Adam DemasiFeb 6

One of the many gifts we got out of the Epstein files is details of Steve Sinofsky’s exit from Microsoft in 2012. We learn that the Surface RT was selling only 10% of the low-end of their predicted sales numbers, he was being pushed out, and Epstein was coaching him on negotiating an exit package.

He leaked internal Microsoft email threads to Epstein, where they were discussing the $900 million write-off of unsold Surface RTs. He negotiated to exit with $14 million in stock, which we knew about at the time, but it’s absolutely wild to learn who was involved, and the inner workings of it.

Windows 8 is the first product launch I properly remember. I was sick on the day of the Build 2011 keynote, so I stayed home and watched it. I ran all the betas and was excited for how Windows was changing. We were promised a new era with nicely-designed apps and a far better experience for developers, but they utterly flubbed all of it by being so confident in selfish things.

They were so sure the entire 27-year-old Windows ecosystem would magically reconfigure itself around Windows 8-only full-screen apps. They were even more sure they could sell tablets that could ONLY run apps from the Store that didn’t exist yet - or ever. Of course it wasn’t going to work. Why would it?

All of those RT tablets, which other brands also sold, are ewaste now. The Store is shut down, you can’t sideload apps because the licensing server is also gone. They pulled the plug on releasing Windows 10 for them. Without jailbreaking, you can’t do anything other than doodle in Paint or write a document in Word.

It’s maddening that someone can cost the company almost $1 billion on a product ANYONE could have told you wasn’t it. It’s even more maddening they can get a $14 million+ reward for so obviously missing the mark.

Yeah, there’s so much more that’s way more serious out of the files, but this one was relevant to my life. It adds another piece to the story of how I first learned that companies with all the capital in the world will get greedy and let you down.

https://www.neowin.net/news/former-windows-chief-shared-internal-secrets-with-jeffrey-epstein-documents-reveal/

#epstein #windows

Show threadTim

@kirb I remember the arrogance. They were positive that everyone was going to drop what they were doing and rush to rewrite all of their software following Microsoft's direction for the privilege of being locked in their walled garden before they'd even finished building the trap.

In the end they couldn't even use the word "metro" and lost any way to even communicate what they wanted devs to do. Then kicked down their own sand castle with Windows 10 which nerfed the Surface user experience.

Feb 6 at 4:21pmWeb
Show threadJason LefkowitzFeb 6
@stiv @kirb "Metro" was fantastic branding and they absolutely bungled it. A complete self-own. It was shocking at the time, and kind of still is.
Show threadAdam DemasiFeb 7
@stiv Seriously, we could have been at a point today that WinRT/Metro is the gold standard, and almost nobody writes Win32 any more. But they were so sure people would want this tablet that could only consume content and write docs/emails, and needed the app framework to assume the lowest common denominator. Then they went and redid it as UWP and then WinUI and made it even more fragmented.
Show threadipod-nano._http._tcp.local.Feb 7
@kirb @stiv i still don't understand them jumping yet again after UWP.
Show threadAdam DemasiFeb 7
@760ceb3b9c0ba4872cadf3ce35a7a4 @stiv Don’t forget Silverlight as well, that was the platform on Windows Phone 7/8. Best I can think of is that management wanted to get away from the tarnished WinRT name, and engineers took it as an opportunity to fix bad API design (nothing serious, every big framework will have some design mistakes). Probably was also easier to make some of the UI design changes. But it still really could have stayed compatible all the way through.
Show threadTimFeb 8

@kirb @760ceb3b9c0ba4872cadf3ce35a7a4 I'm old enough that I was introduced to .NET Winforms when it was new and got very familiar with it. Then Microsoft introduced WPF and said Winforms was deprecated (this was roughly around 2008 by my memory). Of course to this day you can still find many apps still being written in winforms apps, and EOL still hasn't come, but it threw cold water on a lot of devs.

So I guess Microsoft has been creating schisms in its own ecosystem for most of this century.