Technologizer

Few people understand Microsoft better than Tandy Trower, who worked at the company from 1981-2009. Trower was the product manager who ultimately shipped Windows 1.0, an endeavor that some advised him was a path toward a ruined career. Four product managers had already tried and failed to ship Windows before him, and he initially thought that he was being assigned an impossible task. In this follow-up to yesterday’s story on the future of Windows, Trower recounts the inside story of his experience in transforming Windows from vaporware into a product that has left an unmistakable imprint on the world, 25 years after it was first released.

Thanks to GUIdebook for letting us borrow many of the Windows images in this story.

–David Worthington

Microsoft staffers talk MS-DOS 2.0 with the editors of PC World in late 1982 or early 1983. Windows 1.0 wouldn’t ship for almost another two years. From left: Microsoft’s Chris Larson, PC World’s Steve Cook, Bill Gates, Tandy Trower, and founding PC World editor Andrew Fluegelman.
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Yesterday I paid a long-overdue visit to one of the Bay Area’s most amazing geek destinations–the Weird Stuff Warehouse, which salvages the hardware and software that Silicon Valley has lost interest in. The place has been in business for a quarter century and throngs of shoppers were roaming the aisles during my expedition. And it was bursting at the seams with shrinkwrapped software for defunct platforms, obsolete gadgets, components and cables of every imaginable type, and much, much more.

View Silicon Valley’s Island of Misfit Tech slideshow.

You saved and you saved until you could finally buy that shiny new $1000 gadget that promised you everything under the stars. When it came time to plug it in, you found your joy being subsumed by abject horror. Your stomach plunged deep into your gut and you (yes, mortal non-designer you) recognized a fundamental flaw in your flashy gizmo so obvious that it made you want to pick up the device and smash it over the designer’s head.

Even the best designers make mistakes…but this article isn’t about them. We’re about to, ahem, celebrate the worst consumer electronics designers through the lens of their faulty creations. Since I’m far from an all-knowing technology god, I’ve limited our survey to fifteen design problems that have not only bugged me through the years, but that are widespread enough to have bugged many of you too. These problems aren’t limited to current technology, but they all fall into the nebulous realm known as “consumer electronics.” You know: TVs, telephones, VCRs, DVD players, MP3 players, and more.

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I spent a couple of my formative years as a tech journalist working at InfoWorld–the publication which may have taught more to more tech journalists than any other. Thanks to Google Books, its entire print run is now available to peruse–including the early issues that document many of personal computing’s defining moments.

Even if you never read any of the articles, the early magazine-format covers are wonderfully evocative. I’ve compiled some of my favorites (from way before I worked there) into a gallery.

View The Golden Age of InfoWorld Covers slide show.

“Insanity,” novelist Rita Mae Brown wrote, “is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” By that standard, the long history of tablet computers doesn’t quite count as insanity–manufacturers have tried a variety of form factors and features over the years. But the results are the same, over and over again: failure. It’s the classic example of a gadget that the industry keeps coming back to and reintroducing with all the hype it can muster–and which consumers keep rejecting.

Today, Apple is announcing its first true tablet. It took the company thirty-four years to get around to it, and it’s just about the only outfit in the business that abstained until now. Whether the device looks brilliant or misbegotten, all evidence suggests that there won’t be much that’s repetitious about it. Even so, it’s worth looking back at more than two decades of attempts to get tablets right–none of which really succeeded, and some of which failed on a monumental scale.

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“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” So said legendary tech visionary Alan Kay. He was absolutely correct. But he might have added that inventing the future is anything but a cakewalk. Even though everyone who does it has the luxury of learning from predecessors who tried and failed.

The brightest inventors on the planet keep coming up with ideas that never amount to much–even when they set out to solve real problems, and even when their brainchildren foreshadow later breakthroughs. And professional tech watchers have long proven themselves prone to getting irrationally exuberant about stuff that just isn’t ready for prime time.

