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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak

WINDOWS INSIDER PODCAST – EPISODE 33 PART 2 – SOMETHING DIFFERENT with Chris Guzak

JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the Windows Insider podcast, where leaders from and Windows Insiders discuss tech trends, careers, and innovation. I'm your host, Jason Howard. This is Episode 33, The Start of Something Different. But first, if you're not yet a Windows Insider, head over to our website Insider.Windows.com and register for free.

Insider get access to upcoming Windows features before they're released to the public, plus exclusive opportunities to experience all Microsoft has to offer. All right, on to the show.

JASON HOWARD: With the 25-year anniversary of rapidly approaching later this month, we're taking a walk down memory lane to discuss the legacy of the Windows OS as well as the foundational changes that have helped drive the evolutions of the modern OS we all know and love.

Joining us will be Principle Software Developer Chris Guzak, who will discuss usability and the original shift from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.

Without further ado, let's get on with the show.

[MUSIC]

JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the podcast, Chris. Thank you so much for joining us today.

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm a bit podcast fan, myself. It's kind of cool to be involved in one, I guess. We'll see how this goes.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. Well, hey, for the listeners out there, the Insiders who are tuning in, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do here at Microsoft?

CHRIS GUZAK: Yes. So, I grew up in the Seattle area. Went to the University of Washington. Studied computer science and electrical engineering and graduated at a time when Microsoft was just getting going.

Initially, I worked for DEC West, we had an office in Bellevue, but they canceled the project that the team was working on there, and they offered to move me to Boston. I said, “That's probably not a good idea.”

I called my buddies at Microsoft, got an interview, and got a job offer. That's kind of how it all started for me at Microsoft.

JASON HOWARD: That's kind of fortunate, because from some previous chats that we had, you've been around Microsoft quite some time — it's 25 years and counting, if I got that correct.

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak

Let me ask you something. In an era where tend to jump back and forth between jobs and companies, they don't tend to stick around too awful long, it seems. What's been the driving factor of longevity for you? What's kept you around here for so long?

CHRIS GUZAK: That's a good question, and it's something people ask me a lot. I often don't feel like I have a great answer for it, but looking at things, there's just been a steady stream of great projects that I've gotten to work on at Microsoft from when I started even up to today. Things are changing every year, sometimes in big ways, sometimes not.

But project after project with really interesting challenges, technical challenges and business challenges, that's the thing that keeps me coming back. It's just fun work to do for me working on hard problems, problems that require creativity, problems that require collaboration. I really love working with the people I get to work with. That's kept me satisfied, so I've stuck with Microsoft. Actually, really stuck with Windows for pretty much my whole career.

JASON HOWARD: Do you feel like you've had a good balance of work and life between that? You've been doing this for so long that one of the things that seems to drive people between jobs is you go somewhere; the environment is a little different than you were expecting. Maybe you get burnt out. Have you found a good balance along the way?

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah, there are definitely points in my career where I didn't have the balance right. I was probably working too much and actually I enjoyed that, but the past 10 or 15 years, I think I've got that figured out. Take time away when I need to. My wife and family, and get to go do things and get away, come back to work, and actually I think just in general, the company is doing better at that. when I started early days, there was such an intense culture in the company. Well, that's mellowed out quite a bit. I don't find that much of a problem these days. I guess with this work at home, I myself work sometimes a little bit too much, but starting to figure that out as well.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. Well, given your tenure as we kind of opened with, no doubt, you've seen a huge number of changes across Microsoft as a company, and more specifically to Windows, given that's where most of your focus has been along the way. So, reaching back into history, which version of Windows did you first work on?

CHRIS GUZAK: Yes, this is kind of crazy. When I joined the company, Windows 2.0 — I think it was Windows 2.1 or 2.1.1 was the in-market version of Windows. (Laughter.)

Windows 2, people familiar with it at all, it was very primitive, very buggy, it was basically a runtime for apps. It was fun to come join the team that was working on that. At that point in time, the team was working toward what would become Windows 3. I think we were even talking about Windows 2.5 for a while. That didn't happen, we ended up with three.

