I've been a little dismayed by some of the recent sections as the considerations were more rarefied than my limited and idiosyncratic experience. For starters, I liked Windows 8 and was gratified when (with 8..1?) I could start on my desktop. And I loved the Start Page. I still use it on Windows 10.
I also have three icons on my desktop. They are named Shutdown, Restart, and Logoff and have appropriate images. They fire up shutdown.exe with appropriate command-line options :).
Having an invite to the Microsoft Store as part of a workshop on the campus, my favorite T shirt is the one with "backward compatibility" in mirror image. OK, the OpenBSD wire-frame image of a puffer fish is also favored.
There is no doubt I am not in the essential demographic. Having keyboard, mouse, and a 30" monitor is demonstration enough. That I still want to provide tutorials on the use of CL.exe and Native Build Tools is further confirmation.
And for me, the death-knell is Windows 11 which cuts me off at the knees as a consumer.
I began with software in 1958, and I clearly remember the IBM umbrella (or confinement dome), the failed interruption from Burroughs, and other experiences. I watched Sperry Univac fail to understand that virtual memory was here to stay despite the failure of the 360/67 project and so were caught short when every 370 had it. Xerox failed at a time when their proprietary silicon was ill-equipped to contend with Intel and Motorola, although it is probably more relevant that the company business model and DNA were ill-suited to a commodity "office of the future." Desktop PCs disturbed the mainframe enterprise world in much the same way as the smartphone has broken the desktop tether.
I have had the pleasure of watching Raymond Chen knit and also have Grace Hopper know me by name. I am forever grateful to have met my contemporary, Donald Knuth, in 1962 when he had a contract to write a book on programming, and I learned how much art can be seen in watching him code. Knowing Peter Landin led to interests and insights that I continue to pursue.
At 83, I might outlive the PC. Either way, I too shall pass. In many ways, it has been a great time to be alive in the upbringing of the ubiquitous computer and many other technological advances. May human nature thrive despite the unintended consequences.
Thank you. It may very well be that our concerns were rarified relative to you or even our existing base of many customers like yourself or as I described those comfortable with the product. The aim was not to be lofty but to aim for the other 6-7 billion computers that would be used.
Many debated the graphical interface versus command line this same way. The graphical interface brought computing from 100M to 1B and the command line would not have done that.
I tried to write why I thought this point of view mattered to the business. But I agree it will all pass. In fact it has passed.
I loved this series, especially the Windows 8 related content. Having worked at Microsoft from 2001 to 2013, it was interesting reading the “behind the scenes” stories of the various decisions and challenges. Thanks for the journey Steven!
I've been following hardcore software from the start eagerly awaiting and reading each installment. I'm a child of the 80s so grew up with the pc, the early mac, the amiga (which you've referred to in a few passing comments) and today I work in as a product management consultant. Living through this period, taking a platform agnostic view of the world and seeing tech, products, services and companies rise and fall are all central to my worldview - nothing is permanent - but there is always something to be learned.
Understanding the thinking, the processes, the joys, the pain points, the learnings from giants such as yourself and others who have also reflected on their careers (e.g., Tony fadell) are an invaluable resource. I'm odd in that I was an apple user in my early years, switched to Windows at 7, got super excited for win8 (I managed to get hold of the Samsung tab from //build from an attendee friend) and fully understood what you tried doing, and ultimately have a view (like any geek) on why things might have failed.
In any case, thanks for literally everything. Your writing here, your work at MS, office, windows and everything else that has and will contribute to the tapestry of tech and in turn our lives.
As an aside, its interesting to juxtapose your writings with documentaries of the general period (e.g., Bob Cringelys triumph of the nerds) which give a further glimpse on Microsoft during the boom times!
You can count me among the people who reacted extremely negatively to Windows 8--my dad got a laptop with it, I stuck with 7, but I experienced enough of it helping him with computer problems as to call it "Windows Hate". Even with Windows 10, I ended up installing Classic Shell to bring back the Windows XP start menu, and eventually purchased WindowBlinds to make Windows 10 look like a (somewhat janky and deformed) version of the Windows Classic interface. Eventually this year I switched away from Windows permanently (aside from a Windows 11 partition I only use for gaming), and now I use Arch Linux with KDE Plasma--set up so the UI looks and works almost exactly like Windows did twenty years ago. I use the start menu (the Excalibur launcher, which is almost identical to Windows XP's start menu except that its programs are sorted in separate menus by XDG categories rather than in a single hierarchical menu) almost exclusively for launching apps. Even on Windows 11, I still use Classic Shell and disable search in the taskbar. I don't think I will ever stop doing things this way. Even the new things I learned to move full-time to Linux (and not an "easy" Linux either) were themselves old, if not ancient--POSIX shell, vim, package management, an orthodox file manager (yes, like Norton Commander in the '80s but using the KDE/Qt toolkit instead of being a character mode app), configuring things with text files. It all feels simple, proven, and robust compared to the creepy "friendliness" of my phone which thinks it knows what I want better than I do and every new phone works differently from the last phone for no good reason--why do I want this nonsense from a tool?
