- Sofiane MEROUANI
- Sep 1, 2023
- 21 min read
Updated: Oct 4, 2023
No Windows 10 Updates or Windows 11 "Moments" or whatever Microsoft has in store will match the frenzied development of Windows Longhorn that Redmond embarked on more than two decades ago, where everything seemed possible and within reach, nor will it equal those periodic - simplistic - cumulative updates shipped as "Service Packs" during Windows 2000/XP, and Server 2003 eras.
Recently, I have been reading what I would call the Paul Thurrott's Red Binder of History of Windows For The Rest of Us ( a nod to the fictional The Hugo Rupert Talbot-Carey's Definitive Guild for Law Students and Paralegals) a set of articles directly archived from the SuperSite, the ancestor of Thurrott.com - which I took a great delight to print from 2004 to 2009 and keep them clean for historical purpose only. Yep, I had two slow-printing Epson printers back in the day and a set of RGB ink colored cartridges that I purchased with my ultra-thin salary I had back when I was a student here at the University of Algiers.
And those low-end ink cartridges took an eternity to get one page printed and those countless of nights, listening to that humming sound made by the printers as they got one page out of the tray like a hot baked bread out of the oven.
But you know what's the old saying says : "when we love, we don't count".
The Red Binder covers FAQs, reviews and previews. I even bookmarked some of my favorite articles like Longhorn (obviously) - the ancestor of Windows Defender acquired from GIANT software in December 2004. And on September 1st, 2008, Paul previewed the very first version of Chrome 1.0, - You came from very long way baby! the web browser made by Google that would go on crusade against IE and Firefox. And just a kiss with history (*) - Little did I know, Paul know- and the world know - two or three weeks after the article was written, Lehman Brothers would go bankrupt, setting a domino effect which resulted in a 2008's financial meltdown that would reverberate around the globe. Yeah, Paul I love doing what the showrunner/screenwriter Donald P. Bellisario exceled doing in NBC's time travelling drama Quantum Leap : "Kiss with History" or "Brush with History" depending on whom you talk.
Anyway, The archived papers are not a Definitive Edition per se, since it do not cover the site entirely from its inception in 1998 to 2015. Otherwise, it's not an Epson I'd need but rather a full printing press. Just kidding :) Nope. After all, I stumbled on the site - as I mentioned in my previous article - twenty years ago, on late summer 2003 - when I was preparing for my baccalaureate exam - and the UI niceties from Luna interface that graced the newly released Windows XP - although some critics called a Fisher-Price UI, less sophisticated than Aqua from Apple - is what pushed me to keep an eye on what's Next at Microsoft. And Dedham-native tech journalist Paul Thurrott had the answer : Microsoft was gearing up for a monumental lie eh … huh mmm...sorry... I mean monumental upgrade (which would turn out to be a 🤥 lie) WE ARE GEEKS BEARING GIFTS to Windows XP under the code-name of "Longhorn" for the upcoming PDC 2003 slated for October of that year.
Apple was still struggling back then, trying to get up on its feet after a turbulent 80s and near-moribund 90s. Steve Jobs, who returned in 1997, re-calibrated the company he founded, ousted some of its executives, discontinued some of lukewarm products and released a set colorful internet-ready eye-candy, cumbersome-less iMac for educational markets, self-elevated himself as the CEO. And at the turn of the millennium, released the first flavor of Mac OS built on NEXT, and the iPod MP3 Lineup.
And for Microsoft. Well, the company was at its apex. As Paul Thurrott said :
"It could do no wrong". And Windows was not just awesome. "It rocked".
In the early 2000, Microsoft released a number of internet related tools as part of its bold internet strategy. New Visual Studio version under the .NET umbrella that would consolidate all the programming languages into a single package. It created along the way , a new language called C sharp (originally nicknamed : C with "Class") to compete with Java, and released various flavors of operating systems at rapid pace : Windows 2000 for business, which took four years in the making, a third edition of Windows 98 tagged as Windows Me for home user with some innovative features that would be ported into Windows.NET 1.0 in then near future like System Restore. And Internet Explorer, the venerable web browser that caused so much troubles for Redmond with the DOJ at the turn of the century was riding high, eclipsing all competitors with 90+ precents of market share.
