Programming Windows: Universal (Premium)

2014 began with exciting news: my sources told me that Microsoft would discuss its vision for the future of Windows at Build 2014, which would be held that April. This vision included a year-off Windows release codenamed “Threshold” that would most likely be called Windows 9.

We knew by that time that Microsoft would update Windows 8.1 in early 2014 with a service pack/feature pack-type update called Update 1 (or GDR1 internally), and I reported at the time that the most likely release timeframe was April. But the bigger news was Threshold, which would ditch the cursed Windows 8 branding and would add a “Metro 2.0” user experience. Microsoft planned to deliver three Threshold pre-release milestones in 2014-2015 and then ship the final release in April 2015, I was told. And it would be accompanied by Office Touch for Windows, which was codenamed Gemini.

“Threshold recasts Windows 8 as the next Vista,” I wrote. “It’s an acknowledgment that what came before didn’t work, and didn’t resonate with customers. And though Microsoft will always be able to claim that Windows 9 wouldn’t have been possible without the important foundational work they had done first with Windows 8—just as was the case with Windows 7 and Windows Vista—there’s no way to sugarcoat this. Windows 8 has set back Microsoft, and Windows, by years, and possibly for good.”

On February 4, 2014, Microsoft announced that Satya Nadella would succeed Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to become its third CEO. His appointment followed a several months-long process in which several key candidates were considered, including outsiders like Ford’s CEO, Alan Mulally, who had taken himself out of the running because Gates and Ballmer wanted to remain directors of the board. And while he may have seemed like a long shot for the CEO role, Nadella had most recently run Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, and as such, he seemed like the right fit to guide the software giant into its preordained cloud computing future.

“I believe over the next decade computing will become even more ubiquitous and intelligence will become ambient,” Nadella wrote in his opening message to employees. “The coevolution of software and new hardware form factors will intermediate and digitize — many of the things we do and experience in business, life, and our world. This will be made possible by an ever-growing network of connected devices, incredible computing capacity from the cloud, insights from big data, and intelligence from machine learning. This is a software-powered world.”

The letter didn’t mention Windows even once. But it did (incorrectly) reference Microsoft’s one-time slogan of “a PC on every desk and home,” adding awkwardly that “the opportunity ahead will require us to reimagine a lot of what we have done in the past for a mobile- and cloud-first world, and do new things.”

Nadella’s rise to the CEO position had followed a mid-2013 reorganization that then-CEO Steve Ballmer had named “One Microsoft” in a refutation of the divisive internal politics that has escalated after Steven Sinofsky took over the Windows division. At the time, Ballmer told employees that he had had a vision of “three screens and a cloud”—the three screens being PC, phone, and TV—and that Microsoft would need to reorient itself to meet the needs of this new dynamic.

This new strategy would involve Microsoft software and services, of course, but also a growing family of first-party Microsoft hardware. The software giant had unveiled its Surface PC lineup, for example, in 2012. And in 2014, it had been forced to bailout out its most important Windows Phone partner, Nokia, by acquiring its Devices & Services business—and about 25,000 employees—for $7 billion, giving it an in-house smartphone business too. Combined with its Xbox videogame hardware, Microsoft was suddenly a major player in every relevant consumer and business hardware market imaginable at the time.

In the wake of the One Microsoft reorg, most of Sinofsky’s key lieutenants would be forced out of Windows and would then leave Microsoft.

Julie Larson-Green was put in charge of a new Devices and Studios Engineering Group that would bizarrely see her lead Microsoft’s “studios experiences including all games, music, video and other entertainment.” But that would end quickly: former Microsoft exec and Nokia CEO Stephen Elop returned to the company when the Nokia acquisition was completed and took that role from Larson-Green. She continued in obscurity until November 2017, when she finally left Microsoft for good.

