Net Buzz with Richard Wiggins | 5

East Lansing, Michigan
Windows 98: Why Microsoft Should Prevail

By Richard Wiggins

eeing Bill Gates for the first time in person made quite an impression on me. There he was, standing about 150 feet away, describing plans for Microsoft in general and Windows in particular. I was in Tokyo to speak at the massive Windows World '96 conference, and had managed to wrangle a press pass to attend as Gates addressed about 1500 Asian and Western reporters. Gates was even more geekish in his mannerisms than one would expect; he was introduced to the blare of arena-level conference-pop, and his first action was to mop his hair out of his eyes. Most of his remarks were, well, unremarkable, but my ears perked up when he described how Windows would behave in the future.

Gates declared that the "Web page metaphor" would be the new standard for the Windows interface. Rather than launching applications and opening files, one would follow hyperlinks among documents; appropriate applications would launch automatically. The user wouldn't even know what application was being launched under most circumstance; by default, one wouldn't know or care whether the underlying document format was Microsoft Word or HTML.

Gates demonstrated a mockup of how this might work. The demonstration involved a workplace scenario of a pharmaceutical company with an inventory management problem. Gates depicted a world in which document sharing, e-mail, and real-time communications via the desktop PC all worked together seamlessly. At one point in the demonstration, a manager allowed a co-worker across the country to execute an Excel spreadsheet from the manager's hard disk - the owner of any data would have the capacity to enable others to run remote applications against their data as the need to do so arises.

The scenario Gates described and demonstrated was mind-boggling. He argued that this new "Web page metaphor" for documents along with Net-based tools for collaboration and communication would greatly enhance the ability of workgroups in large corporations to get real work done. It was an impressive pitch, and an impressive demo.

Within months, Microsoft released the extensions to Windows 95 that began implementing what Gates described that day in 1996, and announced plans to integrate Web navigation into the operating system itself. Today, almost two years later, the version of the operating system that fully implements this vision is called Windows 98, and is available in beta form for anyone who wants to pay $29.95 for it. However, if the Justice Department has their way, the Windows 98 vision may never be implemented.

As much as I worry about the Microsoft juggernaut, it seems to me that any effort to halt the implementation of the vision Gates described in 1996 will be counterproductive at best and destructive at worst. Here's why…

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