Remembering Windows 95
It's a slow time in the technology industry. Breakthrough innovations are few and far between: the iPod is almost four years old, and it's hard to point to anything very interesting since then. Because revenue growth has slowed, mergers and acquisitions have become the main order of business at such companies as Oracle and, for a time, HP. Venture capital is increasingly migrating to biotech, physical security, and other sectors only tangentially related to computing. The industry could use an injection of energy, activity, and not least important, revenue.
Given this state of things, everyone is watching Microsoft, which is preparing to launch a new operating system next year. Last month, merely changing the name from code (Longhorn) to product (Vista) devoured a lot of attention, and more recently a stripped-down version of the product shipped to beta testers. The product has been a long time in coming, and the scope has been managed downward in several respects. Nevertheless, both Microsoft and the industry more generally see Vista as a potential jump-start very much in the same category as Windows 95 ten years ago. Because Vista represents the first opportunity in over ten years to begin with a "clean sheet of paper," unlike Windows 3.1, 98, ME, and 2000/XP, Bill Gates has repeatedly linked the two products in public.
Before looking at whether that association is warranted, it's worth remembering just what Windows 95 brought to market. In 1994, loading a browser onto Windows could be complicated by the operating system's lack of Internet Protocol support. DOS prompts were very much a day-to-day reality. File names were limited to eight letters, and CD-ROM support was spotty. E-mail was used only by fringe populations rather than being nearly universal. Adding hardware was more difficult than it needed to be, multitasking was nearly impossible for both processing and user interface reasons, and multimedia computing was, again, the province of only a small subset of users.
Windows 95 changed all of that. Even before Gates' famous "Pearl Harbor" speech helped turn Microsoft into an Internet-aware company, Windows 95 made Internet connection, through both browser and e-mail, a mass phenomenon. Multimedia, too, became an everyday event with better hardware support (including CD-ROM drivers). Overall usability, despite the initial confusion at using a "Start" button to shut down a machine, was enhanced by deeper camouflaging of the command-line layer, longer file names, and plug-and-play peripheral support. Finally, the operating system kept pace with Intel's chip performance and supported more realistic instances of multitasking.
The public responded. In the quarters immediately following the launch, retail sales of Windows 95 software soared, augmenting a strong increase in OEM sales of pre-loaded operating systems. Responding positively to improved networking support and promises of enhanced manageability, corporate IT organizations spent at record levels: Microsoft's operating systems revenues jumped from $1.5 billion in fiscal 1994 to $4.1 billion only two years later.
What might we deduce about the prospects for Vista based on the Windows 95 experience? First, it's hard to see a parallel burst of initial interest, with or without a Rolling Stones commercial. According to Microsoft, the benefits of Vista fall under five general headings:
-Reliability
-Security
-Deployment (for organizations managing large rollouts)
-Performance (including better power management and faster boot up)
-Management
These categories of improvements are clearly aimed at corporate buyers rather than individuals. Most of the things a consumer-grade user will see - including better desktop graphics, and RSS support within Internet Explorer - already come standard in Mac OS X. Backward compatibility will be substantial, to the point that many Vista improvements (including the IE browser) will be available as retrofits to Windows XP. These upgrades will also slow Vista adoption.
Here's another way of thinking about the comparison. In 1995, Microsoft turned the telephone network into an extension of the computer, or vice versa: between them AOL and Windows 95 made the Internet a household utility. In 2006, no parallel leap into an adjoining domain - think of home entertainment, specifically the television - will be supported. Bill Gates’ longstanding prediction about widespread adoption of a voice and speech interface to the PC will be addressed with Vista support, but even given a powerful standard processor configuration at its disposal, Vista still won't make masses of people retire their keyboards.
In short, Windows Vista looks like a solid product for corporate purchasers, but the lack of "gee-whiz" and "I've always wanted to be able to do that" desirability will prevent end-user excitement from reappearing the way it did ten years ago. An industry in search of the next big thing will have to keep looking.
--Dr. John Jordan
Founder, Still River Research
Posted by John Jordan at August 10, 2005 12:53 PM
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