Tami Reller, meanwhile, left Windows to lead Microsoft’s marketing efforts alongside Mark Penn. But she was forced out of Microsoft in March 2014 by Mr. Nadella and was replaced by Chris Capossela. Engineering lead Jon Devaan had exited in late 2013. Antoine Leblond left Microsoft in March 2014 alongside Tami Reller. And Jensen Harris, the non-designer who took credit for the design of Windows 8, left Microsoft in October 2014 after being pushed out of Windows and into Microsoft Mobile Labs.

Only two Sinofsky acolytes survived the One Microsoft fallout. Surface lead Panos Panay somehow kept his job after the disastrous Windows RT launch. And Mike Angiulo, despite a very public embarrassment in the wake of a leaked video, moved into Surface, where he was sheltered by Panay, before moving into Microsoft’s Cloud & AI business in 2015; he actually stayed at Microsoft until 2018 somehow.

As interesting, Windows had new leadership.

Terry Myerson was put in charge of a new Operating Systems Engineering Group that would span all of the firm’s OS work for PCs, phones, videogame consoles, and “back-end systems.” The press release also noted that “the core cloud services for the operating system” would be part of Terry’s group too.

Myerson was an unknown to many, especially outside of Microsoft. But he had joined Microsoft in 1997 when it acquired his company Intersé Corporation, and he had most recently run the Windows Phone business, reporting directly to Ballmer. As part of the so-called “B-team” working on Windows Phone—much of the staff in this business consisted of former Windows division team members who had fled or were forced out by the Sinofsky regime—it was somewhat fitting to see Myerson succeed Sinofsky and be granted an expanded empire that combined Windows for PCs with Windows Phone, Xbox, and a new embedded platform that would be called the Internet of Things (IoT). That he was specifically put in place to reverse Sinofsky’s wrongs was just the icing on the cake.

With the purges complete, Nadella in place, and Windows somewhat righted by the release of Windows 8.1, Microsoft faced a happier and more transparent 2014. And it wasn’t long before we got our first hint at what Myerson and the new team at Windows were planning.

“The first thing that we’re going to talk about today is an update, coming this spring, for Windows 8.1, that focuses on three specific things,” Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore said at the start of Microsoft’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) press conference in Barcelona in late February 2014.

A long-time member of the Windows team, Belfiore had been banished to Windows Phone during the Sinofsky years, where he became a friend and confidant of Myerson. And with Myerson’s rise, Belfiore was now in charge of a team creating user experiences that worked across PCs, tablets, and smartphones. He was also clearly in the throes of a midlife crisis: he was sporting long hair that partially covered his face and made him look like Journey vocalist Steve Perry circa the mid-1980s. But he was also an excellent speaker, and his casual, natural nature on stage endeared him to onlookers.

“We’re investing in a bunch of UI changes specifically to improve the experience for non-touch users,” he said of the coming update to Windows 8.1, noting that the customer satisfaction data (that Sinofsky had ignored) showed them where Windows 8.x had been doing great and where it needed work. “As we look at the hardware devices that are coming to market, we knew that we needed to give our [PC maker] partners the flexibility to, in particular, reach low price points. And then we focused on some particular customer segments, enterprise and education, where people are really looking for improved management and better compatibility with things like legacy websites in [Internet Explorer].”

There were few details of these changes at MWC, and instead of demoing the update, which was simply called “Windows 8.1 Update,” Belfiore just described a few of the changes it would bring. There would be “discoverable Search, Power, and Settings on Start,” for example. And new mouse interfaces for right-clicking on Start and live tiles. But Belfiore, denied a demo, used language like “let’s imagine for a moment…” as he asked the audience to go along with some invisible charade.

We wouldn’t have to wait long for details. In addition to making it easier to use for people using traditional PCs with keyboards and mice, the Windows 8.1 Update would optimize the platform for lower-end devices that included little as 1 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage, and this would include new mini-tablets. And Microsoft was adding an Enterprise mode feature to Internet Explorer 11. That was the entirety of the update, and the bigger changes would come late, in a second Windows 8.1 update and in Threshold.

Fortunately, Build 2014 arrived quickly.

