100. A Daring and Bold Vision

Hardcore Software has shared the vision planning process for five releases of Office and Windows 7. Though not detailed we followed the same process for two waves of Windows Live Services as well as Internet Explorer 8 and 9. Windows 8 went through this same process, though by now as a team we had become pretty good at it. This section details the resulting Windows 8 plan, The Vision for Windows 8. As part of that, I wanted to take a bit of a journey into the alignment between Windows Phone and Windows 8 and the challenges we saw there. In doing so, I will describe things from the Windows perspective and not delve into the specifics of running the Windows Phone project, which wasn’t my responsibility. Rather, I wanted to cover the challenges of two large projects within the context of Microsoft each trying to figure out what they needed to do. Since 2010-2011 when this took place, it is the strength of Apple’s approach of starting from a reinvented desktop operating system for the iPhone and building out from there that makes the events of this time strategically interesting. As I frame events, the key questions to ask would be “Should Microsoft have waited?” and “Would it have been ok to not be in market with any phone after Windows Mobile 6.5 until 2012 or even 2013?” At least that’s how I reflect on these times. The answers are not complete as the next chapter will also cover some important aspects of this in more detail, particularly the hardware and platform elements.

This section could really be a chapter and isn’t for the faint of heart. Dig in and have fun because it covers a lot of ground that took place in a relatively short time.

Back to 099. The Magical iPad

We never lacked clarity in what we intended to do—reinvent Windows for a new era. That meant a new experience, a new platform for developers, a new connection to services, and, yes, new hardware. Books about reinvention (or disruption) don’t tell you that you can’t just announce such intentions to the world. It turns there is the intention to reinvent and then a plan to build it, though when you decide to share a strategy is an entirely different matter.

I was old enough to have personally lived through the creation of the term Osborne effect as it pertains to pre-announcing products. In high school I programmed my father’s Osborne he bought to keep the books for the family business. We’d been using the Osborne daily since it launched and thought about buying an upgrade for the business. Then Osborne founder and CEO, Adam Osborne, pre-announced the Executive, a fancier model with more memory and a bigger screen. The only problem was it was far from being done. The prototype product was shown in 1983. Customers held off buying the original Osborne long enough that the company went bankrupt before delivering the new computer.

Apple faced a similar dilemma when it first transitioned from Motorola chips to PowerPC chips. The transition was announced in 1994. While it is difficult to tease out the impact of Windows 95 from the chip transition, Apple’s share of the Mac/PC market would steadily shrink for another decade, and decline significantly in absolute unit sales, until the next chip transition to Intel.

Microsoft had long been relatively immune from pre-announcing products because the overall growth of the PC market combined with the breadth of the product line dampened any pullback in a single product. The PC needed an OS even if the next one was delayed. As we saw with Longhorn/Vista, businesses still continued to buy PCs in droves. That’s why many Microsoft products seemed to be talked about long before they were released. There was an added benefit to this early sharing, or as we called it openness, which was used to generate platform momentum. With nothing to lose, Windows itself benefitted from a solid 5 years of momentum building in the early days before Windows 3.0. Back then it was all just an industry norm.

In our world, the Windows business had just survived the Longhorn mess and recovered with Windows 7. We now faced an entirely new market situation. Windows itself faced structural challenges—actual alternatives in the market in the form of phones, tablets, browsers, Intel-based Macs, and soon ChromeOS. At the very least, people could just stick with Windows 7, which was fine by us, except given new alternatives most customers would not even consider buying a new or additional PC, which was very bad for us.

Every bone in the Microsoft body would cry out to begin evangelizing Windows 8 as soon as we had plans. We were going to build a new platform and evangelists wanted time to articulate the strategy so developers could weigh their alternatives. But doing so would also run up against Windows Phone 7 and the platform they were evangelizing. The lack of strategic connection between Windows and Windows Phone was obvious but at the time was fraught with difficult choices, especially in the context of competing with Apple.

Then there was the biggest of all problems, again something they fail to mention in books. What if the big strategic bet we planned on making ran right up against our biggest partners and customers? The whole idea of advancing Windows without our partner Intel and the major PC makers Dell, HP, and Lenovo would be heresy, plain and simple. We are talking about Wintel after all. Not only were we planning on a chipset, but we knew we would offer something radical with respect to the actual computer we’d offer customers. Double heresy.

As a result, the vision we created for Windows 8 was not specific in the broad communication about the role that alternate chip platforms, SoC or system-on-a-chip, or new hardware would play in the plans. By using the term SoC we could account for both ARM, the then UK company that designed the chips used in all mobile phones and tablets, and Intel who continued to work to develop a competitive SoC with their ATOM branded chips. While the engineering was well underway, the degree of the bet still needed a bit more data and experience to decide if we could execute specifically on bringing Windows to ARM. By using SoC, if the term leaked, we could always point to Intel’s latest ATOM chips as the goal. The cost of openly defying our own ecosystem and then failing to materialize would have been immense given the state of the PC market.

