Programming Windows: Are You Experienced? (Premium)

With Bill Gates’ triumphant keynote address at CES 2001 out of the way and the troops back at work after an unsettling holiday break, the development of Whistler spun up again at Microsoft’s corporate headquarter in Redmond, Washington. The Windows team was planning a big surprise for its fans and customers, but over the course of three official builds of the product ahead of an expected Beta 2 release in February, there was little hint of the major changes to come.

To date, Whistler had provided the same desktop environment that Microsoft had used since its debut in Windows 95 in 1995. But Microsoft added a twist, with a visual style choice that could be set to “classic,” the basic look and feel of Windows 9x/Me and 2000, and “watercolor,” which introduced a bolder color scheme. Early Whistler builds also showed off simpler new UIs for the Start menu, Control Panel, Help and Support, and other key interfaces, that were matched to the Watercolor visual style.

The first few Whistler builds of 2001 continued this evolution, and a late January build was the first to include the wallpapers, including the iconic Bliss, that would ship with the final version of the product. But that was about it.

But that very week, I received my first clues that major changes were coming. First, I discovered via sources that the watercolor user interface was not the final UI, and Microsoft was planning “a new interface or skin.” And Whistler would not be branded as Windows.NET or Windows 2002, as many had expected: my sources told me that Bill Gates had rejected several names for the next versions of Windows and Office. And that in the latter case, Gates had specifically rejected the names Office X, Office 10, Office 2002, and Office Millennium Edition. The name Gates did like was Office XP. And XP, I was told, stood for “eXPerienced.”

That was somewhat incorrect—XP stood for “eXPeriences”—but with the Office branding shifting to XP and Whistler and Office shipping at the same time, it made sense that Whistler might be branded … Windows XP. At the time I first heard this, in late January, however, that wasn’t certain. (Humorously, one source opined that the theme song for Whistler could thus be “Are you experienced” by Jimi Hendrix, similar to the use of “Start me up” by the Rolling Stones for Windows 95.)

Earlier in the month, I had been invited to the Whistler Desktop Beta 2 Technical Workshop, which would be held February 6 and 7 at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington. There, we would finally learn what was really happening.

“The content of the event will be focused on the consumer and business desktop versions of Whistler,” I was told. “This two-day workshop offers an opportunity to hear from key members of the Whistler development team. In addition to presentations and technical explanations, you will have hands-on time with the product and opportunities for discussion with key executives, program managers, developers, and product managers.”

When I arrived at the Grand Hyatt in Bellevue, Washington, near Redmond, for the event in early February, I noticed an interesting graphical design on a pad of notepaper in my welcome kit. It featured a now-familiar green Start button and blue taskbar, indicating to me that Microsoft was indeed about to announce a dramatically new and different user interface. I scanned the image using some hotel equipment and published the first-ever image of the coming UI change.

The next morning, I drove from the hotel to Microsoft’s Redmond campus to attend the workshop with my colleagues from Windows 2000 Magazine—formally called Windows NT Magazine—and dozens of other tech reviewers. As I sat down and got settled, I noticed another corroboration of the rumored name change: what I was attending was, in fact, the Windows XP Beta 2 Technical Workshop. So Whistler was indeed being branded as Windows XP.

Microsoft group vice president Jim Allchin headlined the event, explaining that Microsoft wanted people to have an emotional connection with their PCs, much as Apple users did with their Macs. Windows 2000 would provide a solid foundation for the platform, and it would solve some consumer frustrations with the DOS-based Windows 9x/Me line. But truly improving the entire user experience would take the PC to the next level.

“Joe Belfiore’s team [which had previously worked on the user interface for Internet Explorer] has worked on a task-based approach for Windows XP,” Allchin told us. “We’re trying to make Windows expand from the current app view of the world to experiences, which is not just a marketing label. Our goal is to enable richer life experiences.”

According to Allchin, this new experiences-based approach would encompass socializing and communications, content consumption and creation, work-related productivity, and gaming and other fun activities, and later breakout sessions provided a deeper dive into each. But there were not a lot of new application programming interfaces (APIs) for developers, he said. But “what’s there is phenomenal.” And of course, Microsoft had previously said that the Whistler-era programming improvements would come via .NET.

Regarding .NET, Allchin said that Microsoft was trying to make its clients—Windows XP and Windows CE, which was oriented towards smaller, non-PC devices—“a great fit with the programming model and with web services.” But Windows XP would only realize a step towards that goal. It would include Microsoft Passport for authenticating against compatible web services and for “events and notifications.” And it would include real-time communications capabilities. That was it, and most of that wasn’t even in the Beta 2 build.

In a Q & A session, Microsoft was asked whether introducing yet another new brand, XP, would confuse customers after Windows 2000 and .NET. After all, it had only recently announced that future versions of Windows would be marketed as Windows.NET.

“There is a little concern about that,” Allchin conceded. “On the other hand, we’ve made Windows 2000 focused on business because we couldn’t achieve some consumer objectives in that release. It would be hard to take that [Windows 2000] label and push it on consumers now, so we will talk about XP being the 2000 engine. In .NET, we have done a confusing job about what it is, there is a lot in terms of branding going on. We will appropriately decorate XP with the way we want .NET included as an ingredient. We made the decision that .NET is a platform, but it’s more of an ingredient brand than a product. We have meetings each week about the . NET branding, and we know it’s confusing. We want to be precise about what it means if you use the .NET brand.”

