When I started at Microsoft, Windows was the golden goose – it made lots of money and was extremely relevant. We even got labeled a monopoly by the DOJ (yay?) There was always lots of work to do that felt very important. By 2015, however, Apple and Linux had become very prominent, and we started charging less and less for Windows. Microsoft’s shift towards a services-based company made a lot of sense, but it was a hard transition for those in the Windows organization for two reasons:
- The Windows organization had a lot of senior talent – people that worked there usually lasted a long time (this was especially true in the graphics organization). To reduce the cost of the Windows organization, they started aggressively managing many of the senior people out. It became very political.
- More often than not, everybody was looking for an excuse to do less meaningful work (which again makes perfect sense, but it was a jarring departure from the good old days). Had I been thinking more clearly, I would have started looking for opportunities in the Azure organization.
I continued to work on various projects, such as:
HDR
We had two goals:
- Make XBOX support HDR10/10+ video playback.
- Make the Windows desktop always use HDR mode when connected to an HDR monitor. Hence, HDR videos and photos will appear correct without having to switch TV modes.
Making XBOX support HDR video playback was easy because it was just another consumer device that interacted with the TV in the ways that TVs were designed. HDR defined sRGB to be 100 nits brightness, and HDR monitors could display objects as bright as 800 nits. People assumed that most of the time your sRGB desktop would display at 100 nits (which is normal) and then if you scrolled through an HDR photo of the sun, the sun would be 800 nits. In other words, your monitor looked perfectly normal, but sometimes it would display objects much brighter than normal.
The problem is that HDR TVs were designed to be watched in a dimly lit home theater – hence the TV only switches into HDR mode when HDR content is displayed. For normal usage, the TV is in SDR mode where sRGB maps to around 400 nits (which is a good brightness to watch TV in everyday conditions). In an office setting, using an HDR TV in SDR mode looks fine, but if you switch it to HDR mode the desktop appears unusably dim. Hence, nothing worked the wary that people wanted it to.
Intel Drivers
One problem that made Windows look bad was the quality of the Intel drivers. Microsoft arranged with Intel to get their driver source so that we could investigate and fix their bugs ourselves. I spent several months fixing Intel bugs (and then arguing with Intel about why they should accept the fixes).
GPU Paravirtualization
Windows wanted to make better use of virtual machines, so we spent some time designing how to take advantage of GPU acceleration within virtual machines. This typically meant marshaling the calls to a host VM where the real resources lived. They continued working on this long after I left Microsoft.
Random hardware devices
My office was always filled with random prototypes of hardware projects that Microsoft was considering. Microsoft used a “tenting” system, where projects were done in secret, but every now and then they would “tent” somebody (which meant they brought them into the tent so they could utilize their expertise). I got tented on about everything that Microsoft was working on, which meant that I always had to keep my office door locked and I’d have to cover certain devices so they remained hidden. I never got to keep a HoloLens in my office, however (although I was tented and contributed to the project).
Decision to leave
I probably worked at Microsoft at least two years longer than I should have. At one point I realized that I was pretty burned out, tired, and not having a lot of fun. I gave about one months’ notice so everybody would have an opportunity of a positive handoff. In my final 3 weeks, I wrote an 80-page brain dump of everything I had worked on just to be nice. I ate lunch with my old boss (Steve Pronovost) about a year ago and he says that people still refer to that document. My last day at Microsoft was April 5th, 2018.
When I started Microsoft, I wasn’t sure if I would last more than 2 years. Instead I lasted 21.5 years (and I loved about 19 of those years)!