Of course, desktop Linux, and especially a version of Linux that expects you to configure it through the command line, will never change the world, nor does anyone who uses it really want it to. It's a desktop OS for desktop computer people, and I will continue using big towers stuffed full of expansion cards and drives until I die. There is no other machine that can browse the web, play the latest games, play the oldest games, write levels for games, drive an external MIDI synth for games, rip vinyl records to digital, write fiction, and hold 14 terabytes of media and serve it to every other device in the house, all at the same time. A true general-purpose computer in a way even the burliest laptop isn't (never mind a phone). It isn't just a computer, it is the sun around which my other computers (an AMD Athlon XP retro rig triple-booting XP, 98, and DOS, an old ThinkPad laptop, an Android phone) orbit. There will certainly be fewer PCs in the world, they will likely get more expensive as economies of scale are lost, but the PC as a technology isn't going anywhere, and neither is the Windows 95/XP interface paradigm that Microsoft perfected in the early 2000s and then slowly ruined with Aero and tiles and mobile-style apps and other alien intrusions.
And frankly, I think there are an increasingly large number of people like me, and not just balding Millennial old heads either, who are sick of "disruption", sick of "innovation", sick of obsolescence, and sick of the authority the tech industry has to upend our lives and the way we do things just because they can. I think an age of technological conservatism is just what our society needs right now. When I started using computers in 1992, almost nothing about computers worked. When you left Microsoft in twenty years later, computers worked so well people stopped buying new ones all the time because the old ones were still doing fine (I sold my old AM2 machine, already several years old, to my workplace back in 2017 to use in the front office--it's still there, handling email and QuickBooks, whereas several much younger prebuilts in the same company went to e-waste). And while that might not be that glamorous or lucrative, that is a damn sight more socially constructive than the utter chaos those hateful little rectangles of alienation we call smartphones have wreaked on society.
Excuse me for some random musings at the end of a long read.
I have a young friend in Tanzania who is studying to be a nurse. One of her big concerns is being able to get a good laptop for her classwork. She is not talking about a tablet or a phone. She needs a computer with a sufficiently large screen and a good keyboard for touch typing.
The PC is not dead. It is no longer dominant, largely thanks to advances in the hardware world that have made device form factors possible which were out of the question when the PC was king. The desktop may be dead; it serves a smaller and smaller number of specialized technical users--really those who need enormous screens. But nothing has yet emerged to replace the laptop in many situations. As for touch on the laptop, for me personally, I have yet to find any benefit; my hands are already by the touchpad and reaching for the screen is a distraction. Once a tablet is large enough to provide adequate screen space for serious content creation, it is no longer as readily portable as a smaller version, and it is in competition with similarly sized laptops which usually have better keyboards and are cheaper.
Is innovation on the PC dead? That's a bit of a different question. It certainly isn't what it used to be, but I would argue again that has more to do with form than function. When the PC was the only computing device at your disposal, then, no matter the task, if it required computing, you (or someone) tried to do it on the PC. Since then, more specialized devices have pushed the PC out of various niches where they never really belonged in the first place.
A better question is, What sort of tool would best suit the user for the task the user wants to do right now? There is no single device that fits all scenarios. What do I personally want? Well, it looks and acts like a smart phone, and it fits in my pocket, and it has days of battery life and inconceivable amounts of storage, and it has a universal port on it, so that when I get home, I can shove it in a device that looks like a laptop, and, presto, there's all my stuff, and now I have a keyboard and a mouse equivalent and a bigger screen. Maybe the port doesn't even have to be there if wireless communication between the devices can be fast enough and secure enough. Similarly, I can dock my device with a desktop equivalent or a TV or who knows what else. The device will exhibit different personalities according to the work I'm doing. It almost goes without saying I'll have nearly perpetual connectivity to the cloud. But all my data and my creations will reside on that device, and only those things I want replicated in the cloud will be there, too. Maybe the different personalities will come from different vendors, but underneath it all, there will have to be somebody's software managing the infrastructure. The more I think about it, that software might well be open source, since competing vendors would try to differentiate themselves, jeopardizing compatibility. This scenario is beginning to sound almost too utopian to ever see the light of day.
Finally, just one guy's capsule review: HARDCORE SOFTWARE was an interesting read for anyone deeply connected to the PC world. In particular, I found its discussion of the tensions between enterprise and retail, marketing and development very illuminating. Its wider appeal is open for debate. I think it would have gained interest from more stories that gave a clearer picture of the characters/personalities of the principal actors. The examination of controversial software changes like the ribbon and the start menu tend to dismiss the concerns of the objectors as being the thrashings of luddites who just don't realize what's good for them. There is also an air that only the author and a few select others inside Microsoft truly saw how the world of computers was changing.
First of all, I'm glad I found your Substack when I did. I remember when Win11 came out, I thought it was nearly a complete return to the Win7 experience. Tiles were gone, and the gadget sidebar made its return (?!). This series really put things into perspective. Thank you for doing this.
It's funny that you mentioned OneNote, since they delisted the UWP version on the store in October in favor of the classic version.
After seeing some of the other commenters I may be one of your youngest readers, but I think I can share some perspective as an ISV in terms of dev and less about business/product strategy. It really looked like the unwinding was complete when Project Reunion was released, which gave Win32 apps access to WinRT. But with the failure of the phone and therefore the loss of developer appeal with UWP, maybe it just had to be this way. "Build it and they will come." No, more like, we need to hitch this giant ice glacier of software and tow it into place.
