Windows 8.1 won't rescue PC market this year, IDC says

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The PC market will weaken even further this year, and Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8.1 OS will be unable to reverse the drop in shipments, IDC said on Thursday.

Due in part to increased adoption of mobile devices globally and a drop in PC sales in China, shipments will shrink 9.7 percent in 2013, according to IDC, which previously had predicted a fall of 7.7 percent drop.

Microsoft’s Windows 8 has also been blamed by analysts as one of the reasons for the decline in the PC market. Windows 8.1, due to ship in mid-October, will address some user complaints, but PC shipments will also fall next year, and rebound with only single-digit growth in 2015, said Jay Chou, senior research analyst at IDC, in a statement.

With Windows 8, Microsoft has put a tablet-like touch user interface on PCs, which has baffled users buying non-touch PCs. Touch laptops remain expensive, and PC makers expect enterprises to upgrade laptops to the Windows 7 OS. The Windows 8 OS and high prices of PCs are reasons why people are looking at attractively priced tablets instead, Chou said.

Lower-priced laptops and convertible designs will ultimately help the PC market recover, IDC said.

“Advances in PC hardware, such as improvements in the power efficiency of x86 processors remain encouraging,” Chou said.

The weak China market will be another major factor in PC shipments dropping, IDC said. PC makers like Lenovo have recorded PC-shipment growth due to a strong China market in the previous quarters. IDC is forecasting PC shipments in China to fall by double digits this year, compounding an already weak consumer market in developed countries.

PC shipments dropped by 11.4 percent during the second quarter this year, totaling 75.6 million units, according to IDC. Component shortages also played a part in shipments dropping during the quarter.

Windows 8 Professional $200.00 Windows 8 isn't for everyone. If you're mostly a desktop PC user comfortable with Windows 7, upgrading to Windows 8 is probably not worthwhile. If you're a mobile user who needs easy access to the...

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Pricing and Packaging for Windows 8.1

For consumers with Windows 8 devices today, Windows 8.1 will be a free update via an easy download from the Windows Store* starting on October 18th**. Windows 8.1 will be a must-have update for those devices - bringing new features and improvements such as greater personalization, Bing Smart Search, and more than 20 new and improved Microsoft apps and services. We are excited to be delivering such an important update to customers in just one month and nearly a year after launching Windows 8. However we also recognize there will be some folks who may want to upgrade devices running older versions of Windows to Windows 8.1. The information in this blog post is meant for those people.

Consumers who are not using a Windows 8 device will be able to buy Windows 8.1, either as a download from Windows.com or at your local store as a retail packaged DVD product. While pricing varies by market, in the U.S., Windows 8.1 will be available for $119.99 ERP (U.S.) and Windows 8.1 Pro will be available for $199.99 ERP (U.S.). The pricing and editions for Windows 8.1 are similar to what we have today for Windows 8.

One shift to note in Windows 8.1 is that we will be offering “full version software” at retail and online for download that does not require a previous version of Windows in order to be installed. The copy of Windows 8 that is currently available for sale at retail and online is an “upgrade version.” This shift allows more flexibility for customers in specific technical scenarios and is in response to feedback we’ve received. It will be easier for those consumers who want to build PCs from scratch, run Windows 8.1 in Virtual Machine (VM) environments, or run Windows 8.1 on a second hard drive partition.

For non-Windows 8 devices, here is how upgrading to Windows 8.1 using the retail DVD and download software will work:

Windows 7: Consumers can upgrade a Windows 7 PC which will bring along all their files, but will require them to reinstall desktop apps including Microsoft Office.Windows XP & Windows Vista: Windows 8.1 is not designed for installation on devices running Windows XP or Windows Vista. Although not designed or recommended for devices running Windows XP or Windows Vista, consumers still wanting to upgrade from Windows XP or Windows Vista should buy the retail DVD instead of using the download and boot from the DVD to do a clean install of Windows 8.1. Note: files, settings and programs will not transfer – Consumers will need to back up their files and settings, perform clean installation, and then reinstall their files, settings and programs.

If you buy a device later this year that comes with the Windows 8.1 edition, you will be able to purchase the Windows 8.1 Pro Pack for $99.99 ERP (U.S.), which unlocks all of the great features unique to Pro, as well as Windows Media Center. If you are on Windows 8.1 Pro, you can buy Windows Media Center for $9.99 (U.S.).

If you are on the market for a new device today, I suggest taking advantage of our PC Selectorto find the right Windows 8 device that is perfect for you. And remember, you will be able to update your device to Windows 8.1 for free through the Windows Store.

Windows 8.1 evolves Windows 8, bringing the latest advancements in hardware, apps and services and the OS to enable a unique experience in everything you do.

More to come on Windows 8.1 including new devices and retail offers as we near October 18th!

* Internet access required; fees may apply.
** Starting at 12:00am on October 18th in New Zealand (that’s 4:00am October 17th in Redmond).

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Skype for Windows 8.1, engineered since the acquisition

This blog post is part of a series of guest posts we’re publishing this week from different people in groups across Microsoft who helped us build Windows 8.1. – Brandon

For an engineer, nothing is as rewarding as seeing the product you’ve been working hard on used by the people it was created for. I work with a team of talented engineers and we are responsible for delivering the best Skype and Lync experiences. We pull together all of the underlying technology (the video and calling stacks, signaling protocols, runtimes, etc.) and match them with the scenarios, user experiences and UI that (hopefully) make communications a great experience for you. We develop the client applications for multiple platforms including Windows, Mac, web, and Xbox – and we’re very proud of the work we’ve done with Windows to bring the Skype built-in experience to consumers!

Yesterday marked the two year acquisition anniversary of Skype by Microsoft. And our work integrating Skype with Windows began then. The journey of Skype for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 has been about addressing user needs through innovation in design, features and infrastructure. We’ve been releasing updates to Skype for Windows 8 pretty regularly over the past year and consider it a point of pride that we’re not doing “big bang” releases. We were able to scale Skype’s brand and technology innovation while enhancing Microsoft’s portfolio of real-time communications products. Most importantly, we were thrilled by the opportunities to extend the value of Skype to other Microsoft products and services – Windows 8.1 is a direct result of these efforts.

When Skype for Windows 8 launched, we took a fresh approach to our UI and debuted the new Modern look of Skype. Working closely with the Windows team, our focus was to collectively design a great experience for the new, reimagined platform. Now, with Windows 8.1, we’re continuing to invest in optimizing and simplifying the experience so you can do more at once, which has always been a cornerstone of Windows. For example, new to Windows 8.1, users can answer an incoming Skype call from their lock screen, launch apps side-by-side with Skype and scale to the size of your device. We worked closely with Windows engineering to make sure Skype was seamlessly integrated with Windows 8.1 – so it’s not just the communications app that comes with your operating system, but a useful tool to stay in touch with your friends, family and colleagues.

Being part of Microsoft has opened up doors and increased collaboration and innovation across products. With Windows, we had a unique seat at the table to help inform the product from the ground up. One such example is the ability for users to answer Skype calls from their lock screen. This was a shift from Windows 8, where applications couldn’t really do anything when the device was locked. However, the Windows team introduced a new toast model for VoIP applications that allows users to answer the call using video, answer with voice only or ignore the call completely. We worked to make sure the transition from locked call to unlocked device was smooth and secure. We made sure that when users input their password while inside a Skype call, they’d move from this state of running over a locked screen to the complete operating environment. I think you’ll be pleased with how intuitive the experience feels and it will be fun to watch other apps take advantage of this functionality.

