Bill Gates: Windows 95 Was 'A High Point'

BobJacobsen writes "CBSnews.com has an article about Bill Gates and Steve Balmer answering questions at the 'All Things Digital' conference. When asked about 'high points' in his time at Microsoft, Gates replied 'Windows 95 was a nice milestone.' The article continues 'He also spoke highly of Microsoft SharePoint Server software, but didn't mention Vista.' Was there really nothing else that Gates considered a high point?"

Comments

Considering what came before it...

[kungfoolery]

...ya gotta admit, Windows95 was a huge improvemnt. WFW was really nothing more than a crappy shell plastered on top of a not so great OS. With Win95, it seems MS really came up with something much more modern and different (please note, I'm comparing Windows to earlier iterations of itself, not Mac, Unix, or anything else). It finally implemented a TCP/IP stack, Explorer (for better or worse), 32-bit filesystem, and a workable interface. The stupid start button was still eons behind what Apple had (and still has), but it was a huge leap from WFW.

More accurate high point == buying DOS?

[Sparky9292]

I'd figure the major high point would be Bill Gates buying Tim Patterson's 86-DOS for $50,000 and selling it to IBM and the clones for bazillions.

Re:It WAS a high point

[phantomfive]

Yes, and it represents Microsoft at its high point. All the world (figuratively speaking) was happy to get windows 95, it was such a clear advance over windows 3.11. It was a job (relatively) well done. Investors were happy. Customers were happy. It was the product that would push them into the clear winner position in the PC market (and by PC in this case I include Mac, since they drastically lost market share afterwards).

Then anti-trust investigations started up. Windows 98 was an incremental update that had to be dumped for windows NT. Security issues started to matter. This open source stuff became a threat. Now everyone is trying to knock them off the mountain. And may very well succeed.

I wonder if it bothers him?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

TFA quotes Gates as saying "We got to dream about a software industry and the greatest tool of empowerment ever - the personal computer - and be part of creating that in terms of the platform and the applications,"

I wonder if the fact that MS is now decisively on the wrong side of the computer-as-tool-of-empowerment bothers him? I don't mean as a CEO or shareholder, obviously MS' strategy has made him giant piles of money; but personally. It can be argued that MS had a considerable hand in making cheap and common x86 gear a reality, back in the bad old days of fragmented consumer gear and hyperexpensive IBM suitware; but it has been a while now. Perhaps more than ever, MS is working against empowerment(and no, I'm not just fudding about Vista DRM-OMG!, I'm talking about things like Rights Management Services, and mandatory driver signing.) Even when they feel charitable, their notion of empowerment is "like corporate; but cheaper".

I wonder, does that bother Bill? What does he feel, privately, about the fact that MS has become the tyrant it overthrew, and has basically settled down to make money by offering software for enforcing corporate control? Does he like that or would he, off the record, admit a certain desire to be on the other side?

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Locutus]

but Windows 95 was just plain BAD on the Pentium Pro which was fully optimized for 32 bit. Remember that 150MHz was the top end back in those days and IIRC, UNIX rocked on the PPro. And OS/2 ran most apps at close to 2x faster on the 150MHz PPro compared to 150MHz Pentium. Windows95 ran much SLOWER on that 150MHz PPro compared to the P150. That's right, Windows ran slower on the new 32bit CPU and Intel was pissed at Microsoft for this. It set Intel back about 2 years and helped AMD grow. They had to hack 16bit optimizations into a new chip and to make it interesting, added new DSP-like registers(SSE) so they could sell it as a new CPU. Otherwise it was just the old stuff dumbed down to run 16bit code better.

Bill Gates says that Windows 95 was a high point for him because he beat IBM in the marketing wars and solidified their monopoly once and for all. They had a huge party when word was sent throughout Microsoft that IBM signed the license deal for Windows 95. It was on the day it was released IIRC. So a technical flop but a marketing marvel is what Bill calls his high point. Yup, I remember seeing the video of a bunch of Microsoft employees in a hallway with a bowling ball and at the other end were 10 software competitor's products lined up like bowling pins. OS/2 was at pin position #1.

I guess NT was supposed to take all of the server market but reliability kept UNIX going and by the time people figured out how to make a whole bunch of Windows PCs replace UNIX, Linux came in and really messed up Bill and Steve's plan for world domination. Where's Bill's tech leadership legacy? Windows 95?

Back to the thread; So there was so much 16 bit code in the "new" 32bit Windows 95 that a new CPU optimized for 32bit code ran the software way slower than the old 16bit optimized Pentium CPU. Exactly what you'd expect from a company where marketing is job #1. IMO.

LoB

I'm actually with Bill on this one

[Mr Z]

Windows 95, with all its warts and issues, was something of a high point. And, honestly, I do consider this from the vantage point of hardware built for Windows 95, running Windows 95 OSR2, or its closely related followon, Windows 98SE.

The launch version of Win95 was awful and nobody was really prepared for it and it caused plenty of problems. It didn't understand USB at all, etc. etc. etc. But, it eventually matured, and it really represented a fundamental mental shift for everyone: DOS is well and truly going away. You could manage things from a GUI. You don't have to set jumpers to install a card.

This was the first Windows that didn't boot into an obvious DOS first. It was the first Windows that started to feel more like a lot more than a graphical version of DOSSHELL.EXE. It was the first version you could credibly manage almost entirely by GUI, rather than editing obscure .INI files to comment out incompatible VXDs.

