Windows 7 SP1 timing questions.

iTunes LPs: not so popular?

HP slate: a sneak peek.

HP sues Taiwanese cartridge maker.

Sobees Twitter client gets upgrade.

Firefox to stop Flash crashes.

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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.

In the late fall of 1984, I was just past three years in my employment with Microsoft. Considering the revolving doors in Silicon Valley at that time, I already had met or exceeded the typical time of employment with a high-tech company. Over that time I already had established a good track record, having started with product management of Microsoft’s flagship product, BASIC, and successfully introduced many versions including the so-called GW-BASIC which was licensed to PC clone vendors, various BASIC compilers, and a BASIC interpreter and compiler for the Apple Macintosh. As a result I had been given the overall responsibility for managingMicrosoft’s programming languages, which included FORTRAN, Pascal, COBOL, 8086 Macro Assembler, and its first C compiler for MS-DOS. It was at this point that things took a significant turn.

I had just gone through one of those infamous grueling project reviews with Bill Gates, who was known for his ability to cover all details related to product strategy, not only those on the technical side. Borland’s Turbo Pascal had just come out, seemed to be taking the market by storm, and looked like a possible competitor to Microsoft BASIC as the language that was shipped with every PC. While Microsoft had its own version of Pascal, it had been groomed as a professional developer’s tool, and in fact was the core language Microsoft wrote many of its own software products in before it was displaced by C.

At $50 for the Borland product vs. the Microsoft $400 compiler, it was a bit like comparing a VW to a Porsche. But while Turbo Pascal was lighter weight for serious development, it was almost as quick for programming and debugging as Microsoft’s BASIC interpreters. And Pascal was the programming language that most computer science students most typically studied. The new Borland product would require serious strategy revisions to the existing plans to port Microsoft Pascal to a new compiler architecture. But it also required thinking about how to address this with our BASIC products. Could a Turbo BASIC be on the horizon? In any case, Gates made it quite clear that he was not happy .

Returning to my office I was somewhat devastated. In the days that followed, as I tried to come up with a revised strategy, I was uncertain about whether I should even continue in this role. I had come to Microsoft from a consumer computer company where I had primarily managed a variety of entertainment and education software. Even in my early career at Microsoft I had managed its early PC games like Flight Simulator, Decathlon, and Typing Tutor. And I had loved managing BASIC, not just because it was the product the company was best known for, but because BASIC helped me get my own start in the PC business, and I believed it allowed a wide audience to tap into the power of PCs. Now my job had evolved to where I was managing a family of products mostly for a highly technical audience. So, I spoke with Steve Ballmer, then my direct manager and head of Microsoft’s product marketing group, and suggested that perhaps I was the wrong person for this job.

A couple of weeks later, Ballmer called me in and proposed that I transfer over to manage Windows. Sounds like a plum job right? Well, that wasn’t so obvious at the time. Windows had been announced the previous year with much fanfare and support from most of the existing PC vendors. However, by the time of my discussion with Steve, Windows still had not shipped within the promised timeframe and was starting to earn the reputation of being “vaporware.” In fact Ballmer had just returned from what we internally referred to as the “mea culpa” tour to personally apologize to analysts and press for the product not having shipped on time and to reinforce Microsoft’s definite plans to complete it soon.

Further, Microsoft’s strategy to get IBM to license Windows had failed. IBM had rejected Windows in favor of its own character-based DOS application windowing product called TopView. With IBM still the dominant PC seller, Microsoft would have to market Windows directly to IBM PC users. It would be the first time the company sold an OS level product directly to end-users (unless you count the Apple SoftCard, a hardware card that enabled Apple II users to run CPM-80 applications on their Apple IIs, which I had also previously managed). Since I had been the product manager that had the most experience with marketing technically oriented products through retail channels (rather licensed to PC vendors), Ballmer thought the job might be a good fit. In addition, he pointed out that since Windows was intended to expand the appeal of PC through its easier-to-use graphical user interface, it should appeal to my more end-user product experience and interests.

