![]() Paul Cubbage, my partner in the service, had developed an advanced forecasting capability. ![]() I’d recently left IBM to join Dataquest and had relatively intimate knowledge of what a train wreck the pre-Windows 95 segment was. To say I was a fan would have been an understatement. As the dedicated operating system analyst for Dataquest, and the designated launch analyst for Windows 95, I was at the center of that storm. In many ways, Windows 95 was massively overhyped, but it showcased what an adequate marketing budget for a revolutionary product could do concerning demand generation. This laptop showcases just how far Windows has come since Windows 95. Let’s talk about Windows 95 this week, and we’ll close with my product of the week - the Slim 7 Laptop from Lenovo. It also made my career for which I’m eternally grateful. The launch year was an essential point in the history of the PC that changed the market forever. From the standpoint of lines and demand, nothing that preceded the product even came close, and even after the launch, only Apple has been able to drive the same level of excitement - but not for an operating system, only for complete hardware. Then Windows 95 was promised and the year running up to the launch was a fantastic mix of media showcases, previews, speculation and excitement. OS/2 the supposed successor to DOS/Windows, wasn’t selling well either, and DOS/Windows was way out-of-date and aging poorly. Steve Jobs was on a forced hiatus after being fired from Apple, and that platform wasn’t doing well. There are very few personal computing platforms that can claim that kind of consistency over such a long time period and such a huge customer base.Last week was the 25th anniversary of the biggest and most critical launch in computing history. But for now, it’s interesting to me that the basics haven’t changed in 20 years, and we’re still using the same basic user experience that Microsoft first launched with Windows 95. I’ll look into examining some related topics in more detail-I’m particularly intrigued by the aborted document-centric stuff, for example-in the future. Windows 95 is a big enough topic that this article only touches on the broad strokes. It was a busy, heady time, and Gary and I worked throughout the summer of 1995, and indeed on the day of the Windows 95 launch as well, to get our book completed. That summer, Microsoft also launched Plus! for Windows 95, codenamed Frosting, Office for Windows 95, and MSN, the Microsoft Network, which was originally envisioned as a CompuServe-like online service that integrated directly with the Windows 95 shell. There were wizards for setting up a printer, adding a new device, setting up remote access, creating a shortcut, installing a new application, and more.Īnd Windows 95 didn’t stand alone. Windows 95 was the first version of Windows to contain wizard applications, which would guide users through task completion step-by-step. “In a document-centric environment, the application window changes and the document stays the same, so the software works the way people work, rather than vice-versa.” Sounds like science fiction, because it is, and this never took off with users. More dramatically, it was possible for a single window to host multiple applications-say Word and Excel-and as you selected the relevant bits, the window would change to reflect the commands of the right app. For example, if you’re working on a project, you would think of the project documents, and find them in the Start menu, and click them, and the correct application would just launch. The theory was that instead of thinking of apps, you’d think of documents. Windows 95 was the start of a grand but ultimately failed experiment at document-centricity. Windows 95 Recycle Bin appears to be the model for the version in Windows 10.ĭocument-centricity.
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