If there’s one thing I know about Microsoft after covering the company for more than 20 years, it’s that it will always respond to a competitive threat. Apple’s MacBook Air convinced Microsoft and Intel to launch thin and light laptops with the Ultrabook initiative, the iPad pushed Microsoft to create its own tablet hardware, and the threat of Chromebooks saw Microsoft try to match the security and simplicity of ChromeOS with S mode versions of Windows.
A history of fast follows (and my own sources) tells me that Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo announcement last month will force Microsoft to seriously improve Windows. A lot of changes are imminent. Barely two weeks after Apple announced the MacBook Neo, Microsoft unveiled a plan to fix Windows 11 that involves focusing on performance, reliability, and the overall user experience.
It’s no coincidence that Microsoft announced these Windows changes around the same time as the MacBook Neo. Just like how former CEO Steve Ballmer held up an HP tablet PC days before Apple’s original iPad announcement in 2010, Microsoft has always closely followed Apple, be it with the Zune or making Windows Mobile a touch-friendly OS.
Sources familiar with Microsoft’s Windows efforts tell me that plans to improve the operating system started last summer. The Windows team first started improving the consistency of dark mode across the operating system as an early easy win in the fall. But as the threat of a low-cost MacBook emerged, and reviewers, enthusiasts, and consumers grew more vocal about the pain points of Windows 11, Microsoft started to look at a bigger response.
One of the key changes being planned for Windows 11 later this year is improvements to memory efficiency. The plan is to reduce the memory footprint of Windows 11 to open the door to devices with less RAM. Not only will this help PC makers respond to the ongoing RAM crisis, it will also help them ship devices that respond to the MacBook Neo low price point enabled, in part, by its meager 8GB of RAM.
Microsoft is also working on improving search in Windows, reducing the latency of the Start menu, and speeding up File Explorer. Windows 11 users will also finally be able to move the taskbar to the top or sides of a screen, and even pause Windows updates for as long as they want. Microsoft is also promising to reduce the noise and distractions of Windows, which will hopefully mean fewer ads and annoying pop-ups. All of these changes should add up to a faster, less annoying version of Windows 11 that runs more reliably on devices with less memory.
This renewed engineering effort reminds me of Microsoft’s response to Apple’s M1 chips. The M1 showed that a phone-like chip could easily power a laptop and offer much better performance-per-watt than anything Intel could ship. While Microsoft had spent a decade dabbling with Windows on Arm, the M1 kicked off an even bigger effort with Qualcomm to respond with Copilot Plus PCs. Microsoft was so confident it had finally nailed the transition to Arm that it spent an entire day showing off progress to members of the media, pitting its new hardware directly against the MacBook Air.
I’m still surprised that I use an Arm-powered Windows laptop daily, especially as Microsoft’s original Windows on Arm launch with the Surface RT was such a mess that it led to the company pivoting to focus on Intel-based Surface Pro devices for many years instead. It wasn’t until 2019 that Microsoft got serious about Windows on Arm again. Microsoft’s Windows chief, Pavan Davuluri, was a key engineer in the effort with Qualcomm to make Windows on Arm a reality. Davuluri worked on the custom Surface processors with AMD and Qualcomm, and helped launch the impressive Surface Pro X model ahead of Apple’s transition to its own silicon.
Davuluri is now leading the effort to improve Windows 11 and once again respond to a competitive threat from Apple. The launch of Copilot Plus PCs helped temporarily stem the flow of Windows laptop users switching to a MacBook Air at the premium end of the laptop market, but a $599 MacBook Neo is an even bigger threat since it targets the mass-market audience. Apple is also chasing iPhone owners who might be considering a budget Windows laptop, which will put a lot of pressure on Microsoft’s OEM partners.
Davuluri has assembled a team of engineers and designers to tackle the Windows problems, with Marcus Ash, head of design and research for Windows + Devices, leading the effort. Ash previously worked on Windows Phone at Microsoft and was one of the founding members of the Cortana digital assistant. Microsoft would have probably named Cortana something like “Microsoft Personal Digital Assistant Home Premium” if it wasn’t for Ash’s team pushing to make the codename the product name.
Ash has now assembled a team of design experts and engineers to chase after the issues in Windows that need to be addressed in a thoughtful way. Rudy Huyn, famous for single handedly trying to save Windows Phone, has been working on improving the Windows shell and File Explorer. Even Scott Hanselman, a well-liked developer at Microsoft, is working on Windows improvements as part of his new role as vice president of technical staff for CoreAI, GitHub, and Windows.
So it seems Windows is in good hands, but the proof is in the pudding. Microsoft will now need this team of experts to execute its plan to fix Windows 11 quickly and with quality if it wants to counter the impact of the MacBook Neo and win back trust in Windows. While the Ultrabook response to the MacBook Air changed Windows laptops forever, Microsoft’s immediate response to the iPad with Windows 8 took a whole new version of Windows to course correct. I’m hoping we won’t have to wait for Windows 12 to see meaningful improvements.
The pressure is now on to get Windows into a much better place, and there’s nothing like a bit of healthy competition to force a Microsoft response.