At least Win16 and DOS had serious technical limitations, so ISVs had incentive to move by themselves. For a time before Reunion the Windows team was adding features to WinRT to the exclusion of Win32 developers, but that wasn't enough to entice. It was more frustrating than anything, given select restrictions with the runtime container and the packaging model which, for a lot of my peers, made the platform a non-option even for a rewrite! I could somewhat sympathize with the Office team when you mentioned VBA compatibility. Lots of apps needed a "file futzing" permission that wasn't there.
Here's some good news: WinRT is alive and well, that's where new OS feature work continues to happen, and the developer community I'm a part of on Discord has members younger than I am and they are very excited about Windows as a platform.
At the same time, plenty of my own peers, including those within Microsoft, are frustrated and exhausted at the strategy behind Win10 and 11. What would it take to be hardcore again? The desire to do something different is there.
Thank you, Steven, for the wonderful biopic of your history at Microsoft. I have read since the very beginning and loved every post. It will be hard to not have your weekly articles to look forward to now.
I also want to say thank you for being open and interacting. We have done so here and on Twitter a few times, and you are always gracious in your response. I expect you were a good man to work for. I would have enjoyed that. (I work with someone now who worked on Outlook when you were in charge of Office. He has told me more than once that you were a good head of the division, tough but fair and always thoughtful, and has told me stories of you driving the same car for years even when you were a senior VP!)
Thanks again! I of course will continue to read anything you post in the future, and hope our paths cross in the physical world as well. I can imagine how your experiences would be valuable to the startups you work with. (I’m in the process of starting my fifth now.)
Regarding windows 8. I was a very early Windows user from Windows version 1, retired and switched to Mac around 2005. Still curious, I wanted to try Windows 8 when it came out, my first impression was wow this will require a lot of training, how will corporations roll it out without lowering productivity of their users. I called some CEO friends and they just said not a problem, our company will just stay on Windows 7 to not impact productivity. Was the training cost for such a new UI in Windows 8 taken into account by Development, Sales and Marketing?
I read the early chapters and I LOVED it. I frankly think your book is one of the most important publications to read for a software executive (I am a founder of a SAAS company).
However, I stopped reading after the early chapters because it was hard for me to connect the dots from week to week (the schedule you were publishing on). For example, how does the bundling of Excel + Word (“The best feature we have for competing with WordPerfect is Excel.”!!) apply to future product, architecture and organization decisions. I hard to remember what I read last week and then apply it to the new ideas.
So, I thought I would wait for you to finish all of the chapters and binge read it.
And now we are finally here! Congrats on your achievement.
Is there a PDF version of all your chapters or a book planned so its easy to read it - all or once or do we just go through it one by one on Substack archives?
Thank you for the kind words. I'm sorry to hear the serialization presented a challenge. 🙏
There will be a PDF and my plan was for that to be available to the "True Blue" subscribers. It will have a table of contents, index, page numbers, and more, though online will still be the best way to experience all the photos, images, videos, articles, and PDFs. I'm looking at what else I can do. It is a lot of pages ;-)
Steve, it was a great journey you took us on. Some of the detailed geek material was over my head, some just too technical for my level of expertise. However, as one who enjoys history, this is a remarkable work of non-fiction that you can be immensely proud of. I enjoyed the ride and learned a lot in these posts. Thank you!
First of all thanks for this journey that I lived as a user (since ms dos 3 and apple // times).
The beginning of msft were so interesting and I guess little known.
As for w8.
I always had some intel machine around but preferred the mac (more fun, more elegant and a little posh)
But there was a brief period when I dropped it and went 100% msft: the era of W8 (and 8.1) and the Surface pro.
It was the ideal computer! A tablet when I wanted to or a PC when I needed to.
The interface was fun and fast. You also put the address bar in full screen IE on the bottom of the screen as Apple would have done 8 years later.
It is beyond me why people did not like it. Maybe the fault was that switching from one to the other “modes” (sorry) took us by surprise almost always.
Maybe that on Arm you could not get google to create a native Chrome version (why is that btw)?
In any case when they went back to Win7...I mean, Win10...the magic was gone.
I now have pc at work but all my personal gear is Apple (ios and mac)
Yes they should have insisted and get us windows 8.3.
Chrome on ARM would have had two problems. First we did not want to open up Win32 or desktop apps to third parties. That would have just meant people would port viruses and malware too!
Second, Chrome itself (on desktop) would have been horrible for battery life. We would have loved a touch enabled modern version of Chrome and would have supported that.
I meant way above my paygrade. I admire very much how you personalized your account and did not narrate your experience as an abstract observer. I appreciate and respect the direction that had to be taken. I am forever grateful that Wintel (along with valuable contribution from Compaq) broke the grab of IBM for all the desktop and LAN marbles. Stay safe. Live long and prosper :).
Thank you very much for the Hardcore Software! I truly enjoyed that journey and definitely learned many things from your Impressive Product Management experience. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Since I first came across the Hardcore Software I was waiting for the Windows 8 Chapter. I must say I love the Metro (Modern) UI from the Windows Phone 7/8 days and owned several Windows Phones. The concept of the tiles is smart, the UI is beautifully minimal and the Metro Apps were a pure joy to use. And I was a huge fan of the Zune's UI too. Sad that the Metro UI didn't stick. It was a breath of fresh air especially compared to the tasteless Android Shells of the time. And the Metro UI still looks great today, it is timeless.