As far as how these alternate chips would come to market, we had not yet decided on a complete plan. Would we go the standard route which was to evangelize to the OEMs as we did with Media Center PC and later multitouch support? Would we build a first-party demonstration device and use that as the basis of evangelism as we did with Tablet PC? Or would we commit to what was either unimaginable or incredibly dumb depending on if you were our customers/partners or BillG and design, build, and sell, our own new device? The vision would be silent on this. The plans were still being made and would be resolved just a few weeks after the product vision was communicated.

With the iPad announcement described in the previous section, the pressure on everyone to respond was immense. For some the rise of Android was even more worrisome, primarily because of the history of Apple being less of a real threat. Google caused more consternation because it was growing so large so quickly in an area entirely new to Microsoft. Either way, even though Microsoft was the among the first to enter the smartphone market, by 2010 our share remained in low single-digits and would never get much higher.

The app revolution underway in Silicon Valley was on the iPhone. And we were missing it. I learned this firsthand sitting in the pouring rain after a wedding in San Francisco in 2010, when everyone else was using a new iPhone app to summon a limousine late at night. It was my first experience with the UberCab on-demand car service, and we couldn’t summon one on my Microsoft phone as we became drenched. The app gap was just getting started. Every day it seemed like a new company released a new app for the new iPhone platform and none of that innovation was happening on Windows. I swear it felt a bit like what IBM must have experienced when everything new was on Windows and all that was on OS/2 was what they paid to have there.

Windows and Windows Phone: Alignment?

The Windows Phone Team was in the midst of the significant reinvention of the phone platform, originally code-named Photon, which became Windows Phone 7 or WP7. The fall 2010 release was more than six months from the rollout of the vision for Windows 8.

There were many challenges in entering, or re-entering, the smartphone business. Bootstrapping an ecosystem was chief among them. Finding the right hardware partners proved difficult in the face of competition for those same partners from Android. There was also the challenge of building a differentiated product when the high-end was so solidly iPhone while Android seemed to cover the breadth of the market. To many reading this, the market might appear analogous to the evolution of the PC market, except Android has the role of Windows and the premium niche occupied by iPhone is much larger than the eight share points Apple computers achieved.

WP7 faced several software challenges simply because the core operating system was so old. Support for the latest capabilities across graphics, networking, multicore CPUs, removable storage, and devices (such as the NFC reader required on Japanese mass transit) was becoming increasingly difficult to impossible, as was enabling the product to work worldwide across languages with complex characters and input methods. A hot topic on the heels of the product release was the rollout of 4G or LTE technology, especially in Asia, and the challenges WP7 had in building support in the operating system.

When it came to synergy with Windows the developer platform was the key challenge. Windows Mobile, Microsoft’s original phone OS, supported a subset of the Developer Tools strategy which had a nominal relationship to Windows itself. Breaking with that platform, WP7 made a new bet on the nascent Silverlight project, a decidedly non-obvious strategy relying on a technology project essentially salvaged from the prior big bets in Longhorn as I described when I supported moving the team and early project out of Windows. As a competitor to Adobe Flash, it seemed most suited to lightweight games, video, and photos designed for a cross-platform experience. A significant class of apps, sure, but as a general-purpose platform, a Windows platform, Silverlight was inadequate and would face challenges in maturing to a complete platform. For example, there was little hope of building an email client or Office in any enduring way using Silverlight’s capabilities as they were. That was certainly my opinion. They made a strategy that was first and foremost based on time to market and that leveraged a new initiative in Developer Tools that many were very excited about, including the evangelists. The use of Silverlight felt leveraged and very…strategic. This will be further discussed in the next chapter. Given the break from Windows Mobile, there was an opportunity for a strategic platform alignment that was not taken advantage of.

By the time it released, with its stark Metro tiles and hubs rather than apps, Windows Phone felt unique and differentiated, despite the potential limitations. The Windows community would develop a wildly enthusiastic following for WP7, despite the paucity of apps relative to iPhone. Walt Mossberg wrote a review with the headline, “Microsoft’s New Windows Phone 7: Novel But Lacking.” He concluded “…Microsoft has used its years in the smartphone wilderness to come up with a user interface that is novel and attractive, that stands out from the Apple and Google approaches, and that works pretty well.” Ultimately, he did not recommend it and said it was neither as good nor as versatile as iPhone or Android.

Sales for Windows Phone would peak roughly a month after initial launch of WP7 and would never match that launch spike.

From my perspective, Microsoft’s phone business faced many challenges but chief among them was a weak platform for building apps, and related, an underpowered operating system relative to modern computing needs and competitors, even with the new WP7. After launch there were rising numbers of Windows Phone apps, but the vast majority were simply web sites hosted inside an app without much, if any, work from the owners of the web site. The flagship apps were mostly paid for or even supervised by Microsoft. The lack of enthusiasm from third parties did not match the optimism within the halls of Microsoft and from our biggest fans. Being the third choice in the market, even a Microsoft choice, was not enough.

I’d soon learn the size of the hill that needed to be climbed for a new Windows.

