Programming Windows: Software + Services (Premium)

Most didn’t appreciate it at the time, but the 2008 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) was an inflection point for Microsoft, a dividing line between the Microsoft of old and the cloud superpower of today. To that time, each PDC had focused on a specific new platform, like NT in 1992 and Longhorn in 2003. And those platforms were primarily both client-based and on-premises solutions.

But with Microsoft evolving over time to embrace more diverse technologies like workgroups, client/server computing, and then web services, its focus likewise broadened. Many Windows releases included both client and server versions, plus other derivatives aimed at PDAs, phones, and embedded devices. And Microsoft embraced the web, and web services, and improved its Internet Explorer web browser to support web standards.

The software giant also suffered from a debilitating decade of antitrust scrutiny and oversight, giving competitors like Apple, and Google the time and space they needed to find emerging new markets for non-PC personal devices and cloud services, and then control and later dominate them in Microsoft’s absence. And the relentless march of open source continued, pitting decoupled systems that were free—except for support—and lightweight against Microsoft’s more expensive, proprietary, and tightly coupled Windows ecosystem.

In short, by the time PDC 2008 rolled around in October 2008, personal computing had changed. And Microsoft, once again, was forced to react to external forces beyond its control and realign its product offerings to better compete in this new world. And so the PDC that might have been called “the Windows 7 PDC” in others times was something else entirely. It saw the introduction of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s new OS for the cloud. And it saw the expansion of Microsoft Online—which, after several name changes would be called Microsoft 365—and its Live Services platform.

These three platforms were a break from the past in that they were hosted and maintained by Microsoft instead of being made available in traditional on-premises versions. This shift would bring many changes to the industry, among them vastly diminished roles for Microsoft’s partners and many in-house IT staff. But that would become more obvious in time.

The messaging would also evolve over time as did the product mix. But at the outset, Microsoft referred to this shift as “software + services,” meaning that it would now offer its traditional software-based solutions alongside a new and growing set of Microsoft services. In the short term, the software would be more powerful and extensible than the services. But that would change, too, as its cloud infrastructure and services offerings matured.

PDC 2008 was the first PDC to not feature a keynote address from Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, who had followed through on an earlier promise to transition out of a day-to-day role at the software giant so he could focus on global health and education issues at his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He was replaced by Ray Ozzie, who had joined Microsoft in 2005 as one of three chief technical officers when the software giant purchased his company Groove. Ozzie became Microsoft’s chief software in June 2008 when Gates left. And he provided the keynote address at PDC 2008.

This was appropriate as Ray Ozzie had led Microsoft’s push into cloud computing, appropriately enough, with a 5000-word Gatesian memo, “The Internet Services Disruption,” that would forever change the company.

“Computing and communications technologies have dramatically and progressively improved to enable the viability of a services-based model,” Ozzie writes in the memo to Microsoft’s executive staff and their direct reports. “The ubiquity of broadband and wireless networking has changed the nature of how people interact, and they’re increasingly drawn toward the simplicity of services and service-enabled software that ‘just works’. Businesses are increasingly considering what services-based economics of scale might do to help them reduce infrastructure costs or deploy solutions as-needed and on subscription basis.”

“Most challenging and promising to our business, though, is that a new business model has emerged in the form of advertising-supported services and software. This model has the potential to fundamentally impact how we and other developers build, deliver, and monetize innovations. No one yet knows what kind of software and in which markets this model will be embraced, and there is tremendous revenue potential in those where it ultimately is.”

Three years later, Microsoft was ready to show off the work that had happened in the wake of this memo. Key among that work, of course, was Windows Azure, previously codenamed Red Dog, a cloud-scale operating system built by a small team that included NT architect David Cutler.

“Windows Azure is a new Windows offering at the web tier of computing,” Ozzie announced during his PDC 2008 keynote address. “This [is] what you might think of as Windows in the cloud. Windows Azure is our lowest level foundation for building and deploying a high scale service, providing core capabilities such as virtualized computation, scalable storage in the form of blobs, tables, and streams, and perhaps most importantly an automated service management system, a fabric controller that handles provisioning, geo-distribution, and the entire lifecycle of a cloud-based service.”

