Programming Windows: 10 (Premium)

Microsoft spent much of 2013 and 2014 correcting the mistakes of Windows 8 via a set of small but meaningful updates. But its best work was yet to come: the software giant would celebrate the 30th anniversary of its core desktop platform in 2015 with a new version, Windows 10, that would go on to be its longest-running and most successful yet.

Codenamed “Threshold,” Windows 10 was an explicit admission that Windows 8 was the wrong direction. Where Steven Sinofsky’s insular and divisive team had taken a bold but misguided bet on touch-first mobile interfaces, Terry Myerson set out to dismantle those mistakes as much as possible. Windows 10 would be desktop-focused, not touch-focused, and while traces of the touch-first mobile interfaces of the past were present, they were clearly secondary.

With Windows 10, the Start menu would come back and all applications, including so-called universal Windows apps, would run alongside each other in resizable windows on the desktop. And key Windows 8 user interfaces like the Charms and Switcher would disappear.

For application developers, Microsoft would evolve the mobile app platform that arrived with Windows 8, but it would rename it yet again—to the Universal Windows Platform, or UWP—and expand its availability beyond PCs, tablets, and phones to also include Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets, and the Xbox One videogame console. It was, Myerson would later claim, “Microsoft’s most comprehensive platform ever,” and it would be backed by a unified mobile app store and user interfaces that would be “tailored” for specific device types.

Microsoft formally announced Windows 10 at a small event in San Francisco on September 30, 2014.

“I think we’d all say that Windows was at a threshold,” Myerson said while opening the event in a nod to the product’s original codename. The “new Windows,” as he called it, could have been called Windows 9, of course, and the team had debated other names, including Windows One. But because it wasn’t an incremental release, and because Windows 10 would provide the underpinnings for so many different product categories, they felt justified skipping over 9. The fact that Apple had by that point been using the version 10 with its Mac operating system for over 12 years probably played a role too.

From a user interface perspective, Windows 10 would look and feel natural to the over one billion Windows users who were not stuck with Windows 8. It would be a good upgrade from either Windows 7 or 8.x, Microsoft said, but the big upgrades were all on the desktop side, with a new Task View interface, support for multiple (virtual desktops), and a new Snap Assist interface that would suggest apps to fill the remaining space on-screen if you snapped an app.

“The diversity of the Windows audience is finally addressed by Windows 10,” Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore said during the event. “We’re adapting the core user experience to handle that diversity of users and devices.”

For users with tablets or 2-in-1 PCs, Microsoft’s biggest advances in Windows 10 involved the transition between the desktop and the touch-first interfaces that remained. The firm had created a technology called Continuum that would automatically configure such a device when a keyboard was detached or re-attached. For example, those with a Surface Pro and a Type Cover would get a touch-friendly interface when the Touch Cover was removed, and a desktop-centric UI when it was attached.

To make sure that Windows 10 was exactly what its customers wanted, Microsoft would develop it publicly via the new Windows Insider Program. Conceived months earlier in a brainstorming session with the team, Myerson had wanted to make sure that customers had a real voice in the creation of Windows 10, and the Insider Program was the result. It kicked off the day after the event, on October 1, and was open to anyone who wanted to participate; all you needed was a Microsoft account. Myerson promised “a steady stream of early builds from us with the latest features we’re experimenting with.”

In another rebuff to the Sinofsky years, the initial Windows 10 announcement focused on the enterprise features like the availability of simpler Mobile Device Management (MDM) capabilities on all Windows 10 devices (including PCs), a choice of updating models that would respect the needs of businesses, faster and more reliable in-place upgrades, and selective wipe capabilities that would allow IT staff to remotely wipe corporate data from a Windows 10 device/PC without impacting the user’s personal data.

But looking ahead, Myerson said that Microsoft would provide an update about consumer-oriented features in early 2015 and “talk much more about other device types.” Then, at Build 2015, it would unveil more details about the Windows 10 developer story before finalizing the product sometime later that year.