Under siege, Bill Gates seemed invincible. And there was one "line" from MSFT's extravaganza - I don't remember his name - who was present during the PDC 2003 and got an itch to write codes, Microsoft did not just embrace the internet strategy. In fact it celebrated.
And how about the DOJ probe that started during the joint-venture between Microsoft and IBM in 1989 and reached its apogee in May 1998 with a possible splitting the company up into two separate entities ? Well like it said on the Fortune magazine :
Justice be damned.
What get me emotional about reading the achieved articles form SuperSite is how the world we were living twenty years ago was simple. It was way before the emergence of the social medias, fake news and most of all, the AI - which was only seen in the realm of video games, start taking shape in our daily life. Usually, when I returned from the University, I was always excited to fire up IE and click on the bookmarked SuperSite to get the first taste of what Microsoft had in Store, and of course, Paul Thurrott was an expert in getting the latest news of Redmond before the world under the quip "You heard it here first."
But the excitement about what Microsoft had to offer started to diminish by the time, Microsoft was losing sight on Longhorn, and Apple started to emerge like a rising Phoenix with the late Steve Jobs mocking Microsoft on being late on getting Longhorn out of the door.
To be honest, I have never been a big fan of Apple. I grew up with Windows. My first experience was with Windows 3.1 (a.k.a David Cutler's version) on my uncle's Dell whom he updated in spring of 1997 to Windows 95 just to play Duke Nukem C:/DUKE3D.exe and Shadow Warrior. When I excelled at school, my dad , who was a former engineer under contract with Germans, took me to his work and he had a Siemens computer that ran on Windows NT 4.0 - which I recalled - I could not run a game - so to my dismay, I was struck playing Solitaire. And he brought on June 2000, that Fujitsu Siemens' laptop Scenic series with a whooping 128 MB of Memory, 20GB of Hard drive and 800Mhz Pentium 3 processor. With an interchangeable floppy/battery. The laptop was a gaming haven for me, until it became infested with Virus and Dr. Solomon came to save the day.
Fast forward from mid-to late 2010s, we felt there was a real competition between the two companies, each of them releasing exciting products to the audiences : Xbox, iPod, Zune, iMac, iPhone, Windows Mobile...to cite a few. Windows Vista, on the other hand, was not terrible as many think - it was just ahead of its time. But Vista's failed adoption to the wide audience was nothing compared to the greatest train wreak that would become Windows 8, an operating system that wanted to re-write how People interacts with computer but instead, it alienated the entire Windows community. That doomed operating system that changed the face of Redmond forever, ousted many of its legendary executives and forcing the company to shift its effort to cloud computing and AI - while Apple - a struggling giant of the 90s - enjoys nowadays a widespread success on hardware + software.
Ooh. I got another nasty headache.
In my previous post, I mentioned I would not talk about Windows 8, which had been a debacle for Microsoft and a disappointment for the Windows community. But looking back, Microsoft - as tech journalist Paul Thurrott always stated -- had to react to the exterior forces beyond its control and as a result it had to act fast - Windows 8, which came out seven years after Google purchased Android - an operating system initially intended for camcorders and five years after the first iteration of the iPhone, was conceived as a reaction to the ever-growing smartphone world that was dominated by -- namely: Apple and Google - two giants playing in a playground once owned and ruled by Blackberry and Nokia. Heck, Apple even opened its first App Store on both iPhone and iPod touch so that any end-user can book a flight tickets, a hotel or even purchase groceries on the go. So back in late 2000s who would need a legacy Internet Explorer or a set of debugged software to get things done now - while everything seemed possible with a touch of a finger.
So if I have to reprise what Netscape's wizard Marc Andresen's prophetic words of 1994 that's still relevant today : Windows is still just a poorly Debugged Set of Device Drivers
But first let's start from the beginning.
June 2012.
