Panos, Word by Word (Premium)

In writing about Windows for over 25 years, I’ve also always been interested in the people and strategies behind the product. For sure, there have been ups and downs. Victories and setbacks. Product design wins and epic duds. It’s been quite a ride.

Without getting into the various personalities of everyone who ran the Windows organization over the years, let’s just say that my relationships with these people have ranged from actual friendship to outright toxic. And in one case, Steven Sinofsky, I experienced both. I don’t mention Sinofsky here to denigrate the man, I’m sure he had his reasons. But rather to contrast him with the current Windows chief, Panos Panay. And it’s pretty easy to sum up neatly.

Panay is the anti-Sinofsky.

That assumes, of course, that this week’s missive about the future of Windows is in any way representative of the man, his goals, and his broader strategy for moving the platform forward.

Where Sinofsky was overly-wordy—you may recall I used to write posts specifically to summarize his overly-long missives into something understandable and readable—Panay is concise, almost too brief. Where Sinofsky was pathologically driven and would pen massive posts over weekends without the foreknowledge or feedback from his PR team, Panay seems more methodical, quiet, and calm. Sinofsky was a ruthless engineer with no people skills; Panay is driven but he seems like more of a designer, more of a team player.

You get the idea. They’re different.

But they’re also similar, right? They have to be: You can’t get to this level of leadership in a company like Microsoft without having certain political skills, ambition, and drive. I don’t care too much about that stuff, per se. But in reading this week’s Panay post, I’m consumed by the need to understand what he wrote. With Sinofsky, I had to sift through thousands and thousands of words to find the true meaning; with Panay, there are far fewer words, and all of them, I think, hint at deeper meaning.

So in the spirit of my Sinofsky tear-down posts of almost a decade ago and with due respect to Mr. Panay, who I feel is a good person, I’d like to consider what he really says in this week’s short missive. And what he doesn’t.

As a team we have been spending a lot of time with our customers, OEM partners and teams inside and outside of the company listening and learning. The feedback we are hearing is energizing, and if one thing is clear it is that Windows plays a critical role in helping people navigate the times we are in.

After an opening bit about how life has changed for everyone, the first thing Panos discusses is feedback: Panay and his team, he says, are listening to their customers. We’ve heard this before. In fact, one of the worst aspects of the Sinofsky era was the constant drumbeat of not listening to customers all the while pretending publicly that they were. The Windows Insider Program exists solely because of his successor’s frustration with this lie.

Our collective hope for the current regime is that Panay, in being responsible both for Windows and for Microsoft’s first-party hardware, will drive innovation and improvements that benefit both. In this way, Microsoft can achieve with Windows what it has elsewhere; for example, the creation of Office 365 (and then, later, Microsoft 365) means that the constituent parts of that offering can be improved as a singular whole instead of separately, and the individual product teams never need to worry that customers only have some of the products.

Windows and Surface are a bit different, of course: Not all Windows customers will have Surface PCs. But in improving those product lines together, Microsoft can modernize Windows to work better on new classes of devices that may come first from Surface and, if successful, make their way to other PC makers too, as was the case with the Surface Pro form factor.

Customers are using Windows PCs to stay productive, connect and learn in this time. In fact, over 4 trillion minutes are being spent on Windows 10 a month, a 75% increase year on year.

This sounds impressive. But I’m concerned by three things. First, the “in this time” bit, which suggests this upsurge in Windows usage is temporary. Second by the 75 percent increase bit; that means that usage has gone from about 2.3 trillion minutes in non-pandemic times to 4 million minutes today. (Combined, these first two items suggest that people are home and simply using whatever devices they have.) And what was all that new usage? Zoom?

The bigger issue, though, is that a 75 percent increase isn’t really that much compared to other usage metrics we’ve seen. Teams usage exploded from 38 million daily active users (DAUs) before the pandemic to 75 million. That’s almost 200 percent growth. More to the point, what has non-Windows mobile device usage been like? I bet it’s gone up a lot more than 75 percent.

As the world and people’s routines are changing, it is important that we focus on meeting our customers where they are now and helping them get to where they want to be in the future.

This is transitionary text meant only to set up the two big topics Panay discusses: The release of the May 2020 Update for Windows 10 and Microsoft’s new plans for Windows 10X.

A great step the team is taking to meet customers where they are is with the Windows 10 May 2020 Update, coming free, as always, to every Windows 10 PC starting this month.

It’s free, as always. That says nothing. These updates are always free.

It’s coming to “every Windows 10 PC” … is doubtful. No Windows 10 release is installed on every compatible PC. But whatever, that’s a minor point.

“Starting this month.” What this doesn’t say is that it’s starting Patch Tuesday, which is next Tuesday. And the reason, we’ve heard, is that a Zero Day vulnerability has pushed the release back by two weeks. I’m curious he doesn’t mention that, but perhaps Microsoft doesn’t want to even hint at a problem until the fix is available. So we need to pay attention to this month’s security updates on existing Windows 10 versions.

He then discussed a few May 2020 Update features. No need to bother with that; to most users, this release isn’t significant from a new features perspective. Which is just fine.

For those of you who are Windows Insiders, you have gotten to try many of these new features even sooner. Thank you for helping us shape the future of Windows. If you are not a Windows Insider yet, we invite you to join us.