Ozzie also noted that “Windows Azure is not software that you run on your own servers but rather it’s a service that’s running on a vast number of machines housed in Microsoft’s own datacenters first in the U.S. and soon worldwide … The initial features [are] only a fraction of where you’ll see from our roadmap that it will be going … We’re betting on Azure ourselves, and as the system scales out, we’ll be bringing more and more of our own key apps and key services onto Windows Azure because it will be our highest scale, highest availability, most economical, and most environmentally sensitive way of hosting services in the cloud.”

The Azure bit was followed up by a presentation by original NT team member David Thompson regarding Microsoft Online, which was then not yet broadly available. Microsoft Online would be built on top of Azure, and like Azure itself, it would only be made available as a Microsoft-hosted cloud service.

“Microsoft Online is enterprise-class software delivered via subscription services, hosted by Microsoft, and sold with partners,” he said. “Today, we offer Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, CRM Online, and OCS Online. We offer Exchange-Hosted Services, Office Live Meeting. But that’s really just the beginning. In the future, all our enterprise software will be delivered as an option as an online service. And the key value prop of Microsoft Online Services is that it provides the best experience. These are the richest collaboration tools, the market-leading collaboration tools, but they’re available in a much easier-to-use form, and easier to administer, and easier to buy. And they provide a faster way to get to that value. It’s easier to stay up to date because we do it for them, and they can deploy as an online service in minutes instead of months.”

On the second day of PDC 2008, Ray Ozzie took to the keynote stage again, this time to discuss what he called “the front-end innovations in our client platform.” One imagines he was of two minds about this part of the show, given his seer-like predictions about the future of computing. But Microsoft had a mess to clean up, thanks to Windows Vista. And the leadership of the new Windows team was eager for its moment in the sun. And after 15 minutes or so of introduction from Ozzie, he finally yielded the stage to Steven Sinofsky. It would mark the first time that most in the audience had ever seen the man, let alone paid attention to him.

Despite his awkwardness and limited presentation capabilities, the talk went well: Microsoft had alienated a lot of its userbase with Windows Vista’s quality issues, but they were also looking for some sign that it would turn things around with Windows 7. And Sinofsky’s slow-drip style of improving lots of small things rather than trying to reinvent anything major was just what the doctor ordered.

“We’re going to show you how Windows 7 brings you a personalized experience where you’re in control of your PC,” he said. “We’re going to show you how you can connect whether it’s devices or storage or all the information so you can find and organize the information across your PC. And then we’re going to show you how to bring together all the functionality of devices, and those are just three of the areas that we’re going to show you today in Windows 7. It’s a very broad release and it takes a lot to bring out a major release of Windows. There are many parts of it we’re not going to get to show you today, but there are 20 sessions here at the show that dig into the details of how all of this is implemented.”

Sinofsky brought out his chief lieutenant, Julie Larson-Green for the first demonstration of the new Windows 7 desktop, and, if anything, she was an even more awkward presence on stage. But she dutifully stepped through the major user interface changes, which included improvements to the Taskbar—including jump lists, in-line progress bars, and window previews—window management, Windows Explorer, home networking, and media management and access, before her micromanager boss couldn’t help himself and butted in with more information.

“And you can also do that with videos and pictures as well,” Sinofksy interjected after a demo of Windows Media Player remoting content to a smart speaker. “So if you have a photo frame or something like that, you can send your media all over your house.”

“Right,” Larson-Green added, tersely. “Thanks, Steven.”

On she went. Windows 7 would include a new feature called Device Stage that provided access to all of the functionality provided by compatible connected devices like printers and media players. It would kill the Sidebar, but keep gadgets, and let them exist right on the Windows desktop. It would extend the Aero glass effects with new color and personalization features. And …

“We’ve also made it easier to share and create themes on your own, and I know that’s something that’s really important to people,” Sinofsky interjected, again.

Right. Thanks, Steven.

Microsoft was also improving the notification area in the Windows 7 Taskbar, and allowing users to hide system icons they didn’t need. It would provide a new Action Center interface that would queue up notifications and centralize security and performance information. It would work with multi-touch displays, a feature Green had first shown off earlier that year. There were even updates coming to Microsoft Paint, Calculator, and WordPad. Most notably, Paint and WordPad were getting the ribbon UI that had originated with Office 2007.