June 2012. It was - as I'd call it in my own euphemism: "Year: Zero" ( a nod to Dark Knight) I began work as a flight attendant after six months of theoretical and practical trainings where I'd wake up at 6am every morning. Barack Obama is seeking re-election for a second term as the president of the United States. In golf, Tiger Woods wins the Memorial Tournament played at the Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio, tying with Jack Nicklaus for PGA Tour victories. On the tech side, Apple released a new iPhone 4S and marked the company's first keynote under the helm of Tim Cook and without Steve Jobs who passed away a year earlier from pancreatic cancer.
Meanwhile in Los Angeles, Microsoft is gearing up to show off a new device that would compete with the venerable iPad, the "stylus-less" slate presented by the late Steve Jobs in 2010, gave another hard slap to the iSlate industry that BillG. first championed during the XP heydays. The forerunner of the iPad was named Tablet PC. It came equipped with a version of the newly Windows XP tailored specifically for that kind of hardware. The only catch was : Windows Tablet PCs were chunky, a real battery drainers and a most of all: a commercial flop.
As New York Times pointed out in one of its articles that Microsoft learned from insiders that Apple had bought large quantities of high-quality aluminum from a mine in Australia to create the distinctive cases for the iPad. And Redmond was afraid the OEM partners would not take the same bet to compete with Apple. As a result, and like they did with the original Xbox to face off the threat of The PlayStation 2, they needed to get their hands dirty and conceive its own hardware.
It's called the Surface.
Microsoft did not bother to find a name for the new device. Back in 2007, they released an interactive surface computer as information kiosk called, you guess... "Surface", targeted for hotels and casino with the user interacting through the surface of an ordinary object, rather than through a monitor, keyboard, mouse, or other physical hardware. in 2012, to avoid confusion, they recycled the name "Surface" for its new series of Tablet PC. Even "Metro" was originally conceived as a new format that would compete with PDF during the Longhorn heydays. |
While Steve Jobs was hailed by his fans as the father of the iPhone and iPad, Microsoft on the other hand, appointed a former Cornell Alumni Steven Sinofsky as the head of both Windows 8 and Surface projects. Brought in after the debacle of Windows Vista, to correct the mistakes, he successfully shipped Windows 7 and other apps under the Windows Live umbrella as well as a refreshed version of Office 2010. And today, is the day to prove to the world that Surface is the real competitor.
Under the development for three years. This was in the summer of 2009, when Microsoft was putting the finishing touches on Windows 7 and just starting to shift its development efforts to Windows 8. For those who remember that time, there wasn't even an iPad to compete against; Microsoft already knew that Windows 8 would be touch-friendly to face off iPhone craze, and that it needed a solid tablet as a vehicle for showing off its next-gen operating system.
After a brief introduction by Steve Ballmer, SteveSi. came in and showed off the new Surface RT to the select group of journalists. During the demo, while toying around the Metro-powered version of IE, the app suddenly crashed, prompting Sinofsky to pick up another unit. Mishaps like that happened all the time - especially during live broadcast. During the Bill Gates's keynote in 1998 when he presented the new plug-and-play capabilities for Windows 98, with the familiar Blue Screen of Death appearing on screen, making the Founder a bit nervous, or countless of failed demoes during Apple Macworld with Steve Jobs.
But as Paul Thurrott pointed out- Steven Sinofsky - with ALL DUE RESPECT TO HIM AND HIS INTELLECT - is not Steve Jobs - nor Bill Gates. And if I have to reprise what Sam Beckett's famous quip when he made his first temporal leap during the pilot episode of Quantum Leap TV Show (NBC 1989 - 1993) :
When nothing's familiar, you're either still dreaming or in big troubles.
And for Steven Sinofsky, he was no dreaming. He was in trouble indeed. And on that day, just like Jim Allchin when he walked to BillG's office eight years earlier, telling him about Longhorn's being a pig and needing to start over - scrapping two-plus years of hard work, Steven Sinofsky's fate was sealed the moment he was on stage, the moment he picked up the cursed unit that had frozen inexplicably in front of the select group of tech reporters and millions watching the live broadcast.
Irony.
