Zorin OS 18 has topped 2 million downloads, with more than three-quarters coming from Windows users as Windows 10 support ends and upgrade limits bite.
The post Zorin OS Hits 2 Million Downloads as Windows 10 Support Ends appeared first on TechRepublic.
Zorin OS 18 has topped 2 million downloads, with more than three-quarters coming from Windows users as Windows 10 support ends and upgrade limits bite.
The post Zorin OS Hits 2 Million Downloads as Windows 10 Support Ends appeared first on TechRepublic.
Windows helped launch the PC era. Now, Microsoft wants to launch the age of AI agents.
The post Inside Microsoft’s Plan to Embed AI Agents Deep Into Windows appeared first on TechRepublic.
Windows helped launch the PC era. Now, Microsoft wants to launch the age of AI agents.
The post Inside Microsoft’s Plan to Embed AI Agents Deep Into Windows appeared first on TechRepublic.
[Editor’s Note: Agents of Transformation is an independent GeekWire series and March 24, 2026 event, underwritten by Accenture, exploring the people, companies, and ideas behind AI agents.]
It was “like bringing a Porsche into a world of Model Ts.”
That’s what Microsoft said in its 1990 annual report about the shift from MS-DOS to Windows. But the bigger breakthrough for the company wasn’t the graphical interface. It was Windows’ ability to serve as a platform for applications made by others.
Windows 3.0, released that year, made third-party software easier to find and launch, and offered developers a clear bargain: build to Microsoft’s specs, and your software would become a first-class citizen on the computers that were arriving “on every desk and in every home,” as the company’s original mission statement put it.
Thirty-five years later, AI feels less like a car and more like a rocket ship. But Microsoft is hoping that Windows can once again serve as the platform where it all takes off.
A new framework called Agent Launchers, introduced earlier this month as a preview in the latest Windows Insider build, lets developers register agents directly with the operating system. They can describe an agent through what’s known as a manifest, which then lets the agent show up in the Windows taskbar, inside Microsoft Copilot, and across other apps.
The long-term promise for Windows users is autonomous assistants that operate on their behalf, directly on their machines. Beyond routine tasks like assembling a PDF or organizing files, agents could monitor email and calendars to resolve scheduling conflicts, or scan documents across multiple apps to pull together a briefing for an upcoming meeting.
Achieving that level of autonomy requires more than just a clever interface. It will take deep, persistent memory that operates more like the human brain.
“We are now entering a phase where we build rich scaffolds that orchestrate multiple models and agents; account for memory and entitlements; enable rich and safe tools use,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a blog post this week looking ahead to 2026. “This is the engineering sophistication we must continue to build to get value out of AI in the real world.”
Elements of this are already emerging elsewhere.
But Microsoft’s Windows team is betting that agents tightly linked to the operating system will win out over ones that merely run on top of it, just as a new class of Windows apps replaced a patchwork of DOS programs in the early days of the graphical operating system.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is using the Agent Launchers framework for first-party agents like Analyst, which helps users dig into data, and Researcher, which builds detailed reports. Software developers will be able to register their own agents when an app is installed, or on the fly based on things like whether a user is signed in or paying for a subscription.
The parallels to the past only go so far. Traditional PC applications ran in their own windows, worked with their own files, and didn’t touch the rest of the system for the most part.
“Agents are going to need to be able to scratchpad their work,” Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said recently on the South Park Commons Minus 1 podcast, explaining that agents will need to retain a history of user interactions and tap into the necessary context to solve problems.
Agents are meant to maintain this context across apps, ask follow-up questions, and take actions on a user’s behalf. That requires a different level of trust than Windows has ever had to manage, which is already raising difficult questions for the company.
Microsoft acknowledges that agents introduce unique security risks. In a support document, the company warned that malicious content embedded in files or interface elements could override an agent’s instructions — potentially leading to stolen data or malware installation.
To address this, Microsoft says it has built a security framework that runs agents in their own contained workspace, with a dedicated user account that has limited access to user folders. The idea is to create a boundary between the agent and what the rest of the system can access.
The agentic features are off by default, and Microsoft is advising users to “understand the security implications of enabling an agent on your computer” before turning them on.
