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 i...