After the release of Windows 8 and Surface RT in late 2012, the man who once received many calls by BillG. to persuade him to work for him instead for the government - who tried and failed to convince The Founder about the importance of Internet as the "Next Killer App. for Windows" as drafted by his sidekick J. Allard. CORNELL IS WIRED!!! Rising from Mike Maple's Application division to head Office's development going forward - and in that spring of 2006, he'd sit in that super small cubicle office that belonged to SteveB. announcing he'd lead Windows codename "Fiji" and "Blackcomb"- Steven Sinofsky's reign ended on December 2012.
Following SteveSi's retirement, his remaining lieutenants were tasked to correct the mistakes. But the damage was done, In 2013, they released an updated version of Windows 8.1, bringing back the start button but not the menu itself. Some third party apps were provided on the web to complete the picture and restore the Menu where once it's belonged, chief among them Start8 by Brad Sam' Stardock.
And suddenly Windows looked normal again.
That same year, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox One, which turned out to be another debacle -- but that's another story -- A year later, the man who appointed Steven Sinofsky as the head of Windows would be ousted too. That man is none other than the CEO Steve Ballmer. He would be replaced by the Hyderabad-born Satya Nadella who helmed Server division in early 1990s find himself in February 2014, the same mouth and year, the late Ghostbusters' Harold Ramis passed away, the third CEO of the largest software company whose valuation past the trillion.
After that, Microsoft would never be the same. How did we come up to that result.
But let's step back. Nine years ago, shall we ? Where it all began. The root of the doomed Windows started. The moment the train left the station, knowing full well that thr locomotive 🚂 of Microsoft would be heading toward uncharted territories, and the railroad uphead were uneven, risky, causing it to derail off track sonner or later.
September 2005
The genesis of what would become Windows 8 started at the time when Microsoft had made sweeping changes after Windows Vista was released to the dismayed public. These changes actually took place in fall of 2005 during a major company-wide reorg in which three major core divisions saw the light and "Longhorn" has just been christened as Windows Vista and a series of time-bombed CTP Builds followed suit. Fast forward to spring 2006, Former CEO Steve Ballmer, appointed Steven Sinofsky the head of Office division - whose reputation of getting a new Office version on time - seemed the viable Vice President to succeed Jim Allchin, a wise technologist and musician who like Icarus burned his wings as he got closer to the sun -- twice -- with the Cairo project in 1994 and Longhorn in early 2000s.
With Steven Sinofsky at the head of both Windows and Office divisions - the Microsoft's cash cows - Brian Valentine's in charge of the Server counterpart - no wonder he'd become a self-proclaimed autocrat - Sinofsky first jettisoned Allchin's team, responsible for the debacle of Windows Vista - as they found themselves as a "B-teamer " working on Mobile division and the then-nascent Windows Phone. Sinofsky erected a Chinese wall. Gone the build leaks and over-promising features that would never make in the final shipping product, a excess of zeal that doomed Vista during its development. He then corrected the mistakes made by his predecessor and released a Windows 7, which can be seen by many - as a Windows Vista done right or Vista SP2 -- depending with whom you talk - As Paul Thurrott pointed out, anyone with computing skills could have made Windows 7. Anyone.
May be myself. :) -
However, time was running late for Microsoft to catch up with competition. When Windows 7 hit the shelves in October 2009 - Redmond showed off some touch-first HP tablets which never went on sales. But it was a hint the company would focus on touch-screen devices going forward and as evidenced in 2010 which had been the year Microsoft got serious with smartphone and ready to face off Apple and Google with Windows Phone (which in reality is just a Windows Mobile reworked from the ground up to meet the early 2010s standards in smartphone industry).
OS-wise - if you do the math - it took about eight years to move from Whistler - with a five year pit-stop at Longhorn - to Blackcomb (later renamed as "Vienna") In those eight years, Microsoft attempted mudding the water for Windows XP in various forms, from Media Center Edition for ten foot screen, Starter Edition for the emerging markets , and some free-of-charges applications as part of Reloaded (i.e. a smoke and screen) marketing "decoy" campaign for Windows XP designed to satiate fans while Longhorn was being reset.