But, yeah, I was fortunate to join — get on the Windows team. The first project they handed me was this program called Card File, which if you look that one up, it's kind of funny, this applet that was for managing

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak information. It was an app that already existed, but we were adapting it, updating it for Windows 3. This was just the new hire, here you go, work on Card File. That was what got me going. Yeah.

So, from then, printer drivers and helped on setup and did a bunch of things early in my career, but near the end of the Windows 3 project, I started helping out the people that were working on the at that point. At that point, we had the managers — and , print manager, and I helped a couple of teams that were — that weren't really teams, that were guys that owned those. And that got me connected to the shell. And that's kind of how a big part of my career got going in terms of being involved in the design of the .

JASON HOWARD: So, all the way back to two, and then obviously to Windows 3.1, and then there was this — I don't know, what will we call it? The titanic shift that came about, and that was the glorious product known as Windows 95. So, given — I think you used the word “primitive,” which I mean, given the comparison of the two versions, I mean, that's probably not a bad descriptor.

What was challenging about making the jump from Windows 3.1 to what ended up becoming Windows 95?

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah, it was a pretty big jump. We essentially started from scratch on design of the shell. And I actually don't remember exactly when that decision was made. I remember we were working on implementations that were like Windows 3, but that at some point — well, showed up. He joined the team and I remember him presenting what he had spec'd for what the shell should look like.

I think this might be a (inaudible) thing or not, but it's like a five-page spec. (Inaudible) The Windows 95 shell was spec'd on five pages, and we took that, and we started on a new design. And there were some pretty fundamental architectural things that had to be created.

So, this guy, Satoshi Nakajima (ph.), he worked on the low-level beta model of the shell. we broke it up into different pieces, assigned different parts of the system to different people, but unlike in Windows 3 where there were these separate applications, essentially worked on individually by individual people, we were taking the work of many people and integrating it all in this cohesive design based on the explorer application as this universal browser that was explorer Windows then of course the desktop and the and the , things like that.

So, yeah, it was a big shift and, halfway through that project, we converted from 16 bits to 32 bits, because when we started, we were writing 16-bit code and as the subsystem that was built below us, the Win32 subsystem came online, we converted from the 16-bit model, the 32-bit model.

So, there was this big push where the whole team was involved in porting to 32 bits. That was a big accomplishment for the team to get fully onto 32 bits. And, there were a lot of differences in the design. We went with this object-oriented design, where we had icons and the icons represented things.

You could pick them up and move them and they stayed where you placed them, the icons on the desktop. This was famous — Windows is famous for that now, but back then, when you moved things in a folder, moved a file

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak around and you dropped it, it stayed there. So, initially the alt icons were placed explicitly. Eventually, we decided that was probably a bad idea. People got really confused when their icons were on top of each other.

But this object-oriented design — picked things up, moved them. The icons represented a thing, a file, a folder, a printer, or a drive, a device, things like that. So, that was a big, it was a fundamental part of the design based on this name space architecture Satoshi created.

JASON HOWARD: If I can ask a little bit about something you brought up about the shift from 16 to 32 bit, what did that enable y'all to do? Like, at that point in time, how big of a change was that? Like, what capabilities did that unlock for the — with the software that y'all were writing at that point?

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah, so, the 16-bit model, you could address — well, it's how much memory you can address, how much memory is available. So, you were very constrained in a 16-bit model, the 286 processor had this two 16-bit values, the segment architecture, where you could address up to a megabyte of memory, but you had to write really complicated code. You had to write code that was aware of the near and the far locations in memory of objects.

So, it was more complicated. So, the 32-bit model was actually simpler. But we just had to update our code to accommodate the — or get rid of the assumptions in the 16-bit architecture. But the more fundamental thing was the Win32 platform was created or defined, and ultimately that design came from the NT team. They were working early days of NT. In fact, I don't know if you know it, Dave Cutler was the guy that came from DEC West.

He and I started the same day at Microsoft. He was working on Windows NT. He was a long industry veteran, and I was — right out of college. (Laughter.)