This is an interesting aside. It’s clear that the Windows Insider Program, which is well-intentioned, hasn’t lived up to Microsoft’s goals. It certainly hasn’t adequately replaced the in-house testing that Microsoft previously did, given the many problems we’ve seen with feature updates (major new Windows versions) over the years. And activity is very low: Despite having tens of millions of Insiders, the active base there is only about one million, I’ve been told by reliable sources.

Some of the problems with the program are obvious. The communication from that team is unprofessional and of low quality. And despite creating clearly defined testing parameters, the Insider team keeps screwing with what each ring tests and has escalated the user of A/B testing, alienating their most loyal fans. I can’t honestly say that fixing these problems would solve the bigger issues with the program. But you have to start somewhere. And this is Panay’s problem now.

The following is the most interesting bit, in my opinion:

As a team, we are committed to delivering meaningful innovation in ways that matter most to the billion people around the world relying on Windows right now. That is why, in this holiday and the next, we are going to accelerate innovation in Windows 10 to ensure that Windows devices are the best way to work, learn and play. We are going to make important improvements in every one of those areas.

Delivering meaningful innovation suggests more than just minor changes and fit and finish improvements. Granted, he could specifically mean only Windows 10X, and that Windows 10 desktop will continue to plod along, as it should.

“This holiday and the next, we are going to accelerate innovation in Windows 10 to ensure that Windows devices are the best way to work, learn and play.” This holiday … and the next? He may not have meant to emphasize this, but we were just getting comfortable with the new Windows 10 release cadence, where the H1 release is a real feature update and the H2 release is just a cumulative update with minor changes (that masquerades as a feature update and has a longer-term support lifecycle for businesses). Does this mean that 20H2 and 21H2 will now be much bigger releases, i.e. “real” feature updates?

I don’t think so: I believe he is describing Microsoft’s plans for Windows 10X specifically here, and is acknowledging that its new architecture will require at least a few years of work. But that said, Windows 10X is not shipping this year. So why would Windows 10 require accelerated innovation in the 20H2 timeframe?

He also specifically says that this innovation will come in those three areas: work, learn, and play. Has the COVID-19 pandemic literally changed Microsoft’s plans for Windows 10? Are we going to see major new features targeting those areas this year? In desktop Windows 10, that is. I doubt it.

With that increased focus comes a shift in priorities for Windows too. The world is a very different place than it was last October when we shared our vision for a new category of dual-screen Windows devices. As we continue to put customers’ needs at the forefront, we need to focus on meeting customers where they are now. Our customers are leveraging the power of the cloud more than ever, and we believe the time is right to lean into this acceleration in a different way.

This is a feint. And I want to be clear about this. We knew about Windows 10X for a long time before Microsoft announced it in late 2019. And the only surprise, the only thing that didn’t make any sense, when they did announce it was that it was suddenly targeting dual-display devices. And only dual-display devices.

My take on that is that Microsoft was trying to ride a wave of what it saw as a popular new form factor, sort of like Windows 8 briefly saw a flash of interest on mini-tablets before that market disappeared overnight. But the dual-screen push was always a mistake. Windows 10X had been designed for more traditional form factors from the start. And Microsoft was offering dual-screen devices at a time when the real innovation was happening with folding screens. It would have failed.

So now Microsoft can pretend that COVID has triggered a change. When in fact, Windows 10X as originally announced was already failing at that time, and it and the devices on which it would run, like Surface Neo, were never going to make it to market in time for late 2020. Aside from the poor strategy around dual screens, there were just too many problems. Still are.

But what the heck, it’s COVID’s fault. No one else will question this.

With Windows 10X, we designed for flexibility, and that flexibility has enabled us to pivot our focus toward single-screen Windows 10X devices that leverage the power of the cloud to help our customers work, learn and play in new ways.

This is the one line of pure nonsense in the post. Windows 10X was always designed for single screen devices. It’s Windows. There isn’t a computing platform on earth that is designed solely for dual screens. If it can run on two screens, it can run on one. There’s nothing inherently flexible about Windows 10X. Removing the dual screen stuff will speed development and help Microsoft get to market faster.

That said, he never discusses a schedule for delivering Windows 10X. This talk about the 2020 and 2021 holidays suggests… what? Something this year? I have a hard time believing that since multiple sources tell me it’s a mess.

Also, note that he specifically mentions work, learn, and play again here. This supports my earlier belief that his mentions of innovation in late 2020 and late 2021 are specifically about Windows 10X and that he will not force us all into the old Windows 10 desktop update schedule again.

These single-screen devices will be the first expression of Windows 10X that we deliver to our customers, and we will continue to look for the right moment, in conjunction with our OEM partners, to bring dual-screen devices to market.

That time is already past. By the time Windows 10X is ready for dual-screen devices, the entire market will have shifted to folding screen devices. Which are just single-screen devices, really. So we can all look forward to a future missive about that pivot. Which I feel is inevitable.

Look, I welcome any communication, clarity, and transparency from the Windows organization. And this post is … good, from that perspective. But there’s so much left unsaid. And so much we still have to speculate about.

But then, that’s what we do. And will continue to do if we must.