Before a Surface (Premium)

While editing Brad’s book Beneath a Surface, I was inspired to go back and re-watch Surface press events from the past and research my notes from those days. Doing so was an interesting exercise. And a reminder of how much this product line has evolved over time.

I don’t want to undermine what Brad is doing with his book. Instead, I’d like to provide some surrounding context around the stories he tells in Beneath a Surface, and do so using some interesting information from my own archives. Here, I’ll examine what was happening in and around the industry at the time Microsoft decided to go forward with Surface.

So let’s start at the beginning.

The origin of Microsoft Surface is fascinating to me. It’s an intriguing and controversial idea that would never have happened without the patronage of a madman, Steven Sinofsky, who had taken over the Windows organization in the wake of the Windows Vista debacle.

As is so often the case during leadership transitions, one of Sinofsky’s first goals was to eliminate both the people and strategies that he felt weren’t working and replace them with his own people and ideas.

He had previously led Microsoft Office development, so he brought Julie Larson-Green and other top lieutenants to Windows with him, as well as key user experience people like Jensen Harris.

As for strategy, Sinofsky immediately shut down the open development approach of his predecessor, which relied on big-bang announcements about future plans at Microsoft events to generate excitement. Under Sinofsky, Windows would now be developed in secret. And Microsoft would never disclose any new features unless they were absolutely going to make it into the product.

Sinofsky ran a tight ship, and his version of the trains running on time was to ensure that a new Windows version came out on a regular cadence, in this case, every three years. This was a direct reaction to the years-long delays of “Longhorn,” which was eventually tossed aside for Windows Vista. Microsoft would never again let that many years go by between major Windows releases.

A control freak who was suspicious of everyone, Sinofsky cultivated a divisive “us vs. them” mentality within Windows that applied as much to other parts of the company as it did to competitors. Like many of that generation of Microsoft executives, he also suffered from a severe case of Apple envy. And many of the ideas he green-lighted were direct attempts to mimic Apple, despite evidence at the time that these efforts—like Zune—were failing.

Sinofsky’s flaws were overlooked and even celebrated in some quarters thanks to the success of Windows 7, which went on to sell 670 million licenses over its three-year life cycle. But with hindsight, it’s easy to see that anyone could have “fixed” Windows Vista. It was too big and slow, and it originally shipped with some important compatibility issues. Windows 7 could just as easily have been the next Windows Vista Service Pack.

But the damage had been done. Seen as a savior of sorts for Windows, Sinofsky could now be bolder and chart a new path for what was then still Microsoft’s core product. He fell into a now well-understood delusion among tech leaders, that persists to this day, that he was another Steve Jobs. And he fashioned himself as the Jobs of Microsoft, the person who made all the decisions and directed the strategy.

But like everyone else under this spell, Sinofsky was no Steve Jobs. And instead of saving Windows, he killed it: Thanks to Sinofsky’s terrible decisions and silly secretiveness, Windows 8 was an even bigger disaster than Windows Vista. And it arrived at exactly the wrong time, as the iPhone and then the iPad and Chromebooks rose up to seize the imagination and dollars of the buying public. We are today still dealing with the ramifications of Windows 8’s “touch-first” design and still-immature apps platform and store. And the PC business is now just two-thirds the size it was at its peak.

I will say this for Sinofsky: He was never afraid of making big changes to well-established products. He OK’d the introduction of the controversial ribbon user interface in Microsoft Office. (Which is just now being rolled back.) He destroyed Windows by designing a version of the product that didn’t run well on the billions of traditional PCs that Microsoft’s customers were actually using. And he forced Microsoft to make its own PCs.

That latter effort, which resulted in the Surface family of products, is a classic example of right time, right place. Had Windows 7 not been so successful, Sinofsky could have never pivoted Windows to be more like the iPhone and other multi-touch devices. And he very much never could have convinced Microsoft’s CEO and board of directors to undermine the entire Windows business by competing with the very partners, PC makers, which were responsible for most Windows license sales.

And yet he did.

Maybe the ribbon should have been a warning. Well-liked by some and reviled by most, the ribbon suffered from only one major sin: It was a one-way, dead-end street. Sinofsky’s Office division would not allow users to choose between the ribbon and the traditional menu- and toolbars-based UI of the past. The stated reason was that supporting both would be a nightmare. But the real reason was that Sinofsky thought he was infallible, that his ideas were right, and that users would simply fall in line. Again, the Steve Jobs complex.

Windows 8 was the same thinking applied to another product: One couldn’t choose between the new full-screen and touch-first Start screen and the traditional Start menu that had been in Windows for 17 years by that point. Instead, they would have to just learn the new user experience. And to drive home the point, Microsoft even removed the familiar Start button. Sinofsky scattered his bad ideas all over Windows 8, like DNA at a crime scene.

Surface could have been something very different. It could have been yet another project within Microsoft to inspire its PC maker partners to make products that would run Windows 8 more efficiently. But Sinofsky could point to many past failures along these lines. For example, when the software giant released Windows Media Center Edition back in 2002, it had told PC makers to create elegant, stereo component-like PC designs that would look at home in a living room. But the first Media Center PCs were all traditional tower PC designs instead, and they looked out of place in the living room.

Flush with success, and with his eye on the CEO position after what he assumed would be yet another win with Windows 8, Sinofsky took on the role of patron for the small Surface team in Microsoft that wanted to make its own hardware that would work well with Windows 8. And he convinced both Steve Ballmer and Microsoft’s board that a “co-opetition” model made sense, that making both the software and the hardware was the only way to push back against Apple and what he saw as a mobile, touch-first future.

Put another way, Microsoft’s slow-moving and risk-averse PC maker partners could not be trusted to deliver touch-first Windows 8 PCs of their own. They would simply do what they’d always done and act passively to protect their businesses. PC makers had no particular interest in seeing Microsoft make such a major change to Windows or their products. But Sinofsky felt that Windows was on a precipice, and was about to be undermined by a changing market.

So Microsoft green-lighted Surface. Against all common sense, it would make its first PCs and compete with its own partners.

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, I will again recommend Brad’s book, Beneath a Surface. It’s a great account of the entire Surface story to date, and it provides a much greater context for the stories I’m telling here. And I have a lot more stories to tell, and tons of archives to make that happen.