Programming Windows: The Product (Premium)

For years, Microsoft had worked closely with its biggest partners to maintain and expand a symbiotic PC ecosystem based on Windows. This relationship was so successful that it catapulted Microsoft to fame, fortune, and infamy. But it required work from both sides, with Microsoft and the PC makers meeting regularly to discuss upcoming technological advances to ensure that they were supported in a timely fashion, and to assess upcoming technological disruptions to ensure that Windows PCs remained the most popular personal computing platform on earth.

The relationship may have reached an apex of sorts during the development of Longhorn, when Microsoft’s biggest PC maker partners worked diligently to incorporate that system’s incredible advances in new hardware designs. HP, for example, partnered with Microsoft on several generations of “Athens” PCs that included built-in telephone handsets and other futuristic features. And ASUS created a prototype laptop with a small external smart display for viewing notifications without having to open the display lid.

Neither ever came to market. And there was always an uneasy feeling within Microsoft generally, and the Windows team specifically, that the PC makers could and should do more. But thanks to the smaller margins inherent in building hardware, PC makers were always trying to cut costs and find new revenue models based on added value services. They started adopting new technologies, like new versions of the Universal Serial Bus (USB), more slowly, or not at all in cheaper models. They piled more and more software into their products, making Windows boot and run more slowly, and less reliably.

Most gallingly to Microsoft, the PC makers didn’t always support technologies that were provided by new Windows versions at launch; HP’s initial Media Center PC in 2002, for example, was a basic tower PC that looked out of place in a living room and not the stereo component-like design that Microsoft had requested for Windows XP Media Center Edition.

By the time the vindictive Steven Sinofsky had seized control of Windows and fooled the Senior Leadership Team into believing he knew the right way forward, Microsoft’s relationship with PC makers had already become strained. He responded to the drama by making it worse: he didn’t brief PC makers about the new technologies that Windows 7 would provide until it was too late for them to support them in time for the launch. And so the first generation of Windows 7 PCs were just uninspired Windows Vista PCs. Both sides blamed the other.

Thanks to the Apple envy that was spreading throughout Microsoft, Sinofsky quietly launched a plan to push the PC makers out of the equation: Microsoft, he argued internally, should make its own PCs. And though CEO Steve Ballmer eventually championed succumbed to the alure of copying Apple’s unilateral strategy as well, this request was shot down repeatedly by the company’s Board of Directors. And so S...