The lock screen and other great features on Windows 8.1 like app-to-app launching and new screen size support steamed from our teams coming together to address user needs. With app-to-app launching, we made multitasking even easier. Now Skype users can not only share the screen with other apps but open another app (the browser, a picture, an Office document, etc.) and have it snap to the side of Skype. As Windows 8.1 reaches more and more products we realized the Skype client needed to automatically adjust the size and layout of the device. With the help of the Windows team we created an application that intuitively changes based on the aspect ratio and orientation of the devices’ screen.

We’ve been working hard on Skype for Windows 8.1. I am proud of what we produced so far and excited about the future development possibilities. It’s a pretty cool app, and I think I speak for the entire engineering team when I say, we can’t wait for you to get your hands on it.

Noah Edelstein
Director of Program Management
Skype

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Engineering Xbox Music for Windows 8.1

This blog post is part of a series of guest posts we’re publishing this week from different people in groups across Microsoft who helped us build Windows 8.1. – Brandon

Hey all, Alex Garden here. I’m the general manager for Xbox MVR, which stands for Music, Video and Reading. The Windows team invited me to highlight the work our team has put into Windows 8.1, specifically the awesome enhancements we’ve made and are continuing to make with Xbox Music & Video. Our team has a long history of working with Windows to deliver amazing entertainment experiences. For Windows 8, we were one of the first app developers to help validate and refine the platform for music and video apps. For Windows 8.1, we’re taking all we’ve learned, adding some new tricks and releasing our best products yet. While there are many awesome new video features our teams created together like playing TV and movies from Windows 8.1 to Xbox One, and Xbox 360, improved video downloading, and movie hero search, I am going to focus on how together we have transformed music for Windows 8.1.

Our team has completely re-imagined and rebuilt Xbox Music for Windows 8.1. After shipping the initial version of Xbox Music for Windows 8, we collected a ton of useful feedback from our customers on what was working for them, and where we needed to do better.

Many of our customers appreciated the Xbox Music service features like ad-supported free streaming, custom internet radio stations and the ability to take their music and playlists to different devices. At the same time, we didn’t hit the mark for ease of use and simplicity. By putting our streaming and internet radio features up front, we unintentionally made it tougher for customers to access their own collections. And once they got to their collections, many customers told us they wanted a better way to manage and curate the collection of MP3’s they have been building for many years.

We knew what customers had come to expect from a music service and we knew we had great cues on which to build on top. We created an entirely new user interface that blends the magic of modern design elements with the utility you have come to love in Windows.

As you can see, we have condensed what were 3 layers of the app into a simple, single page with clear callouts of our major app features – collection, streaming radio, the store and playlists. Moving between the features is as simple as clicking the title. In addition, playback controls are always visible on screen making it simple to pause the song you are listening to or skipping to the next one. We’ve tested this design with a lot of customers and out of the gate it is much more understandable and comfortable to use.

While it was an option before, now customers will launch straight into their collection by default. With platform improvements of Windows 8.1, we were able to build the rich album and artist views our customers were used to. Gone are the dull grey spreadsheet views, replaced by more beautiful grid view of album and artist art. Playlists are always visible in the left hand nav bar, making it simple to craft or kick off that perfect mix of music.

We set out to be a Windows showcase app, which means we designed and built the Music app to look great and be usable when in 50/50 or snapped mode. The app hides columns when a customer puts it into 50/50, and collapses the left nav bar to buttons as a customer scales down the window. Our improved snapped view is clearer and easier to use when a customer scales it down to minimum size. These investments allowed us to offer an amazing experience in portrait mode, which will undoubtedly be appreciated by our customers using the new, smaller form factor Windows 8.1 tablets.

Key to making this all happen was strong collaboration. To realize this new vision, we partnered closely with the Windows team throughout the development cycle on several important fronts.

A great music app is just as much about managing your personal collection of songs as it is about playing them back. We worked with Windows and the Mail app team to extend the modern design language to support these productivity-like scenarios. In particular, we worked to make sure it was easy to navigate between different areas of functionality, ensure large lists of content were intuitive to use, and complex commanding for collection management could be made simple. As a result, the new Music app has a greater information density, on-canvas commands and simplified navigation model.

In addition to being the default music player for consumers, we helped ensure the Windows platform is flexible enough to meet the needs of other entertainment app developers. We worked with Windows to add platform support for several features our customers told us they needed. For instance, new to Windows 8.1 is the ability to have music on an SD card show up in your music library, as well as the ability to manage the Music Library folders from within an app. These types of improvements make Windows better for all types of media apps.

The relationship between the teams was incredibly positive. We greatly benefitted from the design and engineering feedback from the Windows team, making our app simpler to use, better performing, and a great showcase of what’s unique and new with Windows 8.1. Windows benefitted by learning from our customers to improve both the user experience and platform for media scenarios.

Is it October 18th yet?! My team and I can’t wait for the release of Windows 8.1 and to unleash an all-in-one music service that can truly lead the industry. Check it out for yourself and let us know what you think. Explore the music store to see what’s hot. Discover new favorites with custom radio stations. Rock out while you surf the Web, get some work done or sling an upset bird around your screen. Play a song from the results page of a Bing search or pair your favorite playlist to a SkyDrive slideshow. Let music be your connector to all your Windows experiences.

Alex Garden
General Manager
Xbox MVR

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Windows 8.1 now available!

Less than a year ago we were preparing to launch Windows 8, which introduced our vision of highly personalized mobile computing. And here we are today announcing the global availability of Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 demonstrates our commitment to continuously improving the product to create a richer customer experience. We are excited to have customers start updating their devices today and getting to experience new Windows devices this holiday season.

Windows 8.1 brings a variety of new features and improvements to Windows 8 that we think people will really enjoy. We listened to your feedback and are delivering many of the improvements you asked for.

If you are a consumer with a Windows 8 device, you can now download the free update to Windows 8.1 online through the Windows Store*. Please visit Windows.com for everything you need to know including how to get the update for your Windows 8 device. If you are a consumer on a device running Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, or the Windows 8.1 Preview – this page on Windows.com will detect your OS and provide you with all the information you need in order to get Windows 8.1 on your device. I also highly recommend reading our FAQ which answers many of the most common questions about getting Windows 8.1.

Starting tomorrow October 18th, Windows 8.1 will also be available on new devices and as packaged DVD product at retail locations around the world. You can also click here to learn about the wide variety of new Windows devices available now and coming throughout the holiday season to find the one that best fits their needs, and their budget.

To celebrate the new Windows, starting today for the next 8 days – we will pick 810 (see what we did there?) random winners per day who tweet and share their new Start screen after updating their Windows 8 device to Windows 8.1 with the #MyStart hashtag.

To take a screenshot of your Start screen in Windows 8.1, open up the Share charm from your Start screen and tap or click the down arrow next to “Start” and choose “Screenshot” (shown above). Alternatively, you can press the Windows logo key + PrtScn on your keyboard or if you're using a tablet, press the Windows logo button + the volume down button.

Winners will receive a $10 promotional Windows Store gift card to get started with great Windows apps and games. Click here for the full terms and conditions for the sweepstakes including how to redeem your gift card if you are a winner. Winners will be informed via Direct Message on Twitter. This sweepstakes is for participants in the U.S. only. However, we would still love to see Start screens from people around the world and in different languages!

We will also be hosting an IAmA chat on reddit today with several of our engineers to answer your questions about Windows 8.1 from 10:30am to 12:00pm (PST). Our engineers are excited to answer your questions about many of the new features and improvements in Windows 8.1 (see more below on these features and improvements). Please note this will not be the appropriate place to seek help with any issues you may have had with getting Windows 8.1 on your device – the best place for assistance with your issues will be the Microsoft Community forums.