Steven Sinofsky had keynoted the inaugural Build event in 2011, which made sense since it was his brainchild. It was also part of a far-reaching plan to remove as much of the past as possible and replace it with products, services, and events of his own design. But with Sinofsky ousted in the wake of his power grab, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had filled the celebrity void and headlined the next two Build events, in 2012 and 2013. By 2014, however, Ballmer was gone. And so it was that the first face we saw at Build on April 2, 2014 was an unfamiliar one to many.

“It was 22 years ago, that right here in Moscone Center, we had our first Microsoft developer’s conference,” Microsoft executive vice president Terry Myerson began. “This just an amazing tradition that we’re all a part of here today. And so I asked myself, what is the right way to kick off this conference? You know, I considered coming out chanting, ‘developers, developers, developers’!” Here, the audience laughed, enjoying the throwback to a classic Steve Ballmer moment and breaking the ice for the new guy. And after another less successful attempt at humor, Myerson did the right thing and simply showed this audience who he was.

“What motivates me, what motivates everyone you’re going to hear from today, and everyone else who works for the platform teams at Microsoft, is making your creativity come to life,” he said. “Every day, we’re thinking, how are we going to enable our developers to build the richest applications, to reach their customers in every corner of the globe, whether they’re at home, or at work, or in their garage.”

Unfortunately, Myerson and his team were somewhat constrained by the horrors of the past. He couldn’t simply reverse Sinofsky’s terrible decision to create a new mobile app programming model that was inexcusably not built on .NET. All he could do was try to make it better, and more inclusive, an evolution of the Windows Runtime platform that would take developers’ four years of investments and broaden the market for those apps to include new device types.

Myerson, like Sinofsky and Julie Larson-Green, was awkward on stage, especially at first. But unlike his predecessors, he got better over time and became more poised and confident. And even at this first major keynote event, standing somewhat nervously in front of several thousand people, many of them highly technical, there was an honesty and realness to Myerson that provided a welcome break from the forced and unnatural marketing drivel of the past. It was always very clear that Sinofsky and Larson-Green were just an act. But Myerson seemed like a regular person.

The first segment of the keynote focused on Windows Phone, with Joe Belfiore discussing Windows Phone 8.1.

Windows Phone was, at the time, quite exciting, and while the platform would crater and disappear within a few short years, Microsoft was at the time promoting how Windows and Windows Phone shared the same underlying platform. Among the innovations in Windows Phone 8.1 was Microsoft’s “truly personal digital assistant,” Cortana, which was named after a character in the “Halo” games. Apple had come to market first with a similar but more limited service called Siri, but it is perhaps notable that Microsoft somehow managed to beat Google to market with a voice-based assistant.

After a lengthy series of demos of Cortana and other new Windows Phone 8.1 features, Belfiore finally moved on to discuss the Windows 8.1 Update, a much less dramatic update than Windows 8.1, which had gone a long way towards fixing the many problems with Windows 8. The update had been announced earlier at MWC, but Belfiore provided the first public demo at Build, starting off with the Internet Explorer 11 Administrator Mode, which would make Windows 8.1 an easier pill to swallow in the enterprise.

Of more interest, of course, were the new keyboard and mouse features, given that Windows 8, especially, was so hostile to the over one billion Windows users with traditional form factor PCs.

“If you’ve been a Windows user for a long time, you probably have a deep and intimate relationship with the taskbar,” he said. “It’s the way you think about switching between or launching apps, and we’ve enhanced it significantly in this update to work with new Windows Store apps.” In previous versions of Windows 8.x, Metro/Modern/Windows Store apps did not appear on the taskbar, which was part of the desktop environment. But in the Windows 8 Update, the new Windows team was finally working to remove dualities that Sinofsky and his team had forced on users.

Now, icons for Windows Store apps would appear in the taskbar alongside those for desktop apps.

Windows Store apps would also display a titlebar, like desktop apps, when run from the desktop. And though Windows Store apps would still run full screen, users could mouse down to the bottom of the screen to display the taskbar. “I no longer have to think about the different switching models for apps, whether they are desktop apps or Modern,” he said, slipping back into the then out-of-date name for the newer environment.

