Microsoft Courier

~ the last words ~

courier was the part of internet history i can read about but never personally touched, because nobody could. it leaked first, then it died. between september 2009 and april 2010 it lived as a few minutes of concept video on gizmodo and a wave of comments from people who wanted microsoft to make something that did not look like a giant windows tablet.

the device was supposed to be two seven-inch screens hinged together like a small leather book. you would write on one side and sketch on the other, then "tuck" content from screen to screen using a gesture that mimicked tucking paper into a journal. the os was a custom build on top of windows ce, with handwriting recognition that microsoft had been working on since the tablet pc days. it was, by all accounts, the most novel design idea inside microsoft in years.

it never shipped. on april 29 2010, three months after apple announced the ipad, microsoft confirmed to cnet that courier was cancelled.

~ the record ~

~ what it was supposed to be ~

the project lived inside a group called alchemy ventures, run by j allard, the same executive who had built the xbox business and run the zune line. courier was developed largely outside the normal windows division. that was both its strength and the reason it got killed. the team had nvidia tegra 250 silicon, a 3-megapixel camera, a stylus with palm-rejection, and the freedom to design an os without windows constraints.

features included infinite journal (a notebook with timestamped, geotagged pages), smart agenda (a daily summary you could swipe through), plus a clip-tuck-paste workflow that mimicked the way people actually use physical notebooks. the videos showed someone planning a trip by pasting hotel photos into one half of the booklet and writing notes in the other half.

~ the day it died ~

according to cnet's jay greene, who interviewed microsoft executives in the months after the cancellation, the killing meeting happened between j allard and bill gates. gates asked how courier accessed email. allard said it was not designed to have an email client, that users would get their email through the web. gates was reportedly not happy with that answer. a few weeks later steve ballmer cancelled the project, citing the need to consolidate microsoft's tablet effort around windows.

so courier died because it did not have an email client, and microsoft put its tablet hopes into windows 8, and that went the way it went.

~ the inheritance ~

courier's ghost showed up twice more inside microsoft. project andromeda in 2017 was a second attempt at a pocket dual-screen device, and was itself cancelled before launch. surface duo finally shipped in 2019, running android instead of any microsoft os, and sold poorly. the booklet form factor lives on now in samsung's galaxy fold line and in the nintendo ds-and-3ds hinged-screen genealogy.

j allard left microsoft a few weeks after the cancellation. he had been at the company for nineteen years. courier is the prototype people still ask about when they talk about microsoft's lost decade between zune and surface, and it is the one product the company killed that the press has never stopped asking about.

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