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 ea...

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