At that point Windows was no longer considered the company’s star project, as it had become a bit of an embarrassment. Even internally there were doubts among some in the company that Windows would ever ship. Also, because Ballmer had already burned though four product managers to try to get there–people who now had been either reassigned or were no longer at Microsoft–the product was developing a reputation for career death. Apparently prior to offering the job to me, Ballmer had tried to persuade Rob Glaser, already recognized as a bright, up-and coming talent, to take the position. But Glaser turned him down. When Glaser heard that I was offered the position, he even stopped by to counsel might that it would be a bad career move.

This made me think that perhaps the offer to me was a ploy by Gates and Ballmer to fire me because of their disappointment in dealing with Turbo Pascal and my suggestion that perhaps my assignment to managing programming languages was a poor choice on their part. It seemed clever: give me a task that no one else had succeeded with, let me fail as well, and they would have not only a scapegoat, but easy grounds to terminate me. So, I confronted Gates and Ballmer about my theory. After their somewhat raucous laughter they regained their composure and assured me that the offer was sincere and that they had confidence in my potential success.

So, in January of 1985 I transitioned over the Windows team, but even as I assumed my new role, I discovered that the Windows development architect and manager, Scott McGregor, a former Xerox PARC engineer, has just resigned. Ballmer himself took up McGregor’s role as the development lead in addition to his other responsibilities.

Shaping Up Windows

My first task was to assess of what was done and what was left to be done as well as come up with a marketing strategy of how to sell an OS add-on to end users, a task that was a significant challenge because no Windows applications existed at that time. How to sell a new application interface without any applications?

I discovered that while the three core functional components of Windows (Kernel–memory management, User–windowing and controls, and GDI–device rendering) were mostly in place there was still a substantial amount of work to be done, and Ballmer had given me only six months to finalize the product and get out the door. This didn’t bother too much since I had currently held the record for getting a product from definition to market in the shortest time.

There wasn’t much time to make changes. Ballmer was emphatic not to redefine what was already done, even though McGregor had changed Windows from its original overlapping windows design to a tiled windows model and every windowing system out there or under development featured overlapping windows. There also was not enough time to change the Windows system font displayed in title bars and control labels from a fixed width typeface to a proportional typeface, which made the overall look a bit clunky, especially in comparison to the newly announced Macintosh interface. Steve’s promise was that in the next release I would get creative freedom to make any significant changes to the product’s interface. I could add some functionality to make it more appealing to end-users, but overall the product needed to be finished, not further tweaked in any way that jeopardized getting it out that summer without further embarrassment.

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Technologizer’s Web stats are, of course, representative only of the Technologizer community–and this site is small enough that fluctuation is normal. (For instance, the percentage of visitors who use Macs varies a lot from month to month, which can skew browser data one way or the other.) But for what it’s worth, the last few months of usage data shows Chrome growing almost continuously, and Firefox jumping around in no clear pattern:

Chrome:
September: 9.05%
October: 8.93%
November:  9.69%
December: 12.65%
January: 14.03%

Firefox:
September: 45.79%
October: 41.35%
November. 42.09%
December: 45.46%
January: 41.43%

Net Applications’ January data also has ten percent of Web users on Windows 7. With Technologizer visitors, it’s sixteen percent–making Windows 7 the second-most used version of any operating system, after Windows XP, which 38 percent of you are still using…

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Gruber talks about the abstraction represented by the iPad–the way its interface shields the user from the minutia of the fact it’s a computing device in a way that no traditional computer does. He uses a car metaphor:

That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.

[snip]

Eventually, the vast majority [of computers] will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying computer is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.

If he’s right–and I think he is–the change is going to be less revolutionary than evolutionary. With computers, interface changes are nearly always about abstraction.

Want proof? Here’s John C. Dvorak–an odd bedfellow for Gruber if there ever was one–writing shortly after the Mac’s release in 1984, using a comparison he credits to Will Hearst II:

What the automatic transmission did for the automobile is what the Macintosh will do for personal computers.