The long-delay of Windows code-name "Longhorn" can be compared to the development hell of Duke Nukem Forever, the sequel of the widely-acclaimed Duke Nukem 3D which took "Forever" to complete. 15 years in the making which resulted in a poor reception of the final game and the dismantlement of 3DRealms before being saved by SDN Invest. |
Meanwhile Linux, quipped by Steve Ballmer as a "cancer" was gaining traction for businesses and Apple was riding high with its flagship hardware and Operating Systems. Steve Jobs reinvented how people placed calls when released iPhone with App Store, and Cupertino was on a verge to give another blow with an iPhone with a bigger screen made for consumption, called the iPad. Along with the WinFS, Bill Gates's holy grail for advanced storage subsystem for Windows that never came into fruition, and ended up as MSFT's founder biggest regret, the idea of the Tablet PC was also championed by Gates during the early heydays of Windows XP, but did not found enough traction and had gotten some lukewarm receptions by dedicated tech reviews (or actually from vertical markets professionals instead of mainstream users) mainly due to batteries issues.
Truly, Microsoft was ahead of its time with Windows CE, Tablet PC, all precursors to iPhone and iPad.
So as early as 2011, Microsoft was gearing up for the first bits of Windows 8, showed off the operating system running on ARM processors. Rumors at that time stated that Microsoft was working on a new user interface for the operating system. And Sinofsky's top lieutenant Julie Larson Green who put the lipstick on the pig on Office 2003 - so to speak- did an impressive job on the Ribbon UI in Office 2007 as well as the refreshed version ported into Windows 7 as Scenic Ribbon, was an obvious hint that something big is happening behind the scene. And its happening right into Windows 8.
And that was the Start Screen.
A little refresher here. Before the famous Start Screen made its debut in 2012 with Windows 8, Microsoft already experimented with HTML-based Start Screen with the defunct Encarta-like navigational breadcrumb as early as summer 1998, as evidenced in the screencaps gallery below. It was later reinstated (with Windows Me tag-name) in full screen and windowed modes during the development of what would have been Windows code-name "Neptune", the first - and sadly - the cancelled consumer version of Windows built on the venerable NT technology that would power the then-recently released Windows 2000. All the Web-centric UIs were written in aforementioned HTML/CSS - which were and still languages used for web design before Microsoft decided to embrace the web standard right into Windows. The unannounced .NET initiative was still in the designer's shop though.
Fast forward XIII years later. Microsoft presented the Start Screen to Windows 8.
Although the UI was the avant-garde in term of elegance, it presented a major problem for the end-user. When it was first demoed in mid-2011, it seemed that the much publicized Start Screen was some sort of UX that had been grafted right into the desktop - which is true - Think of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta's movie Face/Off. Builds of Windows 8 had not offered to the end users the "how-to navigate" into it. Heck, the Start Menu which graced the taskbar since Windows 95 was gone, and users had to hover over the edge of the screen to rev up - the Start Screen. It seemed ambiguous to new users as it would require a steep learning curve. Even the icons that were featured in the early builds all the way to the RTM, seemed flat, lifeless and I easily compared them to the icons that graced Whistler builds in 2000 used along with Watercolor/Mallard as placeholder while UX team was working on Luna. And to make thing worse, Sinofsky vetoed not increase the system requirements to align with Windows 7, but in exchange, he scarified the elegant and sophisticated "Aero Glass" of Windows Vista and 7 that was so much praised by the press and highly anticipated by the end-users during the "beta" heydays , despite being a resource hog for some low-end computers (remember that Vista Ready Sticker ?). The end result you ask : a super dull ugly user interface that came straight from the UX library that someone wedged at the corner of his dorm room could have created using an unauthorized bootlegged copy of Photoshop. "Plex"," Jade" and "Slate" from the Longhorn prototypes were way better than the flat UI featured in Windows 8.
That was unacceptable.