Again, after Windows Phone 7 Apple made their UI more "flat" too and just recently introduced Widgets in line with the App Icons, in the same grid. Very similar to the Windows Phone's tiles concept. The best compliment to Microsoft I guess.
I have some issues with Windows 8 though on the conceptual level to be honest. All the previous versions of Windows starting from at least 3.1 were uniform and cohesive if this terminology makes sense here. Their concept was clear, solid, probably they were very well planned in advance. All their elements played well together, had similar UI and logic.
Windows 8 on the other hand seems to have an identity crisis. It tries to merge the phone/tablet UI with the traditional Windows desktop UI. And those UIs are so different, it doesn't even look like they are coming from the same Company. With many Apps appearing twice. Like, say, Calculator or Internet Explorer. Or, more notably, Control Panel/Settings. And the phone/table UI doesn't even feel right on a Desktop PC or a laptop with no touch screen, it is optimized for finger swipes. It trully shines on touch screens.
I've been working in Agile Software Development for the past 7 years and my theory is that Windows 8 was the first Agile Project for Windows. With no big Waterfall-y master plan. All the features that had a proper priority were put into a melting pot. Tablet UI, Ribbon for the Windows Explorer, Additional Modern Settings, New Task Manager, New Windows Store Apps. Modern Internet Explorer. Traditional Desktop Internet Explorer. And so on.
This question bothers me on a personal level and I would beyond thankful and remember it till the end of my days if you could shed light on this topic. Do you think that the mixed reaction to Windows 8 has something to do with Agile Development? Or could it be caused by trying to merge the Tablet UI and the traditional Desktop UI that should not have been merged in one OS?
I believe when we look at what what happened with Windows 8, we have to consider that products exist in three distinct dimensions: physical (functional), emotional (how people are made to feel) and spiritual (beliefs / expectations). There wasn’t really anything wrong with Windows 8 at the physical level and and we see that the research and validation that led to its makeup does appear in many successful products later. This tells us that its “failure” results from the other two dimensions and probably mostly the spiritual dimension of what people believed PC’s and Windows in particular to be.
When a very well established product evolves, we not only have to get it right at the physical features level, we need to bring people on the emotional and spiritual journey. This is fundamentally about the marketing and branding around it. This must evolve with or even ahead of the physical elements. This is often why market leaders lose their footing at the physical shifts, they have a hard time bringing the product team and their existing customer base on this journey through all three dimensions required. The new competitors come with not only new physical elements but also a new point of view on the emotional and spiritual elements while the market leader get stuck in at least 2 or 3 of the dimensions. I think this is also why it takes to version 3 to really get the mass market moving, because thing are not yet fully aligned on all three dimensions with the physical one usually not fully aligned and in place for most users until V3.
Steve, this is an impressive amount of work you have done , writing this well is very hard work. Congratulations with how well you captured the history of Microsoft and Windows from ver 1 to Windows ver 8. Thank you for taking us on this amazing journey.
I've spent over 30 years working with the Windows stack in software development roles, but I have never spent that much time thinking about Microsoft's decline. Computers still sell, Windows still gets good reviews, and even though Apples sells many more Macs nowadays, gamers still need PCs, unless they prefer a console.
As far as Windows 8 goes, it didn't offend me at the time of its release. I couldn't afford a Surface tablet back then, and I've never been a big traveler or someone who works in a coffee shop or someplace else that requires a laptop or tablet., so I didn't really have the need. I have owned modern Surface tablets, as well as iPads, and of course mobile phones, and I do realize I can do most of the bill paying, web surfing, and other activities easily on my phone versus my PC. But I prefer the PC.
Phones are great for many things, but PCs are better, at least in my opinion. And I prefer Windows, not just because it's familiar, having used it for so long, but also because it provides more freedom in how it's used, and it has extremely accessible software development tools. Macs are interesting, and I've owned several and I've programmed on them, but I find them unfriendly. MacOS is stiff and uninviting, whereas Windows is open and accessible.
Back to Windows 8: I liked it, and the only negative thing I can think of concerning it is how Windows Server 2016 would sometimes take forever to perform Windows Updates. Otherwise, it was a good release. But unlike those who find fault with every release of Windows, I can only think of one that disappointed me, and that was ME, and that was because the upgrade to it from 98 SE failed and I just reinstalled 98 SE and moved on.
It is sad to think of Microsoft's decline, and also of how much power critics have over something like a new Windows release. I see the same thing with video games nowadays. Gaming sites are constantly finding negative things to say about video games, and Microsoft's Xbox strategy, in the search for clicks to make money off ads. It's a mean-spirited way to conduct business, but it's how we do things in a free society. I wish it was all friendlier, but that's not going to ever be the case.
Thanks for the insights. I appreciate the history lessons, and look forward to reading subsequent posts.
I've been a little dismayed by some of the recent sections as the considerations were more rarefied than my limited and idiosyncratic experience. For starters, I liked Windows 8 and was gratified when (with 8..1?) I could start on my desktop. And I loved the Start Page. I still use it on Windows 10.
I also have three icons on my desktop. They are named Shutdown, Restart, and Logoff and have appropriate images. They fire up shutdown.exe with appropriate command-line options :).
