Programming Windows: The End of an Era (Premium)

On October 27, 1998, Microsoft announced that the oft-delayed Windows NT 5.0 would be renamed to Windows 2000. The name change was largely symbolic, since NT 5.0 would not ship in a consumer version to replace Windows 98 as originally promised. Instead, Microsoft’s long-planned platform unification would have to wait for the next major release.

Still, it was the end of the era. Though the Windows hawks had won back control of the desktop from Brad Silverberg’s Internet Platform and Tools, there was a sense inside Microsoft that the computing world was moving on from the PC. And that the forces that had put the PC at the center of personal technology would soon do so for simpler devices, for web applications, or for some combination of the two.

Microsoft had long had designs on the post-PC world, had as early as the early 1990s begun working to establish itself in markets that it felt would evolve, naturally, to include PC-like technologies and connectivity. But its early efforts in interactive TV, pen-based computing, and electronic books were all abject failures. And even its early pushes into portable devices like Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), which should have been an easy transition, saw little traction. Only in servers, the most PC-like of its new markets, did Microsoft—and, in this case, NT—see any platform success.

But in the PC space, Microsoft’s biggest—OK, only—competition was itself. With approximately 95 percent marketshare and usage share heading into 1999, the question wasn’t whether Windows would win, it was which Windows. Microsoft desperately wanted the answer to be NT, both because it was more technically advanced and because its licensing costs were much higher. But the cheaper and more compatible Windows 9x family of products, still built on a rickety MS-DOS foundation, consistently outsold NT by a wide margin, even in the business markets that Microsoft explicitly stated were the province of NT.

The solution, foisted on Microsoft by its increasingly influential marketing department, was to lose the NT brand and just rebrand Windows NT 5.0 as Windows 2000. This would make the product appear to be more in-line with its other date-branded products. And because 2000 was in the future and 1998 was in the past, it made the product appear to be more of an appropriate upgrade for Windows 98. This despite the fact that NT 5.0/Windows 2000 was still not as compatible with the same broad range of hardware and software as was Windows 98.

“Windows NT will be the basis for all Microsoft PC operating systems from consumer products to the highest-performance servers,” Microsoft senior vice president Jim Allchin said somewhat disingenuously at the time. “Windows NT is going mainstream.”

Microsoft also announced that it was dropping the Workstation branding for the client version of Windows 2000. Now, it would be called Windows 2000 Professional. “With improvements across the board in ease of use, mobile support and total cost of ownership, Windows 2000 Professional is the right choice for all business users,” Microsoft vice president Brad Chase said. “It’s no longer just for high-end workstations.”

As for the NT team and the product’s biggest fans, marketing suggested throwing them a bone: Windows 2000 would ship with the redundant tagline “Built on NT technology.” But instead of instilling a sense of pride, it was instead a bitter reminder that NT, once valued as something special, had lost out to an inferior and more pedestrian product line. That NT stood for “New Technology,” making the new tagline really read as “Built on New Technology technology,” was the final insult.

Well, perhaps it was the penultimate insult: Microsoft still had to actually ship NT 5.0, er, Windows 2000.

After finally delivering its long-delayed Beta 2 release to reviewers back in August 1998, Microsoft finalized a feature-complete Beta 3 on a timelier schedule, in late April 1999. Beta 3 offered customers their first a peek at Microsoft’s new “better together” marketing mantra, where businesses deploying both Windows 2000 Server and Professional would reap the biggest benefits and, according to Microsoft, the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).

Microsoft delivered the first Windows 2000 Release Candidate (RC) on July 1 and then issued two more RCs before finalizing the product on December 15, 1999, and releasing it to manufacturing. It announced that it would ship Windows 2000, finally, on February 17, 2000.

As for the DOS-based versions of Windows, the end, once nigh, was now protracted.

After internal complaints that Windows 98 was being undercut because the Internet Explorer team had been releasing its best features for free, Microsoft delayed the release from 1997 to the first half of 1998. But Microsoft had an ulterior motive: It was also concerned that a U.S. Federal District Court would prevent the firm from shipping Windows 98 with IE 4.0 bundled. And so it pretended that the delay was so that it could deliver tools that would help Windows 3.1 users upgrade more seamlessly to this version of the product.