The industry, however, remained optimistic that WP7 would be a contender for the number two spot behind Android, as Blackberry and Symbian (from Nokia) continued to decline, and iPhone was viewed expensive and low volume. IDC predicted even as late as 2011 that Windows Phone would go from about 3.8% share to over 20% share by 2015.

Regretfully, that 3.8% share was the platform’s peak.

We planned Windows 8 while WP7 was still finishing. We were about nine months ahead, both teams working hard to achieve a shared view of plans with what might become both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.

The problem was Windows Phone and Windows did not share aligned schedules, which made most efforts at synergy optimistic at best or an academic exercise at worst. In a quest for synergy between groups, I long advocated to align dates, especially with respect to making firm commitments. In all Microsoft history the only time teams successfully collaborated was when schedules aligned from start to finish and shared a complete focus on that one goal. We seemed stuck, however, unable to align our differing views of how fast we could move and what should be a collective priority. Should we have stopped working on Windows or stopped working on a Phone? These questions seemed silly since obviously neither made sense at the time. I was fond of repeating a mantra that sometimes to speed up we first must slow down. To most that came across as dumb, especially in the context of gaining prominence of Google and Facebook leading with speed. When groups aren’t aligned getting aligned is extraordinarily difficult and requires painful choices. Was Phone ahead of Windows? That couldn’t be because it was built on an old code base. Was Windows ahead of Phone? That couldn’t be because we had not done any of the work to be a mobile OS yet. Should we have not released WP7? Should we have stopped working on Windows 8 until after WP7? Would we then have done another new reset of WP7 instead of a fast follow-on release? These were non-trivial questions to ask.

Apollo, the code name for Windows Phone 8, would start well after Windows 8 had started, plus there was the interim Windows Phone 7.5 release, code-named Mango. We could have aligned on many things with a schedule where Apollo finished after Windows 8, but the Phone Team did not want a schedule to stretch out that far. Our planned Windows 8 availability was in June 2012. To the Phone Team, finishing Windows 8 code in April would not have allowed enough time to make holiday of 2012 with phones. From my perspective, our April 2012 date for Windows 8 was aggressive. If Windows 8 were the next Windows 7 then in all likelihood we would have hit the date, but given the massive scope of the project I could not be so precise (shades of schedule chicken with my friends in Germany a decade earlier.)

Absent alignment across the full schedule, at every step the teams would be doubting each other, making alternate plans, or hedging on alignment. In this case, Windows Phone appeared to me to have more confidence in their target dates than I did in mine. Depending on the scope of changes in the phone plans that seemed plausible.

What would an aligned plan look like?

It would be a Windows Phone built using the new Windows 8 operating system. A plan like this would address both the operating system shortcoming of WP7 and the limitations of the Silverlight platform. Executing would have been straightforward, assuming the Windows Phone business was comfortable with the schedule and doing the work to make sure Windows 8 ran on the hardware phone partners required. The effort to bring Windows 8, as planned, all the way down to a phone level of hardware was significant but with a fully committed effort from the Phone Team it was entirely possible—Apple proved that by bringing OS X to the iPhone.

A plan where Windows limited itself to what was in Windows Phone 7.5 amounted to simply delaying the start of Windows 8 for another two or more years. This quickly began to feel like Longhorn all over again. Besides the WP7.5 code base and developer platform were no starting point for a long-term platform play and the phone required far too much of Windows anyway.

This was another round of strategic handwringing or unrealistic thought experiments since no one wanted any team to slow down, stop, or rethink plans resulting in slowing down or stopping. No one.

I was certainly not going to force the issue. Another team’s schedules were their business, and I had enough concern over executing our aggressive plans. I retreated from the debate. I wasn’t willing to force my idea of a plan without more support from Windows Phone.

Everyone was concerned about time to market—who wasn’t? Tens of hours in meetings were burned up on hypothetical conversations about aligning on overly specific features or creating seemingly impossible synergies where the whole conversation was built on a foundation of dates that were not accurate to more than three to six months. Creating mythical savings by shaving weeks off testing or partner releases was academic. These handwringing conversations drove me nuts, like my 8th grade science teacher’s reaction when I used too many significant digits just because my TI-35 could display them. We needed a coarse and big bet, not trying to gerrymander a solution without disturbing existing plans, existing plans that were not getting us to a stronger position.

In these discussions, we found ourselves detailing minutiae of Bluetooth drivers and graphics subsystems and how to share those, which were good goals but entirely divorced from the broader challenges of alignment or step-function change required to earn a seat as a leader. We seemed unable to discuss the deeper strategic issues like the developer platform or the need to move all of Windows Phone to a new OS and that a new OS had to be built first. There was nothing specific to Windows and phones in this situation; rather, this was a typical Microsoft pattern of strategic dysfunction. When faced with a big problem, we’d devolve into a debate about tactics, trying to find some alignment with minimal impact, then we’d surface with disappointing or unrealistic plans. It was the classic big company dynamic where the PowerPoints got longer and more divorced from reality and then one person in the room had to step back and say, “wait a minute.” That was usually me or JonDe.

