How Microsoft learned from the past to redefine its future

One of the parts of Microsoft's headquarters represents everything that has changed in its design philosophy. Inside, there are four rows of tables. At the forefront is everything the company already makes in stores. In the second, there is the next generation of products, and in the third and fourth, there are really conceptual things that Microsoft wants to try to create in the future. "If you spend enough time in this room, you see the gaps, some bulbs go out," says Ralf Groene, head of hardware design at Microsoft.

These days, Microsoft's main goal is to look at the bigger picture – not just the product, but how a whole ecosystem of products needs to be commercialized, evolved, and worked together in the next few years. years. While in the past, products may have been secretly developed by separate teams and eventually appeared and feel disparate because of this, Microsoft has recently abandoned this approach. It has now adopted a philosophy called "open design" that involves sharing ideas within the company, integrating products and failing faster. The hope is that it will lead to a better combination of hardware and software that seems to come from one company and is also better for it.

It's not just about improving Microsoft's visual design. It's a much deeper change that aims to modernize the way Microsoft ships software and competes with much more agile startups that can aggressively attack the many companies it traditionally controls. The challenges of a technological industry that is accelerating every year are considerable.

I have heard and read many stories about the evolution of Microsoft's culture in recent years and the closer collaboration of product teams. It's such a big change at Microsoft that I wanted to see for myself how society does things differently now. Earlier this month, I spent three days at the company's headquarters in Redmond, WA, where I met with designers and engineers, attended illustrations planning meetings, and leaders involved in this new approach to design.

One thing is clear from my visit: Microsoft has really learned from the mistakes of the past. However, it will not be easy to transform a 44-year-old company to redefine its future.

Every Thursday, Surface, Windows and Microsoft applications come together to discuss what they are working on. During one of these many meetings in a sunny conference room at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, designers came together to debate the intelligence that Microsoft should have with its designs. What is the tone of the voice? What is the visual representation of the product's personality? Ultimately, how should the voice of Microsoft be expressed in the form of illustrations and design?

More than a dozen employees attended the meeting, representing products such as OneNote, OneDrive and Microsoft Teams. Everyone has criticized each other's designs, offering opinions and ways to build on Microsoft's color scheme, principles of illustration, and general voice to create consistent products. This may seem like a normal meeting in most companies. At Microsoft, it would have been unimaginable just 10 years ago.

For its latest design system, Fluent Design, Microsoft draws ideas from the entire company and keeps everyone in sync with an internal catalog of shared principles and guidelines. Designers can connect to see the work of other users through models, concepts and designs delivered to the public. "This was the first step in the democratization of design at Microsoft," said Jon Friedman, vice president of design and research at Microsoft.

This approach comes from one of the biggest failures of Microsoft: Windows Phone. At launch, Microsoft brought together the company's Windows, Office, and Hardware teams to create a radical new "Metro" design language that gives its operating system a modern look. Windows Phone as a platform may have failed, but its design really pushed Apple and Google to create better mobile operating systems.

"I think what we've learned, at least on the phone, is that to have a good design system, you should not be limited to just one product," says Albert Shum, Design Manager for Windows. "How do you adapt to hundreds of products serving millions of customers, in a way, billions of customers?"

Fluent really brought Microsoft back to the basics of design, with a greater emphasis on simplicity. Instead of a bold typography and edge-to-edge content, Fluent focuses on subtle elements such as light, depth, movement and materials. We saw it appear in Windows with motion notes and blur effects. He has also appeared in Office and on the Web for services such as OneDrive, Office Online and Outlook. Microsoft is gradually making Fluent the centerpiece of how the company views design.

It's a design that has to adapt to a multitude of products, some of which are used by over a billion people around the world. Microsoft designers need to determine whether they create artwork and artwork for students, workers, or consumers in general, and how these designs will be interpreted in different places. There is a lot to cover and every software design must also respect the style of the operating systems of Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc., which feed the many hardware devices running the Microsoft software.

In one of Microsoft's hardware manufacturing workshops, I spotted an unpublished Surface Mini on a hinge designer's shelf. When I joke with Groene, the head of the hardware design, about how he forgot to hide the Surface Mini from his team, he's more interested in what's going to happen. "We are a software publisher. Being able to design better software with hardware is always what inspires us, "he said.