Having an invite to the Microsoft Store as part of a workshop on the campus, my favorite T shirt is the one with "backward compatibility" in mirror image. OK, the OpenBSD wire-frame image of a puffer fish is also favored.
There is no doubt I am not in the essential demographic. Having keyboard, mouse, and a 30" monitor is demonstration enough. That I still want to provide tutorials on the use of CL.exe and Native Build Tools is further confirmation.
And for me, the death-knell is Windows 11 which cuts me off at the knees as a consumer.
I began with software in 1958, and I clearly remember the IBM umbrella (or confinement dome), the failed interruption from Burroughs, and other experiences. I watched Sperry Univac fail to understand that virtual memory was here to stay despite the failure of the 360/67 project and so were caught short when every 370 had it. Xerox failed at a time when their proprietary silicon was ill-equipped to contend with Intel and Motorola, although it is probably more relevant that the company business model and DNA were ill-suited to a commodity "office of the future." Desktop PCs disturbed the mainframe enterprise world in much the same way as the smartphone has broken the desktop tether.
I have had the pleasure of watching Raymond Chen knit and also have Grace Hopper know me by name. I am forever grateful to have met my contemporary, Donald Knuth, in 1962 when he had a contract to write a book on programming, and I learned how much art can be seen in watching him code. Knowing Peter Landin led to interests and insights that I continue to pursue.
At 83, I might outlive the PC. Either way, I too shall pass. In many ways, it has been a great time to be alive in the upbringing of the ubiquitous computer and many other technological advances. May human nature thrive despite the unintended consequences.
Thank you. It may very well be that our concerns were rarified relative to you or even our existing base of many customers like yourself or as I described those comfortable with the product. The aim was not to be lofty but to aim for the other 6-7 billion computers that would be used.
Many debated the graphical interface versus command line this same way. The graphical interface brought computing from 100M to 1B and the command line would not have done that.
I tried to write why I thought this point of view mattered to the business. But I agree it will all pass. In fact it has passed.
I loved this series, especially the Windows 8 related content. Having worked at Microsoft from 2001 to 2013, it was interesting reading the “behind the scenes” stories of the various decisions and challenges. Thanks for the journey Steven!
Thank you very much for following along and the kind words. Super glad you enjoyed the journey.
I've been following hardcore software from the start eagerly awaiting and reading each installment. I'm a child of the 80s so grew up with the pc, the early mac, the amiga (which you've referred to in a few passing comments) and today I work in as a product management consultant. Living through this period, taking a platform agnostic view of the world and seeing tech, products, services and companies rise and fall are all central to my worldview - nothing is permanent - but there is always something to be learned.
Understanding the thinking, the processes, the joys, the pain points, the learnings from giants such as yourself and others who have also reflected on their careers (e.g., Tony fadell) are an invaluable resource. I'm odd in that I was an apple user in my early years, switched to Windows at 7, got super excited for win8 (I managed to get hold of the Samsung tab from //build from an attendee friend) and fully understood what you tried doing, and ultimately have a view (like any geek) on why things might have failed.
In any case, thanks for literally everything. Your writing here, your work at MS, office, windows and everything else that has and will contribute to the tapestry of tech and in turn our lives.
As an aside, its interesting to juxtapose your writings with documentaries of the general period (e.g., Bob Cringelys triumph of the nerds) which give a further glimpse on Microsoft during the boom times!
Thank you for following along on the journey and your kind words. 🙏
You can count me among the people who reacted extremely negatively to Windows 8--my dad got a laptop with it, I stuck with 7, but I experienced enough of it helping him with computer problems as to call it "Windows Hate". Even with Windows 10, I ended up installing Classic Shell to bring back the Windows XP start menu, and eventually purchased WindowBlinds to make Windows 10 look like a (somewhat janky and deformed) version of the Windows Classic interface. Eventually this year I switched away from Windows permanently (aside from a Windows 11 partition I only use for gaming), and now I use Arch Linux with KDE Plasma--set up so the UI looks and works almost exactly like Windows did twenty years ago. I use the start menu (the Excalibur launcher, which is almost identical to Windows XP's start menu except that its programs are sorted in separate menus by XDG categories rather than in a single hierarchical menu) almost exclusively for launching apps. Even on Windows 11, I still use Classic Shell and disable search in the taskbar. I don't think I will ever stop doing things this way. Even the new things I learned to move full-time to Linux (and not an "easy" Linux either) were themselves old, if not ancient--POSIX shell, vim, package management, an orthodox file manager (yes, like Norton Commander in the '80s but using the KDE/Qt toolkit instead of being a character mode app), configuring things with text files. It all feels simple, proven, and robust compared to the creepy "friendliness" of my phone which thinks it knows what I want better than I do and every new phone works differently from the last phone for no good reason--why do I want this nonsense from a tool?
