Hardcore SoftwareSteven Sinofsky
Hardcore Software
by Steven Sinofsky · first published 2023
11mentions
3recommended by
9HN commenters
2021–2024first – last mentioned
33% recommend67% neutral
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…executive support. That probably explains why the dream was kept alive for over a decade (Cairo started in 1991, WinFS was finally left out of Vista in 2006). Steven Sinofsky's interesting online book "Hardcore Software" has some chapters about Cairo and later WinFS: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/020-innova... "Cairo aimed to advance personal computing with dramatic changes in how we thought of…
on “Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and ...” ↗…They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again. I agree with this. And what I think is so fascinating is how much they left on the table during this very same time. Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software substack is an amazing read[1]. And it really shows how much they got wrong as well as how much they got right. MS is firing on all cylinders. Both the OpenAI partnership and the GitHub acquisition are…
on “GitHub Copilot X: The AI-powered developer experience” ↗Dan Luu is great. If he's up your alley, you may also like Steve Sinofsky ("Hardcore Software"), Raymond Chen ("The Old New Thing"), and if you're in to the business & finance side of things, Patrick McKenzie aka patio11 ("Bits About Money").
on “Ask HN: What software/tech blogs/magazines should I be reading in 2024?” ↗…revenue per customer. A customer won’t pay more than, say, $40 for a book. But they’ll more likely pay ~$120 by paying $10/month for a year. See also how Steven Sinofsky is publishing his book series Hardcore Software on Substack with the option to pay up to $300/year to get a final, printable PDF edition of the series once finished. I paid $100 to read this series for a year and one of my friends went for the $300…
on “I'm Publishing My Next Book on Substack” ↗…revenue per customer. A customer won’t pay more than, say, $40 for a book. But they’ll more likely pay ~$120 by paying $10/month for a year. See also how Steven Sinofsky is publishing his book series Hardcore Software on Substack with the option to pay up to $300/year to get a final, printable PDF edition of the series once finished. I paid $100 to read this series for a year and one of my friends went for the $300…
on “I'm Publishing My Next Book on Substack” ↗…enabled average users to discover and access functionality that they never knew about or understood before. The numbers were very significant. (I think I read about it in Steven Sinofsky’s newsletter called Hardcore Software. He was in charge of Office back then.) Power users by definition tend to invest in learning the software. They’ll be initially annoyed at changes, then adapt. And in the era of continuously delivered…
on “User Driven UI” ↗Everything Is Buggy is the 4th instalment of Steven Sinofsky's [1] serialized book Hardcore Software: Inside the Rise and Fall of the PC Revolution [2]: > Hardcore Software is a first-person account of what I saw at the PC revolution from the perspective of joining Microsoft as a newly hired software…
on “Everything Is Buggy” ↗I'm reading Hardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky as he writes it at the moment, it's very interesting. https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/ One of the things he talks about it the approach the Microsoft Tools team took…
on “The School of Wirth” ↗This is my take on this too. Software in general takes a huge amount of work to reach "completion". Mvps exist because of this. Somewhere in the "hardcore software" book (1) Stephen Sinofsky touches on the amount of work to ship desktop software. (1) https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/about
on “The harsh truth of video games programming” ↗On this topic I’m finding Steve Sinofsky’s “Hardcore Software” blog/newsletter very interesting lately: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/ He’s a Microsoft careerist engineer who rose through the ranks to be in charge of Office through the ambitious…
on “Action Plan for a New CTO” ↗…(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Sinofsky), of Microsoft fame - he led the Office division through many of its biggest releases and later briefly led Windows. Apparently he recently wrote a book called “ Hardcore Software: Inside the Rise and Fall of the PC Revolution”: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D4TJ8BKB
on “The Toll of Being a Disruptor” ↗