Even if Microsoft executes perfectly, the landscape is different now. In the early 1990s, Windows became dominant because developers flocked to the platform, which attracted more users, which attracted more developers. It was a virtuous cycle, and Microsoft was at the heart of it.
But Windows isn’t the center of the computing world anymore. Smartphones, browsers, and cloud platforms have fragmented the landscape in ways that didn’t exist back then. Microsoft missed the mobile era almost entirely, and the PC is now one screen among many.
In the enterprise, Microsoft has better footing. Azure, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and a growing ecosystem of business-focused agents give the company a strong position, competing against Google, Amazon, OpenAI and others for cloud-based AI agents and services.
Agent Launchers is a different bet — an attempt to make Windows the home for agents that serve individual users on their own machines. That’s a harder sell when the PC is competing with phones, browsers, and cloud apps for people’s attention. Microsoft can build the platform, but it can’t guarantee that developers will show up the way they did 35 years ago.
And unlike in the 1990s, Microsoft can’t count on users to embrace what it’s building. There’s a growing sentiment that these AI capabilities are being pushed into Windows not because users want them, but because Microsoft needs to justify its massive AI investments.
In October, for example, Microsoft announced new features including “Hey Copilot” voice activation, a redesigned taskbar with Copilot built in, and the expansion of “Copilot Actions” agentic capabilities beyond the browser to the PC itself.
“They’re thinking about revenue first and foremost,” longtime tech journalist and Microsoft observer Ed Bott said on the GeekWire Podcast at the time. The more users rely on these AI features, he explained, the easier it becomes for the company to upsell them on premium services.
There is a business reality driving all of this. In Microsoft’s most recent fiscal year, Windows and Devices generated $17.3 billion in revenue — essentially flat for the past three years.
That’s less than Gaming ($23.5 billion) and LinkedIn ($17.8 billion), and a fraction of the $98 billion in revenue from Azure and cloud services or the nearly $88 billion from Microsoft 365 commercial.
By comparison, in fiscal 1995, five years after the launch of Windows 3.0, Microsoft’s platforms group (which included MS-DOS and Windows) represented about 40% of its total revenue of $5.9 billion. Windows was the growth engine for the company.
Windows is unlikely to play that kind of outsized role again. But AI integration is the company’s best bet to return the OS to growth. Whether that ultimately looks like a restored Porsche or a rocket ship on the launchpad probably doesn’t matter as much as keeping it out of the junkyard.
Tracking down a far-flung team for a 40-year reunion isn’t easy. But the people who worked on Windows 1.0 got some help from their younger selves: a mischievous Easter egg they hid long ago in the software that would become the foundation of the world’s dominant PC platform.
Back in the mid-1980s, before the product launched, they secretly inserted credits in the code, listing their names, to be revealed through a specific combination of keystrokes.
As the story goes, Bill Gates inadvertently found the list by slamming his fists on the keyboard in frustration over the system’s sluggishness, a discovery that only made things worse. The fix: make the sequence more obscure. It worked. The credits went unnoticed by the public until 2022, when a researcher who was reverse-engineering old Windows binaries found them.
When members of the Windows 1.0 team decided to hold a 40th anniversary reunion this year, that roster became their starting point. It was a time capsule that doubled as a guest list.
A core group from that original Windows team reunited over dinner at Steve Ballmer’s offices in Bellevue on Tuesday evening — trading memories, correcting the historical record, and marveling at what they accomplished back then under nearly impossible circumstances.
“Today, developers have all these tools, drag and drop,” said Rao Remala, an early Windows developer, adding that he would challenge anyone today to build a functioning PC operating environment under the 64K segment limits and other technical constraints of the era.
“Have you tried it in ChatGPT?” Ballmer joked from across the room.
This year has been filled with commemorative milestones for the tech giant, from Microsoft’s 50th to Excel’s 40th to the 30th anniversary of the company’s internet pivot. But this one is different. It’s a glimpse into one of Microsoft’s scrappiest projects, from a moment in its history when key resources — including budget and computing power — were far more scarce.
