Programming Windows: Universal (Premium)

2014 began with exciting news: my sources told me that Microsoft would discuss its vision for the future of Windows at Build 2014, which would be held that April. This vision included a year-off Windows release codenamed "Threshold" that would most likely be called Windows 9.

We knew by that time that Microsoft would update Windows 8.1 in early 2014 with a service pack/feature pack-type update called Update 1 (or GDR1 internally), and I reported at the time that the most likely release timeframe was April. But the bigger news was Threshold, which would ditch the cursed Windows 8 branding and would add a “Metro 2.0” user experience. Microsoft planned to deliver three Threshold pre-release milestones in 2014-2015 and then ship the final release in April 2015, I was told. And it would be accompanied by Office Touch for Windows, which was codenamed Gemini.

“Threshold recasts Windows 8 as the next Vista,” I wrote. “It's an acknowledgment that what came before didn't work, and didn't resonate with customers. And though Microsoft will always be able to claim that Windows 9 wouldn't have been possible without the important foundational work they had done first with Windows 8---just as was the case with Windows 7 and Windows Vista---there's no way to sugarcoat this. Windows 8 has set back Microsoft, and Windows, by years, and possibly for good.”

On February 4, 2014, Microsoft announced that Satya Nadella would succeed Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to become its third CEO. His appointment followed a several months-long process in which several key candidates were considered, including outsiders like Ford’s CEO, Alan Mulally, who had taken himself out of the running because Gates and Ballmer wanted to remain directors of the board. And while he may have seemed like a long shot for the CEO role, Nadella had most recently run Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, and as such, he seemed like the right fit to guide the software giant into its preordained cloud computing future.

“I believe over the next decade computing will become even more ubiquitous and intelligence will become ambient,” Nadella wrote in his opening message to employees. “The coevolution of software and new hardware form factors will intermediate and digitize — many of the things we do and experience in business, life, and our world. This will be made possible by an ever-growing network of connected devices, incredible computing capacity from the cloud, insights from big data, and intelligence from machine learning. This is a software-powered world.”

The letter didn’t mention Windows even once. But it did (incorrectly) reference Microsoft’s one-time slogan of “a PC on every desk and home,” adding awkwardly that “the opportunity ahead will require us to reimagine a lot of what we have done in the past for a mobile- and cloud-first world, and do new things.”

Nadella’s rise to the CEO position had followed a mid-2013 reorganizatio...