After a paid Consumer Beta Preview Program in early 1998, Microsoft finally revealed that it planned to ship Windows 98 in late June, just ahead of its latest deadline. The marketing of this product was interesting since it didn’t offer any compelling advantages over Windows 95 with IE 4.0. Microsoft claimed that Windows 98 ran “applications faster and easier than Windows 95,” whatever that meant, and that it would natively support universal serial bus (USB), functionality that had arrived previously in an OEM Service Release (OSR) of Windows 95.  Windows 98 also offered “DVD and television broadcast capabilities, allowing a PC with a TV tuner card to seamlessly receive and display television and other data distributed over broadcast networks.”

In early May, an Appeals Court panel cleared the release of Windows 98 with bundled IE functionality, so Microsoft shipped Windows 98 as promised and was perhaps more surprised than anyone when sales immediately exploded. Microsoft sold over 1 million copies of the Windows 98 Upgrade at retail within its first three weeks in the market, and customers gave it 90 percent satisfaction rating. By September, retail upgrade sales had hit 1.5 million units, and Microsoft admitted that interest in the lackluster upgrade was “stronger than anticipated and spurred an increase in retail sales of PC and software in an otherwise depressed market.”

By the time 1998 concluded, Windows 98 licenses had topped 3 million units, making it the best-selling software of the year. “License purchases of Windows 98 this past holiday season outpaced our previous holiday retail sales records for Windows,” Microsoft reported.

For 1999, Microsoft planned a second version of Windows 98, the imaginatively named Windows 98 Second Edition. Windows 98 SE would replace Windows 98 in retail stores and would be bundled with new PCs, and it was offered to existing Windows 98 users—on CD, of course—for just $20. Windows 98 SE included Internet Explorer 5.0, support for Firewire and Advanced Configuration Power Interface (ACPI ) power management, Internet Connection Sharing, and other minor advances. It shipped in June 1999 after a very quick beta.

But Microsoft still wasn’t done with Windows 9x and its MS-DOS-based underpinnings. Thanks to the revised shipment plan for Windows NT 5.0/2000, Microsoft had several next-generation technologies in the works that couldn’t be added to an NT-based version of Windows until late 2001 at the earliest. And so the firm began plotting a final non-NT mainstream Windows version, aimed solely at consumers, that could include these features.

Developed under the codename Millennium, the product was eventually named Windows Millennium Edition (Me). And despite its short development cycle, it included several major if unappreciated platform advances like System Restore, System File Protection, and Automatic Updates. It also shipped with numerous other improvements, like Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) for cameras and scanners, support for the hibernation power management state, a new networking stack, Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) support, and much more. It even hid—but did not remove—access to Real Mode MS-DOS for the first time.

In a road not taken, Millennium also shipped with what was left of an idea called Activity Centers, which Microsoft had originally hoped to ship in an NT update called Neptune that had been recently canceled. Activity Centers would have melded the Win32 APIs and HTML and presented friendlier front ends to related groups of tasks. Microsoft originally planned to include a Photo Center for scanning, modifying, and managing digital images, a Music Center for recording, playing, and managing digital music, a Gaming Activity Center for configuring and manage games and gaming devices, a Help Activity Center that would replace online help and include web links, and a Home Networking Configuration Center that would help users set up home networking, and provide access to Internet Connection Sharing and other dial-up and networking connections.

What ultimately shipped in Windows Me, alas, was quite a bit less impressive. The system did include Activity Center-like interfaces such as Help and Support and Windows Media Player 7. And while there was no Home Networking Configuration Center, its constituent parts all did ship with Millennium. None of it was accessible to developers, either to extend with their own ideas or to use in their own products.

But there was a reason Millennium didn’t include Activity Centers: By late 1999, Microsoft had abandoned its plans to integrate HTML more deeply into Windows by making it the presentation layer for a new generation of applications. Instead, Microsoft was working on an even new generation of technologies that would supersede these plans and integrate Windows with XML, web services, and a new runtime environment based on Java. This new platform, originally called Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS), would eventually evolve into .NET, which Microsoft announced in 2000.

Despite this, Windows Me was, in fact, a much more technically impressive upgrade than either Windows 98 or 98 SE, and it included important new features that many would later associate with Windows XP, a late 2001 release that finally did combine the classic Windows and NT codebases for good. It was also far more reliable than any previous Windows 9x versions, and it included major user experience advances. It was, unfortunately, poorly received by reviewers, most of whom were likely eager for Microsoft to finally kill off Windows 9x and standardize on NT.

No matter. As of early 2000, Microsoft had delivered the final major releases of what we can now think of as “classic” versions of Windows. After Windows 2000 and Me, all new versions of Windows would include integrated .NET technologies as Microsoft plotted a two-pronged path to evolve its primary platform to embrace not just HTML and Java but interconnected web services. A new generation of Windows was waiting in the wings.