Windows 1.0, which shipped on a set of 5.25-inch floppy disks, was technically considered an operating environment, not an operating system, because it ran on MS-DOS 2.0.
Microsoft announced it was developing Windows in November 1983. The release was delayed as the team worked through leadership turnover, technical challenges, and user-interface debates (i.e., tiled vs. overlapping windows), giving rise to industry accusations of peddling “vaporware.” Windows 1.0 finally debuted on Nov. 20, 1985.
By the time it launched, Apple’s Macintosh had set the standard with its elegant interface (at least by 1980s standards). Other DOS-based alternatives were also on the market. Critics favored the Mac’s polish, but Microsoft bet on broad PC compatibility, and that approach ultimately paid off.
Microsoft would later get sidetracked temporarily by its ill-fated OS/2 partnership with IBM, before Windows 3.1 became a breakout hit and Windows 95 set the global standard.
But none of it would have been possible without Windows 1.0. The intense, multi-year project was the foundation for the platform that ultimately turned Microsoft into one of the world’s most valuable companies, launching careers that would reshape the tech industry.
For Ballmer, who was tapped to get Windows 1.0 across the finish line long before he became Microsoft’s CEO, the 40-year reunion stirred up old memories and emotions.
“Of all the things I worked on at Microsoft, in a way, I have the most pride about this project,” he told the group, explaining that he truly felt part of the team.
As the night went on, the stories came out, some of them for the first time.
Working out of Microsoft’s Bellevue offices, before the company moved to Redmond, the team was largely in their 20s and even their teens in some cases. (Ballmer, in his late 20s at the time, was one of the older people in the office.) That helps to explain the culture at the time.
“Work and social life — there was no difference. It all sort of blended together,” said Scott Ludwig, who worked on the Windows 1.0 window manager, the core system that handled windows, input, events, menus, and dialog boxes.
They were often figuring things out as they went. For example, when Lin Shaw started in August 1984, months before the original ship date, not a single printer driver existed. She built the banding architecture — a way of imaging one strip of a page at a time to work within memory constraints — that would last through Windows 95.
She routinely stayed up all night and considered it the best job in the world. “It was just like college,” she told the group during the reunion dinner, “except I got paid really well.”
Gates got involved — at times down to the smallest details. Mark Taylor, who wrote the calculator and other early Windows apps, recalled Gates asking him to remove a timer delay in the Reversi game — not to make it faster, but to make Windows look faster. Years later, chips got so fast that the move flashed by too quickly to see, turning the fix into a bug.
Joe King, who worked on the Windows Control Panel, had an office across the hall from Ballmer with remarkably thin walls. He watched a parade of people come for their “SteveB meeting.” The pattern was always the same: quiet conversation at first, then Ballmer would start pacing, getting louder, gesturing emphatically, and reaching a crescendo before it was over.
“The door would open, a guy would sheepishly walk out, and Steve would greet the next person with full energy and enthusiasm,” King recalled. “I would see that all day long.”
Tandy Trower reminisced about joining the team in 1985 despite being warned that it was a dead end by another product manager, Rob Glaser, later of RealNetworks fame.
“I came to Microsoft with this vision of bringing software to the people,” Trower said, explaining that Ballmer pitched the Windows project to him as a way of accomplishing that goal.
He took the job, only to discover the head development manager was already gone. Ballmer offered reassurances that the product was “virtually done.” It wasn’t.
When Trower suggested changes — overlapping windows, proportional fonts — he got the same response: “You want to ship this year?” The answer was yes. Trower ended up working on Windows through Windows 95, part of a Microsoft career that ultimately spanned 28 years.
Marlin Eller, a programmer and musician, was interested in building a music notation editor. At the end of his first year, Gates asked what he wanted to work on. Eller pitched his idea. Gates engaged enthusiastically, then asked: “How big is the market?” Eller realized it was very small.
Gates had another idea. For music notation, Eller would need to build a graphics package — lines, ovals, curves, etc. An operating system needed that foundational technology to support spreadsheets and charts. And that’s how Eller ended up working on Windows.
“The thing the world does not know,” Eller joked before the dinner, “is that Windows was written so I could do music notation. All those other people were working for me.”
