Today’s announcement from Microsoft was BIG – billion units big. A massive internal reorganization of (Software) Engineering Organizations inside Microsoft results in big rethinking of the placement of Windows Engineering. See New York Times Tech News Coverage talking about the shift to fuel Cloud and Productivity missions. I have personal experiences of being a massive user of Windows and now a massive user of other operating systems. A bit of reflection helps to probably predict where the world might go from here. Or at least I wish where the world, I wish will go towards.
About twenty five years back I discovered Windows during my summer internship at Microsoft. I had the fortune to work with fantastic and passionate set of engineers and leaders. I learnt a lot from them. In 1994, I joined the Windows NT organization focused on the networking team. Again I was fortunate to work with fantastic set of engineers learning to build commercial grade software. The team I was part of was building TCP based utilities and an yet to be released server product. I still remember the day when my then manager, David Treadwell (now at Amazon), provided me the mission as “Build the best web server”. And we did! We produced the best web server product that went on to win Industry benchmarks and leadership. The NT operating system grew significantly in presence to win more enterprise deployments. Our server product grew to millions of deployments and went through its own journey of scaling, hardening, reliability, programmability, and many evolutions. In the 90s, the industry was abuzz with applications built on Win32 API. Our web server product – IIS – had its own APIs – ISAPI, ASP, and then ASP.net. All together there were servers, OS deployments, applications, and all we saw were significant growth. Subsequently in 1999 I moved to work on a search engine product for a couple of years followed by eight years of work to build the commerce platform (for online services).
Windows 95 was a massive product followed by Windows 98 and then Windows 2000. By Windows 2000, the operating system experiences were blended and built atop Windows NT. More reliability and more security, albeit at a loss of usability. Windows XP righted several wrongs to become probably the world’s best and longest (and profitable) running Operating system on the PCs. Through the 2000s there were significant ambitions, challenges, and compatibility issues. The business world might call this phase the classic ‘growth challenges’ or as the economists may call it ‘tragedy of riches’. Either way the OS was growing in presence, size, and usage. Being inside Microsoft, all the services I was building were on Windows; we had limited exposure to other operating systems. Outside linux had ignited a firestorm of growth in many areas – small (mobile, devices) and large (servers, hosting). Afar Windows seem to go through repeat set of organizational changes and usual once in 3-4 year releases. Massive releases required massive testing and of course also brought in highly profitable revenue.
Something changed around 2005. Much like many others, I stopped buying software for my PC at home. There were not many compelling software and there were several online services coming in with features. For instance, I stopped buying the streets & maps CD software (my favorite in late 90s), encarta (Another 90s favorite), and Money (it went through several name changes but experience become more clunky). Perhaps it was because I was a family man and had limited time. Or perhaps the allure of software application on the PC was vanishing. My group was building ecommerce software. We helped MSN and Xbox Live sell 10s of millions of subscriptions on monthly payment model. We wondered aloud, and as did probably 100s of others in the company, if we can use the same ecommerce software to help sell applications. We attempted to help sell traditional CD based windows applications (had too many issues with licensing and fulfillment). And we experimented with helping Windows be sold as a subscription in trial basis in different markets. Experiments are always a worthwhile learning experience. We learnt a lot. It helped me improve the commerce platform offering and services. Some third parties were selling windows apps online. Who knew then that it in the next decade, Windows will open its own app store too; I for sure did not know.
About a decade back a small device called iPhone showed up in 2007. It was a small device at a high price point and a reasonable user experience. And the device showed up again in 2008 with more capabilities. And again in 2009 it showed up with even more capabilities. And more and more users were buying into this phone. Even I switched from my smart phones (I have had smart phones since 2000s) to iPhone and enjoyed it. I enjoyed beating the queues at Disney World using the iPhone app to monitor the waiting times. I enjoyed the easy navigation and search facility provided. Unbeknownst to me I had 10s of applications downloaded and a few paid ones too on this iPhone. Didn’t realize that a sea change is underway. And indeed. In 2010 (or maybe 2011), my wife came back from a conference where she got an iPad as a gift. It was a new experience to see more apps on this light device. The camera was useful as was the easy browse and read experience.
Independently in 2010, I pitched the idea to build a wallet on the phone (my 3rd attempt) and got the opportunity to build a team around it. In addition I was asked to build the application store for Windows Phone Store (which later became Windows Store). It seemed that my dream of enabling an app ecosystem with payments atop windows was coming true. That said a start in 2010 (nearly 3 years after iPhone and 7 years after iPod) was a challenging one. Despite odds we crossed 200K apps in under 2 years and scaled the service to 191 markets serving tens of millions of users. Certainly at this close vantage point, I got to learn that iPhone and Android (from Google a new entrant with a free OS for device makers) were (and are) growing faster. It was a challenging path forward to grow the Windows Phone Business. Some of the best leaders were called to action to build the product and business. Tough going. Windows was also challenged in the marketplace with users moving to other devices for creating and consuming content. For Ex: iPod, iPhone, iPad, Kindle, Fire TV Stick, Roku, Sling, Cable Boxes, X1 OS, Echo, Google Home, Apple Watch, Air Pod, GoPro, DJI Drones, etc.
Now, as the market pundits will say, a new era of diverse devices is here. An era where software is the fluid that runs the world. An operating system is expected to be the base of software enabling other software to run. And good or bad there are many operating systems to power these diverse devices. Almost in all cases, there is a healthy set of cloud services powering the devices from afar. Instead of a handful of users per PC, we now witness an era of handful of devices per user. This is a new world! And this new world still needs robust, reliable, simple, elegant, efficient, and economical operating system on the devices. Perhaps the OS needs to be packaged, integrated, and offered differently. Into this new era we see the infusion of cloud and AI technologies. Into this new era, Windows is facing the Joseph Schumpeter’s moment of change – creative destruction. The dynamics are forcing a reevaluation. And the leaders are signaling new changes, a new approach, a new mission, and perhaps a new set of products resulting in new businesses.
As a consumer and professional user, this will engender the creation and availability of new software for all of us. As an outsider, I am eager to see what these changes bring forth. I have some ideas of my own and will write that later.
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