During that time, Microsoft revealed to the public a new kind of application called Metro App that anyone can build by leveraging the power of HTML/JavaScript and the venerable C Sharp and C++. For someone skilled in these languages, Metro apps - stolen from the Windows Phone team- were elegant and far superior to the iPhone app and its skeuomorphism look-and-feel. Actually it offered at-the-glance information which made the app looks alive. Say, you are writing an app about booking a plane ticket filled with the livery of the airline you are taking - or may be a to-do-list with a reminder that you need to go to take the child to your physician next Monday. You can program the way how the Toast would notify the end-user about an upcoming event. Metro had it own advantages.
And of course, it had its disadvantages.
Beside forcing the user to opt for full-screen mode until Windows 8.1 was released, the early implementation did not offer how to switch to Windowed-mode. And may be the ugliest part of the Start Screen is the mixture of the elegant Metro app with the legacy software that were all housed within the same interface. Imagine the designer's frustration or a "control freak" like myself of seeing the new 2012's Metro application sitting side by side with 2004 era Photoshop CS3/4 or Office XP whose icon's (identical to Office 2000) did not take advantages of the squared space. The entire UX looked like a kitchen sink. From the UI department , iPhone was far more elegant.
Needless to add after the release of Windows 8 and the pointless update of 8.1 a year later, Microsoft would be relegated to the a second class citizen, while Apple and Google enjoyed massive successes from both consumers and businesses. The last dish effort under Satya Nadella is to update as quickly as possible Windows and Windows Phone, especially after Microsoft brought so much harm to Nokia during the tenure of Steve Ballmer's reign. The Finnish's premium handset manufacturer saw better days in late 90s and early 2000 with the phenomenal brick-and-mortar Nokia 3300, and the avant-gardist Nokia 6600 which I owned - by sticking to Symbian OS, its proprietary operating system instead of fast switching to Android.
So Nadella tasked a man named Terry Meyerson - whom I never heard about -- to correct Sinofsky's mistakes - in a same way Ballmer brought Sinofsky to correct Allchin's mistakes during Vista's era - by releasing Windows 9. While "Blue" the code-name of Windows 8.1 was created by Sinofsky's team, and seen by the corporation as a punishment for harming the platform, the upcoming Windows 9 would be under the direction of Meyerson - while a familiar face at MSFT would ride the shotgun. He is none than Joe Belfiore, a veteran Microsoft engineer whose super rich curriculum included works on various projects for Microsoft products : UIs for "Chicago", Internet Explorer 3 and 4. He coined "Longhorn" as an interim release for Windows in summer 2001 - and headed the eHome division, the department responsible for bringing the Media Center to the living room. Then he moved to the ill-fated Zune to promote Microsoft's flagship MP3. After that, he would be thrown away from the Windows division - just like his pal Iain McDonald when Steven Sinofsky became the boss. And now, Belfiore would be back from the grave -- so to speak - tasked to work on the next Windows Phone update that would share the same kernel as the next Windows.
During the early phase of the development of Windows vNEXT - as it was referred internally- a version string call function would cause a little hiccup for the developers in which a running program is tricked to believe that the function 'Start With Windows 9' is a reference either to Windows 9(5) or 9(8) . To put it in a layman's term, the application ('software') would understand that the os_name of the newest Windows 9 is in the same line like the older Windows version 9x, hence causing compatibilities issues. As a result, Redmond needed to skip "9" to "10" to avoid any unwanted behaviors - although this theory was debunked - but Microsoft decision was final. The successor to Windows 8.1 would be Windows 10.
And the other news that came in - Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows. Going forward Microsoft would update regularly Windows 10 as a service, much like Apple does with MacOS. But Microsoft is not Apple.
July 2015
When the first version of Windows 10 was released to the public in July 2015, Microsoft decided to use date stamp as a way to reference each final build of the version they came out to the web. Windows 10 of that July 2015 is tagged as 1507. Honestly, I never liked it. I'd have preferred each version to be denominated by a minor version number instead like: Windows 10.1, Windows 10.2 like Apple excelled doing it for its flagship OS since 2000. Or may be without Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft could have returned to code-name like each new build would be referenced as a name of a city "Saskatchewan" or a street "Figueroa" like I do with my network computers at home, giving each device a name : "Dedham" (an homage to Paul Thurrott) is a reference to my Surface Go 1. "Boston" (Till I see Marianne Walk Away) referred to my HP Mini Tower. You see the picture. By the time, Microsoft began to play a game of adding and removing apps from each final build. And it made my head throbs so badly. I never liked that practice instead they alienated everything. And it was getting on my nerve each time they made a reference to Halo Franchise, with Cortana - which I hated - and Redstone - the then upcoming update to Windows 10. To be fair, I was never a big fan of Halo. I own an action figure of it and I missed the Halo 5 Limited Edition Xbox One that I sold.