And then there were the pranks. A month or two before Windows 1.0 shipped, for example, developer Mark Cliggett decided to have some fun. He wrote a program that gradually turned off bits on a computer screen, and installed it on Ballmer’s machine when he wasn’t there.
“Multiple bad decisions right there,” Cliggett acknowledged: putting malware on a colleague’s computer, giving it to the future CEO, and missing the irony given the security challenges that would consume the industry years later. Marlin Eller wasted an hour debugging the problem before realizing what had happened. Ballmer, to his credit, didn’t hold a grudge.
GeekWire was invited to cover the Windows 1.0 reunion and document all this history. To prepare, I pulled together a 16-page report using Google’s NotebookLM to mine for information about Windows 1.0 in a variety of historical documents, books, and articles.
After I mentioned this to Ballmer, he suggested I open the evening by reading some colorful anecdotes from the research. It turned into an impromptu fact-checking exercise.
Did Ballmer really call a meeting at 9 a.m. on Easter Sunday 1985 and take down the names of anyone who didn’t show? Yes, he called the meeting. No, he didn’t take names. “I wouldn’t call it exactly a loyalty test,” Ballmer explained, saying it was more about setting a tone.
Did the team really blow off steam by making bombs and rockets with sugar and saltpeter, drawing police to the building when a security guard smelled explosives? Actually, that happened when making a later Windows version, according to someone who was there. The security guard joined them to blow up traffic cones in the parking garage. The police came later, when they were hiding in the library. (The details are a little fuzzy, but you get the idea.)
And finally, turning to a canonical story about the Windows 1.0 project: was the pivotal 1983 Comdex demo really just a videotape flashing graphics on the screen — classic smoke and mirrors to freeze the market? No. “This was real code,” Remala insisted.
“It was a little more smoky than not,” Ballmer added, “but it was all real code.”
Some notable former members of the Windows 1.0 team were missing from the reunion, including the famously hard-to-reach Gabe Newell, who went on to co-found Valve and build Steam into the dominant PC gaming platform.
Rick Dill and Paul Davis, who led development of the Windows Software Development Kit and organized the first Windows developers conference in Seattle in January 1986, were also unable to attend. Dill later managed Microsoft’s joint OS/2 development with IBM and spent years at Amazon; he is now retired in Redmond.
Scott McGregor, the lead development manager recruited from Xerox PARC, left before Windows 1.0 shipped. McGregor later co-authored the X11 windowing system at DEC and served as CEO of Broadcom.
Members of the Windows 1.0 team have gone on to remarkably varied careers.
For example, user interface developer Neil Konzen worked at Ferrari in Italy and pioneered Formula One telemetry. Ed Mills, who worked on fonts, runs a movement therapy practice in Bellevue and is involved in a nonprofit that operates a roller-skating rink in Issaquah.
Cliggett became a long-distance running coach. Eller (who went on to co-author the book Barbarians Led by Bill Gates) teaches computer science. Trower founded a robotics company and continues to work in the field. Taylor is a Seattle public school teacher.
King still introduces himself in the Seattle tech scene by saying he goes back to Windows 1.0 — sometimes prompting the response: “There was a 1.0?” Yes, there sure was.
For Ballmer, the Windows 1.0 experience led to a management technique he still uses today. On his first day as development manager, he repeated to the team what he’d been told was the schedule for different aspects of the project. He heard laughter in response.
He now calls this the “snicker test” — repeat back what you’ve heard from a project’s leaders, and see how the room reacts. If they laugh, you know you’re not getting the true story.
But the real legacy of Windows is much bigger, he told the group this week. If it had shipped two or three years later, Windows wouldn’t have been a relevant product, he said. The key, he explained, was figuring out how to ship “enough of the right stuff at the right time.”
“You did, and it’s nothing short of amazing,” Ballmer said. “It did change the world.”
There are few systems that ensure privacy. Even fewer of those who ensures anonymity. Even when we configure our system well, we must remember about the right application selection, so that our entire secure configuration is not compromised by one unfortunate program. We must also remember about our own behavior on the Internet and what we put
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