Microsoft was also improving the Start screen for keyboard and mouse users, Belfiore continued. With the Windows 8.1 Update, the Start screen would display a PC Settings tile, plus Power and Search buttons, because traditional PC users expected those functions from what used to be a Start menu.

More impressively, the Start screen would also offer right-click context menus for the first time, a dramatic bit of sophistication for an interface that had been previously derided as being something that might have come from Fisher Price. It would also support “power user” capabilities such as holding down the Ctrl key to select multiple items, in this case Start tiles, and perform actions with them in concert.

Microsoft would also now pin the Windows Store app icon to the taskbar, a tradition that would continue in future Windows versions. Belfiore said it was doing this to make it easier for users to discover, because they might then, in turn, discover the apps it offered, potentially helping third-party developers. Belfiore’s use of the term “discoverable” here was not an accident, as one of the biggest complaints about Windows 8 was that many of its new user experiences were non-discoverable.

Microsoft would also integrate non-installed Windows Store apps into the system Search experience so that users could discover apps that way too. And speaking of discoverable, the Start screen would now provide a link to newly installed apps; with Windows 8, these apps were exiled to the far end of the Start screen, which was not visible to the user or in any way obvious.

The Windows 8.1 Update would become available to all users of Windows 8.1 for free, Belfiore noted. But unlike Windows 8.1 itself, which was bizarrely made available to Windows 8 users only via the Windows Store, it would arrive normally via Windows Update on April 8, less than a week later.

With that news out of the way, Belfiore ceded the stage to Microsoft corporate vice president David Treadwell, who would discuss the new opportunities for Windows app developers. A 25-year Microsoft veteran, Treadwell had started with the original NT team and worked under David Thompson. And after a humorous story about the naming of a driver file that literally still exists in Windows today—Treadwell, like Belfiore, was an excellent presenter—he got down to business.

Windows would help developers reach their users across PCs, tablets, and phones, he said. It would also help developers carry forward the huge investments that they had made in their code and the apps they had created. And then he dropped the bomb: Windows would also help developers carry those investments forward across multiple platforms. So not just PCs, tablets, and phones.

Treadwell then announced what was then called universal Windows apps, the successor to Metro/Modern/Windows Store apps. (This would later be renamed to the Universal Windows Platform, or UWP.)

Because Windows Phone 8.1 supported the same Windows Runtime environment as did Windows 8.x on PCs and tablets, Microsoft could now write more common code in a Visual Studio app project that targeted all three form factors.

Treadwell contrasted this approach to what Google and Apple were doing: they wanted you to write one app for phones and tablets and a different app for desktops and laptops, he said. “We don’t see it that way,” he added, forgetting to add the word “anymore.” But this transition required a lot of work, and Treadwell noted that Microsoft had streamlined every phase of the development cycle: user interface, app model, APIs, tools, and Store.

To create user interfaces that would adapt across all three device types, Microsoft had evolved some common controls and had created new APIs that would handle the different input types used by each. It would also provide a way for developers to tailor an app’s UI for the unique properties of each form factor. For example, one might use different views for each form factor, though the bulk of the code would be the same.

Universal Windows apps, like their direct predecessors, would be based on the Windows Runtime, and not on .NET. So they would support the same development models that Microsoft had introduced with Windows 8. That is, developers could create apps in C#/Visual Basic/XAML, C/C++/XAML, or HTML/CSS/JavaScript, as before. Left unsaid: universal Windows apps, like their predecessors, were mobile apps, and while that gave them some interesting capabilities with regards to power management and security, these apps were not as sophisticated or feature-dense as true desktop applications.

To streamline the development of universal Windows apps, Microsoft was updating Visual Studio 2013, its flagship integrated development environment (IDE). To demonstrate this, Kevin Gallo showed that there were now new Universal Apps template options in Visual Studio to help developers get started more quickly. Or, developers could open existing projects and add new device targets. For example, a Windows app project could add Windows Phone as a target or vice versa.

