A lot of my work - both system consulting and software architecture/development - relies upon Microsoft technologies: Whether it's re-engineering a legacy system to take advantage of new SQL Server features for performance or functionality, overhauling a network infrastructure to leverage ActiveDirectory and the extensive platform security functionality, or developing a performant and scalable time-tracking application for an enterprise client, Microsoft is often a very important part of the equation.

Partly due to specialization (it's the tools we target), coupled with simply being the best choice in a lot of scenarios in our target market, we heavily rely on the Microsoft platform for ourselves and our customers. As a professional I can say with confidence that the platform is a secure, high performance, extremely scalable, robust one that compares very favourably against all competitors.

That wasn't always an accurate statement, though. Indeed, it is remarkable looking at the history of Microsoft and learning from their success: On paper it really is hard to believe that Microsoft maintained the market dominance that they did, and it's amazing that competitors couldn't capitalize on Microsoft's late entrance into a lot of markets, and their missteps in others.

Was Microsoft a master of timing, holding off on technologies and advances until the perfect time, or were they simply the beneficiary of a captive audience that was willing to wait however long Microsoft took, blind to the available alternatives?

I'll provide a couple of examples that I recall marvelling at as they occurred- these are hardly exhaustive, however I think it's a nice sampling.

Microsoft Maladies

• Microsoft core offerings were crippled by real/virtual mode limits until long after the 386 and 486 were prevalent. In a nutshell, this made software development a lot less pleasant, and the resulting applications more limited and unstable - I remember being enormously unhappy learning real-mode assembly on the x86 after dealing with the elegant, 32-bit flat world of Motorola 68000 assembly. It seemed so primitive that it still existed, or that a software company continued to rely upon it long after it was obsolete and irrelevant in hardware.
• Microsoft's "operating system" for years was simply the DOS command line, and a set of utilities and software interrupt handlers. While Mac users were busy with a rich graphical user interface, we in the DOS world were anxiously awaiting fantastic new features like DELTREE, and maybe a new version of EMM386 to deal with real mode nonsense. It amazes me now to recall actually going to a store and paying real money for a stack of 3 1/2" DOS 5 upgrade disks...6 years after I was programming applications on a richer 4MB platform, here I was excited that himem.sys could free up some of the critical 640KB of low memory.
• Microsoft toyed with windowing systems, finally creating something credible and successful in 1990 (Windows 3.0). In contrast a variety of competitors had fully-integrated, rich, usable, robust Windowing systems many years before - The 1984 Apple Mac being an obvious example, along with the 1985 Atari ST and Amiga...even options on the Commodore 64. I was an Atari ST fanatic in those days, and I marvelled at how primitive the PC world remained even years later.
• It wasn't until Windows 95/NT that memory protection was utilized to avoid processes stomping on each other's memory. Again, many, many years after most competitors had implemented this basic functionality. Instead we dealt with the normal occurence of misbehaving apps taking down the entire system as a fact of life.
• It wasn't until Windows 95/NT that preemptive multitasking was available in Windows. Prior to this a single misbehaving application could capture the CPU's attention and never let it go (never yielding), which was a fairly typical event. The Amiga featured pre-emptive multitasking a decade earlier.
• Microsoft released Windows 95 without a web browser, remarkably enough, finally releasing a barely changed version of the NCSA's Mosaic in the Plus! pack.
• Microsoft 95 was pretty much a security nightmare. Not only was its software far-from-ready to be connected on the public internet - I remember being the unhappy victims of winnuke and friends when I made people unhappy on IRC (you can't please all of the people all of the time), it also had no real file/object security of consequence. While NT was built as a "multi-user" system from a security and kernel perspective, many of the shell and utilities were user unaware, undermining this capability.
• Microsoft's web technologies were far behind the times until Bill Gates' famous speech that changed their direction, reacting to Netscape's lead rather than charting the course. Internet Explorer quickly ramped up and became the dominant web platform - until it became so powerful that the team was disbanded.
• Alternative 3D rendering APIs (Glide and OpenGL) led the way in an area where eventually DirectX would emerge dominant.

I recall during my early courtship with the PC simply marvelling at how incredibly obsolete the platform seemed to be compared to competitors like the Amiga and the Mac introduced years earlier - from graphics capabilities to software to hardware: Everything about it seemed so backwards in comparison to the superior alternatives, yet customers stuck with it. This was the platform that Microsoft wed themselves to, so surely they would suffer as well, right?

Microsoft's insistence on legacy compatibility led to a platform that moved much slower than competitors - Competitors that had the liberty of just tossing it all out and starting from scratch with whatever whizz-bang feature the newest chips offered. Maybe they could run super-stable and super-fast, and offer the developers an elegant platform upon which to perform their magic...but could it run Commander Keen 1 through 3? Could it run that ancient text database app?

Not All Negatives

Of course it's easy to focus on the deficiencies and imagine that they wrote the whole story, but in reality the situation was much more complex. Windows, for instance, pioneered widely-used video card acceleration (I still remember that shiny new Diamond Speedstar 24x. 24-bit graphics, coupled with hardware acceleration of 3D primitives. It was good times running those benchmarks. Of course the Amiga fanatics will point out that it supported hardware acceleration, just as the STe featured a hardware blitter chip, but the interaction between acceleration and the GDI in Windows really set the bar), and Microsoft's push greatly accelerated the adoption of optical media. Windows For Workgroups brought inexpensive networking to a lot of shops (NetBEUI was imperfect, but it was an easy transition to TCP/IP), and Windows in general represented a "good enough" platform for a lot of users. Internet Explorer, for all of its ActiveX "holes" and CSS quirks introduced the rich web model that we rely upon today.

En Route to 64-bit x86

This all comes to mind as the x86-64 transition accelerates: More and more users are starting to switch to 64-bit capable systems, and the 2/4GB limits of our machines is actually becoming a rational limit among desktop users: Everyday users are shouldered against a limit that seemed almost theoretically large just a few short years ago.

Of course Microsoft has been releasing incomplete 64-bit options for years (for instance you could get a 64-bit version of SQL Server 2000 for the Itanium platform, barring a laundry list of exclusions and limitations, and way back with NT 3.1 Microsoft supported 64-bit processors, albeit in 32-bit mode). Now that 64-bit support is finally becoming a critical factor, Microsoft has a wide gauntlet of support ready, and is finally ready to deliver.

Once again when the market really cares, Microsoft is ready. For years some have been talking about the advantage of various operating systems, such as Linux, being availabile on cutting edge processors and 64-bit platforms. For years that has been paraded as an advantage to customers who continued to run their platform on a standard old x86-32 foundation. Yet now that those limits are being reached, and the platform needs to accommodate new levels of capability and performance, Microsoft is ready. Another deficiency overcome.

The Question

Looking at the platform now - the stability, security, and feature set of Windows 2003, a lot of it already existing in XP - it really does seem like a tremendous window of opportunity for the competition has passed: What used to be a crop full of delectable low hanging fruit is now a well protected enclave featuring armed guards.

If competitors couldn't make inroads before, how do they have a chance now? If Linux couldn't capture the desktop market against a monstrosity like Windows Me!, what chance does it really have against XP?

The most obvious answer is web applications - render the operating system irrelevant and you don't really have to compete.

Tagged: [Software Development], [Programming], [Software-Development]