Working on Win32, need Win32 showed up and became part of Windows. It became that platform we built onto the shell and all applications built on top of. So, that was immature at the time, so it was evolving and it was buggy initially and features were coming online, but there were — there was the team on Windows that was basically porting or emulating the Win32 design that came from the NT guys essentially.

JASON HOWARD: So, with all the changes that have occurred over the course of time, you can look at the modern Win 10 OS, you can look at the legacy, Windows 95 OS, there are folks out there that would argue, I don't know, to varying degrees of success, right, everybody's got an opinion on it, but usability, right? It's always been a bit focus.

Go back in the memory bank and you look at, what you did back at that point in time, what were some of the big lessons that you learned doing some of those the usability tests and things of that nature back at that point in time? Like, what came from it?

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah. Usability has always been a big deal at the company. In fact, this is one of the things that I — one of the reasons I like working on the shell is there's connection to customers that — well, you're working on the layer of the software that has the most direct connection to customers. So, the features you create, people use directly and well, that's a challenge for some, in fact, I think it's probably a point of frustration for many

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak people because understanding how people interact with complicated systems and making them as simple as possible, there are just lots of design challenges there.

There are tradeoffs between, the powerful and the simple, the familiar and it — innovative, there's all these things. And through the course of testing, you start to learn about those things. And usability labs and the we had for bringing people in, putting designs in front of them and measuring their success on completing tasks, that was a fun and exciting thing for me, and I think a lot of the development teams.

So, you'd go into the usability lab and sit behind the glass mirror wall and watch people poke at the software you just created and, usually there's — you just finished some feature and you hope it works right and you got it on this test machine and hopefully it doesn't crash.

But, yeah, you start to be humbled, I think, by how, something you thought was going to work easily, people would understand, it's like, no, people don't — we're not — they don't — that's not obvious enough for them. And, so it's a fun process and well like I said, I really enjoyed that. That was one of the things I liked a lot. there were some particular problems we struggled with, in our design. We have this idea of right click. So, this is something everybody today is right click, of course.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah. (Laughter.)

CHRIS GUZAK: Can we really get away with this right click thing? This was one of the open design questions. So, when, you put somebody in the lab, and they have to discover right click to complete the task. And I don't know, I think at some point, there was some measurement, or we had some estimate of how many people, like, we thought 30 percent of the people knew how to do right click.

And I'm not sure when that was, but — so that's an example of this design innovation that we thought was really powerful, but it had really poor discoverability. So, that's one we struggled with. And, ultimately, we had a design that could be accelerated by right click but wasn't dependent upon it completely.

So, if you have this hypothesis that we can right click only, really powerful, really sleek and simple, , just a minimum amount off interface elements, but we weren't able to do that. So, we depend on the toolbar and the menu bar and the things that had more discoverability. Even simple things like the start menu. So, you'd sit somebody down in front of the computer, it boots up, they sit and look at it and you present them with a task and usually these tasks start with, you have to launch a program.

And they're, like, looking at the screen and they see the bar at the bottom. And there's this thing on the left that says “start” on it, and people wouldn't click on it.

So, eventually, I think we had this feature for a while where, when the system would boot up, the first few times it would boot up there would be some animating arrow that would point over at the start , to queue you to go click on this button. So eventually people started to get that.

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak

The TV commercials for Windows 95, they had the start menu and, like, oh, people see the TV commercials, aren't they going to get it? But it seems not, some people just don't know about that.

I think these days, this is a reflexive thing for everybody, just this idea that people wouldn't find the start button when discoverable, well, it's not obvious today, but back then it was.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah, that's one of the first things that some of these introduction to computer courses that you can take, either for, young kids in school that are learning how to, operate a computer or even adults who go back that may not have had, any formalized computer training, at whatever point in their life that they may be in, that when they start presenting, usually it's on Windows and they start taking them through this structure and whatnot. The whole concept of right click and having, a menu that has actions or, other things that you can do, depending on the context, of course.

Clicking the start button the access lists of programs, and of course, start has changed a ton from 95 to where it's at in now. It's almost I would say we take it for granted at this point that people know how to do these things.