After our reddit chat, we will host a special Tech Thursday Live Twitter Chat to discuss Windows 8.1 from 12:00pm to 1:00pm (PST). Join @Windows, @kristinalibby, and myself (@brandonleblanc) for the chat. To participate in the chat, just use our normal #winchathashtag. We look forward to seeing some of your new Start screens from Windows 8.1! I’m planning to share my Start screen but you’ll have to attend our chat to see it as I’m still finishing up making it look epic.

You’ve heard us (and me) talk a lot about the new features in Windows 8.1 since the Build conference last June but I think it’s worth reiterating the awesomeness that Windows 8.1 brings to your device.

Start the way you want. The Start screen in Windows 8.1 is more customizable than ever with new tile sizes, new background designs and colors – allowing you to make the Start screen on your device unique and personal to you (you should see some of the color combinations I’ve come up with for my Start screen!). You can also choose how you start your Windows experience – at the Start screen or the desktop. The Start button is back. And there is an improved Apps view that allows you to see all your apps the way you want.

Multi-tasking is even better in Windows 8.1 – you can now have up to four apps side by side with flexible windows sizing for each app on the screen. At a minimum, I usually have 3 apps snapped side by side on my devices doing various things like email, listening to music and browsing the web. We have also improved multi-monitor support in Windows 8.1 allowing users to view their desktop or apps from the Windows Store on any or all their monitors.

Bing Smart Search is the easiest way to find what you are looking for and to get things done. Built for touch, swipe or type from the Start screen and Smart Search will find what you need – whether it’s a document on your PC, a photo album in the cloud, your favorite app, or a website.

Windows 8.1 comes with new and improved Microsoft apps and services – available right out of the box and right from your Start screen. Skype is there for instant messaging and catching up with friends and family. We’ve updated the Mail app (well, more like over-hauled) to make email easier – for both personal and email and work email. Two new Bing apps are introduced in Windows 8.1 called Food & Drink and Health & Fitness along with updates to the News, Weather, Finance, Travel and Sports apps. Xbox Music has received a big update for Windows 8.1, and you can watch TV and movies with Xbox Video. And Windows 8.1 comes with Internet Explorer 11which is optimized for touch and brings speed boosts and synchronized browsing history, favorites, and settings across all of your Windows 8.1 devices.

Speaking of synchronizing – Windows 8.1 also comes with deep and improved cloud integration with SkyDrive. Your files are always accessible across all your devices. With SkyDrive smart files, you can create, edit, save and share files anywhere, anytime and your files are always with you, both on and offline.

And the Windows Store has been redesigned in Windows 8.1. With the “New & Rising” section it is now easier to stay on top of the hottest and newest apps to hit the Windows Store. Plus, the Windows Store has a live tile too! The Windows Store will also now provide you with personalized recommendations – powered by Bing. And apps are now updated from the Windows Store automatically by default so you will always have the best and newest versions of your apps. Look for new and updated apps including Adobe Photoshop Express, Box, Evernote, Facebook, Hulu Plus, Netflix, and NOOK, for Windows 8.1. And more to come!

Windows 8.1 will also bring some very innovative new devices for both consumers and businesses from tablets and 2-in-1s with a perfect mix of mobility and productivity, to new laptops, All-in-Ones and specialized industry devices Windows 8.1 brings the widest selection of designs at every price point. I’ll be blogging more about many of these devices over the next few weeks as they become available, so you can find and experience a device that is truly an extension of you.

Windows 8.1 represents collaboration across the entire company. Over the last three days, we’ve featured guest blog posts from our friends at Skype, Xbox, Bing, SkyDrive, and Internet Explorer that discusses in the connected experience that Windows 8.1 brings together.

And now you can enjoy the results of this work today. So get your device updated! And be sure to share those Start screens.

*Internet access required; fees may apply.

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Windows 8.1 Tablets and PCs Unveiled @ IFA

For all of us in the device world, the past year has seen incredible growth and innovation with new form factors, thinner and more powerful components, more durable materials and the evolution of computing experiences. I think IFA 2013, happening this week in Berlin, will showcase how far devices have really come and represents a great year of opportunity for our partners. OEMs are building devices in all shapes and sizes, marrying form and function. It’s incredible to see the breadth of choice and differentiation, and today we get our first look at some of the Windows 8.1 tablets and PCs coming to market soon.

Technology companies and consumers from all over the world are making their way to Berlin for IFA 2013 this week to see the hottest trends and product offerings. New technologies to enhance mobility, continued innovation on the PC platform, smaller form factors, tablets and lots of new touch-based capabilities are just some of the trends making a splash at IFA.

One big trend that’s driving a lot of conversation and innovation right now comes in a small package. We started seeing this trend at Computex with the 8-inch Acer Iconia W3 and I was able to show a sneak peek of an 8-inch tablet from Lenovo. This week at IFA there is a new player to the market and I expect more small tablets still to come. Announced during Intel’s press conference today, the Toshiba Encore8-inch tablet is a stylish and durable little device. These 8-inch tablets will all come with Windows 8.1 and full version of Microsoft Office Home & Student 2013, making them great mobile productivity devices.

If small is not your style, there are plenty of larger Windows tablets to choose from including the new Sony Tap 11-inch tablet being debuted this week. It offer flexibility with an optional digitizer stylus or the ability to use the wireless keyboard and touchpad to work how you want. In addition, there are already some compelling tablets currently in market such as the HP ElitePad 900 featuring enterprise-grade security and an optional expansion jacket that provides additional ports to connect to peripherals, the Dell Latitude 10 that offers up to 10 hours of battery life with the optional extended battery, Acer Iconia W700 comes with a two-way cradle for easy switching between portrait and landscape use, as well as the ASUS VivoTab Smartthat has an optional TranSleeve keyboard which provides a foldable cover, a stand, and a keyboard all in one. Windows tablets are designed for both work and play - they are small enough to travel, but big enough to read your Kindle app clearly and get some work done on the go.

Another area where our OEM partners continue to innovate is with all-in-ones like the HP ENVY Recline 27 that features a revolutionary adjustable design allowing for more positioning choice and control than before, or the Panasonic Toughpad UT-MB5, a 20-inch touch tablet with 4K resolution display – four times better than HD which makes everything on screen look crisp and beautiful. It was just a proof of concept at CES in January and Panasonic announced today that it will be available in the first quarter of 2014. Graphic designers, photographers and visual media enthusiasts are drooling over this new offering from Panasonic. When it comes to these large-format touch displays, such as the Dell XPS 18, HP ENVY Rove 20, our OEM partners are absolutely leading the charge industry wide.

When it comes to notebooks, we continue to see more and more innovation from our OEMs with unique hinges and materials that are helping to reinvent how people use devices as well new capabilities that enable touch + type. Notebooks are also getting outfitted with the latest in chipsets and strong, scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass like the high-res Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus that became available in August and the beautiful ASUS Zenbook UX301 that is being shown off this week with Gorilla Glass 3 lid and palm rest. Recently, Dell announced the next generation of the business ready Latitude 5000 seriesthat are now available with strong steel hinges to redefine the corporate laptop with increased durability. Dell is also offering the Latitude series with non-touch or touchscreen Gorilla Glass NBT options so enterprises can select a device that meets their business needs.

