime” and finally WinRT, which was the name we stuck with in honor of Windows NT. Like NT we never attached a meaning to RT and just said the letters. In this section, we’ll use the term “modern application” for new Windows 8 apps which had also been called Metro and Metro-style. We were still in the midst of resolving this legal dispute and frankly could not keep the terminology straight which confused everyone inside and out of Microsoft.We’ve described the experience goals of Windows 8 and to realize these goals the platform for modern apps in the experience had the following goals:* Native APIs for the new application model, realizing the benefits of the experience* Rapid application development coming from great tools supporting an API that could be mastered with relative ease* Amazing tools of choice, including both .NET and standard web technologies* Broad distribution and a great business model for apps via a new Windows App Store (covered in the next section)The importance of “native APIs” could not be overstated yet was also subject to many philosophical debates over what really constituted native. At one extreme, some believed native APIs simply meant they came from Microsoft and therefore first party was equivalent to native. At the other extreme native APIs implied written from the ground up from scratch, divorced from any existing capability and consequently all new. As with many debates along these lines, one could debate semantics or simply build the product and let it speak.I was familiar with this debate from the earliest days of Windows programming. The advent in the 1990s of object-oriented programming called for a new era of APIs that were improved over the abstractions provided natively—in other words taking the native APIs and recrafting them so they would be easier and more amenable to object-oriented techniques. The story of approaching API development this way, and our failure, was documented in section 010. Our BillG Review. In that story, we developed a new API for Windows that was much prettier and tuned to C++ but was also bloated and different than Windows. This failure led to a super lean, efficient, and Windows-centric API that became the standard for building professional apps for the Win32 era, the Microsoft Foundation Classes, MFC.Without diving too deeply into the weeds of architecture, there is an important point about systems design to make. What separated MFC from the era of object-oriented frameworks was, as described previously, a bet on the underlying platform to do the work. Our framework did as little work as possible and specifically never duplicated Windows functionality. That strategy permitted only one implementation of any given concept to exist and thus defines native. In that case, Win32 remained the native API because of the choices we made in MFC.These choices were the exact opposite of those made in the various .NET technologies, which liberally duplicated capabilities in Windows. This duplication created both inefficiencies and deeper problems. Incredibly difficult problems to solve such as security, accessibility, localization, and so on were made vastly more difficult when there were potentially two (or more) ways to accomplish the same task or worse one way in a framework that made partial use of the OS. In this type of framework there was complete ambiguity as to what constituted native.In the modern context, this debate over native capabilities of a platform is the situation currently consuming the Apple strategy of SwiftUI. SwiftUI is a layer on top of the existing native operating system API, but it also reimplements functionality and provides different implementations of other capabilities. Apple is attempting to decree the SwiftUI the answer, but even struggles themselves in moving apps from the old way to the new way. In the context of this story, SwiftUI and the debates surrounding it have a ring of .NET familiarity. I’ve been surprised at the approach but not the result. Apple has the ability to drive change across existing code that we did not have as discussed in the previous section which might smooth out this strategy over time. On the other hand, this entire section describes the outcome of fracturing even the most robust of developer ecosystems.The approach for Windows 8 was decidedly to define new native APIs and implement those APIs such that there was a single code path for all capabilities. Sometimes the code was brand new to Windows and other times WinRT relied on existing code paths and reused them. Taken as a whole, the set of capabilities represented the first version of the future APIs.The first version of Windows with any utility, Windows 3.0, was about 540 APIs and documented beautifully in the book Programming Windows by Charles Petzold that occupied a rarified position on every developer’s thick oak bookcase back in the day. Most of us just referred to the book as “Petzold.”When Windows 3.0 arrived, it was not exactly meeting a known market demand. The platform was intriguing for a class of developers, some of whom had been working on Macintosh apps and others who just saw opportunity in a new way to program user interface. These developers, much like on Macintosh, could pick up a copy of “Petzold” and within a day or so would find their way writing Windows programs, often as a hobby or side project to impress people at work. It was exciting and rewarding. Within a relatively short time the effort paid off with a solid mastery of the 540 APIs. While there was all sorts of complexity and wizardry in the way tools worked, the breadth was such mastery was achievable by