Early reactions to the Windows 10 Technical Preview, as it was called, were almost universally positive.

“What I can say, even at this early stage, is that Microsoft has cracked it,” I wrote. “They’ve done the impossible. They’ve figured out how to make this work. The company has two separate groups to please here. There’s the humongous group of people using Windows 7 (and XP)—a group that is over 1.1 billion strong—who have assessed Windows 8.x fairly or not and decided that they are not interested. And then there’s the smaller group—but still a huge audience, consisting of some 200 million people—who not only use Windows 8.x but have in fact embraced it on touch-based PCs and devices. These two audiences aren’t just different, though there is some cross-over. They’re polar opposites who cannot understand how the other gets anything done or works efficiently.”

“Folks, this actually makes sense,” I continued. “Where Windows 8 gave us a weird Frankenstein’s monster in which a mobile platform and the classic desktop platform were jammed together in unholy ways, Windows 10 is a saner, more consistent experience. Here, we see the Modern platform treated as just another runtime, alongside Win32, Java, Adobe Air, web apps, whatever. These apps all run side-by-side. As they should … This isn’t making lemonade; it’s alchemy. It’s making gold out of lead. It’s not a minor change, despite the relatively small list of new features in this release. It’s profound. And I couldn’t be happier with what I’m seeing here.”

Ten days later, Microsoft celebrated that over one million people had joined the Windows Insider Program.

“This is going to be a different Windows,” Joe Belfiore wrote at the time. “We’re going to share our plans and progress with you earlier and more often as we want to build a Windows that everyone will love and really enjoy using.” Microsoft had received “over 200,000 pieces of user-initiated feedback,” Belfiore noted, and the program had already grown “into a community of people actively participating and excited to help us build Windows 10.”

Ahead of the consumer features announcement, various new Windows 10 builds leaked in November, December, and early January, giving us an early peek at the new functionality. Among the changes and additions were new wallpapers, a dark mode, a version of Microsoft’s Cortana digital personal assistant on the taskbar, an integrated Store experience with apps, games, music, and movies & TV all in one place, an updated and renamed Settings app (which was PC Settings previously), and a handful of new apps, including, most mysteriously, a new web browser that was codenamed Spartan.

By mid-December, Microsoft had scheduled its Windows 10 consumer event for January 15, 2015, at the firm’s Redmond campus. But the contents of that event would exceed everyone’s expectations.

A more poised and confident Myerson than we had seen thus far opened the January event with a recap of the September announcements and an update on the Windows Insider Program, which now had 1.7 million users who had installed Windows 10 over 3 million times and provided over 800,000 pieces of feedback on over 200,000 topics. “Our team is really leaning into this new open development process,” he said.

Windows 10 would enable an era Microsoft called “more personal computing,” a nod to the renamed business unit that Myerson would soon run. And it would arrive with advances in three general areas: a mobility of experiences thanks to its multi-device compatibility, trust via privacy and security, and natural interactions like voice, pen, gestures, and even gaze.

“Today, Windows customers are spread across many versions,” he continued. “This fragmentation makes it challenging for developers to delight our customers with applications. So we have been investing heavily in making our upgrades as seamless as possible for customers, to create a large, up-to-date customer base for developers.”

This was disingenuous. Worse, Windows 10 would do nothing to solve this problem.

As Myerson spoke those words, Microsoft supported three versions of Windows: Windows Vista, Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 (SP1), and Windows 8.1. And the application issue he hinted at there was one of Microsoft’s making: the universal apps that developers had created for Windows 8.1 would not run on the much larger Windows 7 installed base because Microsoft had not done the work to enable that. Windows 10, like Windows 8.1, would support newer universal apps as well as older but more useful desktop applications, but its introduction would simply add yet another version of Windows to the support matrix. And as we would later learn, Windows 10 would in fact dramatically increase the fragmentation that he spoke of that day: Microsoft would for six straight years issue a new version of Windows 10 every six months, each of which was a new version upgrade with incompatibility issues for developers to deal with. Previously, new Windows versions had appeared roughly once every three years.