Speaking of the icons that graced the new operating system. It appeared that Microsoft still suffered from what I call : "Whistler" syndrome.
As an end user, I think Microsoft really muddied the water with Windows 10 to the point that its OEM Partners told them to F*** YOU. After all, Microsoft was responsible of the debacle of Windows 8. There was never a clear vision on how the OS would go. May be the fear of repeating the same mistake like Longhorn and 8. Beside that, all major veterans who worked side by side with Gates departed, Jim Allchin, David Cutler, Steve Ballmer, Hillel Coopeman..to cite a few. These people was the real driving force that brought excitement to Windows. And to me, it appears that The Windows division is ran by noobs. I also recall a while back - Microsoft did spend money just to promote The Windows 10 wallpaper using some sort of cutting edge camera technology. What the Hell ! While Apple was tinkering with the next big, Microsoft - under Nadella - was promoting a wallpaper.
While you can criticize Ballmer during his final years of tenure at Microsoft, at least he brought some excitements to Windows community back in the days when he helmed the company he joined in 1981 as a manager then as a CEO. With him, we had lot of versions of Windows, exciting software and hardware that I wished they were still active and not discontinued. And with all due respect to Nadella, who will turn 10 next year as the third CEO of Microsoft, we will never have "Longhorn" moment ever. Instead, we saw some minor setbacks, like Xbox Series X and S that could not compete properly with Sony PlayStation 5. And Microsoft did admit that they lose battle against the Japanese behemoth. It just did acquire with a awful sum of money a load of AAA titles just to be used on the S series like Netflix for video games. In 2021, the company did an about face. Windows 10 would not be the last version of Windows, instead they returned to what Steven Sinofsky and his predecessor instituted a long time ago, a three year circle to release a new version of Windows. But the Windows 11 - which has been criticized for his arbitrary system requirement - so that to force the end user to buy a new computer, is merely a lipstick on the pig. It is still powered by Windows NT 10 underpinning. So on the surface it looks shining with those icons but it is still Windows 10.
Lot of cacophony.
THE FUTURE
I remember that corporate song about Apple leading the way, and while the giant was tripped during the 90s, it managed to lift itself off and lead the way. Steve Jobs was right about the post-PC era ended the moment he showed off iPad and the world was pissed off to the point that Microsoft tried to imitate and failed. As a result, everything we do today is on the iPhone and the iPad. Microsoft still hold the legacy of owing applications that are a necessity for any corporates to survive like Office and Exchange. And now they are doing the right thing by exploring the uncharted territories like the AI and how they embraced it right into Windows with Co-Pilot. After a decade of debacles and headache of Windows 10 and its continuous updates that made no sense to me. And the actual Windows 11 - which still survive because of the OEM partners - Microsoft won't be the same company that was at its apex, twenty years ago. Let's see what the future has in store with 12 slated for next year. But Paul, no matter what Microsoft is preparing the end user for the future , AI or another shining wallpaper for Windows 12, we will never ever have "Longhorn" moments.
(*) Kiss with History or "Brush with History", a term coined by TV Producer/Showrunner Donald P. Bellisario for his time travelling drama Quantum Leap that ran for five seasons on NBC from 1989 to 1993. Kiss With History is when the principal protagonist of QL, Samuel Beckett (not the Irish poet) would often rub elbows with people would an d become rich and famous, like Helmrich , meeting Marylin Monroe or grief-stricken Jaqueline Kennedy with blood-tattered coat sitting on a bench at the hospital in Dallas, shortly after number 35 was shot. I used personally as a way to connect two-dots of major events that happened during a short period of time.