Of course, desktop Linux, and especially a version of Linux that expects you to configure it through the command line, will never change the world, nor does anyone who uses it really want it to. It's a desktop OS for desktop computer people, and I will continue using big towers stuffed full of expansion cards and drives until I die. There is no other machine that can browse the web, play the latest games, play the oldest games, write levels for games, drive an external MIDI synth for games, rip vinyl records to digital, write fiction, and hold 14 terabytes of media and serve it to every other device in the house, all at the same time. A true general-purpose computer in a way even the burliest laptop isn't (never mind a phone). It isn't just a computer, it is the sun around which my other computers (an AMD Athlon XP retro rig triple-booting XP, 98, and DOS, an old ThinkPad laptop, an Android phone) orbit. There will certainly be fewer PCs in the world, they will likely get more expensive as economies of scale are lost, but the PC as a technology isn't going anywhere, and neither is the Windows 95/XP interface paradigm that Microsoft perfected in the early 2000s and then slowly ruined with Aero and tiles and mobile-style apps and other alien intrusions.
And frankly, I think there are an increasingly large number of people like me, and not just balding Millennial old heads either, who are sick of "disruption", sick of "innovation", sick of obsolescence, and sick of the authority the tech industry has to upend our lives and the way we do things just because they can. I think an age of technological conservatism is just what our society needs right now. When I started using computers in 1992, almost nothing about computers worked. When you left Microsoft in twenty years later, computers worked so well people stopped buying new ones all the time because the old ones were still doing fine (I sold my old AM2 machine, already several years old, to my workplace back in 2017 to use in the front office--it's still there, handling email and QuickBooks, whereas several much younger prebuilts in the same company went to e-waste). And while that might not be that glamorous or lucrative, that is a damn sight more socially constructive than the utter chaos those hateful little rectangles of alienation we call smartphones have wreaked on society.
Excuse me for some random musings at the end of a long read.
I have a young friend in Tanzania who is studying to be a nurse. One of her big concerns is being able to get a good laptop for her classwork. She is not talking about a tablet or a phone. She needs a computer with a sufficiently large screen and a good keyboard for touch typing.
The PC is not dead. It is no longer dominant, largely thanks to advances in the hardware world that have made device form factors possible which were out of the question when the PC was king. The desktop may be dead; it serves a smaller and smaller number of specialized technical users--really those who need enormous screens. But nothing has yet emerged to replace the laptop in many situations. As for touch on the laptop, for me personally, I have yet to find any benefit; my hands are already by the touchpad and reaching for the screen is a distraction. Once a tablet is large enough to provide adequate screen space for serious content creation, it is no longer as readily portable as a smaller version, and it is in competition with similarly sized laptops which usually have better keyboards and are cheaper.
Is innovation on the PC dead? That's a bit of a different question. It certainly isn't what it used to be, but I would argue again that has more to do with form than function. When the PC was the only computing device at your disposal, then, no matter the task, if it required computing, you (or someone) tried to do it on the PC. Since then, more specialized devices have pushed the PC out of various niches where they never really belonged in the first place.
A better question is, What sort of tool would best suit the user for the task the user wants to do right now? There is no single device that fits all scenarios. What do I personally want? Well, it looks and acts like a smart phone, and it fits in my pocket, and it has days of battery life and inconceivable amounts of storage, and it has a universal port on it, so that when I get home, I can shove it in a device that looks like a laptop, and, presto, there's all my stuff, and now I have a keyboard and a mouse equivalent and a bigger screen. Maybe the port doesn't even have to be there if wireless communication between the devices can be fast enough and secure enough. Similarly, I can dock my device with a desktop equivalent or a TV or who knows what else. The device will exhibit different personalities according to the work I'm doing. It almost goes without saying I'll have nearly perpetual connectivity to the cloud. But all my data and my creations will reside on that device, and only those things I want replicated in the cloud will be there, too. Maybe the different personalities will come from different vendors, but underneath it all, there will have to be somebody's software managing the infrastructure. The more I think about it, that software might well be open source, since competing vendors would try to differentiate themselves, jeopardizing compatibility. This scenario is beginning to sound almost too utopian to ever see the light of day.
Finally, just one guy's capsule review: HARDCORE SOFTWARE was an interesting read for anyone deeply connected to the PC world. In particular, I found its discussion of the tensions between enterprise and retail, marketing and development very illuminating. Its wider appeal is open for debate. I think it would have gained interest from more stories that gave a clearer picture of the characters/personalities of the principal actors. The examination of controversial software changes like the ribbon and the start menu tend to dismiss the concerns of the objectors as being the thrashings of luddites who just don't realize what's good for them. There is also an air that only the author and a few select others inside Microsoft truly saw how the world of computers was changing.
First of all, I'm glad I found your Substack when I did. I remember when Win11 came out, I thought it was nearly a complete return to the Win7 experience. Tiles were gone, and the gadget sidebar made its return (?!). This series really put things into perspective. Thank you for doing this.
It's funny that you mentioned OneNote, since they delisted the UWP version on the store in October in favor of the classic version.
After seeing some of the other commenters I may be one of your youngest readers, but I think I can share some perspective as an ISV in terms of dev and less about business/product strategy. It really looked like the unwinding was complete when Project Reunion was released, which gave Win32 apps access to WinRT. But with the failure of the phone and therefore the loss of developer appeal with UWP, maybe it just had to be this way. "Build it and they will come." No, more like, we need to hitch this giant ice glacier of software and tow it into place.