As with other approaches to cross-platform development, this system wasn’t quite as seamless as Microsoft claimed, as it required developers to manage code that was shared across platforms or unique to any one platform individually. But that would be true of future solutions of this nature, like Xamarin Forms, too. And some of the user interface controls were truly universal, meaning that they would adapt across form factors automatically.

The first part of this demo was excellent. Where Gallo’s previous Build keynote appearance had consisted of him pasting in pre-made code, here he took an existing Visual Studio project for a fairly complex app and added Windows Phone 8.1 support live in front of the audience. This didn’t require him to write any code, but he did make several big changes, any one of which could have triggered errors and sunk the demo. And his good-natured humor about ignoring Visual Studio warning messages—“We all do it,” he said to laughter—was obviously natural and went over well with the developer audience.

The app ran properly the first time in Visual Studio’s Windows Phone emulator, but the opening screen had a display error that wasn’t present in the PC/tablet version of the app. And so Gallo showed how one could use different views for PC/tablet and Windows Phone instead of a single shared view. This bit was canned—he dragged in pre-built Windows Phone views to save time—and thus less effective, but he also showed off some of the impressive new diagnostic tools in Visual Studio.

With that, Treadwell returned to discuss how Microsoft was improving the Windows Store experience for both users and developers.

“The Windows Store now features shared app identities,” he said. “You can give your customers a common app experience across phones and PCs. For example, your customers can buy the app one time, and it works on both phones and PCs. They don’t need to buy a different app.” Here, the audience applauded. And it was clear that Microsoft was aping Sun Microsystem’s “write once, run anywhere” marketing for Java in the late 1990s: with universal apps, they could “buy once, use anywhere.” This system would extend to in-app purchases too, of course.

This functionality was, however, optional: where some developers would want to let users run their games and apps across phones, PCs, and tablets, others would not. The Windows Store would display a universal badge to let users knew which offerings did support this.

To show the power of the shared app identities, Microsoft corporate vice president Kirk Koenigsbauer appeared to demonstrate a universal, touch-first version of Microsoft Office that would work across PCs, tablets, and phones. Like Windows Phone, this was exciting but it would prove to be a short-lived effort, and all it ultimately proved was how limited Metro/Modern/Store/Universal apps were compared to true desktop applications. But at the time, this wasn’t yet obvious, and it appeared that universal Office might be the future of the platform.

Treadwell discussed several other initiatives, but none were specific to Windows, and he reintroduced Myerson, who had some surprises ready for an audience that had already sat through nearly two hours of presentations.

“Are you guys ready for the good stuff now?” he asked. The solutions Belfiore and Treadwell had discussed previously would be made available in days or weeks, he said. But “the number one feedback” that Microsoft had gotten from its developer audience was for the software giant to please share its roadmap. In other words, what developers wanted most was what they had never gotten from Sinofsky: they wanted transparency.

“We’re investing with you, we want to arrive at a great place with you,” he said, echoing the developer feedback. “And to do that, we need to know where you’re going.”

And with that, Myerson launched into a series of revelations the likes of which a Microsoft developer audience hadn’t received since the Jim Allchin era. He was providing a peek at the future and being transparent.

“What Dave [Treadwell] talked about was bringing these universal Windows applications to the PC, the phone, and the tablet,” he started. “But there’s one screen he didn’t talk about. And that’s the television. [And] there’s no better TV experience out there than Xbox.”

Here’s the audience burst into applause, sensing what was coming: Microsoft would extend the universal Windows platform to Xbox One, opening up Microsoft’s video game console to Windows developers in a seamless way.

“If you’re going to put an application on the Xbox, you can’t just make it work with a controller,” he said after demonstrating a universal app that ran across PC, tablet, phone, and Xbox. “You really need to think about how you’re going to take advantage of Kinect,” the Xbox-based motion and gesture sensing peripheral. To facilitate Kinect compatibility, Myerson noted that Microsoft would ship the second version of its Kinect for Windows. “We think this is the future,” he said. “We think that this is the way that we will all be interacting with our computers [in the future].”