Even within our own Windows team, there was a small group in JonDe’s organization that wanted Windows 8 to bet on making a phone from the start. Several key leaders from the Windows NT era were now on the Phone Team and remained close to those in leadership roles in Windows, creating a natural collaboration point. It was a totally rational bet, after all, because that was what Apple had done when it reengineered OS X to be the basis for iPhone and iPad and it was also what Microsoft needed. Apple’s mobile product did not, however, need to maintain its existing business and at the same time move it forward. It also lacked the heft of the Windows ecosystem and moving the product to SoC/ARM in a single release. It also lacked the reality of being third to market in a new and clearly defined category.

I give huge credit to those on the Windows team that pushed to build a phone. As audacious, and that’s the right word, as our Windows 8 plans were shaping up to be, building a phone from within the Windows group was one step more than we could take alone. These were difficult conversations to be had. The team heard the desire to push harder and responded. Had the company been a bit more receptive in a real and committed, and not symbolic, way then perhaps I might have been convinced to reach even further than we did with Windows 8. No doubt I was already nervous about the Windows 8 plan and as such there’s no escaping that adding one more constraint—not building a phone—was welcome.

Apple had the benefit of a clean break with nothing to lose when it built the iPhone. We just did not have that option, or at least did not consider it.

My feeling, and decision, was that competing with the iPad was an enormous leap for Windows 8. On paper, the idea of building an OS on ARM, a new developer platform, an app store, a new user experience, and working on a new generation of hardware seemed like an absurd bet for Microsoft to get done all at once with its flagship product. In big company lingo, it was a stretch goal for the ages. I was worried about the problems that befell IBM when it embarked on Project Stretch, trying to get too much done too soon. That was hubris.

Building a phone would have been an irresponsible effort from just the Windows team. By constraining the first release of Windows 8 to devices that were tablet sized, we had the chance to achieve success in an area that was already our strength, productivity and information work. Tablets had a bigger screen, more room for user interface, more area for battery, and a logical size for a keyboard. Therefore, during our planning for our team, I drew project boundaries at targeting a tablet device rather than a phone device. We knew we could do a phone in the next iteration. In fact, as we’ll see the engineering leaders were already making proof of concept progress in this regard. That’s why it felt rational to constrain now and expand later.

Why did building a phone now keep percolating up as an idea? Primarily it was because of the operating systems effort of leapfrog products. The old management view of developing two products at a time and in theory being able to spend more time developing a future release while doing tactical work in the immediate release. Recall this methodology from the sequence of Windows code names, Chicago/Cairo, Nashville/Memphis, and so on. Also recall, the second release never made it to market.

The idea of the Windows 8 team building a phone while the Windows Phone Team built its own Windows Phone on a different code base seemed to follow this logic. It seemed logical to a company that still held a collective, though slightly revisionist view of the past, which was how we cleverly worked on both the original Windows (16-bit) code base, transitioned that to 32-bits, while also building a native 32-bit Windows NT to become the real future of Windows. That is a great story, but leaves out a ten-year story of warring groups, competitive missteps, failure to deliver, and the pure luck that both IBM and Apple all but failed at everything they did, while all the apps worked across all those variations of Windows. We were in no position to endure or accomplish any of that—the paradigm shift was one we were responding to, not creating.

As we will see, it isn’t clear that delaying one or the other product would have fundamentally changed the trajectory once the bet on WP7 was made, a bet that was made in the middle of building Windows 7.

As we pulled together and began to circulate the draft vision memo the excitement and chatter in the hallways increased. The team was anxious to start work. Microsoft was always at its best when it faced a crisis, and this was a genuine crisis. Those working on the deep parts of the operating system were super excited about “porting” to SoC (I mean ARM specifically as Windows already supported Intel SoC) as that goes back to the roots of Windows NT and supporting many chipsets. They were confident. Those thinking about building apps were extremely excited about building a new Windows API for modern secure, power-efficient, multitouch applications and the challenge to do so as a core part of Windows and not another “random” new runtime from Microsoft. The user-experience team had fully embraced the idea of melding consumption and productivity.

The one question everyone had was about the target computer—where was our iPad and who would make it? Everyone was asking, “Would Microsoft build a computer?” There was little faith the ecosystem could produce something as magical as the iPad. There was a great deal of hope that we would, as a team, actually do the thing everyone thought it would take to truly enter a newly competitive market and redefine what Windows could do.

Whenever asked I said, “I don’t know.”

I definitely wanted to, but we had not yet committed. I’d been lobbying for a couple of months to make that happen. I knew we had to and knew that not doing the hardware would be the same compromise Microsoft had always made and I was certain we would fail as we had in the past. I needed to be very careful about words and body language when it came to hardware. As I saw with the fallout of the Courier project, the OEMs (reminder: Microsoft’s largest customers) did not take kindly to first-party competition. I would maintain this position for the start of the project.

Confidence was high. Our plan for Windows 8 was daring and bold, even audacious. As I write this today reading the plan and in particular looking at the prototypes from Vision day, I am struck by just how much we set out to do. Spoiler alert: we actually got most of what you can see in the videos done for the release.

