Microsoft’s Embrace of Chromium is Historic (Premium)

On December 7, 1995, Microsoft announced a new strategy in which it would “embrace and extend” the Internet in all of its products. Almost exactly 23 years later, on December 6, 2018, Microsoft has finally come full circle, agreeing that what really matters in that the Internet be both open and standards-based.

This is not a capitulation of any kind, though I know that many in the Microsoft user community see it that way. Instead, it is a belated realization and public admission that is previous and proprietary approach was both wrong and wrong-headed. Now, Microsoft will try a gentler and more correct approach. It will just embrace the Internet.

I assume that most are at least somewhat familiar with the infamous “Internet tidal wave” memo that led to Microsoft’s major pivot on the eve of Windows 95’s launch to adopt and co-opt Internet technologies across its products. But I still view that moment as Microsoft’s finest hour, because the company moved as one to address what Bill Gates correctly saw as an emerging threat at a time when it was celebrating its biggest victory. And it did so both quickly and decisively.

(Perhaps a bit too decisively. The actions that Microsoft undertook at that time coincided with the firm cementing its dominance in personal computing and led to damaging antitrust defeats in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere.)

That period of time—say, between 1995 and 2001—is also notable because it was “peak Microsoft” from a market dominance and influence perspective. Microsoft, simply by announcing its intention to do something, could impact other companies’ strategies dramatically. And Microsoft, simply by doing something, could formalize that thing and trigger others to follow.

That ended, and abruptly, thanks to both antitrust and the Longhorn disaster, and since then, Microsoft has lost the script. It’s still big and powerful, of course, but it no longer has the dominance or influence it once had. This is arguably better for, well everyone. But it has triggered a more reflective Microsoft under Satya Nadella, one that is far more open to working with others than in burying them.

These transitions take time. In the interim, there were misguided attempts to just do things—like Zune, Windows Phone, and Windows 8—simply because it was Microsoft, and Microsoft by doing something could will its way to success. These things happened at a time when old-school executives with a fondness for the past were still running the show, oblivious that the world had moved on.

Today, things are different.

And it is instructive, perhaps, to understand how different. When Bill Gates wrote his “Internet tidal wave” memo in the first half of 1995, the future was all upside for Microsoft. And the notion that some upstart, Netscape, could somehow rise quickly and steal it all away was both alarming and unacceptable.

“I assign the Internet the highest level of importance,” Bill Gates noted in the memo, explicitly informing all of Microsoft that it had to follow suit. “The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. It is even more important than the arrival of the graphical user interface (GUI).”

Much of the memo concerns explaining what the Internet was, and what it would become. And it highlights areas in which Microsoft’s own products were already not as efficient or optimal as some web services of that early day. But the most interesting part of this memo, I think, is its description of the new competition that Microsoft faced thanks to the Internet. Gates was very much in protectionist mode.

“Browsing the Web, you find almost no Microsoft file formats,” he notes, adding that he saw plenty of Apple Quicktime videos and Adobe PDF files. “After 10 hours of browsing, I had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows .EXE (other than content viewers), or other Microsoft file format.”

“A new competitor ‘born’ on the Internet is Netscape,” Gates writes of the company Microsoft would destroy, leading to the creation, eventually, of Mozilla and Firefox. “Their browser is dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network extensions will catch on.”

Microsoft, incidentally, once controlled over 80 percent usage share. But the dominant browser today, Google Chrome, controls 64 percent of the desktop PC market and 63 percent of all mobile browsing.

“[Netscape is] pursuing a multi-platform strategy where they move the key API into the client to commoditize the underlying operating system. They have attracted a number of public network operators to use their platform to offer information and directory services. We have to match and beat their offerings including working with MCI, newspapers, and others who are considering their products.”

After trying increasingly futile “Windows only,” “Windows first,” and “Windows best” strategies over the ensuing years, Microsoft has finally—under Satya Nadella—embraced a full-on multi-platform strategy of its own. Where Microsoft Edge was originally designed to run only on Windows 10 and its presumed 1 billion customers, the new Edge will run on all desktop and mobile platforms. And instead of using proprietary innards, it will be based on an open source project.

“One scary possibility being discussed by Internet fans is whether they should get together and create something far less expensive than a PC which is powerful enough for Web browsing. This new platform would optimize for the datatypes on the Web. Gordon Bell and others approached Intel on this and decided Intel didn’t care about a low-cost device so they started suggesting that General Magic or another operating system with a non-Intel chip is the best solution.”

