Programming Windows: More Roads Not Taken (Premium)

Microsoft chief scientist Nathan Myhrvold opined in an internal email in 1992 that the software giant’s business model of the day amounted to no more than “retail sales supplemented by upgrades.” Microsoft, he said, should pursue new business models. “Upgrades [today] represent the closest thing we have to an annual fee or subscription,” he wrote. “This is a powerful way to draw revenue from the installed base, and to keep them loyal to our product.”

As was so often the case, Microsoft eventually acted on the futurist’s advice: The software giant adopted a subscription sales model when it began selling its offerings to the enterprise, and it has since shifted most of its product lines to subscription sales models. In fact, one might gauge the success of the “new” Microsoft by this core change to its business model.

But in the interim, Microsoft experimented with different ways to normalize its revenues and avoid the uneven ups and downs of its Windows upgrade schedule, which typically amounted to a major new version once every three years. There were various permutations of this evolving strategy. But one you’ve almost certainly not heard of is that Microsoft briefly toyed with the idea of annual releases of Windows that would occur as the firm tried to move its codebase off of MS-DOS and Windows 9x and to NT.

It was February 1998. Microsoft’s first major update to Windows 95, now called Windows 98, had been delayed until May 1998 because of the software giant’s ongoing antitrust issues. Windows NT 4.0 had been in the market for about 18 months, but its successor, Windows NT 5.0, had likewise been delayed thanks to the difficulty Microsoft had bringing a full-featured directory services infrastructure, Active Directory, and its IntelliMirror management technologies to market.

By that point, Cairo, Microsoft’s original plan for the next major release of Windows NT, had already been canceled. Instead, Microsoft had delivered three minor releases, NT 3.5, 3.51, and 4.0, which delivered bug fixes, performance improvements, compatibility with new hardware platforms, and, in the 4.0 release, the same stripped-down user interface refresh that had debuted earlier in Windows 95. But since mid-1996, all had been quiet on the NT front.

Sales of Windows 95, by comparison, had exploded. And thanks to external forces---the rise of the Internet and new Plug and Play hardware advances, most obviously---Microsoft had been forced to quickly update that platform over the intervening couple of years. But instead of refreshing the retail version of Windows 95, Microsoft issued service packs, which fixed bugs and added support for new hardware such as large disks (via the FAT32 file system), USB, IEEE1394 (Firewire), Intel’s MMX processor extensions, and newer Intel processors like Pentium Pro and Pentium III. Microsoft also released OEM Services Releases (OSRs) for PC makers which bundled the features from service p...