On March 24, 2010, six weeks following the iPad announcement, 6,000 Redmond-based employees gathered at the Seattle Convention Center for the Windows 8 Vision Meeting. We invited execs from around the company in a VIP section in the front rows, including Office, Development Tools, Server, Mobile, Research, and more. As in the past, the Company’s product executives received the Vision memo and even the opportunity for a small and focused version of the plans for their staffs if they wanted.

Julie Larson-Green led the Vision process and the resulting memo and plans. She and the team perfected the best of top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out planning. They also perfected distilling the plan down to something thousands could understand and presented it in a compelling manner.

The admin team once again did an amazing job on the whole event, including this time getting transportation from Redmond to the downtown venue. They even secured the space that was already staged for the Microsoft TechReady field training summit. We just had to promise to end on time because they had booked the venue until the end of the day. We saved hundreds of thousands of dollars this way. So proud!

We had the full range of collateral for the vision: the 30-page long-form vision memo, the two-pager vision everyone would tack to their corporate-standard cork board, prototype or sketch videos for each of the six vision areas, and a mock press release. The only thing we were totally silent on was the big question of building our own device.

The Windows 8 mock press release was my favorite. With the headline “Microsoft Redefines the PC with Windows 8: Breakthrough Release Brings Customized Experiences for Consumers, a New Business Model for Developers and Strong Value for Businesses” the opening graph read:

Redmond, WA - RTM Date – Microsoft today announced the completion and Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of Windows 8, a breakthrough release focused on humanizing the web. Designed for more natural interaction with the PC, Windows 8 enables a consistent and comfortable experience across the screens and devices you use every day. The Windows 8 experience scales consistently across the broadest array of devices: from small-screen slates to PCs to large-screen TVs, yet with no change in system requirements from Windows 7.  In addition to its groundbreaking user experience, Windows 8 enables developers to create compelling experiences faster, easier, and reach new markets quickly.

The theme of the day was “8” of course. Everything was about the number eight, right down to the use of Saturday morning TV videos on the number eight—"eight, eight, eight let’s sing a song of eight.” The theme of eight continued with a walk-in video of trivia questions related to the quantity eight.

After a brief introduction I asked SteveB to come on stage to provide context on the importance of Windows to Microsoft. His energy level always exceeded that of most and was always difficult to follow as the next speaker. I did not tell him in advance, but for his walk-in video I used what became infamous, a Windows sales video from 1985. It featured him in a tacky plaid coat doing his best “and that’s not all” description of all the features of Windows 2.0, “including Reversi,” all for $99. There was a great line at the end. He announced that the offer was not valid in Nebraska, an inside reference to my former manager, original leader of the Word (then called OBU-Office Business Unit) team, and SVP of the sales force Jeff Raikes’s home state. Most on the team had no idea this video existed and were puzzled by that line at the end. We also showed the now famous “Developers, Developers, Developers” rallying cry which was all too appropriate for the event. While intellectually I understand why some might make fun of these performances, not only are they classic Microsoft events they show the genuine and electric passion SteveB had for the company and the mission we were on. They are as much a part of the success of Microsoft as any software we wrote. Steve probably used the phrase and same passion 1000 times, but it was immortalized in this video. In a later discussion we had on the audio app Clubhouse, Steve discussed what it was like to galvanize thousands of people and why such passion was important as a leader.

I remained backstage and after Steve exited the stage, we walked over to the front row and sat down. I was right behind Steve and would narrate and provide color to the presentation as it progressed. He had of course already read the vision and we had our usually back and forth. Steve was an active listener and always had lots of questions during a presentation. I had sent the written vision to BillG as well but did not hear back much other than a renewed emphasis on the pen and handwriting.

Entering the stage to the Schoolhouse Rock video “Crazy Figure 8” JulieLar presented the vision of the product. The words she used repeatedly were “modern” and “tailored web,” which was our way of describing the new apps for Windows 8, the Windows runtime, and the tools required. The “tailored web” phrase was awkward and my doing, but we meant apps. It was meant to reflect our view that apps were taking advantage of the web platform, not just another runtime API on top of Windows—it was Windows.

Julie presented six vision areas. It is worth going through each one in this text. Note for the web version the vision area slides used at the time are provided and area’s text description is followed by the video shown the team.

* Designed for a Tailored Web Experience

* Engineered for Tailored Web Development

* Connected and Ready to Use

* Enhanced with Services

* Approaching Consumer Electronics Quality

* Future-proofing the OS

While I was saying “chipset to the experience” we always started describing the product from the experience. In most every way the audacity of the release was most visible in the experience, though by no means contained within. From there we moved deeper into the implementation.

The descriptions below are taken from the Vision Memo. Each of these high-level descriptions was accompanied by detailed subpoints articulating specific features that were (for the most part) delivered in the release.

Designed for a Tailored Web Experience. In Windows 8, we will create an experience optimized for consumption scenarios, and the form factors and input methods that enable them. We will design a modern user experience that re-imagines the spirit and benefits of the web—connected experiences, informing in real-time, built on open platforms—but evolved for modern PC form factors. We will cultivate a new ecosystem of applications, optimized around multi-touch, sharing, people, and connection to devices, which together will create a web experience tailored to Windows. We recognize that customers store information about their identity, people, and the services they use in the cloud, and we’ll rely on Windows Live or other compatible services to complete our tailored experience.

