Programming Windows: 8 is Enough (Premium)

With the Windows 8 Consumer Preview behind them, Steven Sinofsky and his lieutenants prepared for the final stages of the product’s journey to release. They would focus on three core areas: Shoring up the OS fundamentals to ensure that Windows 8 performed as well and as efficiently as possible. Improving the quality of the built-in apps, most of which were still quite incomplete. And ignoring the growing chorus of complaints from those inside and outside of Microsoft as much as possible.

Ignoring feedback is easy when you’re sure you know better than anyone else despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. And one imagines that Sinofsky had by this time grown to believe that he was the logical successor to Steve Jobs, who had passed away just months earlier, leaving a void not just at Apple but in the rest of the personal computing industry as well. That Sinofsky was no Jobs was obvious, but it also wasn’t his fault; no one else was either. But despite all his personality issues, Jobs had had important advantages over Sinofsky. He had a good design sense. He made the right product decisions. He put the right people in positions of power and responsibility. And most ephemerally, he was, in fact, a visionary.

Unaware of his shortcomings, Sinofsky pressed forward with his disaster in the making. He had publicly stated that Microsoft would follow up the Windows 8 Consumer Preview with a Release Candidate, and it would. But in keeping with the “Preview” naming change he had instituted for each Windows 8 milestone---“not invented here” being the unspoken mantra of this regime---this would be renamed to the Release Preview. And it was this milestone that his team now pushed towards.

For better or worse, there wasn’t much work to do, at least with the core operating system. Microsoft had locked down the new WinRT programming interfaces in time for the Developer Preview, and the OS itself was feature complete by the time the Consumer Preview shipped. The biggest area of concern should have been addressing all the negative feedback. But instead, the team focused on the built-in apps.

After pulling core apps out of the OS with Windows 7 and relegating them to Windows Live Essentials, a separate download, Sinofsky had directed various teams to create Metro-style apps to replace them. And these apps---and many others---would be included with Windows 8 once again. But these teams quickly ran into the limitations of the WinRT platform, which was new, different, and ill-equipped for creating powerful productivity apps like Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop. It was like telling a Flemish master to paint with his fingers.

This proliferation of “stuff” in Windows 8---which included not just the new apps but other additive new features like the Metro-style user experience---was starting to take its toll on the product’s system requirements. But Sinofsky had promised that Windows 8 would not raise the minimum system require...