After a Quarter Century of Windows Looking Back at 25 Years of Windows Stuart J Johnston
Twenty-five years ago this week, a youthful Bill Gates stood on stage at New York's posh Helmsley Palace Hotel to announce the future of computing: the Windows 1.0 operating system.
Later that month, Gates would take the stage at the Comdex show in Las Vegas to proclaim that the future of computing was with Windows and the graphical user interface (GUI) that Windows introduced to PC users.
Gates turned out to be right on his initial premise, although it would be years before it achieved market momentum, and more years after that before Microsoft gained the dominance it enjoys today.
Today, Microsoft is not only the largest software company on the planet, but it is also dominant worldwide.
It's also facing trends as precarious as it was facing a quarter century ago, as Microsoft struggles to convince customers and developers to look past the tepid response to Windows Vista and instead to embrace Windows 7 as well as Microsoft's emerging "cloud" computing initiative and its "Azure" development platform.
Take the comments by Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, at the PDC conference last month. He described the company's cloud initiative as the "fundamental transformation of the company toward services." If successful, it will change the future of Microsoft and long term may doom the company's sacred cow — Windows.
With those two 1983 launch events, and others in later years, Gates and Microsoft almost single-handedly created the concept of vaporware, the practice of pre-announcing products before they were finished (although it could be argued that IBM originated the approach). Microsoft's embrace of the graphical user interface also started the wheels in motion for years of bad blood among itself, IBM, and Apple.
Indeed, Apple eventually sued for copyright infringement over Windows. Although Microsoft won, the episode led to the conventional wisdom that Microsoft couldn't innovate but was great at copying other companies' work. (Microsoft, after all, had already quietly written the first applications for the then soon-to-be-unveiled Macintosh computer, which would make its debut with the famous '1984' ad during the 1984 Super Bowl a few months later.)
While Gates was right about the importance of GUI, he missed completely on two other pronouncements. First, he promised that Windows 1 would ship by April 1984. It actually took until late 1985 to ship — the vaporware label would come later after Microsoft began routinely promising software on deadlines executives must have known it couldn't meet. (Apple, meanwhile, shipped the first Macs in 1984 right on schedule.)
He also predicted that Windows would attain a 90 percent market share by the end of 1984. On that prediction, Gates was off by ten years or more, but Windows retains its dominance to this day. In fact, Web statistics tracking firm Net Applications latest figures show Windows (all versions) with 90.46 percent market share for operating systems.
It hasn't been easy though.
"Windows had a difficult birth," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told InternetNews.com. "At the time, people thought that GUIs were for children, but Microsoft eventually convinced the market that it was the future," Enderle said.
What a Long Strange Trip
Microsoft finally delivered Windows 1.0 in late 1985, but despite a version 2 and a couple of 'point' releases, it mostly languished because it was crude by contemporary standards, required more processor power and memory than was standard, and relied on Microsoft's chief operating system offering — MS-DOS.
"They [early releases of Windows] were rudimentary, to say the least; just a shell on DOS," Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, who attended Gates' keynote at Comdex 1983, told InternetNews.com.
The market suddenly exploded in May 1990, however, with the introduction of Windows 3, which finally overcame many of the obstacles to it being a useful GUI, part of which had to do with leaps in processor power and plummeting prices for memory. Additionally, Microsoft released a version of its Office productivity applications suite, heretofore only available on the Mac, written specifically for Windows 3.x, giving users a productivity-driven reason to want the system.
In 1993, Microsoft also released Windows NT, which grew from a different code family tree — a 32-bit operating system designed as a server for corporate environments. The original release was numbered NT 3.1 and it eventually led to NT 4 and Windows 2000.
"Windows 3 is when Windows really started to matter, but NT is when they finally got it right," Steve Gillmor, editor of TechCrunchIT and host of the Gillmor Gang podcasts, told InternetNews.com.
However, until the advent of Windows 95, Windows would still require DOS under the covers to provide operating system functions. Windows 95 was a full-fledged OS built on the 3.x code base. With its hybrid architecture, it also ushered in the move away from 16-bit operating systems to 32-bit systems.
The Windows 9x line yielded follow-on systems, notably Windows 98, 98SE, and finally Windows Millennium Edition (ME) — the latter of which was generally viewed as a failure that didn't offer enough reasons to get users to upgrade from Windows 98..