CHRIS GUZAK: Oh yeah

JASON HOWARD: And it's interesting to hear some of this reflection back to a point in time where these were new, that it wasn't commonplace, it wasn't common part of the education or the experience that people were brought into saying, here's some of this foundation that you need to know.

You're talking about the point in time where this was brand new, let's see if people can even figure out how to use this. Is this intuitive to enable some of the other things we're hoping to accomplish?

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah, there was a generation — I mean, everybody today understands these things. This is — people — generation or two maybe of people that are, very familiar with computers and where all this stuff is not a mystery at all. But I mean, my dad, he's still like, “I don't know what to do with this.” you put some screen in front of him, he's like, “I don't know what's going on there.”

We had to overcome that and get to a point where — well, where we didn't have to go super simple on everything. there's still a place for simplicity, but I think we're at a point where most people appreciate power and efficiency where we can deliver on that with our designs a little bit more easily.

But even on our phones, there's swipe actions that you have to learn and gestures that don't — you don't know naturally, but once you learn them and you've lived with them, it all becomes second nature.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah, a little bit of history for me is I was working at T-Mobile when the Android phone OS was first released. And I was involved in the release of the G1, which was the very first Android phone.

And some of the concepts that were introduced back then, the concept of the task drawer and pulling down and things like that, these menus that kind of just came out of nowhere if you happened to move your hand or your finger on the touchscreen in the right way or if, you rolled the trackball in the right way, depending on, other OS's

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak and things, it's like this natural progression that has enabled a broader range of usability and quick actions and functions.

There's still a learning curve, because any time something new comes around, people need to know that it exists and then they have to figure out how to use it.

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah, I think people just know that now. Like, used to be — one of the problems you'd face is this momentum of familiarity and people know how to do something. And whenever you introduce a new way, that frustrates some people.

But I think people these days generally — well, actually, this would be interesting to know, I'm sure somebody has some data on this, but this is, I think, being flexible and learning that you have to continuously learn to use these devices, I think most people — many people are in that mode. So, yeah, that's definitely changed things.

There's always this tension. The designers are always going for sleek and simple, often that — and powerful — that often is on conflict with discoverable. So, these things all play against each other and all these different — well, every design iteration we struggle with this, and especially when there's something new.

JASON HOWARD: So, one of the things that you mentioned, and this description kind of hit with me, and actually there's a question I want to ask you about it, where you had talked about, being a dev, watching people engage with the design that you had put forward, right?

And if you look at the current model internally with Microsoft, there's distinct disciplines, but of course there's partnership. There's the PM team, so program or project managers, there's developers, there's the design folks who kind of do the user research and modeling the PMs kind of come up with how it should work, the devs actually do the work of making it actually function, the design team contributes a lot into how the look and feel of it should be.

Was it always like this? If you go back to some of these early days and these things you were designing, was it quite as rigid between the different disciplines of function?

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah, the disciplines have been — there's been, well, there have been some changes, but the basic structure, design, PM, dev, those you know we had those roles back then and, they exist in a form today. I think the teams were smaller and the interaction between those different disciplines, there was much more interaction, I'd say, you'd have a team would be a developer and a PM, as opposed to seven or 14 developers and a couple of PMs.

So, there was definitely more of that and because things — the teams were smaller, people were — easier to stay connected. We've had the scaling problem of communication with large numbers of people, so there was, more intimate relationship between those disciplines. But the basic structure remains today. And I think works pretty well. I think the company has done well to adapt the roles as industry has learned, as better practices come online, I think just in the realm of engineering, this idea of the developers being responsible for more — a larger responsible — expanded responsibility for the quality of their code and building it in a way that is, sound from the beginning.

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak

And then the recent revolution we've had with PM where they've been — they used to be more involved in scheduling of the dev teams, and now the dev teams have taken that on and the PMs are more responsible for spec'ing and getting those — the functional requirements well understood. So, we have this process that actually in recent — the project I'm working on now, I have seen work really well, actually, the PMs produce great specs and we can digest those into a dev design, dev spec, and then you know transform that into our tasks and our work tracking system.

So, it's actually working quite well these days.