a single person.The property of mastery is an incredibly compelling part of any new platform and often overlooked. The ability to master the platform and to use that mastery to complete an entire project is when something magical can happen, often for a just one or two engineers working together.By the 2000s, there was no mastery of the Windows API to be had, by anyone. At the very best, one could master a subsystem of Windows such as networking, DirectX graphics, or the file system. Of course there were some wizards, but most of them worked at Microsoft or soon would. Even the largest software houses would struggle with building reliable and optimal Windows software. When the complexity of the various .NET, data access, graphics, and networking APIs were added to the mix the system was insurmountable. A huge part of the attraction of various aspects of .NET, such as Silverlight, was the notion that one could master some subset and complete a project. Unfortunately, as discussed, these runtimes were limited enough that one often needed to venture into other parts of Windows to complete projects. There is no escaping that the explosion of headcount and lack of management accountability to that proved to be our worst enemy when it came to strategic platform coherence for thousands of APIs.Our Windows 8 plan was to create a new API that covered the full range of development scenarios we expected (or more accurately hoped) to see in the 1.0 version of the modern app world. That API would be the equivalent of “Petzold.” Due to the increasing capabilities of the underlying OS and development tools, the resulting apps would be vastly more capable and easier to write and debug. Over the summer as we completed the software build that we would distribute to developers, the DEVX team created “Elements of a Windows tailored app: The Developer Story” which captured the “as we built it” mindset and working terminology used by the DEVX and Developer division teams.The team took a scenario approach cataloging many types of potential applications along with how the platform could be used to write them. It also detailed how to reuse existing code, such as line of business code, within applications. At 275 pages it represented the amount of material one could master as an individual or team of 2 or 3 people.The modern platform consisted of three main pillars: modern application behavior, application connectivity, and modern application user interface. Within the context of our ever-confusing terminology, the platform is WinRT which we also called the Metro platform.One of the biggest changes developers needed to understand was that modern applications did not take over the computer. While many had become increasingly aware of the security model of Windows, which prevented access to various parts of the system without a password, the modern approach to applications meant that there was no access at all to the hardware or to other parts of the system. Every application ran in its own “container” (sometimes called “sandbox”) or essentially walled garden. Most requests to the operating system went through an intermediate “broker” to ascertain whether such an operation would be permitted. For example, in Win32 an application wishing to use the camera would simply connect to the camera as a device and start using it. In modern applications, the request depended on whether the user had given permission to use the camera and importantly whether the developer built into the app the proper requests of the user for permission. This was a dramatic change for Windows and was only just starting to make its way to phones, whereas today we are all too familiar with the endless prompts for permissions to devices. These constrains placed on applications created a new level of trust and security for Windows, though at the expense of the kind of flexibility and “anything is possible” that Windows developers had come to expect.Applications also behaved differently relative to how they could consume battery power by constantly running. In Win32, every application ran all the time. It did not matter if the user expected the application to be doing something even if the user could not see the application, it was simply how applications behaved. Every little icon on the system tray, every application that created a “background” process, and every window on the screen could be running on the CPU while consuming power. In a modern application, if an application was not visible to the user, then it entered a new state called “suspended” and consumed no power at all. Only when the app was visible did it resume operating as normal. In the desktop computing model, every window must be constantly updated whether the user is looking at the contents or not with each update draining battery power.This architecture was essential to reduce the power consumption of a modern PC. It was, somewhat surprisingly, controversial. Developers with their large screens envisioned a world with many tasks happening in many windows and work as keeping an eye on all the different windows. The billions on the verge of using phones and tablets, however, were using one app at a time and the screen filled with that app. They were immersed in the app. Switching between apps was instant and tasks resumed instantly when needed. By and large this style of usage so typical on phones mapped to how real-world customers used even current Windows laptops. Most all Windows users had for the longest time, and still, ran applications full screen and worked on one app at a time. Even switching between apps followed the way apps on phones