Sidenote: Kinect died an ignoble death that year when Microsoft was forced to unbundle the peripheral from the Xbox One to lower prices and respond to complaints in a bid to prop up the struggling console. Developers immediately abandoned Kinect as a result.

Next, Myerson announced that Microsoft would bring the graphical power of the Xbox One to the PC and phone via DirectX 12. This wouldn’t just be for games, he noted: medical imaging applications, computer-aided design (CAD), and any other applications could use this technology.

Moving on from Xbox, Myerson noted that there was a whole class of Internet of Things (IoT) devices out in the world, and that silicon breakthroughs were enabling ever-smaller devices and sensors.

“We’ve ported Windows to ARM,” he noted, as he picked up an x86-based Intel Galileo board. “[But] what kinds of devices are possible when a PC runs on something that’s the size of an eraser? We are at a time when the devices we are programming are going to change.” And that was kind of that: after a fun smart piano demo with Joe Belfiore, an onscreen slide noted “Windows on the Internet of Things,” but there was no official announcement about branding or what such a version would even look like.

But then he turned to the Windows desktop and, implicitly, the post-Windows 8.x world.

“1.5 billion PCs users out there, hundreds of millions of new PCs [each] year, and this is the primary interface that we’re interacting with,” he started. “Now, Joe [Belfiore] shared some amazing work that the team’s doing to make that a great experience for every user on the PC. And I’m not here to announce the next version of Windows. But I am going to share that we are going all-in with this desktop experience to make sure your applications can be accessed and loved by people [who] love the Windows desktop.”

A hush fell over the crowd. Would Myerson really undo all of the user experience terribleness of Windows 8 that had been foisted on the world by Sinofsky and his ilk?

Yes. He would.

“For starters, we’re going to enable your universal Windows applications to run in a window,” he said, as an image of universal apps running in windows on the desktop appeared onscreen. Applause erupted. “And we’re going to enable your users to find, discover, and run your windows applications with the new Start menu.”

As he said that, a Start menu opened onscreen, the audience exploded into applause and whistles, and Terry laughed. The new Start menu had two parts, a leftmost apps list that resembled the Windows 7 Start menu and a rightmost area for tiles that resembled the Windows 8 Start screen and displayed live tiles. And the new Start menu was resizable to the top and right.

“You can see here that we have live tiles coming together with the familiar experience that customers are looking for, that some customers are looking for, to start and run their applications,” he said when the clamor finally settled down. “And we’ll be making this available to all Windows 8.1 users as an update. I think there are going to be a lot of happy people out there.”

Myerson’s decision to ship this interface in Windows 8x. rather than wait for Threshold was interesting. It spoke to his desire to undo the terribleness of the Sinofsky years as quickly as possible and to apologize for the mistakes of Windows 8 and fix its problems without requiring customers to pay for the privilege. And the turnaround time on these changes was incredible: Windows 8.1 had appeared just one year after Windows 8, and the Windows 8.1 Update and this coming second update would both appear just one year after that. It was like Microsoft couldn’t erase Sinofsky quickly enough.

Sidenote: We would later learn that the return of the Start menu would happen in two phases. In Windows 8.x, it would be an option alongside the Start screen. But in July 2014, my sources told me that Threshold would remove the full-screen Start experience, along with the Windows 8 Charms. Threshold would also bring virtual desktops, formally, to Windows, though the underlying code had been in there since the NT days.

But Myerson wasn’t done.

“We really want to get this platform out there,” he said, “We really want to remove all the friction. So I want to announce today that when we have this new Windows for the Internet of Things available, Windows will be available for $0. But we’re not stopping there. Again, to drive adoption of your applications … on phones and tablets with screen sizes [under] 9 inches, we are making Windows available now for $0.”

Zero dollars.