Notebooks are also evolving into very compelling two-in-one devices that combine a PC and a tablet into just one device. Building on the great success they’ve had with previous models, OEMs continue to advance their designs. Acer has just announced a thinner, lighter, and more flexible version of the Aspire R7 thanks to the fourth-generation Intel chip and the addition of their optional magnetic stylus Active Pen. The Active Pen can be used with gesture controls at the same time, so customers can, for example, resize a picture with a pinching gesture and adjust fine details with the pen. Also, Lenovo is taking their creative Yoga line to the next level and bringing fun into the workplace with the flexible, secure and enterprise-ready ThinkPad Yoga.

 

These are just a few of the devices being shown off this week at IFA and you can see more over at the Microsoft News Center. It’s awesome to see the continued innovation and creativity from our OEMs and we look forward to bringing their new devices to market together for holiday!

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Readying Windows 8.1 for release (UPDATED)

We’ve hit an important milestone for Windows and for Microsoft—just 10 months after delivering on a bold, generational change in computing with Windows 8, our team is proud to share that we have started releasing Windows 8.1 and Windows RT 8.1 to our hardware partners. In many ways, this marks a new day at Microsoft, reflecting a number of rapid release firsts. Thanks, in part, to customer feedback and an unparalleled level of collaboration across product teams, Windows 8.1 is a important update. We have delivered in a very short time an update to the OS that will bring an even greater unified experience for our customers. As we consider the code we just handed off, and the new intuitive and fluid computing experience it provides - anytime, anywhere, across all devices – we’re confident we made the right bet in continuing our vision and following through on our commitment to rapid innovation and responsive engineering.

In the past, the release to manufacturing (RTM) milestone traditionally meant that the software was ready for broader customer use. However, it’s clear that times have changed, with shifts to greater mobility and touch as well as the blurring of work and personal lives. As such, we’ve had to evolve the way we develop and the time in which we deliver to meet customers with the experience they need, want and expect. We’ve had to work closer to our hardware partners than ever before. Reaching this milestone is about optimizing the overall experience for our customers. Our hardware partners are in a position to prepare the wide array of innovative devices our customers can expect later this fall - just in time for the holidays. Over the next several months we’ll see beautiful, powerful devices, from the smallest tablets to the most lightweight notebooks to versatile 2-in-1s, as well as industry devices designed for business.

While our partners are preparing these exciting new devices we will continue to work closely with them as we put the finishing touches on Windows 8.1 to ensure a quality experience at general availability on October 18th. This is the date when Windows 8.1 will be broadly available for commercial customers with or without volume licensing agreements, our broad partner ecosystem, subscribers to MSDN and TechNet, as well as consumers.

On behalf of the Windows engineering team, we want to thank you for joining us on this journey. So many people rely on Windows in so many ways, and so we thank you for your participation in previewing the product, for your feedback, for your contributions and for your support. You have helped us make Windows 8.1 great for everyone!

We are super excited to see Windows 8.1 help deliver the next generation of devices and a one-of-a-kind experience that’s in sync with the way you live - at home, at work, and on the go.

UPDATE 9/9 10:00am PST:

Based on the feedback from you and our partners, we’re pleased to announce that we will be making available our current Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.1 Pro RTM builds (as well as Windows Server 2012 R2 RTM builds) to the developer and IT professional communities via MSDN and TechNet subscriptions. The current Windows 8.1 Enterprise RTM build will be available through MSDN and TechNet for businesses later this month. For developers, we are also making available the Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate, which you can download here. For more on building and testing apps for Windows 8.1, head on over to today’s blog post from Steve Guggenheimer.

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Windows 8.1: Best Experience of Your Web with Sites and Apps together

This blog post is part of a series of guest posts we’re publishing this week from different people in groups across Microsoft who helped us build Windows 8.1. – Brandon

With the general availability of Windows 8.1, you’ll get the best experience of your sites and apps together on your favorite Windows device.

In Windows 8.1, IE11 delivers an experience that is fast, fluid and perfect for touch. IE11 puts your web sites first, delivering the best web on Windows across the full range of Windows devices and screen sizes that’s equally great for touch, mouse, and keyboard. You can have as many open tabs as you want, and side-by-side browsing with your favorite sites and Windows Store apps together.

As Group Program Manager for Internet Explorer, I am fortunate to work with the team of driven, energetic engineers who are passionate about the web. With the help of many teams in Windows and across Microsoft, we are responsible for making sure your experience of the web on Windows is the best it can be. Here are just a few of my favorite features in IE11 that take advantage of the great capabilities of Windows 8.1.

Windows 8.1 with IE 11 introduces support for live tile notifications when you pin your favorite web sites. Your pinned sites can now be alive with activity, pulling data directly from the websites so your Start screen is updated with the latest posts, scores or stocks – information from the Web right on your Start screen.

Together with the Start screen team in Windows, we designed the live tile support for sites to enable all the same tile sizes and layouts that apps enjoy. We set out to make it as easy as possible for developers to build live tile notifications using the existing RSS feeds for their sites, and we built BuildMyPinnedsite.com to help developers to create beautiful tiles and live notification support with just a few clicks.

On my Start screen I pin my favorite sites like Techmeme, Gizmodo, and deviantART for live notifications, alongside with my favorite apps like Flixster, Bing Weather, Bing Finance, and Twitter.

My Windows 8.1 Start screen with live tiles for sites and apps

Windows 8.1 is great for getting things done quickly with apps and site together. The IE team works closely with the rest of Windows to ensure that IE is fast and fluid when following a link into the browser from another modern app, and when launching modern apps from the browser. We designed the 50/50 split specifically with the modern IE experience in mind, to make the most common patterns of using apps and websites together automatic on Windows. No other tablet makes side by side multitasking this easy.

Opening a site automatically side by side from Mail

Clicking a link from the Mail app or launching an article from the Reading List app IE is automatically arranged side-by-side. You can check a map while reading directions to a friend’s house. And whether you are using a small device or a large one, you can see two things at once on the web by opening multiple windows of IE side-by-side.

You can easily compare two sites at once or use two sites together by launching multiple, full-featured windows of IE11.

Comparing two sites opened side by side in IE

One of my favorite time savers is making a Skype call directly from IE, side by side with a site. IE automatically detects and highlights phone numbers on a webpage. When you see a phone number, just tap on it and begin your call right next to your webpage using a calling app like Skype or Lync. It’s incredibly useful when you are making a reservation or appointment, or want to talk to customer service right from a webpage.

IE automatically recognizes phone numbers making a call with Skype a click away

Like many Windows customers, I spend a lot of time on the web reading. Since the release preview, we introduced a new Reading View in IE11, which is optimized to display text from the Web in a beautiful, full-screen view within the browser. Reading view automatically stiches together multi-page articles and adjusts for your screen size and orientation. Sitting back with your Windows 8.1 tablet and reading the web has never been as easy and enjoyable.

Reading view in IE11 for a beautiful, fast, fluid reading experience, especially on tablets

You want touch to just work – but some sites haven’t gotten around to it. IE11 has many improvements to make touch just work– like giving always reliable feedback when you tap a link, HTML5 drag and drop support, and making common patterns like hover menus work.

A long press to open hover menus with touch and access the command bar

Some of the feedback from the release preview was that opening the IE address bar isn’t as easy using the mouse on a non-touch laptop or PC, compared with tablets. We worked with the Windows apps team to come up with a solution that improves access to the app bar with mouse and maximizes the screen for your content. We added a “peek” for easier access to the address bar in IE by keeping a minimal 15 pixel bar at the bottom of the screen that you can always click on bring up the address bar. You’ll find the same great experience in the Mail and Calendar apps in Windows 8.1.

