Programming Windows: Highs and Lows (Premium)

2010 was an interesting year for Microsoft: in the wake of Apple’s iPad announcement, it had some high-profile product launches and dealt with some even bigger failures. Each in its own way would impact the development of Windows 8.

.NET Framework 4.0 and Silverlight

Microsoft had launched the .NET Framework 3.0—originally branded as WinFX—alongside Windows Vista in late 2006, and it followed that up with version 3.5 in 2007, adding support for LINQ and Visual Studio 2008. Then, in 2010, it shipped .NET Framework 4.0 alongside Visual Studio 2010, which had a new user interface built with the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

Neither of those releases was particularly momentous in terms of new features and functionality—.NET Framework 4’s biggest change was security-related—but that may have been because the .NET team’s focus was on what was, at that time, its most successful offering by far: Silverlight.

Announced as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E) at PDC 2003—the Longhorn PDC—Silverlight was a subset of the full WPF framework and the full .NET Framework. It was, in so many ways, the quintessential Microsoft developer solution, a .NET-based alternative to Adobe Flash that would let Microsoft-focused developers create rich, multimedia solutions that were deployed at scale on the web.

More to the point, Silverlight is a rare example of Microsoft successfully subverting the open standards of the web: Silverlight wasn’t just capable, with a steady stream of major updates following its launch in 2007, it was also hugely successful, with major, high-profile adoptions from key players like NBC, which used Silverlight to stream the 2008 Summer Olympics and the 2010 Winter Olympics, Amazon Video, and Netflix. Silverlight was so successful that Microsoft used it as the basis for app development for Windows Phone 7, which was set to launch in late 2010. Deployed on the web as a plug-in, just like Adobe Flash—an accepted and common form of browser extensibility in the day—Silverlight was installed on roughly 65 percent of web browsers at its peak.

And they just might have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids. Er, ah, Steve Jobs. Who enters this story now for the last time.

As a quick reminder, Steve Jobs is a pivotal figure in the history of Windows. Upon his return to Apple in the late 1990s, he managed to silence his ego long enough to let Microsoft save the company from bankruptcy with a key investment and a promise to continue developing new versions of Microsoft Office for the platform. He leapfrogged Microsoft’s NT-based Windows versions with his NeXT-based Mac OS X and then ruthlessly mocked Microsoft for its ongoing Windows Vista delays, feature copying, and subsequent quality problems. He upended the music industry with the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, easily defeating, in turn, Microsoft’s Windows Media, PlaysForSure, and Zune competition. He redefined the smartphone market with the iPhone, stealing personal computing away from Windows and the PC. And he embarrassed Microsoft and its years-long Tablet PC efforts with the iPad, a product that in its first year sold better than all Tablet PCs combined.

Yes, some of this success can be tied to Microsoft’s antitrust-related stupor of the early 2000s, a problem that also helped companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google dominate new markets of their own. But Jobs orchestrated the biggest corporate turnaround in history nearly singlehandedly and his efforts turned Apple from an also-ran into the biggest company on earth. His deft understanding of what consumers wanted, and his impeccable presentation style rightfully earned him a place in history.

And Jobs was not a man to let a grudge go. When Adobe, a company he felt had been put on the map with Apple’s help in the 1980s, had ignored Mac OS X in the early 2000s, Jobs fumed. And when Adobe created Adobe Flash, the inspiration for Silverlight, and wanted to put it on the iPad so that developers could use their environments and tools to create cross-platform apps that would be deployed on the web, he acted.

“Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and [it] doesn’t support touch-based devices,” he wrote in an open letter on Apple’s website in April 2010. “We do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods, and iPads … Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen … the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces, and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”

And with that, Steve Jobs killed Flash. Not quite overnight. But Flash adoption dropped off a cliff as web developers sought more open ways to deliver rich web applications through web browsers, like HTML 5.

And Steve Jobs killed Silverlight, too, because there was now no way to bring the technology to Apple’s popular mobile devices. Microsoft stopped evolving the technology internally shortly thereafter, but it didn’t issue an announcement or explanation. And when the firm’s developer show, the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2010, arrived that October with not a single Silverlight session and only a quick mention in the keynote, ZDNet reporter Mary Jo Foley asked Microsoft president Bob Muglia what was happening.

“Our strategy has shifted,” Muglia replied, noting weakly that Silverlight was now only used as Microsoft’s development platform for Windows Phone 7. But even that would be short-lived, and with Microsoft prepping a new Windows 8 development model in 2010, the Windows team opted to ignore Silverlight and create its own frameworks and tools.

Bob Muglia found himself in hot water for revealing the Silverlight cancelation before Microsft could figure out a successor, and he left the company in January 2011. He was replaced by Satya Nadella, who went on to be promoted to CEO in 2015.

