On October 26, 2012, Microsoft released Windows 8, a hybrid tablet/desktop operating system that took bold risks but received mixed reviews. Ten years later, we sat down with former president of the Windows division, Steven Sinofsky, to find out how Windows 8 came about, how it predicted several modern computing trends, and how he feels about the OS in retrospect.
In 2011, PC sales began to fall year on year, a trend that alarmed the entire industry. At the same time, the popularity of touch mobile computers on smartphones and tablets has increased dramatically. In response, Microsoft set out to develop a flexible operating system ideal for scaling seamlessly from mobile to desktop. Sinofsky accepted the challenge and worked with many others, including Julie Larson-Green and Panos Panay, then head of the Surface team, to make it happen.
Windows 8 represented the most radical transformation of the Windows interface since Windows 95. While this operating system introduced the Start menu, Windows 8 removed that symbolic menu in favor of a Start screen filled with “live tiles”that functioned well on computers with a touch screen. screen, such as the custom-built Microsoft Surface, but disappointed desktop users. This caused a strong press response, and PC sales continued to decline.
Despite its flaws, several aspects of the Windows 8 interface predicted the way we use tablets and other mobile devices today, including some features (such as side-by-side apps and swiping at the edges of the screen) that were once considered too complex, and Apple later adopted them on the iPad. Aside from the necessary enhancements (such as the restoration of the Start menu for desktop users that happened in Windows 8.1), it can be argued that Windows 8 was ahead of its time, or “too much and too early,”as Sinofsky puts it in the interview below.
The Ars Interview: Steven Sinofsky
To understand Steven Sinfosky’s experience at Microsoft, it’s helpful to know that he worked for the company for 23 years, starting in 1989 as a software engineer. Joining the Microsoft Office team in 1994, he worked his way up to managing the development of Office 2000, XP, 2003, and 2007. Two years later, he became president of the Microsoft Windows division and led the launch of Windows 7, which went on to become a widely successful product for Microsoft. After the launch of Windows 8, Sinofsky left Microsoft in December 2012.
In 2020, Sinofsky began writing detailed historical accounts of his time at Microsoft, and these evolved into a Substack newsletter called Hardcore Software, which he publishes regularly. He’s been thinking a lot about his story lately, so it’s about time for a retrospective interview we did via email. His answers have been lightly edited for formatting, punctuation and brevity.
Q: What was the driving force behind the redesign of the Windows 8 interface? iPad?
Steven Sinofsky: You never give the number one reason, but the main reason for changing the Windows 8 interface was that Windows ran out of steam.
If you look at how Windows thought when we created Windows 7 (2006-2009), the world was very focused on how PCs would compute for what the industry calls “the next billion.”Ultimately, Windows 7 was created at the end of a vision that never came to fruition: a PC that would provide computing power to the billions of people who use PCs.
As we now know, with the advent of the iPhone in 2007 (+apps in 2008) and Android in 2008 (+/-), not only the next billion, but the next billion came from smartphones. Considering that this is how people were going to use computers exclusively, if there was any hope for an increase in PC usage, it would come from experiences more connected to smartphones. This applied to basic user interface (launching programs) and metaphors (touch), as well as fundamentals such as cloud storage and all-day battery life, and how mobile hardware platforms outpaced PCs, such as with sensors..
The whole point was to modernize PC computing to match today’s smartphone computing capabilities. This could easily be seen as ‘catch-up’, but really the whole design was about taking the essence of the PC and pushing it beyond smartphones: app sharing, improved touch screen typing, vital files, file management, support devices (printing!) and so on, which were not on smartphones.