worked. We built support for snapping apps side by side to provide two apps at once.Still, creating only full screen apps with the new platform would be an ongoing debate or discussion with developers. It was the kind of change that was perfectly fine for the broad user base and certainly for future new users, but not what developers themselves wanted. For developers of course the desktop was still there where all their tools ran anyway. We expected developers to focus on the desktop and they did.This was one of a number of issues where the initial audience seeing Windows 8 did not see the world the way we saw the next billion customers heading. They had their jobs to do. It reminded me of the early days of Word when the project was not going well and a Word developer asserted that they aimed “to please an audience of one. I write it for me. If I'm happy I know some cool people will like it.” which was a rather limiting way to think of word processors in hindsight.A distinguishing characteristic of modern applications was how they connected to each other and to Windows. In Win32, apps had a limited way of sharing information with any other app and that was through the clipboard via copy and paste. To do more usually required applications to open up files from one app inside another. This led to all sorts of potential risks, unbeknownst to users, as we learned with Office. Apps could insert malicious data into other apps or apps could crash opening data files created with another app simply because they did not fully understand the other app’s files. Worse, apps could simply navigate the hard drive and gobble up all of a user’s files (in the background!) without their knowledge.Modern apps were therefore isolated from each other. This would be quite limiting if not for the invention of “contracts” between apps, and between the operating system and app. With contracts apps could easily tell Windows 8 they would accept or provide information to other apps. Windows 8 created super easy mechanisms for apps to share their information with other apps while at the same time accepting information from other apps. This all took place only when a user initiated an action. Across the system, inserting data such as photos, searching across apps, opening files, and sharing information within a file were all just a tap or click away. A key aspect of the design of the platform was to make it as trivial as possible for an app to add these features and access them via the charms.There were other connectivity features for modern apps as well, all of which were implemented with security and privacy in mind while doing so with a minimal amount of code. Connecting to a printer, a speaker, or camera could be done with minimal code and trivially. One of our most common demonstrations showed how easy it was in the platform to add a live video feed from a camera with only a couple of lines of code.There weren’t just new-fangled architectural changes in Windows 8. Even the mundane such as how displays worked underwent a dramatic rethinking. At one of the early meetings on Windows 7 tablets when we first showed touch to the PC team at Intel, their ever-enthusiastic platform leader, Mooly Eden, had a question for Windows. He couldn’t just ask he had to show us. Mooly always had to put on a show. He stood up and started flipping a new Windows 7 slate in the air, spinning it. He wanted to know “when will the screen image also rotate?” He was right. Windows had no ability to do what the iPhone and iPad did so well, simply handle the rotation of the screen, essential for a handheld device. Supporting this first required integrating a sensor to detect the rotation, something that no PCs had though Windows 7 provided some early support. Second, the whole video subsystem needed to be reworked. While it was possible to switch orientation of a display in Windows 7, doing so was cumbersome and involved a great deal of flickering and prayers to the Windows control panel. With little fanfare, Windows 8 added this along with support in the modern platform for apps to easily manage the transition between orientations.At the other end of the spectrum of screen sizes, Windows 8 built the correct architecture to handle the new high-resolution screens coming on market. These screens would come to characterize iPhone and iPad as retina screens. While they were available as external displays for Windows, they were always buggy and flakey. Buttons or text would show up super tiny or where apps would click would not match on screen where the click took place. This failure of Win32 was rooted in the inability to uplevel the whole installed base of hardware and software as the hardware advanced leaving the old software in the dust. Supporting these new screens was one of over 100 features in Windows that improved the desktop and one of many features that were newly native in the modern Windows 8 platform.Most would judge the completeness of a new platform for how it enabled them to build the main features of their application. In many ways this was the equivalent of Petzold and included the platform for creating the interaction between a developer’s app and their customers. Relative to Win32 and to the chaos of the .NET world, Windows 8 arrived with an incredibly strong story. Much of this came about because of our own efforts building applications for Windows 8 and the scenario planning for the product. Windows 8 provided a palette of over two dozen “controls” or user interface elements typically used in apps. While one could find these and more via third parties or counting everything offered by all of