The problem that Microsoft was really trying to solve was related to the support it needed to provide to a user base that was on different versions of Windows. Every time a vulnerability was discovered, Microsoft would need to create different versions of the resulting patch, each one tailored for the specific security profile of a supported Windows version. With Windows 10 on the way, the firm would soon have four major versions of Windows to support. But it had an ill-conceived plan to fix all that. It would try and entice as much of the consumer userbase as possible to upgrade to Windows 10, and then it would try to force businesses—which had always approached Windows updates and upgrades in a leisurely fashion—to let Microsoft update their PCs more regularly as well.

Getting consumers to upgrade to Windows 10 would be tricky, given the reputation that Windows version upgrades still had. But Myerson was touting a “seamless upgrade” to Windows 10, using rapid release technologies that Microsoft had honed with Windows 8.1 and its subsequent updates. And he had an ace up his sleeve.

“For the first year after Windows 10 is available, we will be making available a free upgrade to Windows 10 for all devices running Windows 8.1,” he started, to a silent audience. “And, we will also be making available a free upgrade to Windows 10 to all devices running Windows Phone 8.1. And last but not least, for the first year after Windows 10 is available, we will be making available a free upgrade to all of our customers still running Windows 7.” This, finally, was met with applause: Windows 7 still commanded over two-thirds of the market and the installed base was estimated to be about 650 million PCs. Microsoft was literally offering to upgrade almost one billion devices to Windows 10 … for free?

There had to be a catch.

“This is so much more than a free, one-time upgrade,” he continued, positioning the coming changes as a positive. “Once a device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will be keeping it current for the supported lifetime of the device. Keeping it secure, introducing new features and functionality to our customers over time. In fact, with Windows 10, we think of Windows as a service. In the next couple of years, one could reasonably think of Windows as one of the largest Internet services on the planet. And just like other Internet services, the question, ‘what version are you running?’ will cease to make sense.”

Here, Myerson seemed to be implying that Windows 10, despite the obvious version in its name, would somehow persist past the typical support time period of most Windows versions to date. If the version didn’t matter, why even call it Windows 10? Why not just call it … Windows?

“This is great for our Windows developers,” he added. “Not only can they target all device types with one application—PCs, phones, tablets, Xbox, the Internet of Things—but now they can target every single Windows device. Windows as a service makes Windows 10 the most attractive Windows development platform ever.”

Myerson’s continued emphasis on developers here is confusing in retrospect. The Windows 10 developer event was at that time still months away, and this event was supposed to focus on the benefits to consumers. But as noted above, this change to “Windows as a service,” another term that would be formalized into the real name of an initiative, primarily benefitted Microsoft and, arguably, its customers, since it would make it easier for the software giant to support Windows and keep it updated.

We would later come to understand, too, that this system would in no way benefit developers. Instead, new developer features would be tied to specific Windows 10 versions. And with new Windows 10 versions appearing twice each year going forward, the fragmentation issues Myerson highlighted at this event would only get worse, not better, over the next several years.

Sidenote. Microsoft would eventually fix this fragmentation issue with a “Project Reunion,” which would go on to be called the Windows App SDK. The basic premise here was to untie new developer features from specific Windows 10 versions and make the available on all supported versions of Windows 10.

Addressing the enterprise and its lack of desire to let Microsoft control servicing and updating, Myerson said vaguely that his group would “continue to support the way Windows works today with long-term branches and long-term support.” But he really wanted businesses to let Microsoft keep their PCs up-to-date by directly connecting them to Windows Update. The implications, he said, were “monumental.” But he underestimated his business customers, who would go on to push back against Windows as a service would earn support concessions from Microsoft in the years ahead.

