Friday, November 26, 2010

Has Microsoft's Windows had its day?

As more media organisations switch to apps and mobile phone technology, the future looks less certain

The bald man in the ill-fitting check jacket doesn't pause as he stands beside the beige 1980s-vintage PC. The words pour out of his mouth like the sharpest huckster you've ever seen. "How much do YOU think this advanced operating environment is worth? WAIT just ONE minute before you answer," he instructs eagerly. "WATCH as Windows integrates Lotus 1-2-3 with" ? he clutches his lapels ? "MIAMI VICE!"

The screen shows picture of a Ferrari pasted into a document. "NOW we can take THIS Ferrari and paste it RIGHT INTO Windows Write," the man gabbles. "NOW how much do you think Microsoft Windows is worth?... DON'T ANSWER. WAIT until you see Windows Write and Windows Paint and LISTEN to what else you get at NO EXTRA CHARGE!"

We're only 15 seconds in but already you feel buffeted. "The MS-DOS executive, an appointment calendar, a cardfile, a notepad, a clock, a control panel, a terminal, printer, a RAM driver, AND CAN YOU BELIEVE IT, REVERSI, yes that's right, ALL these features and Reversi, for just ? HOOOOW much did you guess?"

Guess? We had to guess? " FIVE HUNDRED? A THOUSAND? EVEN MORE? NOOOO it's just 99 dollars, that's right, it's 99 dollars, it's an incredible value but it's true, it's Windows from Microsoft, order TODAY! PO BOX 286-DOS," he concludes as the address flashes on the screen, before adding weirdly, and without explanation, "?. Except in Nebraska."

Nebraska didn't hold out long, though. That November 1985 clip on YouTube of Steve Ballmer, then head of the nascent Windows group but for the past decade the chief executive of Microsoft, may not have been entirely serious. He wasn't huckstering to you and me; in those days, PCs were very much the province of businesses, because only they could afford the thousands of dollars they cost.

Windows 1.0 was introduced on 20 November 1985. To be honest, it didn't set the world on fire. "It was a hideous mess. All primary colours and no overlapping windows," recalls Scott Earle, a programmer at the time. (Overlapping windows didn't arrive until Windows 2.0, in 1987.) "Just horrible. Very limited RAM [memory for running programs]. Windows 2 was way better." Simon Phipps, then working for the computer maker Burroughs, recalls that "it was an extra software step that seemed to make everything more cumbersome than the environment I was using for my main work."

But it heralded a huge change in how the majority of people interacted with computers, one that would last forever ? and also marked the beginning of one of the most audacious business double-crosses ever, in which a little upstart company got the better of an established giant that everyone thought had a monopoly in the field. For Windows was the lever Microsoft used to overthrow IBM's position at the top of computing ? even while it pretended to be helping it.

It's easy today to forget how revolutionary the whole idea of working with windows showing multiple programs on a computer screen was in the 1980s. Before then, you worked in one program, which would draw its own windows on the screen; Lotus 1-2-3, which Ballmer refers to, was the pre-eminent office suite, offering a spreadsheet, charting and sort-of database. (Remember, this was before email.) Some businessmen ? they were almost all men ? spent their lives using it: businesses were born, grew and died in Lotus 1-2-3.

But when you quit the program, you were thrown back into Microsoft's MS-DOS, which ran the computer, but was about as communicative as a postbox. It was a black screen with a > in white or green on its left-hand side, and it would only talk to you if you offered through mystical incantations such as REN C:\MSDOS.BAT C:\MSDOS2.BAT (which would rename a file). Computers in those "command line interface" (CLI) days offered little help, and no helplines. They had keyboards, but no mouse.

Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center had different ideas: it developed computers that put programs into their own "windows". One day Steve Jobs, then (as now) head of Apple, visited, was shown a demonstration, and decided this was how computers would all work one day. Back at Apple, he drove a team to build the Lisa computer (named after his first daughter), which appeared in 1983.

Compared to every other computer, the Lisa was bizarre, extreme, futuristic. First there was the (for then) high-resolution 720-by-360-pixel 12" black-and-white screen. (Today's have at least four times as many pixels.) There was the way that using the "mouse" ? what a name! ? you could "click" on things, or "drag" them around the screen. You could change fonts, and //see what they looked like as you did it// ? a radical new idea. You could "cut", "copy" and "paste" words and pictures from one document to another, or one program to another. Compared to the CLI world, it was like having a car when everyone else had horses. What to call it? Xerox called it a GUI ? graphical user interface.