Microsoft’s existing platforms, never had the Windows platform delivered the full set of required controls all at once. This resonated with me personally because of my own history. Back in the early 1990s when toolbars were invented and developers wanted to add them, Windows provided no support even though Windows itself had toolbars. For Visual C++ I worked with a developer on the Windows 95 team who wrote those controls and added them to MFC, using the Windows code. That developer was also part of the Windows 8 team, so kind of full circle.A key part of modern apps was how they fit in with the design language for Windows 8 to provide a beautiful, aligned, and consistent experience. Such polish and attention to detail was not something Windows had historically delivered. By and large Windows deferred to the marquee apps like Word and Excel to define the proper look of Windows apps though did not support that look with code or APIs. Windows 8 provided developers with a broad set of tools for typography, animations, color selection, user interface grids to align applications, and more.Fitting into Windows also meant providing the support for system-wide features such as Live tiles, notifications and alerts, as well as all the necessary infrastructure to easily install and deploy apps. These were also features that Windows provided piecemeal, if at all, in the past.Finally, everything discussed above was designed from the start to be programmed from all of the programming languages and tools offered by Microsoft. Developers could build modern apps using web tools of HTML and JavaScript, C#, XAML, Silverlight, and even C++ or Visual Basic. Every demo we planned on showing at the upcoming conference included use of all of these languages. We were ready to atone for the lack of communication over the summer.The platform as delivered to attendees at the upcoming conference was as complete as anything ever delivered by Microsoft all at once, and in the first version. We knew we had a good deal to learn and a list a mile long of what we could do in the future. That was a given. We were so excited though to deliver the future of the Windows platform.We arrived in Los Angeles on September 12, 2011 for our Professional Developers Conference, renamed //build to be attended by 5,000 people and what seemed like the entire technical press community. Marketing for the new Windows 8 Start screen and the new //build logo was everywhere—those live tiles, colorful rectangles, and animation. It was a breathtaking sight. And we were excited to be there. Even the Denny’s across the street welcomed Microsoft for breakfast, with a sign. A pre-show tradition for me is breakfast at Denny’s.Unfortunately, there was also a something of sense of dread about the languages and tools for creating new modern apps—our self-inflicted crisis created at the unveiling of the user experience and the omission of .NET before the summer. There was so much cynicism in how the various existing platforms had been talked about—always implying one worked well with the other when in fact they were all separate, all had limitations that were not said, and all had major issues. As a result, however, we created the opportunity for a set of people to spend the summer alternating between conspiracy theories and anger over the developer platform.The effort to make every single Microsoft language a first-class tool for the modern Windows platform was an immense cross-division project. To say it was easy or lacked controversy would be a huge understatement. It was extraordinarily difficult because many inside Microsoft also either believed or even wanted to believe the conspiracy theories surrounding the deemphasis of .NET by Windows. In some sense they had a right to as they believed in their own work and lived through the alienation and schism that Vista created between .NET and Windows. Windows 7 did offer any relief though it also did not do anything to make it worse. In that sense it was hardly a conspiracy theory, but a fact of life in the .NET world.Windows 8, however, was when the strategic issues of the past required resolution. There was no simple answer. Realistically, the answer would require a degree of subtlety that tested those on every side of the mess, myself included. We absolutely intended to move forward with the languages of the .NET world (C#, XAML, Silverlight, VB, C++) while at the same time there was no plan to simply move all the code created that used the libraries and frameworks of the .NET era such as WinForms, WPF, VB forms, or Forms³ or third parties. This “technicality” would prove to be an enormous barrier to not only acceptance but even acknowledging the strategy we were embarking upon. To many, not being able to simply port their code to new Windows 8 apps was a non-starter. We had accounted for this by describing the difference between domain-specific code (for example all the code that connects to a remote database or cloud service) and the user experience code that would need to be reimplemented. Most all apps written in this world were divided cleanly in this respect. Not only that, this transition was precisely the one most had gone through to provide web access to the databases and cloud services they built.We had two challenges. First, within the Microsoft bubble it was clear “everyone” used these technologies. The Developer division had created a bubble of the .NET developer world insulated, as previously described, from the world of HTML and the web browser. Within that world it was of course true that everyone used .NET. Anything we proposed that was not about