The Dream of Win8 “Metro” “Modern” “Store” apps is Dead.
One big disappointment with Microsoft after having left the company is there current tactic where they’ve basically abandoned the “modern” platform (not sure what to call this...more on this in a minute) and appear to be gutting the Win8 design philosophy.
I believe this is due more to organizational failure than it being a bad idea or design. The metro design and win8 in general is very good on tablets, and it was a design that works well on the Surface RT* (* when it wasn’t lagging like crazy) and on the Surface Pro. But, when Win8 got slammed with bad feedback for forcing a tablet-oriented experience on non-tablet users, everyone panicked, and a lot of good ideas got thrown out with the key bad ones.
I’m sure part of the change was also the realization that tablets weren’t the threat everyone thought they would be. All the industry research at the time said this was the new computing platform, that it could surpass PC sales and replace the desktop, etc etc. And indeed, if Microsoft had successfully executed and marketed a tablet where you showed up to at work and it wirelessly connected and became your desktop...maybe they would have!
But that’s not what happened. Tablets aren’t destroying Windows. Microsoft can go back to making Windows for laptops and desktops, like they have for years. Still, that’s not a good reason to throw out a good tablet platform and design.
The great promises of the modern shell were that modern apps would dramatically improve battery life, introduce connected standby, allow for high performance on low-resource machines, focus on cloud storage, sandbox apps for far better security, and make the PC app buying/updating experience as good as that on phones and tablets. It did this through restrictions placed on apps to ensure well-behaved code, similar to the ones iOS imposes.
Not everything was rosy, though, clearly. Microsoft missed the mark in two key areas - shoving tablet-focused UI onto desktop and laptop machines, and that those benefits alone weren’t enough to make someone dig into rewriting an app for the new platform. iOS delivered that by making people want to develop for the platform first. Microsoft needed to make the surface pro super compelling without any new apps, and they had a lot of good ideas but couldn’t quite do it. Unfortunately, it appears the good of the platform will die alongside the bad.
It’s almost mind-boggling how a platform that was said to be super important - indeed, intended to replace Windows and win32 .NET apps- now seems to have been killed. When I was at MS, everyone was working on getting their product build for modern, because “modern apps” were going to outright replace the traditional windows OS, which would eventually be deprecated. The other mind-boggling piece is how many developer years of effort are basically being thrown away because the vision wasn’t solid.
It’s been killed in a typical Microsoft fashion, too, because from an organizational and marketing perspective, outright removing it is too stark of a change. So instead they reworked it and continue to “support” it while moving any of their own apps back off of the platform and onto the old, win32 platform. I wonder how long it will be on life support.
One thing that certainly didn’t help was the lack of consistency in what to call these. Even before win8 released, we’d gone through at least 6 names for them:
”MoSh” apps (for modern shell - again, this was supposed to replace traditional Windows eventually)
“Win8-style apps” - this was the worst offender, and I believe was the one that they went to market with. I hated this one because it’s not very referential, it’s not catchy at all, and it has a built-in obsolescence - if the design style is good, you should keep using it, but what happens when the next version of windows comes out? Your platform sound sold.
Later I think they added even more, like “Full screen apps” (which became a misnomer with win 8.1). None of us knew what to call them even inside the company, and asking around, that still seems to be the case. I’m not sure how they expected external developers to figure this out!
Whatever the name of the platform really is, it appears to have gone from the golden child to a dying platform in 2 short years. To third party developers in the MS development community, I’m sure the changes are at least noticeable, but to someone who was in Microsoft at the time, the shift in philosophy is enormous.
I think we lost some things along the way, and I think we lost them for some subpar reasons.
I still really believe in pen-based computers, and tablet-size devices with touchscreens (I just also love keyboards). This goes back to the Newton, which is also a really amazing design with a couple large glaring flaws (most notably that it’s not really actually portable) that overrode any of that. I’d have loved if they’d tried to really make Courier-style scenarios sing for the Surface Pro, and marketed that heavily. I’m not sure if the iPad pro will save the space either. And unfortunately, sometimes when every product in a space misses the mark (e.g. MP3 players in the early 00s), it’s hard to people to believe in a space - until someone else makes something great.
Here’s to hoping productivity on tablets lives on.
PS - of interest, I screenshotted (is that a word?) some thoughts that I sent to a Microsoft developer about this.