As part of its new workflow, Microsoft also uses designers working on seemingly disparate hardware in the enterprise. I met Chris Kujawski, an industrial designer from the Xbox, who told me that the changes in the company meant that there were more opportunities for designers, and that jobs seemed less dangerous because designers could now work together more freely. This means that a person responsible for designing the Xbox Adaptive Controller console is now working on the new Xbox console and is designing a new Surface.

The Xbox and Surface hardware may not look the same, but the teams responsible for its design are now side by side at Microsoft. Kait Schoeck, an industrial designer who worked on Surface Book, explains that this new way of working means she's "constantly doing new things" and "constantly learning something new" from her fellow designers.

However, all this hardware needs software to be powered, and Microsoft does not consider these processes as separate processes. "We always consider hardware as a stage for software," says Groene. "Sometimes, the scene can also affect the performance of the software, so there is a back and forth of these two elements."

If you think back to the original Surface RT tablet, which was launched with Windows 8, the software (Windows RT) was really far behind the hardware and was showing through incomplete applications and lagging performance. "We focused intensely on the hardware while the software was being developed at the same time … without really having the time to influence each other," says Groene. The goal of any Future Surface hardware is to never make the mistake of the Surface RT situation and to ensure that the software is maintained.

The speed of the competitors also had a considerable impact on Microsoft. The company began building Surface hardware after seeing Apple's resounding success with the MacBook Air and iPad, while Google's regular software updates for Chrome and Android helped inspire the continued Windows iteration. 10.

But it's not just the other tech giants that have worried Microsoft. There are now thousands of startups competing for parts of its business, ranging from Office to cloud services to Outlook.

The software landscape has changed dramatically since Microsoft organized its workflow for the first time. Back in the day, he sent a new version of Windows every few years. The software, hardware and design teams were partitioned, which did not make a huge difference: the design was minimal and the competitors limited.

Internally, Microsoft teams were also fighting against each other. "You've all seen the picture of all the bands pointing their guns at Microsoft. Certainly, there is a bit of that, "said a Windows Phone product manager The edge almost seven years ago. Microsoft was known for its silo teams led by bosses competing with other teams to create the most popular product. Co-founder Bill Gates has organized product reviews where he kills years of work in one meeting, further encouraging these fiefs as teams compete for Gates' attention.

But over the last decade, things have changed a lot. Competitors such as Google and Apple have developed competing products to Microsoft – good products. Office, a $ 35 billion-a-year business that Microsoft continues to dominate, is now fiercely challenged by Google's G Suite services, tools such as Facebook's workplace and many others.

At the same time, small startups have taken over very large companies from Microsoft, often with great success. Dropbox and Slack have been able to innovate in ways that Microsoft has been slow to respond to, and the company has found itself catching up. Slack is now valued at $ 7.1 billion and more than 30 million customers are paying for its services. Dropbox is now a publicly traded company valued at approximately $ 10 billion.

Some of these threats are incidental to Microsoft's core business, but others are not. While Microsoft's non-Microsoft platforms, such as iOS and Android, are using more and more time, Microsoft needs to build competitive applications. It is no longer the default software of a dominant platform under its control, it is struggling to conquer market share in a crowded market where the application that does it well can take off overnight and attract users of a traditional business. Microsoft has even acquired applications like Accompli to create its main Outlook application for iPhone and avoid falling behind.

Later during the design meeting, illustrators debated the addition of a turtle. They plan to use a turtle to illustrate a page of slow connectivity in Microsoft teams, but first, some decisions must be made: should it come to life slowly? Should he wear an absorbent headband? Will its meaning be clear in all countries?

Greater participation can lead to more specific and inclusive work. But it can also hinder a company that tries to please and integrate everyone involved. I've witnessed this at the design meeting when everyone was discussing an animated profile picture. All the designers were focused on animating the image, but I sat there, silently wondering why the profile picture was not centered correctly. It's a big challenge for a company the size of Microsoft to open up its design process and take advantage of it, without slowing down or missing the basics.

For Microsoft, the revision of the design approach also involves modifying the way it develops products. Increasingly, the company was happy to fail quickly and test solutions to accelerate development time: it meant faster prototyping, learning about open source community support, and changing the core of its software activity.

