Move Slowly and Fix Things (Premium)

He hasn’t, but if Panos Panay were to ask me my advice on running Windows, I’d tell him to do what he’s been doing with Surface. Yes, I’m sometimes critical of the slow pace at Surface, but this is exactly what Windows needs right now.

As you may know, the phrase “move fast and break things” originated at Facebook, and it was the internal motto of that firm until 2014. "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once said, referring to this motto. But let’s not give Zuckerberg or Facebook credit for this creation: This motto is really just a rephrasing of the “competing on Internet time” mantra of Netscape in the 1990s, and it was used for the same reason, to separate the new and fast from the old and slow. It was seen as a differentiator.

Microsoft has certainly applied this philosophy to various degrees of success across the firm’s business units. Office, for example, has evolved from a monolithic suite of desktop applications to a broad set of cross-platform apps and services that literally received dozens of new features every single month. And somehow, it's worked.

But with Windows, we’ve seen the opposite end of the spectrum to disastrous results: Windows as a Service (WaaS), Microsoft’s strategy for pretending that its legacy desktop platform is an online service and updating it accordingly, has failed in dramatic fashion. Windows 10 software updates are known now for only two things: The speed at which they appear and the reliability problems that they inevitably rain down on its users.

Microsoft puts on a brave face when it comes to Windows updates, and it often touts the success of its telemetry-based rollouts, despite the obvious disconnect with reality. But truth is always found in actions, not words: In both 2019 and 2020, Microsoft has halved the speed at which it delivers feature updates, which are really full version upgrades, from twice per year to once per year, matching the speed at which other major platforms, like Android, iOS, and macOS, are upgraded. Microsoft can talk up WaaS all it wants. But it has slowed down specifically because WaaS has failed.

This is the mess that Panos Panay inherited when he was handed the leadership role at Windows after he attempted to flee the software giant for a similar role at Apple. One might see this as a power play, but whatever, it worked: Now Panay runs both Surface and Windows, and it’s easy to imagine that he will use his new role to drive innovation forward in both in lock-step.

Less clear is how or whether his experience at Surface will influence how things are done in Windows. Or whether he will be influenced by how things are done in Windows and switch gears accordingly in Surface.

I’m hoping for the former.

And there is evidence to suggest this will be the direction Panay takes. If you think about the criticisms I’ve had of Surface over the years, the most obvious ...

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