Microsoft reflects on the failures of Courier, KIN, and ultra mobile PCs

[leonroy]

Great talk at Microsoft's Build conference by Jon Friedman about his work as a designer on Courier, KIN and some of the other 'ahead of their time' products at Microsoft.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/9/1...-courier-kin-ultra-mobile-pcs-spot-build-2018

As a long time Microsoft fan I found the talk pretty eye opening and a little sad wondering what coulda been, especially with the Courier.

 

[amirm]

I was at Microsoft for about 1/3 of the experiences/products he shares. As always, the view from the top is different than the view from within.

I can write a book on this . But the problem started with Steve Ballmer thinking that anything that involved "hardware" was a device so it was to be in X-box group. Why? Because they built hardware. Nevermind that the weakest part of Xbox was hardware and that the team was built completely around gaming. And separation from rest of Microsoft (strong hatred of Windows, etc.). He mentions J. Allard as his boss. He was one smart cookie but only technical with no business acumen and full of arrogance. Put all of that together and you have failure after failure of hardware devices. Meanwhile Xbox was losing billions of dollars a year. Money that could have been put toward building other great products at Microsoft.

 

[leonroy]

Heh and I'd definitely read that book.

Things like the Courier project, WinFS or Vista only have light shed on what really happened many years later when insiders move on and break their silence. It's a pity because I think that customers chiming in and saying 'Noooo' at the time can occasionally be a valuable tool. I remember reading about Courier and then the cancellation and my whole dev team were pretty disappointed, it seemed so damn promising.

Regarding the Xbox team though, do you think many of those billions were spent overcoming Microsoft's DNA as a software company?
Also without the example of the Xbox (as a successful hardware product) do you think the Surface lineup would exist?

 

[Soniclife]

This amused me today.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/08/windows_notepad_unix_linux_macos/

Now they have fixed notepad maybe they can move onto some of the bigger problems.

 

[RayDunzl]

Now they have fixed notepad maybe they can move onto some of the bigger problems.

Maybe that was the last thing on their To-Do list.

 

[amirm]

Regarding the Xbox team though, do you think many of those billions were spent overcoming Microsoft's DNA as a software company?

It wasn't as much DNA as pure expertise they lacked to build hardware. What they didn't realize you don't repurpose software people to be hardware people and build mass scale devices like Xbox. One billion dollar write-down for warranty issues (red ring of death) came too late for that realization. Even then they doubled down over and over again. This killed the rest of the company as Xbox losses kept the company from growing profits so stock stagnated. And talent left.

You are also right to the extent that upper management did not understand hardware business. Steve Ballmer certainly did not. And neither he, nor Bill Gates understood gaming either. So the group was left making its own decisions. Very different than a company like Nintendo or Sony where this fit their DNA as you say.

 

[Soniclife]

Maybe that was the last thing on their To-Do list.

Do they use notepad for the to-do list?