Office

Microsoft had introduced its first Ribbon user interface with Office 2007, but only the core applications—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, plus OneNote—had been upgraded, while the other Office applications, most notably Outlook, held steady with the more traditional menus- and toolbars-based UI. That would change with Office 2010, which arrived for businesses in May 2010 alongside SharePoint 2010 and the Office Web Apps, which were marketed as online companions to the desktop apps. Microsoft then launched Office 2010 for consumers a month later.

The improved Ribbon in Office 2010 had been co-developed with the Scenic Ribbon in Windows 7. But Office 2010 is perhaps most notable for its first-time use of Microsoft’s Click-to-Run technology, which significantly reduced the time required to download and install Office over the Internet. By this point, over 500 million people were using Office every day, Microsoft claimed. And going forward, more and more of them would acquire Office digitally online rather than via physical boxed media in retail stores.

Click-to-Run also paved the way for Office 365, which also launched in 2010 as a replacement for Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). With this new subscription offering, Microsoft combined the cloud-hosted Office servers from BPOS with the Office Web Apps and, in higher-end versions, the desktop versions of the Office productivity suite. Office 365 was originally for businesses only, but it expanded to consumers later and, later still, was rebranded as Microsoft 365.

Xbox

Microsoft had launched its second-generation Xbox video game console, the Xbox 360, in November 2005, getting a one-year jump on Sony’s PlayStation 3. The original Xbox 360 was heavily influenced by Apple’s device designs, with its curvy and surprisingly small white and silver form factor, and it was immediately successful, with Microsoft unable to meet demand during its initial holiday selling period. The firm shipped 1.5 million Xbox 360s that year and by 2008, it was touting the Xbox 360 as “the first current-generation gaming console” to surpass the 10-million-unit sales milestone.

There was, however, one major problem: the original Xbox 360 suffered from a historically high failure rate for a consumer electronics product thanks to its poorly designed innards. The most common error, called a General Hardware Failure, became known as the “Red Ring of Death” because the so-called “Ring of Light” on the front of the console would display three of its four light segments in red rather than green when the problem surfaced. The issue was so bad that Microsoft, after first claiming that Xbox 360 failure rates were well within industry norms, was forced to institute a very liberal warranty repair extension and fix all impacted devices for free.

This wasn’t the console’s only reliability issue, sadly: the Xbox 60 would also routinely scratch game discs, among other problems, leading to a class-action lawsuit. But the warranty extension cost Microsoft over $1.15 billion and eventually led to key Xbox executives such as J Allard and Robbie Bach leaving the company in disgrace. (Bach left Microsoft in 2010 and retired, and he was replaced by Don Mattrick. Who then went on to leave Microsoft, also in disgrace, in 2013 when his “always online” plans for the Xbox One fizzled.)

Microsoft finally fixed this problem with the release of a second-generation Xbox 360, the Xbox 360 S, in 2010. This even slimmer Xbox 360 was “a whole new design” that did not suffer from the General Hardware Failure or disc scratching issues of its predecessor. And by the end of that year, Microsoft had sold a total of over 50 million Xbox 360 consoles worldwide, making it much more competitive with the Sony and Nintendo offerings than was the original Xbox.

Helping matters, Microsoft also shipped the Kinect motion-sensing add-on for the Xbox 360 in 2010, giving Xbox fans a Nintendo Wii-like experience. The Kinect—originally codenamed Project Natal—was a blockbuster bestseller and it went on to become the fastest-selling consumer electronics product in history for a time. Microsoft sold one million units in just 10 days, and then 2.5 million in the first month. And it went on to sell 35 million units overall.

But here, again, Microsoft experienced some reliability issues, most embarrassingly with dark-skinned people who couldn’t accurately be scanned by the device. By the time Microsoft launched the Xbox One in 2013, requiring users to get—and pay for—a Kinect with every console, its popularity had faded. And so Microsoft finally unbundled the accessory and canceled it. But it was too late to save the doomed Xbox One, which went on to finish in last place in that console generation.

Sidenote: Kinect did enjoy one brief final moment in the sun when Microsoft sold a special cable for it that allowed the accessory to be used for Windows Hello facial recognition with Windows 10 in 2015.

Zune

With its Windows Media- and PlaysForSure-based products and services failing to make inroads against Apple’s iPod and iTunes Music Store, Microsoft in 2006 took a different tact: it tried to emulate the Apple model with a new in-house suite of end-to-end digital media products and services called Zune. It spent billions of dollars spinning up the Zune business overnight, and gave the team—which was led by J Allard, who had previously spearheaded the original Xbox 360 and its Red Ring of Death to market—an aircraft hangar-sized and warehouse-like building in the middle of its corporate campus a place to hide in plain sight and hire artists and designers indiscriminately.