Hovering your mouse over the app bar “peek” for a hint, clicking opens the address bar

For some people browsing on large screens like big all-in-one PCs is important. We made IE great for that too. On my desktop PC, I turn on “Always show address bar and tabs”. When I browse I make the most of my big screen. It’s easy to switch tabs, get to my favorites, and navigate with the mouse.

Make the most of your large screen with “Always show address bar and tabs”

With IE11 and Windows 8.1 you can browse the way you want whether you are using touch, or mouse and keyboard, and whether you are on a small device or a large one.

We optimized the IE11 browsing engine for real-world sites to download and display fast and be highly responsive to touch. Over multiple releases we’ve built IE on the underlying support in Windows for graphics hardware acceleration and fast, fluid touch input for modern devices. We’re fortunate to work side by side with experts in 3D graphics, composition, and rendering, with the deepest understanding of the Windows graphics stack and modern hardware. By building together and optimizing for Windows we can ensure great performance and battery life while enabling exciting new experiences for the web.

Developers can build next generation experiences with professional-quality web video, and hyper-fast 2D and 3D web technologies that make the most of the underlying hardware. IE11 supports real world standards and compatibility, and new developer tools enable developers to build high-performance web experiences on Windows devices.

Here are just a few examples of how the web is better for developers with IE11:

Modern Web development is easier. IE11 supports the latest standards and frameworks actively used by web developers. Brand new F12 tools in IE enable iterative, visual debugging and tuning of web sites. Modern.ie enables cross-browser testing, no matter where you choose to develop.

Hardware-accelerated 3D web graphics. Interoperable WebGL experiences run on all devices, taking advantage of GPU acceleration. IE11 scans for unsafe WebGL content and implements a software-based renderer to complement the GPU. With Windows, graphics subsystem failures are not fatal, and WebGL continues to run. With IE11, your 3D experiences can access device orientation to create new interaction opportunities for immersive web content.

The existing web continues to work – even better: IE11 is interoperable with existing sites, which just run faster and look better in IE. Of course, intranet sites and apps continue to run in IE11, which supports Compatibility View.

Enable professional-quality video experiences on the Web. IE11 enables HTML5 video without plugins. IE11 supports the latest standards for closed captioning, streaming that adapts to available network bandwidth, and rights management—so all your video content can be as good as the professionals. Power-efficient video streaming in Windows 8.1 extends battery life for web video.

We built IE11 to make the web great on Windows 8.1 and getting to the sites you love fast and using apps and sites together. These are just a few of the ways IE11 on Windows 8.1 delivers the best web experience on any tablet.

We’re excited for you to try IE11 when you update to Windows 8.1 from the Windows Store starting tomorrow, and enjoy the absolutely best browsing experience on your Windows device!

Rob Mauceri
Group Program Manager
Internet Explorer

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Five tools to bring the Start menu back to Windows 8.1

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

When Windows 8.1 ships tomorrow, the Start button returns with it—but if it’s the Start menu you miss, you’ll still need one of these utilities. They bring back the classic pop-up menu that Windows 8 summarily removed, and they add extra features and customization that Microsoft never thought of. Most are free, and the only one that costs anything is well worth its extremely low price. Whether you make the jump to Windows 8.1 immediately or wait a bit, there’s really no point in waiting to enjoy these enhancements to your Windows experience.

Clicking the Start button just puts you into the Windows 8.1 Start page—but fortunately, programs that bring back the classic Start menu still work. The simplest of the programs I tested are Stardock’s $5 Start8, IOBit’s free Start Menu 8, and ReviverSoft’s free Start Menu Reviver.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this is Windows 7, but it’s actually Windows 8.1 with Start8.

All three produce decent facsimiles of the Start menu, but Stardock’s Start8 does the most accurate job of reproducing it. Start8 is still very useful under 8.1, offering a choice of the Windows 7 look-alike Start menu or the new Windows 8 Start page.

It’s easy to switch between the two approaches. You don’t get the same amount of control that you get with other menu programs, though. You can’t configure the look and feel of the menu very much, and you can’t create custom shortcuts.

You can customize the Start-menu button in Start Menu 8’s clean interface.

Start Menu 8 performs similarly to Start8, producing a decent reproduction of the Windows 7 Start menu. It lacks some of the design polish of Start8, but its nice extra touches include the ‘Switch to Metro’ button that takes you to the Microsoft Start page, and the MetroApps option, which provides direct access to apps that use only the Windows 8 Metro interface. These make it a little more useful for those who want to bridge the gap between the two versions.

Start Menu Reviver’s unique Start menu owes more to Windows 8 than Windows 7.

Start Menu Reviver, as the name suggests, also brings back the Start menu, but it dispenses with the past and instead adopts a look that’s in line with the Modern design style of Windows 8 itself. It doesn’t take over the desktop—the Microsoft Start page is still accessible as one of the tiles.

The most interesting feature in Start Menu Reviver is the ability to create and tweak tiles. You can create a tile for any installed program by dragging and dropping its icon onto the menu itself. You can also easily move, resize, or delete existing tiles, making this new style menu very easy to customize.

For anyone looking simply to replicate the Windows 7 Start menu, Start Menu 8 is the simplest and most flexible option. But Start Menu Reviver impressed me: It feels more like a Windows 8 program, and it provides a lot of flexibility. And it’s fair to say that all of these programs do a better job than Microsoft itself of making Windows 8.1 easier to use.

The free Classic Shell and Pokki go beyond adding a Start menu, offering extra features that actually improve the Windows experience. In fact, both of them predate Windows 8, making them the only programs here that you can test-drive on an earlier operating system.

Classic Shell offers three styles of Start menu, plus options to customize its look and feel.

Classic Shell 4.0 adds a number of new features to Windows 8.1, including a customizable Start menu, enhancements to Windows Explorer, and tweaks for Internet Explorer.

Classic Shell’s Start menu offers three designs: a classic, Windows-XP-type design; a two-column, Vista-like design; and a Windows-7-style Start menu. The Start Screen of Windows 8.1 isn’t completely replaced, though: Instead, Classic Shell pins the Start Screen at the top of the Start menu and lists all of the programs from that screen as menu items under All Programs > Apps.

If you would prefer to add to rather than replace the new Start button, Pokki creates an alternative way to start programs. In Windows 8.1, Pokki works alongside the returning Microsoft Start button, adding a button called Home. This brings up the Pokki menu, which offers a customizable list of program shortcuts, as well as a few familiar options from the pre-Windows 8 Start menu.

If you have a long list of programs, you can search by typing a letter in Pokki’s search box. This kind of search also turns up control panels and files.

Pokki also offers a range of free programs (such as Angry Birds and Instagram client Instagrille) that you can install with a single click. You can pin any installed program to a spot on the home menu, which can hold up to 25 program shortcuts per page (there are four additional pages available, for a total of 125 shortcuts). If you don’t want to scroll between pages, a text window at the top of the menu allows you to search by name: Just type the first letter, and the list of shortcuts that begin with that letter show up.

Overall, Pokki still provides an excellent accompaniment to the Microsoft Start menu and Start page, allowing you to start programs faster and more efficiently, and install new ones quicker and easier than you could via Microsoft’s own App Store.

When Windows 8.1 was first announced, we thought these apps might be finished. But that’s not happening: Microsoft’s poor compromise of linking the Start button and the Start page still leaves a features gap that these utilities address.

These five apps offer a solution that Microsoft itself seems to not understand: Give the users what they want, and the power to tweak it to their requirements.