Engineered for Tailored Web Development. In today’s world, the web is an increasingly central part of how customers use computing devices. Given the broad customer reach, the ease of deployment, and the potential for monetization on the web, developers—particularly new developers entering the market—have focused intently on the web and have utilized the standards-based web technologies of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Today, Windows offers very limited value to web developers, who cannot use web programming models for reliable access to the capabilities of the rich client. In Windows 8, we will blend the best of the rich client with the ease of deployment and openness of the web platform and enable developers to easily create, sell and deploy applications that take advantage of native system capabilities such as touch, media, hardware acceleration, connection to devices and services, as well as the capabilities of specialized PC form factors.   Windows Live continues to be an important showcase for our Windows offering and a growing part of our platform message. Windows Live focuses on being a premier developer for Windows and provides additional services, including Windows Live Connect, which developers can use as they build their applications.

Connected and Ready to Use. Connectivity is the oxygen of digital life. People expect to connect to people, websites, data, devices, and applications whenever and wherever they want. They don’t want to think about connecting, they expect to just BEconnected. They’re frustrated if connectivity is cumbersome or unreliable. Windows 8 PCs meet these challenges by easily connecting to people, places and data over any network; making network and device connectivity snappy and responsive on a wide range of hardware; intelligently managing network resources; delivering on the promise of connecting to work or home from anywhere; creating rich and delightful scenarios with wired and wireless devices; providing hosters more economical options for scaling their services; giving organizations the network policy controls to meet their security and compliance goals; creating more opportunities for Telco, retail and IHV partners to participate in and profit from the Windows experience; and offering programmers the ability to use the most important functions of Windows network and device capabilities in modern applications. 

Enhanced with Services. Web services are an established part of daily life, connecting people, devices and information in a diversity of contexts—home, work, and in between and in an increasing number of geographies.  Seamless web services that understand context can move software from the mundane to the modern.  Services help realize the promise of connected technologies, dynamically delivering digital assets—content, media, applications—into contexts that delight customers. Services enable feedback loops and improvements over time, demonstrating customer-driven decision-making, founded in data, and ensuring that the experience becomes increasingly relevant and richer. Services in Windows 8 enhance the customer experience when a connection is present, while respecting a quality baseline experience in a disconnected state. Windows 8 services help us connect with customers, understand their needs and pain points, and enrich their experience over time through dynamic, contextual delivery of content and applications relevant for their locale and in their preferred language.

Approaching Consumer Electronics Quality. In the early days of the PC, most people who owned a computer were hobbyists or technical enthusiasts. As enthusiasts, their expectations were generally low around how much extra maintenance, repair, and tinkering were required to keep PCs running well. In fact, the amount of skill and know-how to keep a PC in top shape was often the source of bragging rights and status among enthusiasts. The Windows 8 PC is easy to own and operate, from the day it comes out of the box to the day the owner decides to retire it. Building such an experience starts with our partners, who design hardware, drivers and applications that are a considerable part of the customer experience. To deliver a great PC to customers, we ensure these partners have the tools and data they need to create and deploy Windows images, assess their quality and solve any problems discovered. In many ways this is a journey that started with Windows 7, where we took a major step forward with both in-box quality and with the work we did with our partners to deliver great systems. Windows 8 takes the next step, with additional capabilities built into Windows as well as tools to help our partners deliver high-quality systems. Hardware platform investments and shared bets with our silicon partners, OEMs, ODMs and IHVs increase system quality. These investments result in the most stable, responsive, power-efficient and low-maintenance Windows we’ve ever produced, running on systems that take full advantage to deliver a quality experience that matches that of consumer electronics.

Future-proofing the OS. One of the greatest strengths of Windows is its versatility. Windows runs on hardware ranging from netbooks to huge multi-processor servers, in roles spanning touch-enabled PCs in the home to massive databases in the enterprise. To make this possible, we build Windows on a powerful set of core services that deliver performance, scalability, reliability and security across a wide range of form factors, user scenarios, and server workloads. And, as the industry innovates in the core components of computing—such as processors, networking and storage technologies, as well as device types—investments in the core of Windows 8 ensure that Windows remains the leading way industry innovations reach our customers.

There are several current trends that will have a particularly significant impact on the core of Windows in the Windows 8 timeframe. System-on-a-chip (SoC) vendors are delivering new offerings that enable emerging form factors such as slates to rival the capabilities of today’s PCs. Virtualization technologies are redefining the boundary between the operating system and the hardware on which it runs and the way that companies deploy and manage both their servers and clients. Further, customers tell us their use of virtualization technologies will grow dramatically. The price of commodity storage is plummeting at the same time that storage use is exploding in both consumer and business settings. And new security technologies are emerging that will affect the way customers experience computing in the future. Our investments in future-proofing the core ensure we’re well-positioned to compete with a wide range of innovative device types, take a leadership position in scalable computing architectures based on commodity hardware and devices, and strengthen Windows as a secure, trustworthy platform.