leveraging that investment was by definition failing to leverage something everyone used. Arguing over how much .NET was used as a portion of total development or skilled developers was futile, especially because even defining terms was impossible as we’d learned for several years of Mid-Year Reviews and Developer Usage Surveys. Even discussing the lack of commercial software would only serve to exacerbate the challenges.Second, the existing .NET world was the one that failed to account for synergy with Windows or address the problems we set out to resolve with a new platform. When it came to consistency with Windows, safety, security, reliability, battery life, or even basic attributes such as performance or accessibility, the plethora of .NET tools failed to achieve a level of performance or quality consistent with our main competitor, Apple.These two challenges were not just external to Microsoft. The .NET bubble extended to the 50,000 person Microsoft enterprise organization that were the tip of the .NET spear and also the massive Developer division itself. Many people had spent a decade building out these capabilities and all was going well until, well, I came along.It was no surprise that the whole time Windows tried to create the connections to the .NET languages to use the new Windows 8 platform we ran into discussions about interoperability or conflicts with the existing .NET platform and APIs. Each new advance in Windows 8 was met with an opportunity to debate the reuse a .NET mechanism to accomplish the same—there was a near constant effort to work to insert the old .NET into the new platform. Windows 8 had a strong point of view about a platform for the future that embraced a new set of qualities entirely absent from the existing .NET efforts.We intended to deliver on that point of view. The good news, actually great news, was that the vast majority of efforts between the teams supported this mission. That didn’t preclude grumbling along the way. There were some outright stressful times. The release of code would surface many of those, either internally or unfortunately externally via the press as well.Since we know now that Windows 8 did not achieve the success we hoped, this is a reasonable time to point out that it is precisely at this moment that the efforts between teams created the “told you so” people. In Microsoft parlance this is done by opening up Outlook and searching through Sent Items and reliving these debates to prove that no one listened, or someone knew all along. Success has many parents and failure is an orphan. No matter what happens someone always said it would. This isn’t about bitterness on any side, but I can promise many more people contributed positively at the time than seemed to contribute in hindsight. We’ll return to this reality.We had an incredible keynote planed for the first morning. It would feature a demo of Windows 8 experience from Julie Larson-Green, an incredible overview of potential Windows 8 devices from Mike Angiulo, for the first Chris Jones detailed the many cloud-based services integral to Windows 8 experience, and on-stage Antoine Leblond would build a modern app using HTML and Silverlight. Even I did a demo showing only features improved in the desktop. It was a two hour and fifteen-minute tour de force by the full Windows 8 product executive team.I had been to a lot (a lot a lot) of Microsoft keynotes and conferences and launch events over the years. I participated in many as well. With as much sincerity as I can muster, the keynote for the 2011 //build conference was absolutely Microsoft at its best. The whole of Microsoft had never come together to deliver such a coherent and compelling message. It was all done live on real computers running real software. Nothing like it has happened since and it is clear we’re in a new era where that 2011 presentation might have marked the end of the PC era live event. Even Apple would cease to take on the kind of risks we took on during that demo when it came to real products, demonstrated by real executives, in front of a live crowd while streamed around the world. It scares me now to think of just how crazy we were. It was by far one of my favorite days at Microsoft.Within that favorite day were two favorite moments. Technically, three if you count the walk-on music at the very top of the keynote that I chose. I walked on to Renegade by Jay Z (with Eminem)—“No lie, just know I chose my own fate./I drove by the fork in the road and went straight.” Certainly, over the top. But I felt we could have taken an easy path and just built yet another version of Windows doing more of the same, there were many options for how to do that the equivalent of going left or right. Instead, we created our own path and went straight. The short sound clip is not in the official video because of copyright.Over the summer we had become increasingly concerned that developers would have no way to experience Windows 8 on the type of hardware we expected to exist in the future. We were working with OEMs closely to create PCs with touch panels, ink pens, and in a variety of form factors from pure slates to convertibles to laptops to all-in-ones. While we tried to have some of those machines for Windows 7, they were few and not commonly owned because Windows 7 lacked the value proposition to drive sales.The Ecosystem team had been working closely with Samsung on an Intel-based PC that was a pure tablet form factor with an available docking station which could be used to connect a mouse, keyboard, external display, and wired network. The PC was powered by the latest low voltage Intel