When asked if XP’s experiences were somehow a bridge to .NET, however, Allchin said that while web services were a component of the end-to-end XP experiences, .NET was different, “a programmable Internet for developers.” This confused everyone, prompting more questions, and when finally pushed, Allchin admitted that there wouldn’t be much of .NET in Windows XP despite previous promises.

“Our current plan, which could change, is for XP to not carry the bits for the [.NET Common Language Runtime (CLR)],” he said. “However, Visual Studio.NET can create that package for end-users and apps can ship with [it]. It’s a timing issue. It’s in flux right now. What can we get done in the amount of time we have? It would be easier if we had the CLR there. But think of it as the C runtime. You can get it from a variety of places. The OS itself isn’t using it. But it might be on the server.”

“.NET is about the move to web services and software consuming those services,” Microsoft vice president Chris Jones added. “XP ties into web services in a variety of ways. Foundation services, they’ll be in XP. Web service ‘drivers’ are available, like Windows Update. Third-party services we hook into, some from Microsoft, some from elsewhere. Meta services and support services will be integrated with XP.

“In our dream, every web server today is a web service tomorrow,” Allchin continued. “We haven’t done a good job articulating this. We’ve changed since last summer from impressionistic to something concrete. We’re so clear on it now inside the company. We need to educate people better outside the company. We’re talking about branding Passport and Windows Update as ‘.NET logoed brands.’ The .NET branding will be there.”

Jones explained that Windows XP would ship in late 2001 in Home (formerly Personal) and Professional versions, a first for an NT-based version of Windows. A suite of servers would also complete the wave in early 2002, though as we’ll see, this family of products would be delayed later for over a year.

“Windows XP is a full-featured superset of Windows 2000 and Me,” he said. “It’s our most significant upgrade ever.” It would offer complete scenarios, where “possible was no longer enough,” and would be more reliable, safer, and compatible than its predecessors. And to make this NT-based product more approachable to consumers, it would ship with a simpler new visual design, among other new features. That visual design was codenamed “Luna.”

Microsoft’s Robert Girling and Joe Belfiore gave reviewers, including me, their first-ever peek at this new visual design, which I would later describe as “a sea of blues and greens.” It better exploited modern graphics technology, pulling Windows out of the limited palettes of colors of the past. It would enable end-to-end experiences related to photos, music, video, and acquiring, publishing, and sharing information between devices and between services. And we would be able to get our hands on early versions of these innovations when Beta 2 shipped later that month.

“The ‘Luna’ user interface goes beyond normal skinning by providing a look and feel that other applications can hook into,” I wrote at the time. “Bundled applications such as Internet Explorer 6 and Windows Media Player 8, for example, will use this look and feel in Windows XP when Luna is enabled … The Luna interface will likely draw comparisons to Apple’s Mac OS X ‘Aqua’ interface. But unlike Aqua, Luna was designed to get Windows users up and running quickly, and it’s obvious that any Windows user will be able to sit down at an XP device and get to work immediately. And the Windows XP interface takes advantage of today’s high-resolution, high color screens by offering up an array of beautifully-details icons, backdrops, and other graphical effects. Folder icons offer miniature previews of their contents: If a folder contains images, thumbnails of the images appear on the folder; for folders that contain digital music, the album artwork is automatically displayed.”

As it turns out, OS X’s Aqua user interface—which we’ll discuss soon—was technically superior to Luna, as the latter was just based on simple bitmaps and didn’t user hardware-accelerated capabilities or scale well to high-resolution displays. But Luna was a dramatic departure from the now-classic visual style of previous Windows versions and a real differentiator.

Windows XP would have identical hardware requirements to Windows 2000, Microsoft said, but with a few caveats: the Luna UI and other new features would require more horsepower than the 64 MB of RAM minimum. Microsoft recommended at least 128 MB of RAM and a mid-level Pentium III processor, but I recommended at least 256 MB of RAM for acceptable performance. “Don’t look surprised,” I warned. “RAM is cheap these days, and there’s almost no excuse for bumping up this critical system component.”

I came away impressed.

“Building on the solid base of Windows 2000 and the consumer-oriented feature set of Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), Microsoft has finally delivered a no compromises version of Windows that delivers the key consumer experiences that real users demand,” I wrote at the time. “Windows XP is a usability success story unparalleled in the history of Windows: no longer must we wonder why things are the way they are, as Microsoft has finally delivered a user interface–no, a user experience–that actually makes sense. It’s hard not to gush uncontrollably about Windows XP’s consumer-oriented experiences, as they are so thoroughly superior to anything available elsewhere. Anyone who wants to work with digital music, videos, or photos, or experience the best that the web has to offer should take a look at Windows XP as soon as possible. But be warned: once you’ve used Windows XP, you will find other OSes—not just other versions of Windows, but Linux and Mac OS X as well—to be painfully hard to use.”

But I had one surprise waiting for me.

Moving between rooms for the workshop’s breakout sessions, I suddenly found myself confronted by a gigantic Australian, Iain McDonald, who was surrounded by a group of smaller and younger Microsoft employees, each peeking over each other’s shoulder to get a better view of the confrontation to come.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well, what?” I replied.

“Were you surprised? Had you seen Luna before?”

When I replied that I hadn’t, that the new Windows XP user experience was a complete surprise, the group laughed and all started high-fiving each other. Apparently, my steady supply of leaks in the previous months had made them worried that the biggest news of all might have somehow escaped from Redmond. But it hadn’t.