Steve Ballmer had a dilemma. He had two groups at Microsoft pursuing competing visions for tablet computers.
One group, led by Xbox godfather J Allard, was pushing for a sleek, two-screen tablet called the Courier that users controlled with their finger or a pen. But it had a problem: It was running a modified version of Windows.
That ran headlong into the vision of tablet computing laid out by Steven Sinofsky, the head of Microsoft's Windows division. Sinofsky was wary of any product--let alone one from inside Microsoft's walls--that threatened the foundation of Microsoft's flagship operating system. But Sinofsky's tablet-friendly version of Windows was more than two years away.
For Ballmer, it wasn't an easy call. Allard and Sinofsky were key executives at Microsoft, both tabbed as the next-generation brain trust. So Ballmer sought advice from the one tech visionary he's trusted more than any other over the decades--Bill Gates. Ballmer arranged for Microsoft's chairman and co-founder to meet for a few hours with Allard; his boss, Entertainment and Devices division President Robbie Bach; and two other Courier team members.
At one point during that meeting in early 2010 at Gates' waterfront offices in Kirkland, Wash., Gates asked Allard how users get e-mail. Allard, Microsoft's executive hipster charged with keeping tabs on computing trends, told Gates his team wasn't trying to build another e-mail experience. He reasoned that everyone who had a Courier would also have a smartphone for quick e-mail writing and retrieval and a PC for more detailed exchanges. Courier users could get e-mail from the Web, Allard said, according to sources familiar with the meeting.
But the device wasn't intended to be a computer replacement; it was meant to complement PCs. Courier users wouldn't want or need a feature-rich e-mail application such as Microsoft's Outlook that lets them switch to conversation views in their inbox or support offline e-mail reading and writing. The key to Courier, Allard's team argued, was its focus on content creation. Courier was for the creative set, a gadget on which architects might begin to sketch building plans, or writers might begin to draft documents.
"This is where Bill had an allergic reaction," said one Courier worker who talked with an attendee of the meeting. As is his style in product reviews, Gates pressed Allard, challenging the logic of the approach.
It's not hard to understand Gates' response. Microsoft makes billions of dollars every year on its Exchange e-mail server software and its Outlook e-mail application. While heated debates are common in Microsoft's development process, Gates' concerns didn't bode well for Courier. He conveyed his opinions to Ballmer, who was gathering data from others at the company as well.
The story of Microsoft's Courier has only been told in pieces. And nothing has been disclosed publicly about the infighting that led to the innovative device's death. This article was pieced together through interviews with 18 current and former Microsoft executives, as well as contractors and partners who worked on the project. None of the Microsoft employees, both current and former, would talk for attribution because they worried about potential repercussions. Microsoft's top spokesman, Frank Shaw, offered only a brief comment for this story and otherwise declined to make Microsoft's senior executives available.
"At any given time, we're looking at new ideas, investigating, testing, incubating them," Shaw said in a statement when word leaked in April 2010 that Courier had been cancelled. "It's in our DNA to develop new form factors and natural user interfaces to foster productivity and creativity. The Courier project is an example of this type of effort. It will be evaluated for use in future offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time."
While the internal fight over Courier occurred about 18 months ago, the implications of the decision to kill the incubation project reverberate today. Rather than creating a touch computing device that might well have launched within a few months of Apple's iPad, which debuted in April 2010, Microsoft management chose a strategy that's forcing it to come from behind. The company cancelled Courier within a few weeks of the iPad's launch. Now it plans to rely on Windows 8, the operating system that will likely debut at the end of next year, to run tablets.
Courier's death also offers a detailed look into Microsoft's Darwinian approach to product development and the balancing act between protecting its old product franchises and creating new ones. The company, with 90,000 employees, has plenty of brilliant minds that can come up with revolutionary approaches to computing. But sometimes, their creativity is stalled by process, subsumed in other products, or even sacrificed to protect the company's Windows and Office empires.
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