Core processor. Many of our demos and most all of the demo sessions (over 100!) would use this PC at the show.At the 2009 PDC we were excited enough by the prospects of touch computing that we provided attendees a free touch laptop. It was a new “thin and light” form factor which was just starting to come to market to compete with Apple. This announcement stunned the audience. Therefore, by the 2011 //build attendees were certain there would be another free laptop. As a point of information that stunt in 2009 cost millions of dollars more than even the revenue from the paying conference attendees.In the keynote, MikeAng, ever the showman, walked through all of the platform capabilities that the ecosystem and developers could bring to life with Windows 8. Showing everything from ARM-based devices to liquid cooled gamer rigs the size of dorm refrigerators. Then he began to describe a new Samsung device. He said, slyly, the device was being produced in small numbers right now as a prototype. I looked at him and asked “so how many will they make” to which he replied “well, I’ve been told not to bring a cool PC unless we brought enough for everyone so there are 5,000 out on the loading dock right now.”And with that we announced the “Samsung Developer Prototype PC” to go with the “Microsoft Windows 8 Preview Build.” And everyone went nuts. The key value of this PC was precisely to demonstrate the value of Windows 8. With one PC running Intel developers could run and develop Windows 8 applications for both Intel and ARM devices. The Samsung came loaded with Windows 8 software, sample apps, Visual Studio pre-release, and more.Little did the 5000 attendees know but over the previous week a team of about 40 Microsoft engineers had been unloading the Samsung PCs from crates air-shipped from Korea to install all this new software and configure them for distribution. In order to get them to Los Angeles in time, Samsung had to manufacture them before the software was complete. It was an heroic effort and made it all the more rewarding for sure. If you’re interested in more about this, Raymond Chen (RaymondC) a member of the Windows team (UEX) and author of “The Old New Thing” wrote a post with some insider trivia, Some trivia about the //build/ 2011 conference.Loaded on the Samsung were 17 new Windows 8 applications, the source of my second favorite moment of the day. In addition to the apps from Microsoft such as Mail, Calendar, Bing, etc. each visible on the Start screens shown throughout the week, these 17 apps represented a chance to have fun with the pre-release. The amazing feature of these apps were that they were built entirely by the interns over their 10-week summer jobs. We asked 17 groups of 2-3 interns to work together to build these fun apps from scratch and zero baseline understanding of Windows 8. Not only were they able to create these apps on their own, but they did so when neither the platform nor the tools were near ready and were constantly shifting. I was so proud to both announce and share their summer accomplishments. While for most school had already started we were able to find about 20 of them who were able to sneak away from school to attend the conference and even provide a scheduled sessions detailing their experience. It was as amazing for them as it was for me. It was a career highlight for me. They even made a video of their summer experience which we showed to all the show attendees in the keynote.That this group took their ideas with an unfinished platform and tools to create new apps was a huge source of validation for the “Petzold” test we hoped Windows 8 would pass.After providing attendees with a candid roadmap from this moment to final release, there was a short break. We were not done with amazing day one content though. There were two absolutely amazing presentations to follow. We overwhelmed attendees with depth and quality of presentations.First, JensenH provided an overview from the experience perspective of what makes for a great Windows 8 app. This was the touchstone presentation that brought together all we had learned to date, since the unveiling and subsequent feedback as well.Following this, AlesH brought things down to the metal and showed the developers in attendance the ins and outs of the Windows 8 platform. He wrote a ton of code and built live apps on stage ably assisted by John Sheehan (JSheehan) who was a senior software engineer on the platform. Importantly, they showed off building apps from scratch using Visual Studio, connecting to Windows 8 to share information and use devices, and also detailed the architecture that provided apps with a sandbox to run in for safety, security, and predictability. They even showed off how apps don’t consume resources when they are not visible on the screen. Of course they used all the .NET languages and showed the broad support for bringing forward that knowledge.Even with all that incredible content, there was one slide we worked the most on and that was a boxes and b******t, or politely boxology, slide showing the new Windows 8 platform and its relation to all of the programming languages and APIs Microsoft had to offer.This was not a slide I dreamed up in my office, not even close. Aleš in his role as distinguished engineering leading DEVX and the Windows 8 platform worked for weeks to create this diagram, collaborating with every part of the whole project across Windows and Developer division. I thought it was a work of art.Aleš also made the slide a key part of his presentation. By the time he spoke the proverbial s**t had hit the fan and he knew he had to somewhat