Microsoft saw it too ? as did other rivals at the time, including Digital Research, which then offered its own command-line system (called DR-DOS). While Microsoft built Windows, Digital Research built a GUI called GEM, which also gave a windowing effect.

But Microsoft had the advantage that it had been chosen by IBM to provide the original command-line system for the IBM PC, which had defined the market in 1982. So it had a ready market when it started to offer Windows. IBM was meanwhile increasingly unhappy at new rivals such as Compaq which had created working (legal) copies of the IBM PC's architecture ? the "clones" that could undercut it. IBM wanted to lock companies in to its hardware; it had also promised it would let people run multiple programs at once, and it is an IBM corporate directive (No.2, as it happens) that it keeps its promises. So IBM devised OS/2, an operating system for IBM PCs, intended to lock people in to IBM PCs by building applications that only ran on it; and OS/2 would only run on IBM PCs. The same strategy had served it well in the "mainframe" computer market (where it sold huge computers which only ran its operating systems on expensive maintenance contracts). Why not for PCs?

Because Bill Gates and Ballmer had other ideas. Gates in particular saw OS/2 as a threat to this mission statement of "a computer on every desk running Microsoft software". So Microsoft sort of cooperated with IBM on OS/2 ? but meanwhile developed Windows to run on any computer compatible with the original IBM specification. IBM had customers, but Microsoft had a growing market of businesses large and small that liked the idea of not being tied to IBM. Windows swept the board, leaving IBM standing alone in the street. OS/2 never recovered, though there are still diehards who insist it was the better product. Arguably, it was ? but it didn't offer the freedom Windows did.

And once Microsoft got momentum, it didn't let up. Windows got better and better, until Windows 3.1, released in March 1992, in effect killed OS/2 for good. In August 1995, Windows 95 had a high-profile launch that saw people queuing to buy it at midnight; it was the first ever piece of rockstar software (whose soundtrack, bought at great expense, was the Rolling Stones' Start Me Up), and the high point of consumer excitement about Windows.

After that, everything has just been incremental. Although its successors ? Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 ? have sold more copies, they've just been part of the computing landscape. Microsoft is as embedded as IBM once was. Windows is a monopoly, which last quarter generated 29% of revenues and 47% of Microsoft's profits; Office, its other monopoly, generating about 31% of its revenues and 47% of its profit, relies on it. Windows was the basis of not one, but two enormous monopolies in how the developed world uses computing. The wonderful thing? A lot of the money that it made for Gates is being redistributed via his foundation to the developing world. IBM never managed that.

Now, 25 years on, the struggle has shifted to mobile phones ? where there's a new form of GUI, introduced by, once again, Apple. In 2007 the iPhone brought touchscreens, app stores and, once again, a different way of interacting. Yet while Google rapidly copied that in its Android operating system (which before the iPhone had had a keyboard-based interface), Microsoft took its time before introducing its own, different mobile interface, which uses "tiles" and swipes and "hubs". It launched in the UK last month and in the US on 8 November, almost exactly 25 years after Windows. The name? Windows Phone 7 ? because Windows remains the strongest brand the company has.

The question now is whether Windows will survive another 25 ? something those both within and without have begun to question. Ray Ozzie, who has just stepped down as its "chief software architect", penned an elliptical farewell missive essentially telling anyone who would listen that Google and Apple had thrashed the company in search and mobile, and that eventually PCs and Windows would not be big money-earners.

And James Gardner, the chief technology officer at the Department for Work and Pensions, recently mused that his department's upcoming upgrade from 2001's Windows XP to 2009's Windows 7 will probably be "the last version of Windows anyone ever widely deploys", because interaction is moving to web browsers and mobiles; we don't need powerful machines or OSs.

You only have to look at the banks, supermarkets, media organisations, musicians, games companies and everyone else offering mobile or tablet apps to see that a post-PC world isn't fanciful; soon there will be more smartphones in the world than PCs (and there are already many more phone users than PC users).

Quite how soon that Windows-free day will come is hard to guess. It sounds a bit like a world without physical newspapers: lots of people foresee it, but the convenience of a paper (and of Windows) is hard to give up. Microsoft won't be able to dominate smartphones in the way it did PCs.

Unbothered, Microsoft is already working on Windows 8. It's probably safe to say that while there are PCs, there will be Windows. And that goes for Nebraska as well.


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