At least Win16 and DOS had serious technical limitations, so ISVs had incentive to move by themselves. For a time before Reunion the Windows team was adding features to WinRT to the exclusion of Win32 developers, but that wasn't enough to entice. It was more frustrating than anything, given select restrictions with the runtime container and the packaging model which, for a lot of my peers, made the platform a non-option even for a rewrite! I could somewhat sympathize with the Office team when you mentioned VBA compatibility. Lots of apps needed a "file futzing" permission that wasn't there.
Here's some good news: WinRT is alive and well, that's where new OS feature work continues to happen, and the developer community I'm a part of on Discord has members younger than I am and they are very excited about Windows as a platform.
At the same time, plenty of my own peers, including those within Microsoft, are frustrated and exhausted at the strategy behind Win10 and 11. What would it take to be hardcore again? The desire to do something different is there.
Thank you. Love hearing from you.
It is going to take something rather unique to alter the landscape.
Thank you, Steven, for the wonderful biopic of your history at Microsoft. I have read since the very beginning and loved every post. It will be hard to not have your weekly articles to look forward to now.
I also want to say thank you for being open and interacting. We have done so here and on Twitter a few times, and you are always gracious in your response. I expect you were a good man to work for. I would have enjoyed that. (I work with someone now who worked on Outlook when you were in charge of Office. He has told me more than once that you were a good head of the division, tough but fair and always thoughtful, and has told me stories of you driving the same car for years even when you were a senior VP!)
Thanks again! I of course will continue to read anything you post in the future, and hope our paths cross in the physical world as well. I can imagine how your experiences would be valuable to the startups you work with. (I’m in the process of starting my fifth now.)
Elia
Thank you so much for such a kind comment and sharing some of your own history. I appreciate your ongoing support.
Regarding windows 8. I was a very early Windows user from Windows version 1, retired and switched to Mac around 2005. Still curious, I wanted to try Windows 8 when it came out, my first impression was wow this will require a lot of training, how will corporations roll it out without lowering productivity of their users. I called some CEO friends and they just said not a problem, our company will just stay on Windows 7 to not impact productivity. Was the training cost for such a new UI in Windows 8 taken into account by Development, Sales and Marketing?
Hi Steve-
I read the early chapters and I LOVED it. I frankly think your book is one of the most important publications to read for a software executive (I am a founder of a SAAS company).
However, I stopped reading after the early chapters because it was hard for me to connect the dots from week to week (the schedule you were publishing on). For example, how does the bundling of Excel + Word (“The best feature we have for competing with WordPerfect is Excel.”!!) apply to future product, architecture and organization decisions. I hard to remember what I read last week and then apply it to the new ideas.
So, I thought I would wait for you to finish all of the chapters and binge read it.
And now we are finally here! Congrats on your achievement.
Is there a PDF version of all your chapters or a book planned so its easy to read it - all or once or do we just go through it one by one on Substack archives?
Nik
Thank you for the kind words. I'm sorry to hear the serialization presented a challenge. 🙏
There will be a PDF and my plan was for that to be available to the "True Blue" subscribers. It will have a table of contents, index, page numbers, and more, though online will still be the best way to experience all the photos, images, videos, articles, and PDFs. I'm looking at what else I can do. It is a lot of pages ;-)
PDF? The “True Blue” edition should be XPS format ;)
Hahaha. No!
Hi Steve- Any update on the PDF / Book version of this?
Steve, it was a great journey you took us on. Some of the detailed geek material was over my head, some just too technical for my level of expertise. However, as one who enjoys history, this is a remarkable work of non-fiction that you can be immensely proud of. I enjoyed the ride and learned a lot in these posts. Thank you!
Thank you so much for your support and these kind words. 🙏
First of all thanks for this journey that I lived as a user (since ms dos 3 and apple // times).
The beginning of msft were so interesting and I guess little known.
As for w8.
I always had some intel machine around but preferred the mac (more fun, more elegant and a little posh)
But there was a brief period when I dropped it and went 100% msft: the era of W8 (and 8.1) and the Surface pro.
It was the ideal computer! A tablet when I wanted to or a PC when I needed to.
The interface was fun and fast. You also put the address bar in full screen IE on the bottom of the screen as Apple would have done 8 years later.
It is beyond me why people did not like it. Maybe the fault was that switching from one to the other “modes” (sorry) took us by surprise almost always.
Maybe that on Arm you could not get google to create a native Chrome version (why is that btw)?
In any case when they went back to Win7...I mean, Win10...the magic was gone.
I now have pc at work but all my personal gear is Apple (ios and mac)
Yes they should have insisted and get us windows 8.3.
Too bad they did not.
Thank you for the kind words.
Chrome on ARM would have had two problems. First we did not want to open up Win32 or desktop apps to third parties. That would have just meant people would port viruses and malware too!
Second, Chrome itself (on desktop) would have been horrible for battery life. We would have loved a touch enabled modern version of Chrome and would have supported that.
Thank you again
I meant way above my paygrade. I admire very much how you personalized your account and did not narrate your experience as an abstract observer. I appreciate and respect the direction that had to be taken. I am forever grateful that Wintel (along with valuable contribution from Compaq) broke the grab of IBM for all the desktop and LAN marbles. Stay safe. Live long and prosper :).
