Windows SideShow

~ the obituary ~

Windows SideShow shipped with Windows Vista on 30 January 2007, under the internal name Auxiliary Display. Microsoft had been talking about it since 2003. The idea was that your laptop would grow a second, much smaller screen somewhere on the outside, usually the lid, and that screen would keep showing you your next meeting and your unread mail while the main machine was closed and asleep. The battery cost of glancing at your calendar would drop to almost nothing.

Microsoft did the platform work properly, which is the part that still reads well. There was a native COM API alongside a managed .NET one, with Visual Studio project templates to go with them. There was also a simulator, so you could develop SideShow gadgets without owning any of the hardware. That simulator turned out to be load-bearing, because for most developers it was the only SideShow device they would ever touch.

The hardware is where it came apart. Asus announced the W5Fe at CES on 6 January 2007, a 12-inch notebook with a 2.8-inch QVGA panel set into the lid, at a street price around $2,200. Dell put SideShow on the XPS 420 desktop the same year and quietly dropped it after it found little use. A couple of WiFi photo frames spoke the protocol. Microsoft ran a SideShow gadget gallery for a while and then closed it.

Support carried through Windows 7 in 2009 and into Windows 8. Windows 8.1 arrived on 17 October 2013 without it.

~ the case file ~

~ a screen on the lid ~

The premise was not wrong. Everybody now walks around with a small always-on display showing notifications from a bigger machine, and it is strapped to their wrist. What SideShow got wrong was assuming that display would be attached to the laptop, and that laptop makers would eat the cost of a second panel and its controller for a feature Microsoft was defining.

Laptop margins in 2007 did not have room for that, and no manufacturer wanted to be the only one shipping it.

~ the OEMs that passed ~

I was a computer engineer on Windows through the entire Vista and 7 period and I never saw a SideShow device in person, in a shop or on a desk. What I did see, more than once, was the control panel entry sitting there on machines that had no auxiliary display and never would. That is the honest shape of this one for most people: a settings page for hardware you did not own, on an operating system you did.

By the time third parties got interested enough to build Android phone apps that pretended to be SideShow displays, around 2012, the feature had one Windows release left.

~ the removal ~

Microsoft did not make an announcement. SideShow was simply absent from Windows 8.1, alongside a batch of other Vista-era ideas cleared out in the same release. The API documentation lingered on Microsoft's developer site for years afterward, still describing how to register a gadget with a platform that no longer shipped.

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