rescue his slide. People had already written instant blog posts and the live blogs picked up on the diagram as well.So what happened?Presented in all the glory of the Metro design style, huge and on stage, was as clear a diagram as we could have created describing the Windows 7 world being brought forward for desktop applications, including support for Internet Explorer, Win32, .Net, Silverlight, HTML, C++, C#, and more. Everything had a box, resting on top of the Windows Kernel (a.k.a. MinWin!). New modern apps were shown in boxes with all the tools and languages available to build “on top of” WinRT, including that same list (XAML, HTML, C#, C++, VB, and JavaScript).The diagram, created by dozens of people from nearly every team in the company, proved incredibly popular, but not in a good way.To support the diagram, Antoine’s full demonstration of building a Metro app went through all the languages and tools, in real time on stage, by building an app. He built several apps. He built an app in HTML. Antoine took sample code from Developer division vice president (and previously manager of Silverlight) Scott Guthrie’s (ScottGu) famous (amongst .NET fans) XAML sample, and with no changes ran it as both a desktop app and a Metro app on WinRT. The new Metro apps were touch-enabled, integrated with search and sharing, and even showed off the beautiful graphical qualities of the platform by displaying nicely alongside the rest of Windows 8.The problem?Before I even got off stage, people were taking the image and redrawing their view of the architecture. Some were critical of precisely how their favorite tools were rendered. Others challenged the technical integrity of the diagram. Within the developer press there were even news stories and a quite a few blog posts dissecting the travesty that was this image. It all happened in real time before we had even finished.There were blog posts that dissected the diagram and rewrote it. It was the technical buzzsaw applied to a conceptual diagram. The weirdest part for me was that this was a diagram we had created about our own technologies, but the .NET community thought of them as their technologies. In reality, they wanted Windows 8 to work like Windows 7 while further adopting their .NET technologies. They wanted Windows 8 to fulfill the .NET promises they believed were made, and even more so now that we were indeed delivering a new platform. There was little accounting for what we believed we needed to accomplish in righting the Windows platform or the necessary steps to modernize the Windows platform.Some of the blogs centered around how much code was actually Win32 though repurposed, not because that would be bad but because of a theory that would undermine our argument about the modern platform being native or completely new. Others took aim at the use of the .NET languages versus the .NET runtimes or libraries. This issue was the whole point, unfortunately. Ironically for me this point also was one I made to BillG for years when it came to the value of owning a proprietary language versus owning the API. Now all those championing a language were learning the value was really in the runtime. Yes, that was always my point.Emotions were running high. There were deep concerns about investments in existing code and porting it to modern apps. We didn’t make this promise to the degree developers wanted and, as a result, there was a wave of feedback over Microsoft abandoning them and costing “millions” of dollars of lost revenue. That’s what people said. To me, this had shades of past transitions, specifically, the major mistake Microsoft Word made in trying to reuse the code for character mode Word to build Windows Word. It did not work and cost the team years. It also felt like the carnage caused when much-loved Visual Basic switched to .NET.The biggest mistake in platform transitions is attempting to deny that a transition is taking place or to believe a dramatic platform shift could be managed by incremental changes.Not everyone writing about this diagram took such a negative approach. Several provided thoughtful views pointing out that there was a good deal to be excited about. In an in-depth view, Paul Thurrott wrote on his SuperSite for Windows blog:WinRT solves many of the problems of Win32, from an apps perspective, though it can't be used for certain things of course (writing NT services, drivers, and the like). Apps created for WinRT are safe, secure, and sandboxed, can't wreck other apps, can't cause "Windows rot," and all install in just 2-3 seconds. They feature isolated storage, single folder installs (as per the Mac), and require user consent to access the general file system. When Microsoft says it "reimagined" every aspect of Windows, this new runtime, or application model, must be included as well. This is part of it, a modern, truly different app platform that is far more different, and far more capable, than many people understand right now.And in the same vein of blowing past peoples' expectations, virtually no app could not be written as a WinRT app. Many are imagining very simple, HTML-like apps, and while I'm sure there will be plenty of those, you need to reset your expectations up. WinRT is amazingly full-featured and not constrained to goofy utilities and simple games. The next "Call of Duty" could be a WinRT app, complete with support for Edge UIs and Charms.And here's something interesting: Virtually all of the Microsoft WinRT apps--Mail, Calendar, People, Chat, and so on--are all written in HTML and JavaScript, not C# or another supposedly superior language.And you laughed when they