Myerson said the phrase “Windows as a service” so often during this segment of the talk that it almost seems like maybe that should have been the name of this product. But unknown to the audience at the time, Myerson had bet his future success at Microsoft on this initiative: tasked by CEO Satay Nadella to make Windows fit into the software giant’s new cloud-first world, Myerson would keep Windows updated like a service despite the difficulty and potential dangers of doing so. And his bonus package was based on how many PCs he could get upgraded to Windows 10 and how quickly. And we would soon learn that he would go to incredible lengths to pump up his numbers as much as possible.

“Windows 10 changes the rules of the game,” he concluded, “and redefines the relationship between us and our customers.”

That comment hung in the air uncomfortably. What Myerson seemed to be saying was that, while Windows Update had been around for decades, it was largely an opt-in service, and users were free to install updates and, when available, system upgrades as they desired. But with Windows 10, Windows Update would become mandatory, something that individuals and even many businesses could not bypass or ignore. Keeping the Windows userbase up-to-date was more important than any individuals’ desire or ability to keep their own PCs up-to-date.

There was no applause. Not because the audience disagreed with this view, per se, but rather because it was so vague and unclear. Was Microsoft really serious about forcing users to install updates as a condition of installing the free Windows 10? And what about new PCs? Those customers paid for Windows, after all. Would they also be forced to install updates?

These would be questions for another day. Moving on, Myerson introduced the next speaker, Joe Belfiore, to demonstrate some of the new Windows 10 features for individuals.

Joe B., as he was known, managed a team that focused on the Windows 10 user experiences across PCs, tablets, and phones. He showed how the Windows 10 visuals had evolved since the September unveiling, and then launched into a list of new features. The first was a full-screen version of the Start menu aimed at tablet and 2-in-1 users who actually like Windows 8.x, and this feature alone says a lot about how much the Windows team had changed under Myerson. Where Sinofsky’s Windows group was all about erasing the past and forcing customers to use unfamiliar new interfaces, Myerson’s team was listening to feedback and behaving accordingly. More to the point, the existence of a full-screen Start menu wouldn’t hurt the majority of users who wanted a normal Start screen. So why not just include the option and make everyone happy?

That said, Microsoft was getting rid of some superfluous and non-discoverable user experiences from Windows 8.x. The Charms bar was gone, and users who swiped in from the right side of the display would now see the new Action Center, which housed Windows 10’s notifications interface and some “quick actions,” often-needed system features like Airplane mode. Switcher, too, was gone, but users could still swipe in from the left to switch between running applications more simply than before.

The modern Settings app would combine the options that were available in both PC Settings and the Control Panel in Windows 8, Belfiore said. He showed off the Continuum feature with a Surface Pro 3, which allowed it to “elegantly transform” between laptop and tablet modes as the Type Cover was attached and removed. This functionality would also work with the mini-tablet PCs that were, by that time, already on the way out.

Looking a little further out, Belfiore then moved into a set of features that would appear over the next three to five months. These included the Cortana digital personal assistant, which would go on to be ignored by users and later deprecated, how the same apps—including the new universal Office apps—would work across Windows 10 PCs, tablets, and phones, and, most intriguingly, Microsoft’s new web browser, which was then called Spartan.

Sidenote: Spartan, like Threshold, is a name from the Halo universe of games.

“Since we’ve had this rapid evolution of the web, and since we’re building this new set of devices on Windows 10 with the universal platform, we think it’s the right time to build a new browser for the modern web which will power our next generation of Windows users,” he began. “Today, I’m excited to introduce you to—codename—Project Spartan, our new web browser experience for Windows 10.”

Spartan would feature a new rendering engine, a new look and feel that seemed natural on Windows 10, and three significant new features: annotation features that included a smartpen-based note-taking capability, inline web article commenting, and sharing; reading features like a built-in reading mode for stripping away ads and other distractions and a new Reading list interface; and integrated Cortana capabilities that would appear when needed, such as when you were viewing the website for a restaurant.

