Programming Windows: Fast and Fluid (Premium)

By 2010, Windows’ fate was sealed. The web and the iPhone had disrupted personal computing, forever pushing the user base---and developers---away from the PC. And so Microsoft was left to decide what to do with Windows. It could coast and let the revenues from businesses roll in while their employees engaged in traditional productivity tasks on increasingly uninteresting and anachronistic hardware. Or it could try to escape the innovator’s dilemma and disrupt its own business, as Steve Jobs had done to the iPod when Apple announced the iPhone.

To its credit, Microsoft chose the latter route. Unfortunately, the man running Windows at the time---Steven Sinofsky---was politically divisive and ill-equipped to take on the role of product visionary. And the decisions he made would go on hurt Microsoft internally and, eventually, externally as well.

It started in January 2010, at least according to a highly placed member of Sinofsky’s team who will remain anonymous. In what can only be called an apocryphal story, they recounted how Sinofsky had gone to CES 2010 and witnessed everyone touching all of the screens at the show, many of which were smart TVs and PC monitors. Sinofsky excitedly called the team back in Redmond. “They’re all touching the displays!” Microsoft, he said, would need to really embrace multitouch in the next version of Windows.

In a version of this story that is probably closer to the truth, Sinofsky later recounted how he had been at CES 2010 with his team and was struggling with how Microsoft could shake Windows out of its rut. “The question was, should we go all in and try to build a device+touch-first platform/OS,” he wrote. “We knew Windows 7 had an easy decade of utility ahead, like XP [had]. What was really bugging me was if Firefox/Chrome was where to use the web and iPhone and Android were where to use apps, then the only reason to use a PC was for ‘legacy’ workflows. We’d seen this before: it was what happened to the mainframe and IBM. Plus, mobile was just better/modern.”

And so Sinofsky did what he always did. He wrote a memo. A really long memo.

“Much has been said about the current environment relative to Microsoft,” he wrote to Microsoft’s senior leadership. “Is Microsoft the legacy? Is it ‘game over’ for Microsoft in various aspects of this new state of the world? Many openly wonder if Microsoft is deliberately holding back on innovations because of a fear that these innovations somehow undermine the traditional business model. Many argue that Microsoft’s product development practices are themselves a barrier to participating in the new world. All of these share the almost cliché view of disruptive attacks on the establishment — on Microsoft. To me, this is a naïve view of how things progress and presumes a deer in the headlights view of Microsoft. It also presumes that we do not have the technical or organizational wherewithal to build new cool and exci...