Or simply consider the last thirty-five years of personal computing and communications:

• If you used computers in the mid-1970s there was a good chance you soldered your machine together yourself and programmed it using switches. You might even have designed it yourself.
• If you used computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the experience was entirely command-line based, and you most likely accomplished some tasks by writing your own programs. You almost certainly didn’t have a hard drive, which meant that you were intensely involved in the management of data (switching programs often meant switching floppy disks–assuming you had the luxury of a floppy drive at all).
• From the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s, you may have used a graphical interface–but if you were on a machine running Microsoft software, you did so only on a part-time basis, and evidence of DOS’s non-abstract nature was visible throughout Windows (eight-character file names, for example). If you went online, it was likely via a command-line service such as CompuServe that was an entirely different world from your local operating system. And if you needed to upgrade your computer, it generally meant opening it up and installing circuit cards.
• Beginning in the mid-1990s, almost everyone began to use graphical user interfaces almost all of the time–although even then, there were diehard command-line fans who sneered at GUIs. Thanks to always-on broadband, the Internet was just there; thanks to the Web, it was easy to use. And USB made it possible to perform a sizable percentage of upgrades without cracking your PC’s case.
• The period from the mid-aughts to today has been a continuation of the one before it. Whether you’re using a local application or a Web service is increasingly irrelevant–sometimes you can’t even tell which is which. Even cables are getting abstracted out of the picture: Devices often talk to each other via wireless networks.

It doesn’t matter whether you like abstraction or prefer to get your hands as dirty as possible. The trend is inevitable, and there’s no reason to think it’s anywhere near completion.

There’s no way that Windows or OS X can ever become utterly abstract, though. Both platforms have roots that stretch back to the 1980s, and which eliminate any possibility that you’ll forget you’re using a computer.

The cruft is especially thick on Windows, which still can leave you having to deal with the Registry and various security hassles and even the fact that an application may consist of thousands of files stored in multiple places on your hard drive. But it’s there in OS X, too. These operating systems have been abstracted about as far as they can be.

With the iPhone, and now the iPad, Apple took a step that’s necessary for further abstraction: It started over.

The iPhone OS’s technological underpinnings are based on OS X’s, but Apple threw a lot out. And when it came to the user interface, it didn’t rework the Mac look and feel–it built something utterly new. That approach couldn’t be any more different from Microsoft’s strategy with Windows Mobile, which retains as much as possible of Windows familiarity, from the Start Menu to dialog boxes to the freakin’ Registry.

By starting over, though, Apple gave up much. On both the technical and usability fronts, there are an array of things it’s either chosen to ignore or is working on but hasn’t yet incorporated into the OS. Obvious example: cut and paste, a mundane system function which didn’t make its way into the iPhone OS until two years after the first iPhone shipped–but which worked really well once it got there.

In its current state, the iPhone OS is still immature–and at times, abstract and limiting feel like the same thing. The OS still provides very little in the way of customization options, and still provides few ways for applications to get at data stored on the device. The inability to listen to a third-party music app while using a different program doesn’t feel abstract in the least; it’s a nagging reminder that you’re using an electronic device.

All of this is a more significant issue with the iPad than with the iPhone. The new device’s larger screen is going to make it a useful tool for applications which will never be key ones on the iPhone, and many of which are familiar from PCs and Macs. We began to see that yesterday morning, with Apple’s iWork office apps. All three are vastly more ambitious than similar programs for the iPhone will ever be, and reminiscent of programs we’ve used on desktop OSes for decades.

Their interfaces were the single thing at yesterday’s event that excited me the most. At the moment, though, they’re hobbled by basic limitations of the OS they run on. On the iPhone, for example, not being able to print directly is either a mild irritant or no irritant at all–but if you plan to use the iWork apps on the iPad, it’s could be a major pain in the neck.