In terms of bringing the state of PC computing forward, Win95 was definitely one of the larger, more successful steps forward. If I had to rate the more successful steps on Microsoft's part, they'd be, in roughly chronological order:

• MS-DOS/PC-DOS 2.1x: First widely deployed and long-lived DOS iteration. Adds subdirectories, device drivers and the EXE format, IIRC. Powered the generation of IBM PCs, PCjrs and the first wave of compatibles that really began to put the PC on the map.
• MS-DOS 3.3: Probably the highlight of the DOS networking era. As I recall, this is the peak of the early LanManager attempts at networking PCs. Also brought many ideas from XENIX back into DOS.
• MS-DOS 6.2 + Win 3.1x: DOS reaches its pinnacle, with proper online help, a decent compiled BASIC and highmem support. Windows finally begins to become something worth putting at the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT for many people. Some of this started happening with MS-DOS 5, but it didn't really reach maturity until MS-DOS 6.2x.
• Win9x: Win95 was a much needed upgrade in interaction with the PC. Established a new UI that'd hold with minimal changes through XP (though it got a graphical refresh for the default XP theme, classic was still available). It finally made it reasonable for most people to dump DOS. It made managing the system entirely from the GUI credible. Though flawed, it brought us the first instance of Plug-and-Play and the end of the jumper. This alone was a pretty huge step. Combine it with USB, and you have a rather noticeable shift in ease of use at the hardware level. Granted, much of this didn't stabilize until around Win98SE, but in many ways Win98SE was really more of a Win95 SP4.
• Win2000: This put the NT kernel on the map for most people, and many still run it. This set the stage for the successful release of WinXP.
• WinXP: For all practical purposes, killed DOS dead for good by bringing the NT kernel to the masses.

I'm not sure whether Win2K and WinXP both belong on the list as separate bullets, or if they really kinda form a single bullet point. Their biggest contribution together was to kill DOS and force everyone to finally program with at least some hardware abstraction. <soupnazi>No direct hardware access for YOU!</soupnazi>

At any rate, if I were to name the highlights of the Microsoft path in terms of actually advancing the state of PC computing for most people, those would be the points I pick.

I'm not a Microsoft fanboi. I was something of a fan, if a bit timid about it, back in the early 90s. I quickly became disillusioned when I got to college and was exposed to UNIX. Here I was with a 386 all to myself that I could barely use without crashing, and I was logging into a timeshare AT&T SVR4 UNIX box with dual 486s, sharing it with 100 other people. In late 1993 I installed Linux and dual booted for a few years, but eventually I was running Linux only. So I'm no Microsoft apologist.

That said, you'd be

Windows vs. Linux in the 90s.

[DrYak]

Hell, in 96, I recall Linux + X not being a very stable desktop by today's standards either. Compared to modern linux distribution, it wasn't very stable.
Compared to the Microsoft software du jour, that's an entirely different story.

Usually, buggy software caused *some* application to stop abruptly. In worst-case scenario the whole K Desktop Environment would crash, bringing down you whole GUI and throwing you back to the shell. Nonetheless, everything running in the background kept running, completely unaffected by whatever problem you had with the GUI : The Samba shares, the Squid Proxy set up to share the modem connection, telnet & ssh, etc...

On Windows 9x/ME, whenever it crashed, you got a bluescreen and *absolutely everything* was down with it. In addition you could really do a lot of things with it. It was supposed to be multi-tasking, but you couldn't load more than a couple of apps at the same time anyway. Loading a CD Burning application and an Office Suite and a web browser was beyond its capabilities.

Windows 95 was the reason I switched to Linux.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one ironic thing I find about Microsoft. Their client operating systems sometimes cause hair pulling, while they do quite well with their server stuff.

This actually underlines the fact that Windows crashes are almost never caused by the Windows OS itself, and almost always by buggy third-party drivers, and even buggy hardware, especially for things like video, which evolve rapidly.

Servers tend to be stable because there's no need to run the latest drivers for things like video and audio, and even if they are installed, they aren't exercised very heavily. Clients tend to crash because buggy drivers and/or hardware from firms like NVidia, ATI/AMD and Intel actually get exercised heavily, which exposes the bugs.

There's actually a slight argument for some form of open source here, since if NVidia, ATI, Intel, et al were willing to give the source code for their drivers to Microsoft, to include in the Windows OS builds, it would almost certainly lead to much higher reliability, since Microsoft would be able to spot a lot of these bugs through review of the code and stress testing (in contrast to the "many eyes" nonsense, Microsoft developers actually would be able to spot and fix bugs). However, these drivers are generally viewed as secret (eg NVidia don't want ATI to see their driver code and vice-versa, so neither will give sources to Microsoft), so Microsoft can't fix the bugs, but still get the blame when things go pear-shaped.

Microsoft's business model of supporting a huge range of disparate parts that can be combined into innumerable configurations has a lot of strengths, which is why it killed off most of the proprietary systems, but it does have weaknesses too. The reliance on drivers written by hardware vendors is probably the single biggest technical challenge Microsoft face, and also the single biggest issue that tarnishes the reputation of their software (arguably unfairly, except to the extent that they could make it easier to write device drivers).