JASON HOWARD: So, we talked a little bit about 3.1, and we've talked a little bit about 95, like I said earlier, was — it's quite the titanic shift. And then if we take a step forward one more, there's this little thing called .

And right around that time, there was this newfangled thing coming — I guess into broader consumption, this whole internet thing that I think everybody just takes for granted now?

If you look at everything that you did in Windows 95 and then you take that step forward into Windows 98, what did the introduction of the internet, right, like, what kind of changes did that bring for that next step of work that you were putting forward for users to engage with?

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah, so, for our team, working on the shell — Windows 95 — near the end of the project, there was a team of people that were tasked with integrating this web browser that Microsoft bought. So, Microsoft bought the Mosaic browser from Spyglass.

And people showed up in my office and said, “Hey, we're working on integration of this internet browser.” Like, what's that? And yeah, that was my first introduction.

So, I helped them build some integration points in Windows 95. The fist Web browser we shipped was in this plus pack. I think we had the plus pack for Windows 95. So, as we were finishing Windows 95, those guys were getting that browser stood up with a Microsoft brand and the set of features that we added.

And they were getting that up and going. This was around the time of the internet tidal wave memo that went out to the company. Everybody was, like, whoa, we're getting going on something really big here.

But, yeah, that was — well, it made computing so much more interesting. looking back at what computers did when they just were sitting on a desk with a floppy disk and a hard disk and a printer, no network connectivity beyond that, like, there wasn't that much interesting happening.

After a while you kind of, like, okay, you're playing games, you're running your spreadsheets, whatever.

JASON HOWARD: It was very task oriented; it sounds like.

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah, but the internet changed the game completely. And, for our team, we adapted our design. Actually, this was a pretty cool result of the design that Satoshi created. We, ultimately, decided to take the browser design that we created for the Explorer and make it work for the internet.

That's when the idea of the integrated browser came up. And this is something that's kind of famous from the point of view of lawsuits and technical issues and all sorts of problems that eventually resulted from it.

But we adapted the Explorer design, so it wasn't just for browsing your files, it browsed the internet. Which we had to add a bunch of features to it, so we need to make it asynchronous. We added this whole idea of — well, details that are too far here, but yeah, so we adapted the shell design and we started putting internet stuff everywhere. I don't know if people remember this idea.

There were all these goofy features that we ended up putting in the shell. In fact, we used for a while we used HTML as the hosting — UI hosting technology for our file — the file browsing experience. So, there was a pane on the left or on the bottom that was HTML and we wrote JavaScript that talked to the program — the object model for the Explorer to implement features in .

Eventually, it was — well, that had performance problems. We eventually had to replace that with something else, but we were so excited about this internet stuff, well, it sent us down a bunch of paths that some were useful, and most were not.

JASON HOWARD: Let's just make everything internet connected, right? (Laughter.)

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah. So, in fact, we eventually got to the point where Windows and the browser — the Windows shell and the browser team were really just sub teams of a larger team. We merged the whole organization. My team at that point was the shell team doing the internet integration, but mostly we were responsible for the shell features and the browser integration stuff.

But, yeah, definitely was a big shift for us and a lot of work flowed from that, which we eventually had to unwind years and years later, breaking the browser back out of Windows. Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: So, I'm going to ask you what's probably a ridiculous question? This is going to seem like something I should know just from the annals of computing history, but is that how got its name?

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah. (Laughter.) It's not — this was like — the internet, it's just part of Windows — this was the idea. It's like, I mean, the Explorer was called Explorer, I think we branded it Internet Explorer, we gave it a unique on the desktop for a while, actually, this was in terms of the data model, this actually is how it's integrated.

There's a node in a namespace. So, we have this thing called the shell namespace and there's an internet node. And underneath that node are all the web pages that you navigate to, but — and we did brand it with Internet Explorer.

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak

But when you launched the Internet Explorer or you launched the regular Explorer, all the same code ran with the exception of some code that branded selected icons differently and you know modified the UI slightly differently.