“We’ve decided that once every 15 years or so we’re going to update the app list in Windows,” Sinofsky said to laughter and applause. “Whether they need it or not, right?” Green added.

After the demo, Sinofsky tied Windows 7 into Microsoft’s new “software + services” vision by noting that his division would augment the Windows 7 experience with the Windows Live Essentials suite of software and Windows Live Services. Essentials was a packaging of applications like Mail, Calendar, and Messenger, which had been included in Windows Vista, but was now made available separately so that it could be updated more frequently. And the Windows Live services extended “this even further by making those services available to you in your web browser, in Internet Explorer, or any browser that you choose. And it brings together a set of services for mail, for Messenger, for contacting your friends, for sharing photos, for sharing information and blogging.”

He also took a moment to dump on Windows Vista and his predecessor, Jim Allchin.

“We certainly got a lot of feedback about Windows Vista at RTM,” he said to more laughter. “We got feedback from reviews, from the press, a few bloggers here and there. Oh, and some [Apple] commercials.”

He went on to very briefly discuss the improvements Microsoft made with Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), but the real work, the hard work, was happening in Windows 7. And Sinofsky did not want to repeat the mistakes of the past. Windows 7 would be ready for PC makers, peripheral makers, customers, and developers on day one. That was not the case with its predecessor, he said. It would use fewer system resources, less power, and scale to more processors. It would run well on low-end netbooks, unlike its predecessor. Mount and boot from virtual hard disks (VHDs). Properly support high-DPI displays. Seamlessly connect with external displays. And it would even make User Account Control (UAC) less annoying via a new Control Panel. (This was met by applause, but it was also skewered by Apple at a future event.)

Virtually everything Sinofsky and Green showed off that day resonated well with the audience, but I suspect that Sinofsky’s plan for shepherding Windows 7 to market with just two major milestones—one beta and one release candidate, following the “pre-Beta” that Microsoft delivered at the PDC—was the most well-received after Vista’s interminable years-long development ordeal.

“The core development of Windows 7 is broken up into four dev milestones, M1, M2, M3, and beta,” Sinofsky explained. “The pre-beta build is just our M3 build, it’s the one that meets our exit criteria on feature completeness, performance. It met everything that we set out to do at the beginning of the project. It’s the build we’re all running internally at Microsoft. It represents the first opportunity for you to experience the APIs, and the work that we’ve put into Windows 7. It’s not feature-complete yet. In fact, much of the user interface work, which of course is at the top of the stack and the last part to come in, will be complete when we get to beta.”

“The next step is the beta,” he continued. “The beta is going to be feature complete. It’s going to be pretty good. It’s not going to be final. It’s going to be a beta. So we’re still not ready for performance benchmarking. We’re still not ready to try out how every single edge case works, but it is the complete product as we envision it. I’m here today to tell you we’re going to deliver the beta early next year as well. And so all of you, of course, will be able to get the beta, and you’ll get it through MSDN, and all the traditional ways, and we’re also going to open up the beta broadly.”

To gather feedback about the quality of the beta, Microsoft would include a feedback tool that would be accessible via a link at the top of every single window. And it was starting something called the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), which Sinofsky described as “telemetry that you opt into. It’s anonymous, it’s private, and it’s optional.” Over time, of course, Microsoft would come to over-rely on telemetry data, and it would become compulsory for those running shipping versions of later Windows releases.

“And then finally is the release candidate and the RTM phase,” Sinofsky continued. “There will be a release candidate for Windows 7, and it will represent the class of bugs that we will fix between then and RTM. We’ll know when the release candidate is going to be after we finish the beta. And that’s how we’ve done each and every milestone of Windows 7. We finish the one we’re working on, and that informs when the next one is going to be done. And so I don’t have any new information on when we’re going to release the product. We’re sticking to, we think, three years from general availability of Windows Vista is the right time to release Windows 7.”

And with that, Sinofsky handed off the baton to Scott Guthrie, who would talk about the Windows 7 developer story. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the meager nature of this update, it was a far cry from the major revolution the developers received with Windows Vista.

We’ll look at that next.