Episode · Hardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky (Audio Edition)
102. The Experience
16 Oct 2022 · 57 min
Episode notes
A challenge that comes with writing down experiences occurs when writing about events that readers lived through, have strong opinions about, and feel they know the full story. My purpose here is to share what we were thinking and doing at the time, how a broad set of people reacted, and then to offer my views of the reasons leading to the results. That is a way of saying this section is going to start with what we set out to do, not where we ended. Back to 101. Reimagining Windows from the Chipset to the Experience: The Chipset [Ch. XV] We set out to reimagine Windows, but it is interesting…
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Hardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky (Audio Edition)
Steven Sinofsky · Business · English
Personal stories and lessons from inside the rise and fall of the PC revolution as narrated by the author. Sinofsky joined Microsoft in 1989 as a software design engineer on C++. Over the next 23 years he worked across many major products and teams including C++ and Visual C++, Office for six major
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20 Nov 2022 · 1 hr 27 min
107. Click In With Surface
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13 Nov 2022 · 51 min
106. The Missing Start Menu
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6 Nov 2022 · 56 min
105. New Ultrabooks, Old Office, and the Big Consumer Preview
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30 Oct 2022 · 1 hr
104. //build It and They Will Come (Hopefully)
Imagine building a computing platform that powers a generation. Now imagine taking the big step of building the replacement for that platform while the original needs to keep going for another decade or more. This is the story of unveiling the new Windows 8 platform for building modern apps, WinRT, at the first //build conference. The difficulty in telling this story is how everyone knows how the world came to view Windows 8. The developer conference of 2011 was a different story entirely. We still had to work through the big issue within the world of .NET developers and their extreme…
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23 Oct 2022 · 37 min
103. The End of Windows Software
A reasonable question to ask is “Why did Windows 8 need to create a new platform?” Not only did Microsoft have Win32, the tried-and-true real and compatible Windows platform, but the company had pioneered the .NET platform and with Windows Phone 7 extended that platform to phones with Silverlight. This post is my take on the history and how we ended up at this point. It takes us way back and shows how sometimes what emerges as a major strategic problem can trace its origins back much earlier than one might think. In the next section we will unveil the platform to developers at the //build…
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9 Oct 2022 · 1 hr 8 min
101. Reimagining Windows from the Chipset to the Experience: The Chipset [Ch. XV]
Welcome to Chapter XV! This is the final chapter of Hardcore Software . In this chapter, we are going to build and release Windows 8—reimagining Windows from the chipset to the experience. First up, the chipset. Then there will be sections on the platform and the experience. Following that, we’ll release Windows to developers and then the public. Then a surprise release of…Surface. There is a ton to cover. Many readers have lived through this. I’m definitely including a lot of detail but chose not to break things up into small posts. There are subsection breaks though. This first section…
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2 Oct 2022 · 58 min
100. A Daring and Bold Vision
Hardcore Software has shared the vision planning process for five releases of Office and Windows 7. Though not detailed we followed the same process for two waves of Windows Live Services as well as Internet Explorer 8 and 9 . Windows 8 went through this same process, though by now as a team we had become pretty good at it. This section details the resulting Windows 8 plan, The Vision for Windows 8 . As part of that, I wanted to take a bit of a journey into the alignment between Windows Phone and Windows 8 and the challenges we saw there . In doing so, I will describe things from the Windows…
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25 Sep 2022 · 32 min
099. The Magical iPad
The launch of an innovative new product is always exciting. The launch of an innovate new product from a competitor is even more exciting. But what is it like when your main competitor launches an innovative new product at a moment of your own fundamental strategic weakness? That’s what it was like when the iPad launched on January 27, 2010. On the heels of the successful Windows 7 launch during a time when Microsoft was behind on mobile and all things internet and in the midst of planning Windows 8, Apple launched the iPad. Many would view the iPad (and slates and tablets) as “consumption…
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18 Sep 2022 · 32 min
098. A Sea of Worry at the Consumer Electronics Show
The planning for Windows 8 was moving right along. But something wasn’t right as we wrapped up Windows 7 activities at CES 2010. It was looking more and more like the plans and the way the ecosystem might rally around them would yield a watered-down result—it would be Windows and a bunch of features, or perhaps irreconcilable bloat. The way the ecosystem responded to touch support in Windows 7 concerned me. How do we avoid the risk of a plan that did too much yet not enough? Oh, and Apple scheduled a “Special Event” for January 27, 2010, just weeks after a concerning CES. Back to 097. A Plan…
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11 Sep 2022 · 33 min
097. A Plan for a Changing World [Ch. XIV]
Welcome to Chapter XIV. This is the first of two chapters and about a dozen remaining posts that cover the context, development, and release of Windows 8. Many reading this will bring their own vivid recollections and perspectives to this “memorable” product cycle. As with the previous 13 chapters and 96 posts about 9 major multi-year projects, my goal remains to share the story as I experienced it. I suspect with this product there will be even more debate in comments and on twitter about the experiences with Windows 8. I look forward to that. This chapter is the work and context leading up…