Richard Baguley has been writing about, testing and breaking technology for the past 20 years. He has written for Wired, Macworld, USA Today, Amiga Format and many others
More by Richard Baguley

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Windows at Intel Developer Forum 2013

Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2013is happening this week in San Francisco and Tami Reller, Executive Vice President, Marketing joined Kirk Skaugen, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s PC Client Group, on stage during his keynote this morning to talk about Windows. The strong continuation of the long lasting (over 25 years!) partnership between the two companies.

Customers expect Windows on Intel architecture to provide compatibility and consistency along with personalization, productivity, and security - on beautiful, smart, connected devices. And this is even more true with Windows 8.1, which is optimized to power the latest in innovative form factors powered by Intel’s “Haswell” (4th generation Core) processors and “Bay Trail” (Atom) processors that Intel is launching this week at IDF. "Bay Trail” is Intel’s first 22nm system-on-a-chip (SoC) for 2-in-1 devices and small tablets and will offer high performance with amazing battery life. A number of these new devices were announced at IFA last week in Berlin– with more to be announced in the coming months going into holiday and beyond.

As we ramp up toward general availability of Windows 8.1, we’re seeing accelerating momentum with Windows 8. Windows 8 PCs were in demand for back to school and we saw a bump in activations (or new PCs coming online) and Net Apps data released earlier this month confirmed this bump between July and August. Our August activations were the highest for Windows 8 so far! And remember, consumers will be able to update their Windows 8 devices to Windows 8.1 for free through the Windows Store.

Tami also talked about the work we’re doing at retail, specifically the Windows Store Only at Best Buy. These store-within-a-store experiences are one of the newest places you can find new Windows devices. We offered more than 100 unique Windows devices in Best Buy stores during the Back to School shopping season. We launched Windows Stores Only at Best Buy in June and today we have more than 400 stores up and running all around the country, manned by Microsoft trained employees to help you find, personalize and purchase the new Windows device that fits your lifestyle.

And finally, Tami also discussed to the work we are doing to raise awareness for Windows XP end-of-support (on April 8th, 2014) and helping businesses and consumers move to a Modern OS. While, we’ve been talking with enterprise customers for years about this deadline, we’re accelerating our efforts across business and consumer audiences. We have a number of programs designed to reduce cost and complexity of migrating like TouchWins, which incents partners to drive PC refresh with Windows 8.1 devices. For more on Windows XP end-of-support, see this blog post.

We are excited for Windows 8.1 all the different kinds of devices coming powered by Intel’s latest processor technology.

UPDATE 9/12: You can watch yesterday’s keynote at IDF with Tami here. Her section of the keynote begins at about the 10:00 mark.

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Building Bing Smart Search for Windows 8.1

This blog post is part of a series of guest posts we’re publishing this week from different people in groups across Microsoft who helped us build Windows 8.1. – Brandon

My name is Kieran Snyder, and I’m a Group Program Manager in the Bing User Experience team. My team was responsible for working hand-in-hand with Windows engineering to build the new Bing Smart Search in Windows 8.1. I’m excited to tell you a little bit about our work with the Windows team to build what is one of the coolest and most visible improvements to Windows 8, and highlight a few of my favorite things, now that it will be broadly available to everyone tomorrow.

Integration from the Start

The Bing/Windows collaboration on Smart Search for the Windows 8.1 update started with our work on Windows 8 when our teams worked together to build the Bing search app. The focus for that app was a cross-team effort to create a modern, fast and fluid search experience that was great for touch, and took advantage of what the revolutionary Windows 8 platform offered. Both teams brought different perspectives to the table in those first days of collaboration. Bing brought a deep knowledge of core search, including experience with experimentation and agile development, expertise in machine learning and relevance, and specialized knowledge in multimedia. Windows was embracing modern design, and brought the kind of unrelenting attention to detail and craftsmanship that is essential when you’re shipping software to a billion people around the world. And as we worked through that initial project across teams – and I was actually a Group Program Manager in the Windows team at the time – we realized how much more opportunity there was to rethink what search should be and to build something really great for people that brought all the pieces together.

From the start of Windows 8.1 development both the Windows and Bing engineering teams knew that we wanted to go all in on search – together. For me personally, the Windows 8 collaboration brought me back to my old roots in natural language processing and got me hooked on the search space, so when work began on Windows 8.1 I moved to the Bing team to learn everything I could about it. But, to make a cross-company collaborative project work at this scale, you need a truly diverse set of individuals involved. On the Bing side we started building a new team to work on Smart Search that drew from a wide variety of expertise and backgrounds. Our team now includes people with advanced graduate degrees and some straight out of college; folks with varied perspective as designers, developers, researchers and marketers; people with experience in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, as well as companies outside of Microsoft and the startup scene. And that’s just our small corner of Bing. All told, nearly 1,000 people in Bing have contributed to Smart Search in some way, including program managers, developers, testers, designers, researchers and our colleagues in business development and marketing.

Rethinking what search should and could be

The promise of creating something together – making a modern search experience that includes the best of Windows search and the best of web search all in one place was an exciting challenge. We knew we wanted to help people find what they needed, no matter where it lived or what it was. We asked ourselves, “Why should someone have to remember where they saved something? What if there is a forgotten note or picture tucked away that can be helpful; how would you know to go look for it? Shouldn’t Windows help you find all of that?” That was the underlying goal with Smart Search – let you simply swipe or type to find everything, all in one place. Whether it is a document on your PC, an app you downloaded months ago, a picture stored in SkyDrive or a website, Bing Smart Search will bring it to the surface. As you’ll see, Smart Search helps you find stuff fast wherever it lives.

A challenge with designing search that works everywhere was reconciling how people have historically searched on Windows versus how they have historically searched on the Web. Consider what we call “query formulation”, which is when you enter your search term in the search box. On the web, when you enter a query in the Bing search box, hitting enter launches a search query for exactly the string you’ve typed – like this:

But in the world of Windows when typing “sky” and pressing enter, you expect to launch SkyDrive directly, rather than searching for “sky” and getting a web search results page. It took us many rounds of iteration to make sure the Smart Search experience exactly preserved web search expectations, but didn’t compromise the efficiency of quick commanding in Windows. Notice how typing “sky” in Smart Search surfaces SkyDrive, as well as related Control Panel settings, and more:

That is just one example of the challenges we had ahead of us to rethink the search experience for a new and improved Windows experience. We quickly realized that even with a great team and a strong partnership, this wasn’t going to be easy!

Leveraging Satori for the Windows canvas

Within the varied backgrounds of our two teams were also many strengths that have given us the opportunity to look beyond the constraints of a traditional search box and create transformative experiences that are unlike anything you can find in other products. My favorite example of this is a feature we call “search heroes.”

To provide background on the search heroes I want to outline a little context on some pretty cool technology that most people don’t know about. For many years, Bing has invested in Satori, which is essentially a repository of the many people, places, events, and objects in the world – what we call entities – and more importantly the relationships between them. At last count, and this changes due to the constant changing nature of the web, Satori includes hundreds of millions of entities and understand billions of points of information linking them together. Satori provides the foundation for our Snapshot experiences on Bing.com, so that when you search for your favorite celebrity or famous landmark, you get an arrangement of facts, biographical information, images and other key information in addition to the most relevant web results.