Will the iPad be permanently crippled by limitations inherent in the current iPhone OS?  Absent access to Apple’s software roadmap, it’s impossible to know for sure, and the company isn’t telling. I do have some guesses, though:

• Rumor had it that Apple’s tablet would run iPhone OS 4.0, which would be announced at yesterday’s event. Instead, the iPad runs iPhone OS 3.2-by definition a relatively minor upgrade over iPhone OS 3.1, the current version that actually runs on iPhones. It’s therefore not surprising that most of the new features appear to involve getting applications to run on the iPad’s larger screen at all. But this we know: There will be an iPhone OS 4.0, and we’ll almost certainly learn more about it within the next few months. That’s when it’ll be logical to expect the major changes that Apple might make to reflect the existence of the iPad.
• iPhone OS is never going to make everyone happy, because Apple is never going to try to make everyone happy. (Exhibit A: the lack of Flash.) In 2015, there will still be people grousing over the OS’s limitations.
• Apple may never publicly say this, but my gut is that it expects the day to come when most or all of its devices run the OS we now call iPhone OS. (It’ll be called something else by then.) If so, the thing has gotta address many (but not all) of its current limitations. It’ll just do so piece by piece over the next few years. And, one hopes, in a way that doesn’t result in it eventually devolving into a clone of today’s OS X.

Apple, of course, isn’t the only company driving further abstraction of the computing experience. With Chrome OS, for instance, Google is pretty much trying to abstract everything out of the operating system except for the Web browser. (Apple limits you to the apps it chooses to offer through the iTunes Store; Google doesn’t let you run apps, period.)

I have no plans to eliminate traditional computers running traditional OSes from my computing regimen any time soon, but I’m glad both companies are scaring themselves–or at least some of us–with radical change. Which is why I think the iPad is a significant product even if version 1.0 is missing any number of bells and whistles which I’m not willing to live without just yet.

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Windows Vista is by many accounts a better operating system than XP, but nearly 90 percent of businesses bypassed the upgrade, and opted to stick with Windows XP, because it was “good enough” for them. Office XP presents Microsoft with a similar problem.

Microsoft is addressing its “good enough’ problem by broadening a licensing promotion called the “Up to Date Discount,” which is targeted at small/mid-size business (SMB) customers who continue to use old versions of the company’s products. It provides current Microsoft products at half off the suggested retail pricing. The program was set to expire on June 30, and was initially limited in scope to Windows Vista and Office 2003.

The promotion does have some catches: It is only available to first year Open Value Subscription (OVS) customers, resellers’ prices may vary, and it’s limited to Professional editions of Office and Windows. Customers that sign up for the program will receive Office 2010 when it ships (it’s expected to arrive this summer).

Another Microsoft promotional offer called “The Big Easy,” allots subsidies to customers to spend with Microsoft partners that increase when they purchase multiple qualifying product groups or if Software Assurance is added to an order. That offer runs between January 3 and March 31, and requires customers to enroll in one of several Microsoft subscription programs.

While those licensing promotions  provide appealing discounts, I’m not convinced whether they actually make upgrading anymore compelling for SMBs. My family owns an business that manufacturers fire protection products, and solicits my opinion from time to time.

Upgrading is always a hard sell. Legacy compatibility is oftentimes far more important than features such as a multi-function task bar– especially when old applications are invaluable to the day to day operation of the business.

When I was asked whether Windows Vista was worth it, my brother was happy to hear that Vista had improved security and management capabilities. But a single application (one that was a big investment) was enough to make Vista no-go.

The cost of replacing business applications can far outweigh the benefit of upgrading Windows. As long as Microsoft keep security vulnerability patches up-to-date, “good enough” is truly good enough for many of its customers.