Thanks to Google Books’ archives of Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, LIFE, and other magazines that frequently reported on futuristic gizmos, we have a readily accessible record of technology that failed to live up to the initial hype–including random notions that never got off the drawing board, startlingly advanced products that didn’t find a market, and very rough drafts of concepts that eventually became a big deal. The best of them are fascinating, even when it’s not the least bit surprising that they flopped.

Herewith, fifteen inventions–not that all of them ever got built–that were at least a decade ahead of their time. They’re in chronological order, starting with the inspiration that gave this article its title.
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The tech press covers Apple like it does no other company. And one oddball, ongoing example of Apple exceptionalism is the fact that even its invitations to product launches are treated as major news. They’re also analyzed as if the minimalist words and imagery they contain will reveal precisely what Apple will announce, if only we can crack the code.

All of which gives me an excuse to…write about Apple invites as we wait for next week’s Apple product event to come around. “A Brief History of Apple Event Invites” recaps eight years of such invitations: what they said, what people thought they said, and whether expectations for the events in question had anything to do with the news that Apple actually released.

(Executive summary: Apple is often vague in its invites but never misleading, and it’s sometimes surprisingly straightforward.)

I’ll be at next week’s event and would be pleased to have the honor of your company for our live coverage. And if you’re in the mood to make predictions, participate in Technologizer’s Apple Tablet Prediction Project, and get a shot at winning a $100 Apple Store gift card.

Nice piece by John Gruber on what he calls the original tablet–the Apple Newton-and what those who would make or covet slate computers can learn from it. (Unless my memory decieves me, however, the Newton’s problem wasn’t that it stated the same (unpocketable) size and kept the same (high) price–the later Newtons were actually larger and more expensive than the first ones. Palm came along and made a Newton-like gizmo that was smaller and cheaper, and the rest is–well, you get the idea…

The world is still busy making technology predictions for 2010. How about some predictions made more than sixty years ago–in magazine ads for hard liquor?

In the mid-1940s, Seagram’s VO Canadian whiskey ads depicted technology miracles which were supposed to arrive in the postwar era. Some did come to change the world, eventually; others, we’re still waiting for. (That’s a TV that prints its own newspapers at right,) In both cases, the art commissioned by Seagram’s is more entertaining today than when these ads first ran.

View Men Who Think Beyond Tomorrow slideshow.

Quick, what’s the most admired technology brand? Maybe you answered Apple. Or Google. Or maybe even Microsoft. I’m reasonably certain, however, that none of the brands you’re about to read about sprung to mind. They’re all damaged goods–severely damaged goods in most cases.

No brand is guaranteed eternal health. (The two most powerful tech trademarks of the mid-1980s were arguably Compaq and Lotus; both are still around, but in greatly diminished form.) The brands in this story haven’t just lost a little of their luster. Most were once among the most respected names in tech, but ran into financial hardship and got sold (often repeatedly) to new owners who were usually mostly interested in strip-mining whatever goodwill the brands retained with the American public.

If you ever loved any of the names in this article–and chances are that you once had a high opinion of at least a few of them–prepare to feel a tad glum.

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It’s two days before Christmas, and I’m feeling festive. Which is all the reason I need to share some holiday-themed electronics commercials with you. Ho, ho, ho…

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If ever a decade began dumb, it was this one.* When clocks struck midnight on January 1st and the dreaded Y2K bug turned out to be nothing but a mild irritant, it proved once again that the experts often don’t know what the heck they’re talking about.

Which was a relief–and a fitting way to kick off the technological era we’ve lived in ever since. Yes, it’s been an amazing time. But it’s also seen more than its share of misbegotten decisions, bizarre dramas, pointless hype, and lackluster products and technologies–often involving the same people and companies responsible for all the amazing stuff.

So–with a respectful tip of the Technologizer hat to Business 2.0 and Fortune’s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business and, of course, to Esquire’s Dubious Achievement Awards–let’s recap, shall we?

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