Ask Paul: December 16 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We’ve finally seen a bit of snow here in Lower Macungie, so let’s get the weekend started early with some reat reader questions.

Who is working on Windows now?

zorb56 asks:

During your Programming Windows series, you released several interviews with folks working on Windows, looked back on stories you either broke or had a hand in extracting meaningful information from Microsoft insiders on, and provided fun anecdotes about the people behind some of the more exciting times in the history of Windows. My question is, what do you see as the main reasons you don’t seem to be able to get this sort of depth from a primary source at Microsoft any longer? I think it was on Windows Weekly a few months back that you briefly touched on this and mentioned simply not knowing anyone in Windows anymore; that all of the top tier engineers you have a relationship with are working in Azure, Office, or have left the company. If you cite this as the reason or one of the reasons, why do you think you don’t have the same relationship with the current crop of developers working on Windows?

When I started my career, Windows was at the center of the personal computing industry, and so that was true from about 1994 to about 2007, when the first iPhone was released, give or take several years. So let’s call it about 15 years. In the 15-ish years since then, personal computing has shifted largely to phones in general—iPhone and Android—or perhaps, somewhat charitably, to mobile. And this is a market in which Microsoft at first floundered and then failed. But we should give the software giant some credit, however, for reinventing itself, too: where Windows was once at the epicenter of everything Microsoft did, it has since pivoted to cloud computing. And we’re about to experience a year in which its cloud offerings generate more revenues than its non-cloud offerings. The trend is clear.

Based on one seemingly well-researched piece, Windows this year contributed just 12 percent of Microsoft’s revenues, its lowest ever, and it’s on a downward trend, from a percentage share basis. To be fair, we might want to include revenues that exist only because Windows exist, too, in the same way that Apple’s services, Watch, and some other businesses only exist because of the iPhone. But it’s a short list. Much of Office, of course. Devices, a tiny business. And some search/advertising, I guess. But whatever. Where Windows was for a long time the majority of Microsoft’s revenues, and it was for another long period of time roughly one-third of those revenues, today it is small. And getting smaller.

And that is why I used to have lots of high-profile contacts who worked on Windows back in the day and do not today: there are almost no high-profile employees working on Windows at Microsoft today because that is not the future of the company and is not where you go if you care about your career and your future. The truly credible—and incredible—people working at Microsoft are nowhere near Windows. They’ve either moved to other parts of the company or have left.

I do know people in the Windows Insider group, of course, but that’s just a community engagement organization, not engineering. Above them, or next to them, I guess, are three-ish main groups of employees: those working on low-level technologies that are in Azure now, those working on surface-level Windows user experiences, and those working on apps. And, come on. This isn’t the core engineering focus it used to be at all. I know Panos Panay, but I don’t have the relationship with him that I did with Terry Myerson, Jim Allchin, or even Steven Sinofsky, all of whom had actual engineering backgrounds, by the way.

I have a technical background, and a technical leaning, and I think that’s what we don’t see in Windows today, nor do we see it in most of the people writing about Windows in blogs or whatever. It’s a more superficial world now than it used to be. And so all I can do, really, is bring my decades of experience and my more technical understanding of things to what I write. I’m sure many of the people in Windows today are as confused about me as I am about some of them.

I also write about more than just Windows. This started very early, in the earliest days of the SuperSite for Windows, so about 1999 or so, when I expanded to other versions of Windows, then Office, then many other Microsoft products over time, and to many competing products and platforms from other companies. Today, I write about personal computing, generally speaking, but my focus is still very much on Microsoft because that’s where most of my experience is, yes, but also because I care about it more. Care about it enough to want it to be better. I encapsulated this in my Michael Pollan-inspired Twitter bio, which reads, “Personal technology, with a focus on productivity, mostly Microsoft.” I like the succinctness of that.

By the way, I’m still friends with many of the people who were in Windows back in the day. Some are still at Microsoft, elsewhere in the company, but most are long gone, and by their own volition for the most part.

Windows 11 on (really) slow hardware

sgbassett asks:

I recently installed Windows 11 on an old and officially unsupported Lenovo Yoga Book (the one with the Halo keyboard). It was very slow and borderline unusable on Windows 10. Yet with Windows 11, it is “snappier” in that menus and web pages seem to open and load faster. I am imagining this, or does Windows 11 run better than Windows 10 on older low-powered machines like this one with an old Atom processor and 4GB of RAM?

Interesting. I’ve installed Windows 11 on probably three unsupported PCs, but not on a PC that low-end, so I’m not sure, sorry. I wouldn’t have thought that it was faster on such a PC though. In fact, one of the big changes in the past year is that the consensus view among reviewers seems to be that you’ll want 16 GB of RAM (as opposed to 8) on a new PC.

Has anyone else tried this?

Microsoft and consumers

spacecamel asks:

Does Microsoft have any big consumer releases coming this year?  What big Xbox games are coming?

On the Windows front, nothing notable that I’m aware of or they’ve announced beyond a series of “Moments” updates for Windows 11. I wonder if we’ll get a Windows 12 preview in late 2023 or if that is a 2024 reveal.

For Xbox, Phil Spencer publicly admitted that the platform needed to do better with regards to always having an exciting exclusive AAA title in the pipeline as this holiday season has been a non-event. But there are some big games coming, for sure, not necessarily exclusives. I have my eye on a few. Dead Space Remake, as the original was amazing. Resident Evil 4 (remake, I’ve never played the original). Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Dead Island 2. Diablo IV. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum (finally). But there are many others, and let’s not forget that game at the center of the FTC drama: Starfield. There will be new Forza and Minecraft (Legends) titles in 2023, as well, and the Age of Empires releases on Xbox console and STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl. Those last four are from Microsoft studios.