I had learned about Zune over a year before it launched when a friend at Microsoft told me that the company was developing its own “iPod killer” in-house. At the time, Microsoft wasn’t sure if this would just be a proof of concept to show its hardware partners that it was possible to compete more effectively with Apple, or whether it would make and market the device itself. But with Apple seizing between 80 and 85 percent of the digital music market that year, Apple envy was running strongly within Microsoft and Zune—then codenamed Argo—was greenlit.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, Zune failed immediately and never stopped failing. The first-generation hardware was a lightly modified Toshiba Gigabeat S MP3 player serviced by a loosely-skinned version of Windows Media Player 11, and while each offered a few interesting advantages over Apple’s offerings, each was likewise a complete rip-off but with their own functional disadvantages.

The situation improved in subsequent generations of the products, and with new services additions like the Zune Music Pass subscription. But by the time Microsoft launched the fourth-generation Zune hardware, called Zune HD, in 2009, the software giant had already begun the process of dismantling the giant, money-losing business, with the hardware team disbanded and many of the core designers and developers moved over to Windows Phone.

In a bit of ironic timing, Microsoft finally acknowledged that it would no longer create new Zune devices the same week that Steve Jobs died in October 2011, and well over a year after it had killed the team that could have made such a product. It subsequently dissolved the Zune brand, with Microsoft’s music and video services briefly using the Xbox brand instead. The successor to Zune Music Pass, called Groove Music Pass, launched in 2015 and was discontinued in 2018.

Windows Phone 7

During his CES 2010 keynote address, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer barely mentioned Windows Mobile, Microsoft’s smartphone platform, noting only that the firm had launched version 6.5 the year before and that Microsoft would have “a lot more to say about phones next month at Mobile World Congress.” Left unsaid was that Windows Mobile 6.5 was a disaster—internally, it was referred to as “the Windows Me of mobile” and “the Rodney Dangerfield of mobile”—and that Microsoft had scrapped plans for a Windows Mobile 7 (codenamed “Photon”) release and decided to go in a completely new direction.

What the B-teamers on the former Windows Mobile team came up with was a design that was unique in a market that was quickly being dominated by Apple’s iPhone and Google’s me-too Android. Instead of static grids of non-interactive icons, Windows Phone introduced a dynamic and highly personalized home screen of live tiles with “at a glance” information.

There were panoramic hubs for media, games, and productivity that could incorporate data from multiple online sources. And Windows Phone 7 Series, as it was awkwardly named at first, introduced a bold new design language that emphasized typography and white space.

Unfortunately, Microsoft did steal one key strategy from the Apple playbook: Windows Phone 7, as it was quickly renamed, was designed for consumers, not Microsoft’s core business customers. And while its hub strategy was innovative and very-much user-centric, it gained no traction at all because the industry’s biggest services refused to allow their brands to be subverted and ignored; the few major services that even bothered supporting Windows Phone did so with standalone apps, not integrated services, turning what should have been content-rich hubs into wastelands.

Windows Phone’s defeat would come just five short years after the initial rush of excitement around its Mobile World Congress 2011 reveal. And there would be good times that hinted at an alternate future in which Windows Phone might have been successful, such as when one-time market leader Nokia dropped the development of its in-house software platform and embraced Windows Phone as an equal partner of sorts with Microsoft. But Windows Phone’s failure was bad enough to take down Nokia with it too, and Microsoft was forced to purchase most of Nokia in 2013 to keep Windows Phone on life support.

Two years later, in 2015, it took a $7.6 billion write-down, laid off almost all of the 7800 former Nokia employees it had gained in the acquisition, and killed Windows Phone.

But before all that could happen, Steven Sinofsky directed his Windows team to use the best ideas from Windows Phone—in particular its Metro user interface, so named because it was modeled on the simple iconography found in travel hubs like airports and train stations—and use them in a new mobile interface they were secretly developing for Windows 8. It would be similar to, but not the same as, Windows Phone. And it would run mobile apps that were similar to, but not the same as, Windows Phone.

It was a momentous decision. It was also the wrong decision.

Thanks to Sinofsky, the Windows team would not work with the Windows Phone team, nor would it share information with them: after all, Windows Phone was led by people who Sinofsky had booted out of Windows three years earlier, and they could not be trusted. Instead, the Windows team would create a similar—but different and incompatible—platform, one that would also ignore years of investments in .NET in a spasm of “not invented here” stupidity.

This mistake was only one of many factors that would go on to doom Windows 8. But it was also one of the dumbest decisions that any Windows leader ever made, and perhaps the single dumbest decision of all. It ensured that Windows 8 would go down in history as one of the worst versions of Windows ever made, a release that alienated users, confused the market, and accelerated the exodus to mobile platforms.

So we’ll look at that next.