Windows 8.1 provides a fantastic, full-bleed canvas where apps can shine, and we realized pretty quickly how the investment made in Satori could be leveraged across this canvas for a Smart Search experience that is beautiful as well as functional. Search heroes take this vast set of structured data that Bing has about the world and turns it into something that feels beautiful, curated, and relevant – something that looks and feels like the best modern apps. Thanks to Satori and Bing, you can think of these experiences as mini-apps that Windows creates on the fly. As you would expect of an experience built for Windows, they include deep links into your Windows applications to help you get stuff done.

Take music, as an example, which has been one of the most popular categories in the Release Preview. With Bing, Windows, and the Xbox team working together, we can present a big, beautiful answer that puts the most relevant information and actions front and center. We are able to include immediate music playback of all the most popular songs in the Xbox Music catalog, serve up music videos, launch apps that can help you go deeper and get more done, and surface other information that is easily accessible with a swipe of your finger. Across Windows, Xbox, and Bing, we built something that none of these teams could have made in isolation.

Dynamic and agile

There isn’t a single part of the Smart Search experience that hasn’t been built in collaboration across our teams, including our state of the art image search and our results page that combines relevant results from Windows, apps, the web, and your personal content from SkyDrive. But perhaps the most critical investment that we’ve made together is our update pipeline and flighting service, which allows Bing to deploy new search features and refinements to Windows every single day. Now you can get critical search updates every time you use Windows – versus waiting for periodic updates. With Smart Search we dynamically reflect the ever-changing web, we can learn what’s popular and what’s not, we can try out new experiences to see how well people like them, and we can improve your experience daily. This is the largest-scale investment in server-side development for Windows that Microsoft has ever made, and it took incredible commitment on the part of the Windows team to build this. More than any other part of our collaboration, this is what sets us up to make new, dynamic experiences together for years to come, delivering what people need when they need it.

One Microsoft

Building something together in such a close way is often hard at a big company. From the very beginning of this project, Katie Frigon, my counterpart in Windows, and I have had full commitment to a shared design process. For fifteen months now, every User Interface PM and designer on the project has gotten together for two hours every Friday morning to share work in progress and to critique and discuss together. These design forums are meetings we continue to have as we look to our next set of features and investments. There is just no substitute for having everyone on a project in the same room together week in and week out to make the project work. We hold shared architecture reviews and code reviews for developers. The lead designers on the project recently gave a presentation to user experience leads around the company about this design process so they can share their learnings. Windows and Bing user researchers test each other’s features in the lab and run shared studies. At all levels of the company and across all disciplines, collaboration has been open, effective, and frequent, and I’m thrilled about what this has allowed us to build together and excited about what comes next.

Smart Search is just the beginning of what’s new in Windows 8.1. We can’t wait for you to check it out! If you have Windows 8, (tomorrow) just go to the Windows Store on the Start screen and get the update. If you don’t yet have Windows 8 or are waiting for all the great devices coming this holiday season, you can head to www.bing.com/smartsearch to see it in action and get a feel for what you’re missing.

Kieran Snyder
Group Program Manager
Bing User Experience Team

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Mark your calendars for Windows 8.1!

Thank you Brandon. Thank you so much for the heads up.

The only concern I have with Windows RT 8.1 is the lack of 3g/4g USB dongle support. Currently, the 3g/4g USB  dongle when attached to the RT device, they appear as storage media. The same happens in 8.1 preview. When inquired, the TechNet guys suggest that those dongles are not optimized for low energy network platform (NDIS 6.3?) running RT so can't be trusted, but works fine in all non-RT version. Only the  built-in 3g/4g support is allowed in RT devices. The devices which don't support the 3g/4g dongles can only connect via WIFI. Which is a demise of one great feature and a very handy alternative!

So dear Windows Team, please consider this scenario:

"When user attach the 3g/4g USB dongle to WinRT device, warn the user that the attached device non-power-saver or not battery-friendly and if they use it as Network adapter, the efficiency of their device battery would be affected".

This is it, your job is to warn the user and recommend them the best practices. If they still want to use non-optimized device, its their battery loss. What if they really needed to use 3g/4g dongle for the most critical 10 minutes of their life? So, not letting them do which they are accustomed to do with Windows in past...just because you think they will permanently loose some fraction of their battery strength...is certainly not a good idea...  Whoever engineered this idea, is WRONG!

Also, from ecosystem or ubiquity point of view, this graceful degradation of power consciousness feature (which is only one aspect of WindowsRT) is a better user experience compared to degrading the purpose of the device (Network adapter -> storage media...). This is NOT the way Windows ever worked or should work. Windows always provide wide range of options and care about the users investments.

Please convince the bosses who matter that lack of this feature is insanely wrong.

Please fix this.

View the original article here

SkyDrive and Windows 8.1

This blog post is part of a series of guest posts we’re publishing this week from different people in groups across Microsoft who helped us build Windows 8.1. – Brandon

My name is Adam Czeisler and I am the Development Manager for one half of the SkyDrive team in Windows Services. Our team, called SkyDrive Devices & Roaming is responsible for building the client software that is the expression of SkyDrive on all devices, including Windows tablets and PCs. The other half of the team, called SkyDrive Cloud Services, is responsible for building the web service that powers these experiences. They also build the SkyDrive website at http://www.skydrive.com.

In the past two years leading up to our work in Windows 8.1, our team built and released several SkyDrive apps on all major platforms. We released apps for Windows Phone, Xbox, iOS, Android, and a Store app for Windows 8. We also released sync clients that perform two-way synchronization of files to the SkyDrive service on Windows 8/7/Vista as well as on Mac OSX. This was a great learning experience for our team. Over the course of several updates to these apps we have learned how people want to access their files from their devices, what features matter most on each device, and also of course the unique set of development challenges and opportunities these different platforms offer. All of this work prepared us for this past year when we set out, together with experts in the Windows team to bring the best of all SkyDrive experiences to Windows.

Before Windows 8.1, our engineering designs fell into two major categories, apps and sync clients. The apps communicate with the SkyDrive service using a stateless JSON API in a design pattern similar to a website. In fact the SkyDrive apps browse the hierarchy of files and folders in SkyDrive via the same JSON API used by the SkyDrive website. This design is helpful because we strive to make the feature set be consistent across all endpoints. The image below shows the SkyDrive app on Xbox 360, built on the JSON API (watch the video).

In contrast the sync clients used a proprietary sync protocol directly with a lower layer of the SkyDrive service stack. This sync protocol is generally limited to supporting “CRUD” operations on files (Create, Read, Update and Delete).

There are pros and cons to each engineering approach. The design used by the apps is good because it allows them to have a small footprint on the device. The apps are able to browse very large data sets relatively quickly because the JSON API lets them ask for any view of the tree independently. There is no need to download the full body of the files in order to browse the collection of files. Caching items like thumbnails, tree structure, etc. can be done in a dynamic way and the cache can be managed independently of the core logic. Because of this design choice, these apps are well suited to small storage devices such as phones or tablets.

On the other hand, this approach has two major drawbacks, 1) offline operations can’t be done on the files and 2) since most operations are performed directly against the service, the performance is limited to the speed of the network rather than the speed of the local storage on the device.

The sync clients have the opposite characteristics. On the positive side, they naturally have full CRUD operations available both offline and online. And when the apps are interacting with the files, they are doing this against the local storage in the device so the speed is often one or two orders of magnitude higher than when accessing this content from the network.

But the sync approach has a major drawback – in order to browse or interact with any of the files on SkyDrive they all have to be fully downloaded on the device. This solution just isn’t acceptable on a device with limited storage because the slice of data that would fit on the devices is typically too small to be useful. Also the raw time to download and sometimes even the cost of downloading this data can be potentially very large.