Sitting in the audience with our guests from around Microsoft and next to SteveB, I could not resist emphasizing or highlighting aspects of the meeting, especially the videos. There was a lot of excitement but there were many questions. The biggest question from SteveB to me was “What about Office?” In our demos of all that was new, particularly with the “Tailored Web”, we did not show Office. For the whole of Microsoft enterprise business and much of the company history, the business was not just Office but Office and Windows.

Without Office there would be no Windows and without Windows there could be no Office—that reinforcing flywheel was essential to both but also essential to the ecosystem. A new Windows without a new Office would send a message to the ecosystem that the new release was not important. Office 95 and Windows 95, Windows 2000 and Office 2000, the XP wave. When Windows didn’t have a new Office or when Office didn’t ride on the coattails of a new Windows, we struggled. Either new PCs were not seen as exciting, or developers would not know what to do with a new Windows, or enterprises would not be interested in the effort to deploy just one of the two products everyone used.

Our answer was simple yet just as bold as the Windows plan—we needed new software from Office just like we needed new software in Windows. The existing tools would run, but the vision encompassed a new user interface, a new API for expressing apps, and a connection to online services. In addition, this API and the store for developers to use would impose a new model where an app did not take over the PC in the same way we were all used to.

One of the more animated discussions, right then and there at the vision meeting, was about the Office Ribbon. Steve wanted to know where it was in our demos. While we were still early, we knew the Ribbon was not the path forward for touch devices or smaller screens. We knew that because the people behind the videos we were watching were the actual people who designed the Ribbon. This was not lost on me but did not seem to resonate in the VIP section at that moment.

For me, the shift that was underway was going to be bigger than the transition from character mode to graphical interface. Just as Windows brought graphical interface while also carrying forward the existing character applications, we would bring forward existing graphical applications. We showed this time and again in the videos. The future, however, was in a new kind of application. In many ways we felt bringing forward classic Win32 applications, Intel hardware, and all of the ecosystem was an opportunity for Microsoft. It was decidedly a compatibility play and not one where we wanted Office to come to rely upon. Said more bluntly, Microsoft did not optimize the Windows experience for MS-DOS spreadsheets and word processors—they ran better than they ever had previously but it was abundantly clear new apps built on Win32 was the strategy.

The challenging part was there was little news in the vision meeting for those in the front row watching. The past year had been a march to get to this point. The internal partners and their teams had been part of the process to get us to this point. It was, perhaps, the shock of seeing it all in one place that suddenly makes it all real.

We were really making a very big bet. Yet one look around in the marketplace and it was obvious we had to. The bet to make Windows in the first place, announcing it one month before Macintosh was announced was equally bold. Like Apple with the iPhone, in 1983 Microsoft had nothing to lose. In 2010, there were potentially immense downsides to making a bold, but incorrect, choice for the next Windows. That made everyone a bit nervous.

SteveB, however, is every bit the optimist and also cheerleader. He left the meeting pumped. He had a million questions, but he was definitely excited. He also wanted everything to get done sooner than we planned. Me? I just wanted to get it done when we planned.

For the team, the meeting was fantastic. We had a vision, a plan, and a team ready to execute. Our ship date was set for April 4, 2012, under three years from the completion of Windows 7. When I look at these plans and the video today, all I can do is wonder at just how much we signed up to do and in just two years. As we’ll see, we also got most everything done and practically on schedule.

We did not know it at the time, but PC sales were peaking—industry analysts forecasted that the 2010 rate of PC sales of 317 million units would rise to almost 500 million by the time we shipped Windows 8. We shared these estimates with the team at every step. We had to.

Confirming our worst concerns, that never happened. Not. Even. Close.

Emotionally, however, the external climate gradually darkened as PC sales flattened over the course of the release, and then began their decline. The forecasts of 500 million PCs selling in a year gave way to forecasts of tablets, particularly with the unit volume of Android tablets, overtaking laptop sales in two years. From the boardroom to the schoolhouse, the iPad was quickly becoming a fixture. People traveling routinely commented on the use of tablets on planes and the rise of iPhone docks and chargers, and even tablets, in hotel rooms. Cash registers, information kiosks, and even signs in elevators were rapidly becoming iPads. Smartphones surpassed PC sales due to the rise of Android—three years after the iPhone released, phones were outselling PCs and the dreams of emerging markets becoming a source for growth evaporated. Tablets as a substitute for PCs was a debate that raged on a decade later even as PC sales declined continuously and iPad sales grew. PCs were baked into the fabric of the workplace and to a lesser extent schools, but any new business capability or use cases were appearing in the context of a browser, almost always Google Chrome.

As we began Windows 8, PCs transformed from a unit-growth business to a replacement business, in the blink of an eye, making our bet far more existential in nature. Given the way PC sales were shifting to a replacement device in business, the comfort of having a Windows 7 foundation upon which to rest—or fail—was, in fact, comforting.

