Programming Windows: Anticip8 (Premium)

On the morning of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s third CES keynote, in January 2011, I received a tip from a source at the software giant: Microsoft was working on a new tile-based user interface for Windows 8 that was codenamed Mosh and might only appear on low-end tablet PCs that could compete with Apples iPad. It would also include a new app model, codenamed Jupiter, and these apps would be delivered to customers via a Windows Marketplace app in Windows 8. Jupiter apps would be Silverlight-based, as on Windows Phone 7 Series, and they would be “immersive,” which I later learned meant “full-screen and touch-based.”

I can now reveal that this tip came in the form of an audio recording of an internal meeting at Microsoft that featured Scott Guthrie answering questions from a Client Platform team that was frustrated by the direction the Windows team had taken. The Client Platform team was then responsible for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms, and Silverlight, but the Windows team had taken Jupiter for its own, and it had deprecated the Client Platform team’s products.

This was a bold power grab by Windows head Steven Sinofsky, and the Client Platform team---which was then part of the Microsoft Developer Division---was worried that it would “get pulled back into Windows.” Guthrie’s answer to this concern was met with laughter, indicating that the team didn’t understand the seriousness of the issue: they would be lucky if that’s what happened. But he also seemed to believe that the Windows team trusted them more then than they had three years earlier, and that they were partnering well in both directions. All they could do was hope for the best and give the Windows team what they needed and hope that the trust continued.

“2010 was a very, very exciting year for our company,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said at the start of his CES 2011 keynote address. “We launched Windows Phone 7, Office 2010, and Kinect, and we introduced Internet Explorer 9 and Office 365. We saw great growth in our Bing and Azure Services. And with the amazing success of Windows 7, it’s truly been a year like no other.” He then promised to share a little bit of what was coming next with regards to Xbox, Windows Phone, and the Windows PC.

Windows 7 was by then a blockbuster success. “Windows 7 PCs are the fastest selling PCs in history, selling over 7 copies a second, [and] they now represent more than 20 percent of all the PCs connected to the Internet,” Ballmer noted. Indeed, PC makers had sold 348.5 million units in 2010, up 13.7 percent (year over year) from the 300 million units sold in 2009. The PC market was back.

Ballmer then carted out Mike Angiulo yet again to show off some of the advances that PC makers had made in the past year. 2011-era PCs would be based on the second-generation Intel Core chipset, codenamed Sandy Bridge, and AMD’s Fusion, both of which incorporated both CPU and GPU onto ...