Dear Steven,
Thank you very much for the Hardcore Software! I truly enjoyed that journey and definitely learned many things from your Impressive Product Management experience. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Since I first came across the Hardcore Software I was waiting for the Windows 8 Chapter. I must say I love the Metro (Modern) UI from the Windows Phone 7/8 days and owned several Windows Phones. The concept of the tiles is smart, the UI is beautifully minimal and the Metro Apps were a pure joy to use. And I was a huge fan of the Zune's UI too. Sad that the Metro UI didn't stick. It was a breath of fresh air especially compared to the tasteless Android Shells of the time. And the Metro UI still looks great today, it is timeless.
Again, after Windows Phone 7 Apple made their UI more "flat" too and just recently introduced Widgets in line with the App Icons, in the same grid. Very similar to the Windows Phone's tiles concept. The best compliment to Microsoft I guess.
I have some issues with Windows 8 though on the conceptual level to be honest. All the previous versions of Windows starting from at least 3.1 were uniform and cohesive if this terminology makes sense here. Their concept was clear, solid, probably they were very well planned in advance. All their elements played well together, had similar UI and logic.
Windows 8 on the other hand seems to have an identity crisis. It tries to merge the phone/tablet UI with the traditional Windows desktop UI. And those UIs are so different, it doesn't even look like they are coming from the same Company. With many Apps appearing twice. Like, say, Calculator or Internet Explorer. Or, more notably, Control Panel/Settings. And the phone/table UI doesn't even feel right on a Desktop PC or a laptop with no touch screen, it is optimized for finger swipes. It trully shines on touch screens.
I've been working in Agile Software Development for the past 7 years and my theory is that Windows 8 was the first Agile Project for Windows. With no big Waterfall-y master plan. All the features that had a proper priority were put into a melting pot. Tablet UI, Ribbon for the Windows Explorer, Additional Modern Settings, New Task Manager, New Windows Store Apps. Modern Internet Explorer. Traditional Desktop Internet Explorer. And so on.
This question bothers me on a personal level and I would beyond thankful and remember it till the end of my days if you could shed light on this topic. Do you think that the mixed reaction to Windows 8 has something to do with Agile Development? Or could it be caused by trying to merge the Tablet UI and the traditional Desktop UI that should not have been merged in one OS?
Thank you very much!
Best Regards,
Stepan
I believe when we look at what what happened with Windows 8, we have to consider that products exist in three distinct dimensions: physical (functional), emotional (how people are made to feel) and spiritual (beliefs / expectations). There wasn’t really anything wrong with Windows 8 at the physical level and and we see that the research and validation that led to its makeup does appear in many successful products later. This tells us that its “failure” results from the other two dimensions and probably mostly the spiritual dimension of what people believed PC’s and Windows in particular to be.
When a very well established product evolves, we not only have to get it right at the physical features level, we need to bring people on the emotional and spiritual journey. This is fundamentally about the marketing and branding around it. This must evolve with or even ahead of the physical elements. This is often why market leaders lose their footing at the physical shifts, they have a hard time bringing the product team and their existing customer base on this journey through all three dimensions required. The new competitors come with not only new physical elements but also a new point of view on the emotional and spiritual elements while the market leader get stuck in at least 2 or 3 of the dimensions. I think this is also why it takes to version 3 to really get the mass market moving, because thing are not yet fully aligned on all three dimensions with the physical one usually not fully aligned and in place for most users until V3.
Steve, this is an impressive amount of work you have done , writing this well is very hard work. Congratulations with how well you captured the history of Microsoft and Windows from ver 1 to Windows ver 8. Thank you for taking us on this amazing journey.
Thank you! 🙏
I've spent over 30 years working with the Windows stack in software development roles, but I have never spent that much time thinking about Microsoft's decline. Computers still sell, Windows still gets good reviews, and even though Apples sells many more Macs nowadays, gamers still need PCs, unless they prefer a console.
As far as Windows 8 goes, it didn't offend me at the time of its release. I couldn't afford a Surface tablet back then, and I've never been a big traveler or someone who works in a coffee shop or someplace else that requires a laptop or tablet., so I didn't really have the need. I have owned modern Surface tablets, as well as iPads, and of course mobile phones, and I do realize I can do most of the bill paying, web surfing, and other activities easily on my phone versus my PC. But I prefer the PC.
Phones are great for many things, but PCs are better, at least in my opinion. And I prefer Windows, not just because it's familiar, having used it for so long, but also because it provides more freedom in how it's used, and it has extremely accessible software development tools. Macs are interesting, and I've owned several and I've programmed on them, but I find them unfriendly. MacOS is stiff and uninviting, whereas Windows is open and accessible.
Back to Windows 8: I liked it, and the only negative thing I can think of concerning it is how Windows Server 2016 would sometimes take forever to perform Windows Updates. Otherwise, it was a good release. But unlike those who find fault with every release of Windows, I can only think of one that disappointed me, and that was ME, and that was because the upgrade to it from 98 SE failed and I just reinstalled 98 SE and moved on.
It is sad to think of Microsoft's decline, and also of how much power critics have over something like a new Windows release. I see the same thing with video games nowadays. Gaming sites are constantly finding negative things to say about video games, and Microsoft's Xbox strategy, in the search for clicks to make money off ads. It's a mean-spirited way to conduct business, but it's how we do things in a free society. I wish it was all friendlier, but that's not going to ever be the case.
Thanks for the insights. I appreciate the history lessons, and look forward to reading subsequent posts.