(If Microsoft does get Activision Blizzard somehow in the coming year, the biggest release I’m interested in is whatever they do with Call of Duty. My understanding is that the late 2023 release will be a massive classic maps pack for the current game, which I cannot wait for.)

Related to this, AliMaggs asks:

I’ve been listening to the rather excellent book, After Steve: How Apple became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul. It’s interesting how many services Apple has gotten into (with varying degrees of challenges and turmoil, but eventually success) have been previously “dabbled in” by Microsoft. From health and fitness (with the Microsoft Band and Microsoft Health) through music (Zune, Xbox Music, Groove) and TV (there was a moment in time when Microsoft was gearing up to produce its own movies and shows).

That was my favorite industry book of 2022. Everyone interested in personal technology, even those who are not fans of Apple, should read it.

Apple’s use of the iPhone as a Halo product to attract additional revenues through other hardware, software, and now services is genius, but that’s also what Microsoft did with Windows: that lead to Office, Windows Server, Internet Explorer, MSN, a spate of consumer electronics initiatives, and a lot more. The difference is that those latter offerings were a lot less successful. For the most part, Apple seems to be doing great across the board. And while the reasons for that are manyfold, a big part of it is that Apple is successful with consumers, and has done a terrific job of attracting them not just logically but emotionally. People connect with a smartphone, which is very personal, much more than they do with a PC, which is now seen almost solely as a business productivity tool (unless you’re a gamer).

Do you think there’s any regret from Microsoft on the markets they’ve given up on, given the way the world has gone since?

I suspect it’s more frustration than regret. They were right to leave digital music, eBooks, fitness trackers, phones, media centers, and whatever else because those products were not successful and were a drag on revenues. We can pick apart the reasons why it failed in each market, I guess, but the overreaching problem is not unique to Microsoft: it had this one successful product, built several successful franchises off of that success, and just assumed if it kept doing the same thing, the world would come along for the ride. Microsoft was never going to beat Apple in digital media, for example, nor was it ever going to change the world with an iPhone, because the Microsoft of those eras cared more about protecting its Windows cash cow than being truly innovative in new markets. So that had to come from a company that was, at the time, not succeeding in its own core market (Macs) and had to look elsewhere.

The consumer side of Microsoft is fascinating to me. There was a brief period when it felt like they had the most comprehensive slate of devices (phones, tablets, laptops, consoles, wearables) and services, compared to Apple and Google. They never seemed to get it over the line in terms of market share. Your post, “Microsoft, Just Bring Back Skype”, is an excellent example of how little they seem to understand the consumer market, or at least they don’t seem to understand the different needs (and wants) of consumers compared to businesses.

In researching the Programming Windows series, I was struck by how many consumer initiatives Microsoft had in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But you can also see the mistakes it made in hindsight, and if you’re familiar with what other companies were doing, can also see why they failed in each case. I never really mapped this out, but the number of new Microsoft consumer offerings started dwindling by 2010 or so, and I suspect the failure of Windows Phone was the major death blow, with Satya Nadella requiring each business to justify its existence.

That said, in the discussions I’ve had with Microsoft CMO Chris Capossela, he has expressed the same viewpoint repeatedly, that Microsoft has a market of billions of users, and while most of them are business customers, all of them are people, and any of them could be interested in using the same or similar Microsoft products and services in their personal lives. There is some crossover, of course, some base of people who use Microsoft 365 and OneDrive personally, and there are Surface and Xbox fans as well. But once you get past the tentpoles, the other consumer offerings seem almost pointless. I get why they keep trying—it’s a huge market and an obvious place for growth—but I feel like it’s pointless. Microsoft is the Oldsmobile of Big Tech as a brand, and it has a work/productivity aura about it that serves it well in business, but not at all with individuals.

Side note, I received an email this morning from Microsoft titled “Host a PowerPoint Party with your friends and family this holiday season”… Reminded me of the Windows 7 House Parties. Case. In. Point. Although I’m now tempted to send out invites for a New Year PowerPoint Party and see how many friends I have left on January 1st.

LOL. “I’d like to see you in person, but I’d rather give you a remote webinar instead. Please hold your questions until the end of the talk.”

If you were Microsoft, wanting to get serious about consumers again, what would you do?

I’m not sure there is anything that can be done. This recent rumor of a Microsoft “super app” is a great example: what the heck could Microsoft put in an app that would make any normal human being want to download it?

I can see two possible ways forward.

The first is by buying their way into consumer markets, as they’re trying to do with Activision Blizzard; Call of Duty, after all, is a great and successful brand, and I bet most of the people playing it have no idea what the corporate owner is. I wonder if there aren’t other markets, and perhaps even some hardware markets, that might make sense for Microsoft and be complementary in some way.

And the second is to just ride it out and wait for the percentage of revenues from cloud services to surpass those of legacy end-user products. I feel like the Microsoft of the future will have plenty of interactions with consumers, but that most of those consumers won’t realize it because it’s happening on the backend, like electricity. That is, instead of using some Microsoft mobile app, they’ll use a popular third-party mobile app that’s powered by Azure or whatever. That’s boring from our perspective, and it won’t make headlines in major news publications like a new iPhone, but it should be quite lucrative.

Xbox aside, I see Microsoft has a cloud-focused business productivity company. But even Xbox is moving more into the cloud and is starting to make sense in the context of the rest of the company. I don’t see that changing.