We started coding just weeks after the worldwide availability of the iPad. We were focused and on a mission. It was amazing.

Steve Jobs appeared at the All Things D conference the first week of June 2010, celebrating the iPad hit the company created. Riding this wave of success, Jobs seemed to have a great time being interviewed by both Walt and Kara, with Kara stating that Apple had surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization. I’m sure no one paid attention to such things, ouch. I cringed at hearing that from my front-row seat, a spot I rarely took, preferring to sit in the back.

In the span of a few minutes, Jobs made the case for iPads as the future of the laptop clear, without even using the phrase “post-PC era” that had become all too common. He dismantled our Tablet PC strategy and even relegated the Mac to legacy.

Among the jabs, perhaps most directed at Microsoft’s unique strategy was the role of the pen and handwriting, so core to BillG’s Tablet PC vision. Jobs said, “handwriting was the slowest input method ever invented.” He said, “If you need a stylus you’ve already failed.” In his view, the Tablet PC failed because it was based on a PC, had all the expense of a PC, the battery life of a PC, all the weight of a PC, and, most of all, a PC operating system that needed the precise tip of an arrow of a cursor and mouse.

It would not end. He was right and the tough part was we knew that ages ago, but the iPad delivered the proof.

I sat there writing it all down. But I was also agreeing. Finally, he pointed out that a “PC operating system” can’t be used with touch, because all the apps have to be rewritten anyway.

Bingo. That was the major lesson of Windows 7 and the entirety of the strategy for Windows 8 in one quip.

While it was still early, the strengths and weaknesses of both the iPad and our plan were materializing. The iPad had no legacy strategy—it was a total break from the past. Importantly, Jobs defined a new operating system with a new interaction model. An OS is more, though, and for the rest of the OS—the interfaces to hardware, memory management, storage, networking, devices, and more—as he himself said three years earlier at the iPhone launch, the iPhone and thus the iPad were in fact based on a PC operating system, OS X. Apple reimagined not the whole OS (though, to be fair, as we will see, much of the guts of the OS change as well) but the user experience, or what techies call the shell. That was exactly our plan for Windows 8.

As if to somehow call out to me to validate the plan, Jobs in his inimitable manner also shared some news that had never been shared before. The iPhone did not lead to the iPad, but rather the iPad was the original product under development years earlier. Upon seeing the technology, the phone became the product goal, but it took time for the hardware to catch up and for Apple to regain footing as a corporation. We already debated this choice, but knowing we intended to bring forward more compatibility and more openness of the platform, we started with a tablet.

In what turned out to be a metaphor for the ages, Jobs compared PCs (including Macs) to trucks, and the iPad was the passenger car for the masses. He said:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars…. PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.

The internet had a field day disassembling the metaphor in a sea of pedantry that only Reddit and Twitter can produce. People were quick to provide the history of production years of trucks versus cars, the shipments of each over time, the reality that suburban drivers buy tons of trucks, and on and on. Why? Because of exactly what Jobs had said—this was a huge transition, and it was going to make many people uncomfortable. The more someone grew up with a PC (a truck), the more difficult the transition, and the more Apple would need to prove it wouldn’t work. This debate continues today.

Outsiders heard that Jobs thought Microsoft had missed every opportunity or made the wrong choices, and in a sense that was his point without saying so directly. What observers did not know was that Windows 8 approached the next steps with a new perspective.

Our goal was to reimagine what a PC could be—no stylus, no Intel chips, none of the OS baggage. From the chipset through developer opportunities to the user experience, we set out to build a new future for PCs by rethinking the assumptions that constrained our every move. We wanted to deliver better products for a modern era.

From the outside it would look like we were copying what had become Apple’s proven success, but, in reality, it was parallel evolution, at least when it came to the tablet. The one thing we were not doing was precisely what we incorrectly thought Apple would do, which was to build a new tablet out of our old OS. We were building a new OS that happened to bring along the old OS. This was exactly what Microsoft had done from MS-DOS to OS/2, from that to Windows, and from 16-bit to 32-bit then to 64-bit.

Because of its phone strategy and execution, Apple was ahead of Microsoft. That Apple had nothing to lose because it had built such incredible success in non-PC devices left a good deal of room and no expectations for Apple to reinvent computing for a changing landscape.

Because of its phone strategy and execution, Microsoft was behind Apple. That Windows was mired in poor execution for much of this time left little room and high expectations for Windows to reinvent itself for a changing landscape.

Still, we were going to be late with tablets, the calendar will prove so. At the same time, we weren’t making irrational or unproven choices, nor were we simply chasing Apple. First mover advantage as a strategy has mixed results so there was a good chance our tardiness could work in our favor.

Back when our vision meeting ended, I stood at the exit as thousands filed out. The optimism and excitement were everywhere. We could not be in a better position to execute.

Our goal was nothing short of reimagining Windows from the chipset to the experience. The plans were bold to the point of audacious. To do otherwise was to stand still and let the new era pass us by—no way I would let that happen.

On to 101. Reimagining Windows from the Chipset to the Experience: The Chipset [Ch. XV]

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