- Microsoft’s executive shake-up continues as developer division chief resigns. Microsoft is losing another veteran executive. Julia Liuson, head of Microsoft’s developer division (DevDiv), is resigning from the software giant after 34 years. Liuson’s resignation came a day after Eric Boyd, former president of AI platform at Microsoft, announced he had joined Anthropic as head of infrastructure. Liuson and Boyd are the latest in a line of executive departures at Microsoft in recent months, ahead of the company’s new financial year in July.
- The new Copilot app is just Microsoft Edge under the hood. Microsoft has been encouraging developers to use its Edge WebView 2 technology for web apps, but the company has decided to ship a full version of Edge as the new Copilot app. If you rename the Copilot executable and its folder to Edge, then it will launch Microsoft Edge instead. This is the clearest sign yet that Microsoft is pulling back from investing more into Copilot on Windows.
- Xbox’s new era needs games like Forza Horizon 6. My colleague Andrew Webster got an early look at Forza Horizon 6, and he’s impressed. The open-world racing game debuts next month and is set in Japan. While some franchises have struggled under Microsoft’s umbrella, Forza Horizon is one of Xbox’s most consistent series. Webster says “What Xbox needs is more games like Forza Horizon 6, which is coming at exactly the right time.”
- Microsoft brings back Windows Insider meetups. Microsoft is bringing back Windows Insider meetups, starting with an event in New York City on April 21st. Members of the Windows Insider team will also be visiting Hyderabad, Taipei, San Francisco, and London in the coming weeks. This is all part of the ongoing effort to fix Windows 11.
- Xbox achievements are getting a visual refresh. Microsoft is working on UI improvements to the Xbox dashboard that will also include a new look and feel for Xbox achievements. Xbox Insiders can now test the new achievements, which have updated icons and animations when you unlock a classic or rare achievement. The notifications will also match your custom color. You’ll also be able to hide achievements from your Xbox profile later this month.
- Why Microsoft’s war on Windows’ Control Panel is taking so long. It feels like Microsoft has been trying to get rid of the Control Panel in Windows ever since Windows 8 debuted in 2012. While there have been several hints that the Control Panel might finally go away, making that a reality has been complicated for Microsoft. Network and printer device drivers have held back some of the work, according to March Rogers, partner director of design at Microsoft. I suspect there have been a lot more complications though, especially as the old Control Panel never really locked down how applets and menus worked, so restricting these has been a big engineering effort.
- Microsoft is testing haptic feedback in Windows 11. Microsoft has started testing a new feature that will let Windows 11 users “feel haptic feedback effects on compatible input devices while performing certain actions, such as aligning objects in PowerPoint, window snapping, resizing, or hovering over the Close button.” It sounds like the ideal feature for a trackpad, or even a mouse like Logitech’s new X2 Pro Superstrike that has haptics-based analog sensors.
- NASA’s Artemis II mission got interrupted by Microsoft Outlook. Even in outer space, Outlook can be a pain in the neck. Commander Reid Wiseman ran into an issue with “two Microsoft Outlooks” failing to work. It sounded like Outlook (New) and Outlook (classic) both didn’t work, and NASA later explained the problem wasn’t uncommon. “You know, sometimes Outlook has issues getting configured, especially when you don’t have a network that’s directly connected. And so essentially we just had to reload his files on Outlook to get it working,” said Artemis flight director Judd Frieling.
- Microsoft’s new “superintelligence” game plan is all about business. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman is now focusing on the company’s own models, instead of juggling this work with the consumer version of Copilot. His plan is for “superintelligence” with “world-class models” that don’t rely on the likes of Anthropic or OpenAI. “That’s really our focus. We want to deliver for developers, for enterprises, and many, many consumers,” says Suleyman. Microsoft debuted a new transcription model on its Foundry and AI Playground services last week that’s all about “pushing the frontier of speech recognition.” With Microsoft Build coming up in June, I’d expect we’ll hear even more about Suleyman’s model plans soon.
- Anthropic’s new model found security problems in “every major operating system and web browser.” Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Nvidia have all got access to Claude Mythos Preview, a new AI model from Anthropic that can flag vulnerabilities in software with practically no human intervention. Anthropic isn’t releasing this to the general public due to security concerns, and the company is hoping the model will give cybersecurity experts a “head start” against hackers.
- A deep dive on Microsoft CFO’s AI spending. Bloomberg News has profiled Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, digging into AI spending, the belt-tightening at Xbox, and lots more. Hood has been at Microsoft for nearly 24 years, and has been Microsoft’s CFO for 13 years. The profile details Hood’s pullback on data center spending last year, and how Microsoft is scrambling to get more data centers online to meet AI demand.
I’m always keen to hear from readers, so please drop a comment here, or you can reach me at notepad@theverge.com if you want to discuss anything else. If you’ve heard about any of Microsoft’s secret projects, you can reach me via email at notepad@theverge.com or speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I’m tomwarren.01. I’m also tomwarren on Telegram, if you’d prefer to chat there.
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