10 Big Bets for Windows That Microsoft Abandoned

pcmag.com:

Microsoft’s vision for the future of Windows is all about artificial intelligence (AI). Not long ago in New York City, I listened as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared, “It’s kind of like the '90s are back,” because of how exciting it was.

I was at the event covering it for my Windows Intelligence newsletter, and it was easy to get swept up in the AI hype. It was the thing Microsoft wanted to talk about, though Surface and Windows 365 cloud PCs had a presence as well.

But wait, what happened to all the other big Windows features Microsoft has pushed in the last few years? So many of them were "the next new thing," and then they fizzled out. Let’s look back at some of the most memorable ones and my favorites. (And no, I didn’t include Cortana. That would be too easy.)

“I can't overstate how much of a breakthrough this is,” said Nadella. But he wasn’t talking about AI in 2023; he was talking about the metaverse in 2021.

Remember the metaverse? Just a few years ago, around the time Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta, Microsoft was all-in.

“When we talk about the metaverse, we’re describing both a new platform and a new application type, similar to how we talked about the web and websites in the early '90s,” Nadella said during his Microsoft Ignite 2021 keynote address. But no one from Microsoft so much as uttered the word “metaverse” in the company's latest event.

What happened? I asked a few people, but I didn’t hear anything surprising. Facebook Meta made a big bet, Microsoft followed, and it hasn’t exactly paid off for either company. (Quest VR headsets are still pretty cool, though.) Microsoft has now laid off a variety of employees working on the metaverse.

Back in 2017, Microsoft announced Windows 10 S. At the