Tech Nostalgia: Reconciling With the Past

When I was writing the article series that became Windows Everywhere, I didn't have a theme in mind per se, though I had a few ideas early on that were more related to my expectations based on my memories and previous experiences.

One obvious idea--that I disproved to myself by writing actual software code trying to prove it--was that visual development tools, so called RAD (rapid application development) tools like Visual Basic, were a major step forward because you could scaffold an app user interface visually and then would only need to write so-called "glue" code. It turns out there's a lot more code to write than that.

One minor theme did emerge as I wrote that series, that the history of Windows is essentially a story about Microsoft either seeing a version of the future and inventing something (which was relatively rare but did happen) or reacting to competitors, emerging industry trends, or other outside forces. This one did pan out, as that's exactly what happened. But it's not a particularly compelling idea, thematically.

But eventually a central truth emerged, a narrative that was first expressed in Programming Windows: We Fought the Web and the Web Won (Premium). In this case, what I arrived at was an inflection point, a time when history hung in the balance and things could have gone either way. For reasons both rational and emotional, Microsoft did what it did, and it was the wrong choice, a mistake. And in doing so, it confined Windows to the fate we now understand quite well, though it wasn't obvious at the time. This was the point in which Windows went from being about the future to being about the past. Subsequent generational innovations would occur on the web and then, in time, on mobile, and Microsoft would not react to those shifts until it was too late. The irony is that it was on the leading edge of the web shift, as Bill Gates had rallied Microsoft to embrace the web, but forces within the company squashed those efforts.

The impact that mistake had on Microsoft culturally can be seen today in Satya Nadella's madcap embrace of AI, come hell or high water. Microsoft had missed the web wave, it had missed the mobile wave, and it had missed the digital personal assistant and VR/AR/MR mini-waves. It did find success, great success, with cloud computing and the resulting subscription-based revenues. But it was also a secondary player, one with a platform that hosts more Linux servers than its own technologies. And it wasn't the market leader, and that was never going to change. Nadella's AI push began as an overt attempt to reestablish the company as a leader, and though it appears that, too, has failed, this push has since transformed into an uglier scorched earth strategy, duplicated by Amazon and Google, to ensure that the company's co-dominance continues when the bubble bursts and all the smaller competitors nipping at its heels disappear.

That story is still unfolding, of course, and the future is...