This platform exists today as Chromebook. And it is perhaps not coincidental that Microsoft is finally planning to offer its own kind of Chromebook-type platform via something that is currently called Windows 10 Lite. Rest assured that the final version of this product will not bear the Windows name.

Anyway, Gates’s “embrace and extend” strategy would see Windows 95 improved with deeper Internet and web integration to the detriment of the MSN client that first shipped with the OS. (The original MSN was basically integrated into File Explorer so that you could navigate through the service as you would through your PC’s file system. That model, which must have made sense to Microsoft in 1994, actually made zero sense given the the-then emerging web and Internet.)

“[Internet Explorer] alone won’t get people to switch away from Netscape,” he noted. “We need to figure out how to integrate Blackbird [a WYSIWYG MSN/website editor that would be called Internet Studio and then scrapped when Microsoft bought FrontPage], and help browsing into our Internet client [IE] … We need to figure out additional features that will allow us to get ahead with Windows customers. We need to move all of our Internet value added from the Plus pack into Windows 95 itself as soon as we possible can with a major goal to get OEMs shipping our browser preinstalled.”

Ah yes, product bundling. Microsoft could only kill Netscape by illegally bundling IE with a dominant platform that was then the gateway to both the Internet and personal computing. I assume we all know how that story ends.

“Over time the shell and the browser will converge and support hierarchical/list/query viewing as well as document with links viewing,” he writes, describing a strategy that was actually implemented, and then abandoned, over IE 2 and IE 3. (This is where Joe Belfiore shows up first; we worked on these early IE versions.)

Gates evens address Internet search. Note that this was years before Google.

“We need to come up with a strategy to bring together Office, Mediaview, Help, Cairo [a set of NT-based OOP projects], and MSN,” Gates wrote of Internet search. “Access and Fox [both were client databases] do not support text indexing as part of their queries today which is a major hole. Only when we have an integrated strategy will we be able to determine if our in-house efforts are adequate or to what degree we need to work with outside companies like Verity … [which offered] scalable technology that can deal with large text databases with very large numbers of queries against them.”

Gates directed that all of Microsoft’s document-making products should output in HTML and, crucially, the “extended forms that we promote.” “Word could lose out to focused Internet tools if it doesn’t become faster and more WYSIWYG for HTML,” he notes.

“What is our competitor to Acrobat?” he asks, predicting the silly technologies that Microsoft would much later add to Windows as XPS, and then abandon to partner instead with Adobe. (Today, Microsoft Edge is, among other things, a PDF viewer and annotator.)

You should read the entire memo. There’s a lot more there, of course, and it’s fascinating to look back at this with a clear understanding of what’s happened since.

Less clear, to some, is what’s happening right now. Despite my attempts to bring clarity to the discussion about Microsoft’s decision, I still hear routinely from readers who see this move as a concession of some sort to Google, an abandonment of Microsoft’s God-given right to control its own destiny, and yet another defeat for a defanged former superpower.

That Microsoft has been, at times just this past week, the most successful company in the world is sort of beside the point. But Microsoft’s current level of success, no matter what you think of it, is directly derived from its embrace of open platforms, standards, and a spectrum of partners, many of which do not have a toadying relationship with the software giant. Satya Nadella has been able to achieve something that neither of his predecessors ever could, in part because of his separation from Microsoft’s early and often dirtier successes.

I’ve already made my arguments for why Microsoft was correct to drop EdgeHTML and Microsoft Edge as originally designed. But I’ll just add here that there is a bigger movement happening within Microsoft. That the firm’s acquisition of GitHub, open-sourcing of WinForms, WPF, and WinUI, and other recent moves should be viewed together, as parts of a broader strategy. That anything is on the table. And that Windows, now, can evolve to better meet the needs of an always-emerging market in ways we’d never previously imagine.

This should please, even excite, the Microsoft fan base. Otherwise, had Microsoft simply stuck to the mistakes of the past—and seriously, is there anything more “old Microsoft” that making Edge Windows 10-only on the desktop?—it would have only hastened the demise of this once-proud platform. This shows that Microsoft gives a shit about what really matters. That it gets it.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Microsoft embracing Chromium is all upside. There is no bad news here, at all. And with a suddenly bright future, we can look back on 2018, for all its terribleness, as the time when the software giant finally started fighting back for Windows.