So, we had a favorites menu in the explorer that was the same favorites menu for Internet Explorer. And the implementation was literally the same thing. And, so you could have favorites for file browsing or printers or whatever and you could also have favorites for the internet. And that's those .url files that — well, I guess we're kind of beyond that now with our current generation browsers, but —

JASON HOWARD: Sure, Windows 95 was really my first personal introduction into Windows, right? I had seen 3.1, but I had never spent really any time I depth using it?

And so, I was fortunate enough to come along, after the , the GUI was kind of a thing, right? And that's where I started learning, and that's where I picked it up.

And so, for me, it was just second nature, this is what exists, this is what I need to learn how to use. And so some of this, the underpinnings of how some of this stuff technically worked, that wasn't what I was learning at the time, it was really about, hey, I've got these tasks I need to accomplish, this is the tool I'm going to use to do it.

And so, you build as an individual user, you build a mental model of, okay, I'm doing this to go use the browser so I can be on the internet? I'm going to use File Explorer to go find this stuff. I'm going to click start menu because I need to access lists of programs and whatever else.

And so, like me personally, like, I build these distinct almost like columns in my head of this is what I'm going to do to accomplish this.

And it never would have clicked that — until this conversation, really, as silly as that might sound, it wouldn't have clicked that those two things were really so tightly integrated that they were almost — the way that it appeared to me as a user at the time that they seemed so separate, right? I'm using them for very different things, but kind of under the hood, so to speak, they're almost identical.

They were almost like just skinned differently, if that's a — even a remotely appropriate way to say that.

CHRIS GUZAK: Oh, it is. It goes further than that. There were even other things that we had integrated in the design. So, this is kind of a strange story. I got a call on a Sunday morning once. I answered the phone, it was like, “Hey, Chris, Bill wants to talk to you.” I was, like, “What?” (Laughter.)

So Bill Gates is on the call it's like — he's, like, “Hey, I've got some questions.

Like, I'm looking at this picture — as he's telling me this story. I'm looking at this picture and it shows the Explorer with a node in the Explorer that has a whole bunch — has e-, has all my e-mail in it. It's like, did we build this? I was, like, yeah. Like, this seems like a really bad idea. I'm, like, yeah, it does, in this moment, we were trying to integrate everything.

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak

And there's value that comes from that. There were actually a lot of good things that came from that, but in some cases, we I think — well, we took it pretty far and this whole idea of it's your files, it's the internet, it's your e-mail. Basically, we wanted to put everything that could possibly work in this model, basically to leverage the familiarity of the model, right? I think that's a worthy goal.

Ultimately, you need specialized tools for specialized tasks and allowing — there were other fundamental problems with this approach, like, it was essentially a monolithic design, which only one team could innovate on, so if you wanted to add features, you had to add it to the whole design and clearly that creates a big bottleneck, so it doesn't scale — well, it doesn't scale at all.

But yeah, for a while, we were going to put everything in this one universal tool and it's the thing that you'll use to access all your information.

In fact, there was this whole information at your — at your fingertips initiative that the company was working toward where essentially taking this object-oriented design, where everything was an icon, everything was something you could act on, drag and drop or right click or drag one thing onto another, that was I think a powerful idea and went pretty far in some places, but clearly has some limits.

We bounced off those a few times.

JASON HOWARD: And it's funny because now you stop and think about the way the vast majority of consumer e- mail is set up if you're using Outlook or some of the legacy like Hotmail or Gmail, you can go back to some of the other providers along the way. And it's — in essence, it's all just cloud-based e-mail now, right? Most people are either using a distinct app or you're just using a web browser and hitting a web address.

It's, like, it's together, we need to pull it apart, looking at those two things comparatively now, it's fascinating to see how much has changed over the course of time.

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah, we've — this idea of integrating everything was essentially apps don't exist. And the world we're in today, now, apps are really the prominent thing. In fact, we've really gone — actually even in our implementation of the current version of the shell and our designs there are all essentially many of — well, almost all of the user interface elements that you interact with today, the start menu and and systems things, those are just apps and they're built using the technologies and the techniques of apps and keeping them independent has a lot of value.