repeated "Windows reimagined over and over again in Tuesday's keynote. I'm starting to think they didn't push this point enough.Our main aim for //build was to put forth the message of a bold reimagination of Windows from the chipset to the experience. That was what we wrote in the press release.So many of the reviews of the pre-release product articulated the bold design, the attractiveness, the functionality across different types of PCs, and the compatibility with everything in Windows 7. The note of caution was always about the amount of change and how some users might be skeptical. Overall, the press and bloggers were excited and impressed with the leap we had taken, excepting those still debating the diagram.After a month with the pre-release code, ArsTechnica in its detailed review had the following to say in “Turning to the past to power Windows’ future: An in-depth look at WinRT”:Microsoft is taking a risk with WinRT, as developers may not follow it, but it's a calculated risk, and it's a low risk. The re-use and modernization of existing technology gives WinRT instant familiarity for developers, but also an easy path for Microsoft to extend the reach and capabilities (and ease the restrictions) should it need to. It's at once the embodiment of Windows' future and the embracing of Windows' past.I shared how I thought this event was Microsoft at its best. The press coverage following the event generally agreed. I recognize in hindsight this might seem to be a combination of delusional and revisionist. It was neither. There were over 1,000 original stories of which nearly 700 were what we called PRIME, an acronym defined by the PR agency for stories appearing by top writers in top publications. On average the stories were extremely positive. In a system the agency used to score the tone and message pick up of stories where 100 is neutral, we scored 124 in 386 news stories, 118 in 293 blogs, and 117 in 11 product reviews done in real time. Microsoft events routinely scored a negative sentiment during this era, meaning less than 100.The agency put together an End of Event recap that ran for over 120 pages. These were tremendous results, not solely because of the content by any stretch. Achieving these results required an amazing marketing and communications effort around the world.With no intention of shaming any writers who subsequently revised their views or chose to come to different conclusions later, some of the quotes that came along with the availability of code and the Samsung PC press loaners were positively effusive:“I've never witnessed this much excitement in a Microsoft audience at a keynote before. It's electric.” –Tom Warren, WinRumors“I might just become a developer considering how easy #Microsoft has made it to write things for Windows 8.” –@reese305“my iPad suddenly became old fashioned #win8 #bldwin” –@martinsih“Hello, Windows 8? This is iPad. You win." - @thurrott“the Metro UI stuff is the best thing Microsoft has come up with in years.” @thurrott“Here’s the real feather in Windows 8’s cap: Write once, run (mostly) everywhere software.”, PC World, Nate Ralph“the experience still felt magic, and that’s what really counts. Well done Microsoft.”, RedMonk, James Governor"Apple bloggers were apparently so flustered by the platform that they resorted to bombarding Twitter with jokes about cooling fans and Silverlight instead of stopping for a moment to realize that Microsoft is showing us the future of computing.", BGR, Zach EpsteinObviously, it wasn’t all positive. Surprisingly, some still questioned whether we would release “on time” though we did not provide a date we knew we would hit the fall. The real lingering question, and one that did not come up all that much at the event, was the “two modes” of Windows. Speaking for “users” many press would rhetorically ask if users would be able to understand the two modes of using Windows, the desktop, and the new Metro experience. Owing to the developer audience, they were not yet concerned about ARM and simply saw it as an opportunity. They would be running Intel because that is where development tools existed.The issue of “two modes” was the one we needed to tackle. I wasn’t sure of what else to do. Given the history of Windows “modes” and what we designed for, the complaint and answer were not easily reconciled. Would this become the focus of the release?With all that, including the protestations around our box diagram, I had wrapped up one of my happiest weeks at Microsoft. It had been a long time since the whole of Microsoft came together as a team and delivered a strategy and produced an event with such clarity and developer excitement.In under 24 hours we had 500,000 downloads of the Windows 8 Developer Preview Release. At the time there were perhaps three million professional software developers worldwide, total.It was Microsoft at its best, but the reactions turned out to be relatively fleeting. The developer community was but one audience. For all the dustup over .NET they were the home crowd at //build.We had a nagging issue of competing with Apple not just on iPads but on laptops. Could we work with the ecosystem to muster something to compete with Apple’s MacBook Air, finally after years of failing to even try?What would mainstream consumers say with a much more polished release? What would developers say about the new Windows Store which we had yet to show them? What would we tell developers waiting to see how Microsoft Office would build for Windows 8?On to 105. New Ultrabooks, Old Office, and the Big Consumer Preview 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