Programming Windows: Marvel (Premium)

In the 1990s, Microsoft experienced a level of growth that was unprecedented in personal computing or any other industry. It was all tied to the success of Windows, an operating environment that many, including IBM, once Microsoft’s biggest partner, had initially written off. But where Windows had entered the 1990s with just a few million users, by the time the 1990s ended, it accounted for several hundred million users and over 90 percent usage and market share.

Microsoft’s success in the early 1990s wasn’t just about Windows. Instead, the firm parlayed its success as the gatekeeper to personal computing by establishing a family of productivity applications and then systematically destroying the competition, leaving companies like Ashton-Tate, Borland, Lotus, WordPerfect, and many others in its wake. It expanded into networking and workgroup computing, ending Novell’s leadership in those markets. It pushed NT into workstations and servers, defanging Sun Microsystems and other makers of high-end Unix systems.

To these companies and other erstwhile competitors, Microsoft was a voracious cancer, eating and destroying anyone or any company that it saw as a threat. It was as friendless in the industry that it had championed as it was alone atop of it.

And it broke the law, repeatedly, while establishing and maintaining its dominance. Microsoft became infamous for pretending to be interested in partnering with companies with innovative products so that it could find out more details and then bald-facedly copy what they were doing. So, the software giant had increasingly found itself on the receiving end of legal and regulatory challenges in the early 1990s.

The two biggest challenges were an Apple lawsuit that alleged that Microsoft had stolen the Mac user interface for Windows and the first of what would be several Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust probes, which ultimately ended in a deadlock. We’ll be looking at these issues, in particular Microsoft’s many antitrust problems, later in this series. For now, it’s just important to know that with these threats eventually cast aside, Bill Gates and Microsoft were filled with the sense that they could never be defeated. So, the firm steamrolled ahead, with its eye on the 1994 release of Windows 4.0. Which would ship, finally, in 1995 as Windows 95.

But Windows 95 wasn’t the only product that Gates and Microsoft couldn’t ship on time in the mid-1990s. In 1993, Gates and Microsoft chief software scientist Nathan Myhrvold began work on a book about the future of the industry called The Road Ahead that was set for publication in 1994. The book touted Microsoft’s take on the “information superhighway,” which the two had renamed the “Information Highway” for some reason. But the book, like Microsoft, almost completely ignored the Internet, which was as that time the hottest topic in the rest of the world.

“I found Gates' observations on the Internet...