The frameworks that we're building from have gotten more powerful, the idea that you could save engineering effort by integrating — building everything in a monolith, that idea was destroyed and we have basically very powerful app runtimes now that anybody can a few clicks and you've created a new application. In the IDEs we have today, compile a new app and a little bit of knowledge, you can get something up and running that's quite powerful and, way beyond the things that we work on for days and days, weeks, — months to get simple little things to work very primitive techniques applied.

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak

JASON HOWARD: So, I — I gotta ask you, obviously, again, this, this goes back to the historical perspective, that for folks who never used Windows 95 or 98, say somebody didn't start until 2000 or XP, dare I mention ME along the way. (Laughter.) I'll bet you I'm going to get some chuckles out of the listeners for dropping that one.

What would you say is, I don't know, the — one of the — most important foundational changes that has created a lasting impact that users may potentially still have some experience with today?

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah, Windows 95 — I mentioned this earlier. So, the Win32 platform that was, when — well, Windows — Windows 95 implemented, had an implementation of the Win32 API, which back then was much smaller than it is today, but the basic model that it created is still used by all — as top apps still utilize that same basic model, they create Windows, those Windows appear in our switchers, the task bar and alt tab and clearly presented on the screen, but the basic idea of the Win32 API, that is a platform — that's something that has had surprising longevity.

I think the — a billion Windows 10 users, I think I saw that number, a billion MAD of Windows 10, so, most of the apps that people use on that platform are using the same model. And that's — well, it's actually surprising.

I guess some parts of it didn't age that well, but other parts are working quite well. In fact, we've tried to get applications to use the new forms of our platform, the Universal Windows Platform, to get many apps that are using the desktop model, the Win32 model, over to the universal platform model.

That in the basic user experience that we created in Windows 95, the desktop, the taskbar, the start menu, even the notification area, which has morphed into Action Center, the longevity of that is pretty amazing, I think, while we've reimplemented the start menu probably a dozen times it seems at this point, the basic idea of a place to go launch things from and the taskbar as a place to switch between apps and launch apps now. Some of these things have stuck around and seen some quite robust and useful, so -.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah, even with all the change along the way, because there's vast amounts of difference between Windows 10 and Windows 95, but there's still these tidbits of familiarity, some things that have kind of stood the test of they laid some of that foundation.

So, from the opposite perspective, right, between you know Windows 95 kind of back in the day and where we're at with Windows 10 now, is there anything that's been lost? Anything that you'd say you kind of miss that you maybe, have a little tug at the heartstrings about?

CHRIS GUZAK: On the whole, nothing that I really depend on, but as — I was thinking about this — the things in Windows — there are some cool things in Windows 95 that didn't make it forward.

And there's this one story I think is kind of interesting. So, in our — in the , we have a setting for you know UI for setting the date and time for the system. So, I think we still have that in the app today.

So, I think it was either Ian or Francis, they were working on this. And in that model, everything in the control panel was a tabbed dialogue. Either tabbed dialogue or wizards. You click on an icon, up would come this — this tabbed dialogue for setting the date and time.

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak

And one of the tabs in that was time zone selection tab. And I remember the first time I saw this, I was like, this is the coolest thing ever, because it was — it had a map of the globe —

JASON HOWARD: I remember that. Yeah.

CHRIS GUZAK: Okay, so — map of the globe and as you move your mouse over the globe, the time zones were highlighted so you could just, go to the west coast and click and, like, oh, I set my time zone, it was very smooth, easy, intuitive. It was powerful and simple; anybody could use this.

And, well, so, that feature — I think we shipped that in Windows 95. And then like the first release we did after, somebody — I remember somebody showing up with a change. And it was, like, oh, we have to remove the time zone thing. I was, like, the — get rid of the map — get rid of the map.

[TCR 0:44:39]

I was, like, what, what, what do you mean? This was the coolest feature. (Laughter.) And it turns out that, well, the time zones track borders. And there are something — it wasn't obvious to me then, but there are borders in the world that are disputed.

And, so you think a map of the world — so, Windows 95 ran on a 640 by 480 screen or maybe 800 by 600, so it was very low-resolution image of the world. So, we had to get rid of the time zone selector just to get rid of the tension that arose from people's disagreement or lack of agreement about borders.