In Windows 8 we tackled these problems by releasing both a SkyDrive modern app and a SkyDrive sync client. We had all the pros and all the cons of both engineering designs. In addition the app and the sync client couldn’t communicate with each other which led to some temporary inconsistencies that could be confusing to people who used both. When we started planning for Windows 8.1 we knew we wanted to do something better. Could we have the best of both worlds?

To do it, we knew we would need a solution that let people browse the full SkyDrive namespace in Explorer and in the SkyDrive modern app. We also wanted them to be able to perform CRUD operations against this dataset, even when offline. But we didn’t want to have to download the entire SkyDrive to the local device to accomplish this. Could this be done? We weren’t sure, so we joined forces with the experts in the Windows team to see if we could build a hybrid solution that gave us everything we wanted.

Our team has deep expertise in file sync technology. Several members have released multiple file sync products over the years; some have even worked on similar technology in Microsoft Research. But we didn’t have deep experience with the Windows Shell architecture, codebase or APIs. Clearly we would need this in order to deliver the best integration of SkyDrive into Windows possible. Luckily the team in Windows with the most expertise in this area was formed to help us design and implement the integration of SkyDrive into Windows. This team, called Cloud Experience, was our main partner in Windows during the year. After discussing the problem above they came up with a design for a new platform in Windows called “smart files”. Smart files are files that contain only metadata and no “body”. In addition they have a special behavior where applications or components on the system can register to be the provider for the contents of the file and when a caller reads the body of the file via certain APIs, these providers are invoked to satisfy this request. By hooking the SkyDrive sync engine into this pipeline as a provider for files in the SkyDrive namespace, we could seamlessly provide access to data stored in the service without forcing all the data to exist on the device before accessing it. That sounded very promising, so this was the design we chose.

Now we had a solution that reduced the space needed on the device to access the full SkyDrive namespace while still allowing full CRUD operations to be performed both online and offline via Explorer in the Desktop. But we also needed the SkyDrive modern app to be able to view and modify these files. So we rebuilt the SkyDrive app on top of the Windows Shell APIs, which are built on top of the core file system with additional behavior such as mentioned above for smart files. This meant that the SkyDrive app could now have offline access as well as have a spectrum of performance from network to local speeds depending on whether or not the files were downloaded to the local machine. Awesome. Now we just had to build it!

Working directly in Windows this past year to integrate SkyDrive deeply into the operating system was a fantastic journey for our team. We learned firsthand about the tremendous breadth and depth of scenarios that the Windows Shell supports by integrating both as a provider in the sync engine and a consumer in the modern app. Through the process we gained a deep respect for the people who built that system over the past decades in such a layered and extensible way that allowed it to be augmented with a service-backed file system in such a short time with relatively few architectural changes.

For example, the image below shows the existing file copy dialog in Explorer effortlessly lighting up a scenario where the sync engine is automatically invoked to download several images as they are being copied to the Desktop from a folder in SkyDrive. Stats like percent complete, throughput and remaining bytes are shown to the user. You can even pause or abort the operation through this user interface and because of the deep integration with the Windows Shell, the sync engine will respond to these commands directly.

Another highlight was working closely with the group in Windows dedicated to performance analysis and improvements. With their help and guidance we made several key changes to minimize the impact of the sync engine on the system. For example, for more efficient monitoring of changes in the file system we integrated into a built-in Windows component called the Change Tracker. This allowed us to eliminate nearly all direct scans of the local files in SkyDrive, which in the standalone version of the sync client were necessary to ensure we didn’t miss any changes while the process wasn’t running. With help from the Cloud Experience team we cut the memory footprint in half by leveraging the search indexer to store file transfer status. We also did work to protect the CPU idle state by creating a special dormant mode in the sync engine so that when there was no outstanding work to be done we could “go to sleep” and have nearly zero impact on the rest of the system.

Switching gears to the modern SkyDrive app, I want to highlight another great partnership we had this year with the team that builds the apps and controls related to photo and image processing in Windows, called the Apps for Creative Expression team. In Windows 8 they built the modern Photos app that aggregated SkyDrive photos as well as photos from your local device. The app had a very nice interface for viewing photos but both of our teams were frustrated that customers could hit “dead ends” in both the SkyDrive app and the Photos app when interacting with images on SkyDrive. For example you couldn’t move, rename or edit photos in SkyDrive from the Photos app and in the SkyDrive app the viewer was not nearly as rich as the one in the Photos app. We really wanted to solve these problems together in Windows 8.1. The way we did this was to build both the Photos app and the SkyDrive app using nearly all of the same source code and binaries, with some small runtime differences in default views and theming. In addition to working directly in the core apps, the Apps for Creative Expression team designed and built the beautiful photo viewer/editor control that is used in both apps.

For a great example of the types of scenarios that are enabled by the integration of the SkyDrive sync engine into Windows and the sharing of code between the Photos and SkyDrive apps, try browsing full-screen through some photos in SkyDrive using either the modern Photos or SkyDrive app, swipe to bring up the app bar and then choose ‘Edit’. The full file will be automatically downloaded from the SkyDrive service and the photo editor control will present you with a variety of useful and powerful touch-enabled tools to enhance your photos. If you save the changes, they will be automatically uploaded to SkyDrive via the sync engine. No matter whether you interact with your SkyDrive photos via the Photos app or the SkyDrive app you will always have the full set of appropriate features available to you.

One of our philosophies as a team has been that clients are an extension of the service. We think of them as simply another endpoint that expresses the service to the customer, much like a browser. This means that all clients should have roughly the same feature set and capabilities. They will be of course tailored to the device but the customer experience should be familiar in every expression of the service.

Besides making sure the experiences are consistent and familiar on every endpoint, we also need to ensure that the operations on all of our endpoints are reliable and robust. From an engineering point of view, in order for any service to achieve the kind of reliability that our customers expect there are three capabilities required. Engineers need to be able to 1) measure reliability, 2) diagnose issues and 3) deploy fixes. This process must be repeatable in a tight iterative loop. As the cycle continues, quality rises.

When we designed our original standalone sync clients, we realized we had gaps in all three areas above that we needed to fill. So over the years we have iterated on solutions to increase our capabilities in measurement, diagnostics and deployment. We created a telemetry system that measures sync convergence across all of our clients on a daily basis. We built a pipeline to gather anonymous data that lets the team diagnose issues that are flagged in the telemetry system. And finally we built an updating mechanism for the Windows sync client through which we could deploy fixes to all endpoints with no user-interaction. When we integrated the SkyDrive sync engine into Windows 8.1 we were able to keep all of these capabilities by either bringing them into the operating system or using other pre-existing mechanisms. Because of this, we are able to continue our work to monitor and improve the experience of our customers using the product each day.

I am extremely excited for the GA release of Windows 8.1. Knowing that millions of customers will be using SkyDrive in more useful ways than they have ever been able to do before, with many of them using a cloud file service for the first time ever, is humbling, exciting and inspiring all at the same time. As a team we will face new challenges as we scale up to meet the demands of the millions of new customers we hope to gain. We will learn and we will improve continuously. Our goal is to delight every person who uses SkyDrive, every minute and every day they use it, so that they are customers for life.

And by the way, there are tons of other great features in Windows 8.1 besides the SkyDrive integration. One of my favorites is the new small-size tiles on the Start screen. I can get all of my most important apps on one screen now, which is always alive with color and activity. Here is my own Start screen running Windows 8.1. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

(This is Adam’s Start screen in Windows 8.1!)

Adam Czeisler
Development Manager
SkyDrive

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