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Glide calls itself a “portable and transparent Web operating system,” although purists might maintain that it’s more of a Web suite–an uncommonly rich one. Its features include:

• A word processor
• A presentation program
• A spreadsheet (although this feature is only available as a local app, not a Web-based one at the moment)
• A Webmail client
• A calendar
• Chat
• Music and video players
• An image editor
• A photo sharer
• A painting and drawing program
• A Web site builder
• A Twitter clone (except with more features, such as media sharing, and the ability to post a whopping 1400 characters at a time–and it can also serve as a Twitter client)
• Several business-oriented collaboration tools
• Message forums
• An RSS reader/news portal with stock ticker
• An online file manager

And a number of other features, too–plus apps that bring its social-networking features to BlackBerry (brand new) and Android. (There isn’t an iPhone client, but Glide’s mobile site squeezes down much of its functionality into smartphone-friendly form.) You also get 20GB of free online storage, plus a software client that can use this space to sync multiple PCs and Macs, roughly approximating something like SugarSync–except with far more free storage.  There are extensions for Firefox and Chrome that put a Glide toolbar in your browser–and the company is in the process of rolling out a toolbar for Internet Explorer.

The idea is that you can use Glide on any or all of the computers in your life (including your smartphone), using it to put a full complement of tools at your fingertips and to make your documents, photos, and other media available anywhere and everywhere. (The service builds in file-format conversion technology that translates documents and media on the fly as needed)

On the Web, the service offers four different environments, including a desktop, a file manager, a portal, and a new search-centric interface that lets you find Web pages, then grab them for editing in the Glide word processor.

Wait, I’m not finished: it also has a variant designed to manage health records, and one for educational institutions, and one for kids. And Transmedia, Glide’s creator, is working on a version that can be booted without an underlying operating system, turning it into a Chrome OS competitor.

Overall, the service is as wildly ambitious as anything I can think of on the Web. If Google and Microsoft merged tomorrow and announced that they were trying to build what Glide is trying to build, you’d wonder if they were biting off a bigger technological challenge than they could easily digest.

Glide’s goals are laudable. Its scope is comprehensive. It’s full of interesting touches, many of which perform briskly given that everything’s running in the cloud. (The service was originally written in Flash, but much of it is now implemented in the snappier AJAX and other Web standards.)

Unfortunately, Glide’s execution still fails to live up to its ambition. It no longer has the idiosyncratic pie-based interface the original version sported, but there’s very little consistency from one area of the service to another–each of its multitude of apps has its own way of doing things, and its own philosophy about where tools should live. The four environments feel like different worlds rather than parts of an integrated whole. Clicking on things tends to open up new browser windows hosted at different domains, such as GlideSociety.com, GlideLife.com, and GlideFree.com.

In short, Glide is disjointed. It’s also buggy in spots–or at least I ran into oddities like the syncing software telling me it couldn’t find its database, then proceeding to work just fine, and my word-processing text sometimes disappearing when I attempted to change the font size. Transmedia’s CEO, Donald Leka, told me that my troubles with the service were atypical.

In other cases, I couldn’t quite tell if Glide was misbehaving, or if I simply didn’t understand what a feature or application was designed to do. The documentation is in the form of a couple of PDFs, but the service really would benefit hugely from a sweeping context-sensitive help system.

Like I say, I continue to admire the vision behind the service. A Glide that nailed every aspect of what it’s attempting to do would be a thing of wonder. But I think the way for Glide to fulfill that vision isn’t to keep adding more stuff–it’s to spend the next year or so making all the stuff it’s got more comprehensible and consistent, and less quirky.

Here are a few more screen shots to give you a sense of Glide’s flavor–both how much it does, and how very different it looks from app to app.

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CNET’s Ina Fried is reporting that the packs have nearly sold out. The packs sell for $149.99, which is a bargain considering that three stand-alone copies of 7 Home Premium list for $359.97.

There are two good reasons why Microsoft should make the family packs permanent: Its Windows licensing revenue is suffering, and Apple has long offered them for OS X. (A Snow Leopard 5-pack sells for $49.99.)

While Windows 7 has boosted Microsoft’s license revenues, netbooks have begun to chip away at the Windows cash cow. Windows 7 has proven popular with early adopters, and anything that Microsoft could do to get more customers to upgrade is a good thing.

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But here’s reason for at least guarded optimism: Engadget has grabbed some images from a Nokia presentation that previews a 2010 version of Symbian. It has an all-new user interface. And it looks…pretty good. The presentation only shows still images, so there’s only so much you can tell about the future of Symbian from it. But consider my appetite whetted.

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