The audience, predictably, applauded. But it’s unclear if many of them understood what a milestone this really was.

Microsoft’s software empire was literally built on Windows license sales, and this fact had colored its strategy for Windows Phone, a platform that competed with another Android, that was ostensibly free. Android was never free, however. Hardware licensees had to pay for the Google Play Store and the Google apps that made Android, Android. But this distinction was lost on most, and, regardless, Android was less expensive than Windows Phone and was handily outselling Microsoft’s smartphone platform—and the iPhone, for that matter—by this point. Microsoft was taking this drastic and unprecedented step in a last-ditch effort to save its platform from dying at the hands of this voracious new competitor.

And it’s important to remember that in acquiring Nokia, Microsoft would be competing with its own hardware partners in the phone market soon, just as it already was in the PC market with Surface. Pricing Windows Phone at $0 would soften the blow for its non-Nokia partners.

Myerson’s incredible set of announcements no doubt left the audience in shock, especially in the context of Build, which had been relatively content-free for Windows developers over the previous two years. But he sent them in a fit of euphoria when he announced that all attendees would get a free Xbox One console, plus a $500 Microsoft Store gift card so they could purchase the Windows Phone or PC hardware of their choice. This bit, at least, was similar to the previous two Build conferences, which had relied on giveaways to generate excitement. The difference in 2014 was that the giveaways were additive: Build 2014 had been exciting enough to stand on its own.

“We really do believe in this natural user interface,” Terry said as he concluded his talk. “We believe in these gestures, we believe in voice, and we believe the applications of the future are going to interact with humans using these techniques. We really do believe in the Internet of Things. We think as the screens get smaller and the devices get smaller, the cloud gets bigger. And we’re going to make some incredible new things possible. And last but not least, we believe in all of you. We believe in our OEMs and device diversity. We believe in our developers, and the best is yet to come. And we’re here to help you guys do it. So … thank you.”

Myerson then introduced the next speaker, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, who was inarguably the best public speaker that Microsoft had at that point. Elop discussed upcoming Nokia smartphones, which was interesting but doesn’t really relate to this story beyond the fact that Microsoft was, at that time, preparing to finalize its acquisition of Elop’s company.

More importantly, Myerson’s final words on that stage were prescient in ways that were not obvious at the time. In speaking of natural user interfaces, IoT devices, and the cloud-powered services that would make it all possible, Myerson had clearly communicated Microsoft’s vision of a post-PC future. That seems obvious, but underlying it all was a concept that he would later clarify as “the next wave.” That is, even in mid-2014, it was obvious to Microsoft that it would never own the smartphone market as it had done with PCs. And that it would need to look to this next wave, the generation of personal computing that would follow the smartphone, if it wanted to regain its throne. Everything else it was doing in this space simply amounted to treading water while it figured out what that next wave would be.

And speaking of the future, when Elop concluded his talk, he introduced the new CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, who was of course greeted with thunderous applause of his own.

A slender and fit man, Nadella was—and still is—a robotic speaker, but as a very technical engineer, he was also seen as a return to form for Microsoft’s leadership in the wake of Steve Ballmer, who had come up from the marketing ranks. And as such, he was very much appreciated by the developer audience at Build.

“I was in San Francisco for the very first PDC [22 years earlier],” he said. “I was not yet at Microsoft, this is when the Win32 APIs were unveiled, and ever since I don’t think I’ve missed a PDC or a [Build] developer conference.”

Nadella spoke of what he called “ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, or this mobile-first, cloud-first world where Windows is prevalent.” And Windows was, of course, prevalent at Microsoft for many, many years. But under Nadella’s leadership—he had come up in the company’s Server and cloud businesses—Windows would become a lot less prevalent. And his focus would shift, and quickly, from “mobile-first, cloud-first” to just “cloud” as he killed off Windows Phone and forced Terry Myerson to make Windows make sense within the new Microsoft.

Despite his words that day, Nadella’s head was firmly in the clouds. And Windows would never be the same again.