Belfiore then introduced Phil Spencer, head of the Xbox team, to discuss PC gaming. Spencer was, at that time, a relative unknown, but he would soon join Myerson on Satya Nadella’s senior leadership team (SLT) as he pivoted Microsoft’s unprofitable videogame business towards subscription-based cloud services, a future that made sense within the software giant’s cloud push.

Since the introduction of the first Xbox console in 2001, Microsoft’s commitment to PC gaming had been mixed. Despite the relative success of the product line—Xbox had finished in last place behind Sony and Nintendo over its first three generations—Microsoft brought Xbox to Windows in the Vista time frame, but it foolishly rebranded the services as Games for Windows – LIVE, killing any interest or momentum. And with Windows 8, Xbox had become Microsoft’s overall entertainment brand, with music- and video-related apps and services.

Windows 10 would be different, Spencer said. It would include integrated social networking-based gaming capabilities via a new Xbox app. A new Game DVR feature that would let gamers record game sessions and take screenshots (and then use the Xbox app to share them). A bundled version of the DirectX 12 gaming libraries that would make games run faster and look better on Windows 10, while being more energy efficient. And, most impressively, a new streaming feature that would let users play their Xbox One-based games from a PC elsewhere in the same home. Thanks to Spencer, Microsoft was finally taking PC gaming seriously, and these efforts would only increase in the coming years.

“And while Xbox is coming to Windows 10, Windows 10 is also coming to Xbox One,” he concluded, referencing the then-current Xbox console. “Now, with Windows 10 coming to Xbox, I don’t think we’re going to see millions of people using Excel on their Xbox. But for developers who wan to bring their applications over to the television screen, this is going to make it very easy to do so.”

Left unsaid, the Xbox One really was a new kind of Windows 10 device under the covers. NT architect Dave Cutler, long out of the spotlight as he preferred and inexplicably still at Microsoft all these years later, had led a team that created the Xbox One’s OS platform. And it was based on the architecture that had been first created for Hyper-V Server and the Hyper-V feature in Windows Server 2008 and newer, with isolated partitions for different system functions.

Terry Myerson returned to the stage and announced that Microsoft would within the next week release a new build of Windows 10 to the Insider Program. Of more interest, perhaps, was the mention of
“two new Windows 10 experiences.” The first was called Surface Hub, and Microsoft had slyly hung this large collaboration smart display on the stage backdrop for all to see for the entire presentation. Surface Hub would enable a “communal experience,” Myerson said, and it would run a special version of Windows 10. It featured an 84-inch 4K screen, support for multiple users, and a larger new Surface Pen.

Surface Hub was straightforward enough—and Microsoft would later add a smaller, less expensive model—but the second new Windows 10 experience was anything but.

“We were inspired by the idea of mixing our applications and games back into the real world,” he began. “But obviously no technology exists to make this possible. In my decades in this industry, there have been a few key moments when a technology or experience has just blown me away. And we’ve created one of those experiences with Windows 10.”

He then introduced Alex Kipman, a strange little man who resembled an older and more disheveled version of Joe B., to unveil HoloLens, a so-called “augmented reality” (AR) headset that could blend the real world with virtual elements that Microsoft called holograms.

At the time, HoloLens was neck-and-neck with Cortana in the minds of Microsoft’s decision makers as a possible “next wave” product that might one day supplant the smartphone. But like Cortana, HoloLens would only see limited success, and this team would suffer a mass wave of staff defections to Meta while reports emerged about Kipman’s sexual misconduct and bullying issues.

Whatever its eventual outcome, HoloLens, like Surface Hub, was based on Windows 10 and it would run universal Windows apps, and so it was added to the list of compatible devices that this new platform would support.

Satya Nadella was next, and he stated that his goal was for the 1.5 billion people using Windows “to move from needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows.” This was fanciful, and Nadella would go on to ignore Windows, which remained a dependable source of revenue, for the next several years. But for that brief moment in early 2015, it felt like anything was possible. And that maybe, just maybe, Nadella and Myerson could right this ship in a world dominated by smartphones and position Windows for the next 30 years.