May 27, 1990

THE FERVOR with which everyone crammed into Manhattan’s City Center Theater last week for Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 3.0 announcement almost got me thinking, for a brief moment, that we were teetering on the edge of a great breakthrough in personal computing technology.

Of course, we weren’t. What seemed to be lost on most of the software vendors, analysts and press at the event was the simple fact that Windows 3.0 is really nothing more than a big software upgrade, the third major release of a product that maybe this time Microsoft got right.

Microsoft Windows is what’s called a “graphical user interface,” a la Apple Computer’s Macintosh, for MS-DOS-based personal computers. It uses what’s now known affectionately as the WIMP metaphor — windows, icons, mouse and pointer — to allow users to navigate and use their files and applications without having to learn arcane, “command-line” operating system languages such as the ones used to navigate MS-DOS or Unix.

Since I have been following this business since 1984, and thus was present to hear the opening salvo of the Mac’s user interface revolution, the entire Windows 3.0 presentation sounded terribly familiar to me. Except that last week, DOS zealots weren’t sneering (like they’ve sneered at Apple for the past six years) when they heard such comments as, “With graphical user interfaces, there are less commands and the commands that do exist are simpler to understand.”

The whole Windows announcement left me with kind of a creepy feeling, and for a long time I couldn’t figure out why. After all, I’ve been a supporter of graphic interfaces for a long time. Making computers that are easy and intuitive is critical if the computer industry really wants to make the personal computer as ubiquitous as a telephone.

So I’m really glad that Microsoft managed to get it together enough to realize that the first two versions of Windows were utterly ridiculous — difficult to install, obtuse to use, and “counter-intuitive,” as it’s called in buzzword lingo.

I’m also glad because I think it’s vital to move the world of computing toward a single standard user interface, with standard formats for text, graphics, video, sound, data transfer, electronic mail, and so on.

In fact, only in the electronics business could such an oxymoron as “competing standards” be planted as firmly in reality as it is for dueling graphical interfaces like Apple’s Macintosh, Sun Microsystem’s Open Look, Hewlett-Packard’s New Wave, IBM’s Presentation Manager and Microsoft’s Windows.

But I finally figured out what really disturbed me about the Windows announcement: it was revisionist history, in the tradition of George Orwell’s “1984.”

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, center stage after the ear-splitting video that started Tuesday’s presentation, called Windows 3.0 “a major milestone in the history of the PC industry.” Gates’ idea of a milestone in 1984 was Intel’s 80286 chip — certainly a successful chip upgrade, but hardly a breakthrough.

When Gates said this, many reporters and analysts in the audience who were around for the introduction of the Mac in 1984 looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

Gates’ remarks reminded me how long-time ecologists felt on Earth Day this year. After years of shouting into the wind, trying to convince a selfish public of the horrors it was inflicting on the planet, they felt vindicated when their message was finally delivered in the mass media. But they were, at the same time, outraged that some of the world’s most brazen polluters used Earth Day to spend millions of advertising dollars trying to make us believe they’ve always been great protectors of the environment.

In the same way, many people who’ve tracked this business over the years felt duped by Microsoft’s choice to virtually ignore the vital role Macintosh played in users’ demand for a good graphical interface. At least 10 people came up to me after the presentation and said, “Hmmm . . . where have I heard all this before?”

The announcement of Windows 3.0 was important, absolutely, but it was also unavoidable. Today, personal computing is becoming more complex at an exponential rate, and a good graphical interface is one of the organizing principles that keeps it moving forward. Microsoft is doing the obvious right thing and putting its corporate weight behind an interface that is likely to both expand the PC market and maybe make life a little easier for its customers, too.