Microsoft Moves Decisively to End the Nonsense Era (Premium)

While many are understandably worried about the demotion of Windows within Microsoft, there’s a silver lining: All of the nonsense is being demoted as well, leaving Microsoft to focus on what really matters to this product and its users.

And that, folks, is good news.

Don’t get me wrong, I was never rooting for Windows to fail. And I don’t mean to suggest that this demotion is the best thing that’s ever happened to the platform. But I rely on Windows very much and have no interest in its competition despite decades of experimentation. I care about Windows. And … there is evidence now that the demotion will, in fact, have positive side effects.

As you must know, the onslaught of nonsense features in Windows 10 over the past years has been so troubling to me. As is this weird insistence that each new Windows 10 version, now shipping two times per year, had to be a big deal, had to contain many major new features.

I write and talk about this issue a lot, but I’ll just call out one article that sums it up nicely: In last year’s Here are the Most Over-Hyped Changes in the Windows 10 Creators Update, I listed out the nonsense new features that shipped in that release. Each shares a single and obvious commonality: They would each be used by so few people that it was unclear why Microsoft went to the engineering effort to add them to its flagship client platform.

And we just sort of went through that with each release, with Microsoft briefly pretending that nonsense features like Mixed Reality, 3D, emojis, or whatever would ever matter to some broad base of users. When none of it was at all successful, no problem, Microsoft just moved on to the next release. There’s always something new and exciting to promote!

The thing is, PCs are productivity tools. And Windows, like it or not, just isn’t used for engaging consumer activities like social media, watching videos, exploring new apps, or reading. Not by the masses, at least, all of whom have long since turned to more personal, mobile, and always-connected devices, in particular smartphones. The PC is boring. It’s where work happens.

But I’ve always liked that. And as things evolved and I stopped needing to load up my laptop with podcasts, music, videos, and other content before each trip, the PC settled into its more traditional role. Like virtually everyone else, I just use it for work. It’s actually quite freeing.

So the return to desktop-centricity in the initial version of Windows 10 was thus a big deal to me. But that push was squandered in the years since as Microsoft unsuccessfully fought to make Windows exciting to users again, and to find new ways to monetize a product that most people don’t even really pay for. Windows 10 has since succumbed to advertising, crapware bundling, and those nonsense features that rile me up so much. It’s a mess.

Anyway, Windows, as you know, has been demoted. Terry Myerson was sent packing, there is no one on Microsoft’s senior leadership team who is directly responsible for Windows, and the development of this product was split between two main groups. The “core” of the OS is now over in the Azure group, which makes sense given its Windows Server heritage. And the front-end user experiences are organized under a new Experiences & Devices group.

That Experiences & Devices group consists of multiple teams. For Windows specifically, two main teams are relevant to this discussion: The Windows experiences team, led by Joe Belfiore. And the New Experiences and Technology team, led by Kudo Tsunoda.

Well, it was led by Kudo Tsunoda. This team, which I might have previously described as the “nonsense features team,” was just summarily executed by CEO Satya Nadella, who has proven to have no patience for non-justifiable efforts. And Mr. Tsunoda is now looking for a new job.

I had heard about this organizational shuffling just before we started recording Windows Weekly on Wednesday but didn’t know any details.

Since then, Mary Jo has reported that Microsoft is furthering focusing on its intelligent cloud and intelligent edge strategy, which left no room for the nonsense—“Mixed reality, ‘3D for Everyone,’ Story Remix, Photos, HoloLens and ‘other secret unannounced things'”—-that Tsunoda’s team was working on.

“Tsunoda’s team was disbanded,” Mary Jo writes.

Good.

Microsoft is also shifting some teams around in ways that make sense.

For example, Albert Shum’s design team and the Windows Insider Program (which is more marketing than engineering) are moving from Windows core to Joe B’s Windows experiences team. And the devices management team and Microsoft Edge are moving from Windows core into Experiences and Devices.

But that removal of nonsense is the big deal here. When Microsoft first announced that Terry was leaving and that Windows would be scattered throughout the company, I noted that further changes were coming. That the firm would spend much of 2018 re-evaluating the new structure and the new teams that resulted from that reorg. This week’s changes are the first big aftershock, if you will, from the reorg, a reshuffling of the original plan. A much-needed one.

And with the Redstone 5 feature set firmly rooted in useful productivity features instead of the nonsense we got in the past, it seems that some sense of normalcy is returning. I’m not suggesting that some nonsense won’t make its way past the decision-makers, they can’t all be winners. Or that some of the products under Tsunoda’s now-defunct team won’t live on for some reason. But by and large, things are looking pretty good, especially when you consider all the doom and gloom around Windows 10 this year.