Every three years or so, America’s computer Godzilla, Microsoft Corp., ups the ante in its drive to dominate the world’s home and office desktops by releasing a new operating system.
In the beginning was MS-DOS (Microsoft disk operating system), followed by Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME (Millennium Edition).
Starting as a distant second to Apple Computer Inc., Microsoft raised the stakes with each upgrade, winning market share every time. It worked so well that today no fewer than 90 percent of all the world’s PCs run Windows and 85 percent use Microsoft applications like word processors, spreadsheets and databases.
With a mortal lock on the work-a-day side of personal computing, Bill Gates’ company now seeks far greater wealth from the softer side of sitting in front of a screen.
In his sights is the world of entertainment: the making and playing of home movies, showing and printing snapshots, listening to CDs and, of course, using the Internet for shopping, e-mail and the growing pursuit of instant messaging, where two or more people can exchange messages in real time.
With the looming Oct. 25 release of Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional, the ever-higher stakes that Microsoft plays for with each new Windows release will reach the nosebleed level.
Jim Cullinan, lead product manager for XP, boasted that this radically different look and feel for using a PC “gives you the freedom to experience the best of your PC.” That, Cullinan said, is where XP comes from: “eXPerience.”
You will experience it, however, with Microsoft as your ever-present guide, and as you get immersed in the XP experience, you will find Microsoft always ready to sell you something or to help its many strategic partners sell you something.
Here are three examples that show just how deeply Microsoft has embedded a new breed of commercialism into the small screens on home desktops:
When you open the folder called My Pictures–designed to hold all of the photographs you scan, digitize or download–a panel on the left-hand side of the screen offers to put you into contact with companies like Kodak that make and mail prints to your doorstep.
When you open the folder called My Music, that same left-hand pitch panel pops up to let you shop for music online from outfits with deals at Microsoft like CDNow.
When you click to open the Windows Media Player to listen to your own CDs, you get utterly blitzed with pitches to buy CDs similar to the one you are playing. Microsoft also encourages you to visit Web sites promoting various talents and even to send away for tour memorabilia commonly sold at concerts.
Looking to the future
A great many people will not see themselves using computers in this scenario. Yet these same folks should remember when people heard about television and even went to a store to watch it but never thought it would be in their own homes.
The absolute keys to the kingdom that Gates and company covet are the combination of a powerful multimedia computer and some kind of steady Internet connection, preferably by way of so-called broadband connections like cable modems or digital subscriber lines.
With your PC always on the Internet, it will be a snap for whomever controls the display on your screen to beam you sales pitches and to deliver entertainment products digitally, such as music and even videos like soap operas, game shows or movies.
With Windows XP, it will be Microsoft controlling the display.
When television became a serious part of American life there were three major companies that determined what the screen in your home would look like: NBC, ABC and CBS. As things stand with the smaller screen that links to the Internet, Microsoft alone will control the look and feel of what you see and hear.
Still, there are huge rewards for the user in all of this because it amounts to setting a single standard. We all will do the same sorts of things with our keyboards and mice to call up the luxuries of home entertainment and the empowerment of an Internet connected computer.
Windows XP delivers with a hugely improved set of tools that span everything from Microsoft’s free Web e-mail (Hotmail.com) to a greatly improved built-in Web browser. The revised Media Player delivers a near sublime home music experience as well as all those gaudy commercial ploys.
Another highlight: Windows XP integrates very well with the growing number of digital gadgets–cameras, scanners, digital video camcorders, personal digital assistants and music players like the popular Rio.
XP is so solidly integrated with peripherals that once you plug something into the computer the software recognizes that you plugged it in and what it is. The software then pops up a menu suggesting all of the things you might do with whatever gadget is in play.
A digital camera creates a popup of software that will transfer photos from it and allow rudimentary picture editing such as cropping, red-eye removal, and color and contrast adjustments.
As noted earlier, you also will get an offer to click an icon and have your newly scanned and tweaked images printed and home-delivered. Such offers will be welcome to some, hated by others, but they seem likely to be part of the computer user’s life as time passes and more of us move into the world of broadband multimedia computing.
Older PCs need not apply
XP amounts to at least something of a gamble for Microsoft because it only works on a relatively high-powered PC, and so a great many people with older PCs simply will not encounter it until they buy a new machine.
Breaking with a past tradition of at least claiming that almost all Pentium-class computers can run previous operating systems like Windows 98 and ME, Microsoft itself recommends that XP users have at least 128 megabytes of random access memory and a Pentium II running 300 mHz or faster. Such computers were the top of the line just two years ago.
In fact, testing for this review found that XP doesn’t work smoothly on machines with less than 750 mHz processor speed. It would seem that it is going to be harder to sell the general public on upgrading to XP than it was selling prior upgrades like 98 and ME that are much more forgiving in areas like processor speed and system memory.
Nevertheless, Microsoft executives have acknowledged plans to spend beyond $1 billion promoting XP, even at a time when its business fundamentals have been shaken by the broader decline of technology stocks.
More than in the past, however, promoting XP will be aimed at selling new machines powered by Intel Pentium III or Pentium 4 chips (also equivalent machines with AMD chips) and 128 or 256 mb of RAM.
The XP promotion is viewed as a godsend by embattled PC-makers like Dell, Gateway and Hewlett-Packard, because Microsoft is, in effect, funding ads for their products at a time when sales are in serious decline.
The final quarter of the year traditionally has been the strongest in the PC industry, and there had been concern that Microsoft waited too long with an Oct. 25 launch date for XP.
In response, Microsoft over the past two weeks has allowed some of its partners, including Dell, Gateway and HP, to begin selling XP-loaded machines. But as never before in its turbulent history, everything seems to be riding on whatever excitement the company can generate surrounding the launch of XP as an upgrade product.