Microsoft's old approach was to write each line of code. According to Friedman, modern startups write about 5% of their code, and use open source tools for the rest. "There are all these great sources of open source that we build and build that we start to share more openly among ourselves," says Friedman. "For us, it's all about adopting open source design and engineering."

Microsoft has also created a new way to prototype future products, hardware and software, reducing the time needed to build a prototype for hours or days to minutes. It was originally a tool to test changes to Office on the Web, before Microsoft developers refactor the code to make it open source and start prototyping things like new search interface of the company, a new method to optimize the search results in Office, Windows, etc. .

The prototype tool is essentially a Web version of Windows and Office where designers can instantly change the appearance of things. Windows, Office, and Microsoft Edge designers are all now using this tool to test changes to products. "This allows us to consider new hardware, hardware without screens, hardware with screens, etc. to determine if there is real human value before investing in the manufacturing of a real product, "says Friedman.

Product manufacturers are also using this new prototype tool to get a better idea of ​​the software changes that will be needed for the hardware in the future. With this new prototype, Microsoft hardware designers can now try to conceptualize future hardware with or without displays. Some of this future hardware might involve dual displays or even peripherals with foldable displays. Microsoft is striving to support this type of hardware, but is clearly waiting for the opportunity to launch something radically different.

Investment in products, whether hardware or software, once involved big bets for Microsoft that did not always work. "At the time we were shipping software, client software, every two or three years, we had to imagine what was going to happen in the industry in two years and find an adequate solution," says Friedman. . "It's very difficult because the industry continues to grow faster and faster."

Teams within Microsoft are now expected to work in a series of shorter sprints to build prototypes or complete designs. Instead of everyone working on a given date of months or years down the line, a simplistic version of the work is built, and extras are added at the top.

Think of this more agile approach, like making a very basic pizza, then add more sophisticated toppings each time. The value of a project, or its absence, is perceived much earlier and well before it is completed. Microsoft's open design philosophy applies the same set of design rules to the entire company and allows for easy integration of a design element designed for one product to another. Each product does not need its chat bubble or search bar. Instead, the common design elements look like trimmings. They are centralized and reused.

This new focus on speed and the adoption of open source has changed the way Microsoft designs the marketing of its products. "I think our new cultural philosophy is about trying things … and if they fail and we cut them, it's a great learning that we'll apply to the next thing," says Friedman. "More and more people at Microsoft are rewarded for trying things, learning and applying the knowledge. Because we invest in a culture of growth. "

If this new approach to Microsoft design works, then the company should be well positioned to respond to software and hardware changes in the coming years. But nothing like this is ever easy. For a company as big as Microsoft, it looks like a multi-year change and there is no guarantee that it will succeed. Microsoft has spent $ 7.5 billion to acquire GitHub and allow its own developers to share and collaborate even more closely. The challenge now is to get everyone to embrace this new approach and completely rethink Microsoft's internal culture.

Microsoft's commitment to open source, its move to Chromium for its Edge browser, and this new open design give clear insights into how the company is redefining its future. "I hope everyone can build some of the Microsoft experience in 10 years. I hope the product names will disappear completely in the future, "says Friedman.

Beyond open source and Windows, the story of Microsoft's future design seems more and more inclusive and focuses on listening to humans who actually use its products. We've seen it recently with the Xbox Adaptive Controller, and we're starting to see Surface move into more personal areas, like headphones. This is an approach we saw for the first time with the Windows feedback program and the company is turning more and more to the voice of its customers to influence its design decisions.

Hopefully this customer voice will mean better hardware and software, but Microsoft's centralized design means that the company is about to prepare for failure. Unified design raises the stakes. If one thing fails, everything fails. But if Microsoft is really listening to its customers, this agile new approach should allow it to fix things quickly.

Microsoft has clearly learned from its past and this new design change is a smart bet for its future. The challenge now is to combine all of Microsoft's ideas, among its more than 100,000 employees, into a single design that consistently fits the billion users of products like Office or Windows.

The challenge is also not to be too early for new products, which is a delicate balance that will prevent Microsoft from launching products and kill them in a few months. Otherwise, if this open design does not really work, we could consider well-designed hardware and software that reminds us of what they might have been.