Anyway, that was like a very disappointing — see this feature, and I was like, oh, this is the coolest thing to see it disabled, I just maybe just because we lost it, that's the reason it stuck with me. So —

JASON HOWARD: I have to say, I think this has been a very fascinating trip back in history. I'm still — I'm still chuckling both internally and audibly over the fact of how Internet Explorer got its name, like, really as sad as this is going to be to — for me to reiterate this, I never connected the dots that, one would have taken its name from the others. It was just — it's what I learned, and so they were distinct tools.

I guess you had to have been there, right? I mean, you were there, you helped with some of the design, you were there while other people were working on it alongside you, and you alongside them. And so,— I guess it's all about perspective, right?

So, given everything that we've talked about as we're wrapping up here, there's one more thing I've got to ask you. Without getting yourself into trouble here, is there anything exciting that you're working on that you want to talk about?

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah. So, the project I'm working on now, this 10X version of Windows.

I can't say much about the new plans, but I'm still working on the 10X aspect of Windows now and that's pretty cool because it's this new core based version of Windows. There's lots of common code here, but it's in some ways new relative to the desktop.

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak

But, I'll probably be helping out on the 10 — Windows 10 feature set, too, here pretty soon. So actually looking forward to that because there's some cool work that's getting queued up there, so — and, but I can't say anything about that.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah, it's — (Laughter.) I understand. The listeners might be a little — a little disheartened, but hey, that's just kind of the way it goes, you know? It is nice to know that there's cool stuff coming, so they'll have to keep their eyes out and wait for some preview builds with some new goodies to show up.

CHRIS GUZAK: Yeah, the team's pretty fired up. I think there's a lot of great ideas. Well, we've been working on waves of improvement to Windows. There are times where we pause a bit or we don't focus much on the desktop and we're coming back to the desktop I think now in terms of a focus and trying to really refine the experience people have with a PC on a desktop or a laptop, that's something that was, kind of pushed behind this big wave of mobile computing, but I think it's on its way back and in some ways, so I'm pretty excited about that, so —

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. Well, hey, I can't thank you enough for making the time to come and talk to us to share some of this awesome history, right? You've, like I said at the beginning, you've been around for a while. You have worked on some of the coolest stuff that has kind of driven not only the foundations of Windows, but obviously, the cutting-edge stuff that we're working on next. You've seen it all. You've been there. I'm glad that, you've stuck around, and you didn't move off halfway across the country or all the way across the country, really.

Like, there's no telling how different, Windows would be. It's like a butterfly flaps its wings in a forest somewhere kind of thing, right? Those little individual decisions they all kind of add up to these big things. And I'll just say I'm thankful for the work that you've done, the work that you continue to do. Hopefully, the listeners feel the same way? All the Insiders around the world they love this program, they love the products and services.

That come for Microsoft, obviously, Windows being one of the biggest. So, I'll just say, a heartfelt thanks to all the work that you've done and continue to do and for joining us to share some of this history because there's a lot of stuff.

CHRIS GUZAK: Thanks for that. Appreciate that. I just feel really lucky to be able to work on this stuff. I landed at the right time. Got to work on some great projects, still working on great projects. I personally just feel super lucky to be able to do what I get to do, so thank you.

JASON HOWARD: Absolutely. Well, again, thank you so much. It's been great chatting with you.

CHRIS GUZAK: All right.

[MUSIC]

JASON HOWARD: With that, Windows Insiders, this episode is a wrap. This was an eye-opening look back at the Windows 95 era and the early changes that helped usher in the age of modern computing.

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Windows Insider podcast Episode 33 – Part 2 Guest: Chris Guzak

It's been fun to watch the evolution of Windows across the years, and it's exciting to see all the changes Windows 10 has and continues to bring to users.

Once again, I'd like to thank both Chris and Raymond for joining us and sharing some of the fascinating history that has brought us to where we are today. If you enjoyed this episode, you won't want to miss what we have in store next month, so stay tuned.

Again, thanks for tuning into the Windows Insider podcast. Join us for a new episode each month, and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite app. Until next time.

[END EPISODE]

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