On the 20th birthday of the PC, the launch of Windows XP could be the end of DOS as we know it, says Jack Schofield
At the end of last month the grey skies over Seattle turned blue after a week of rain, and a helicopter took off from the Microsoft campus with briefcases holding the final “gold code” of the company’s latest operating system, Windows XP. Manufacturers such as Compaq, Dell and IBM are not supposed to start delivering PCs loaded with the new code until September 24, and retail packages will not reach the shops until October 25.
However, for all practical purposes, Windows XP has now shipped. The RTM (release to manufacturing) stage of a new program’s development usually passes without comment. In the past 20 years I have never seen it turned into a lavish marketing event. Indeed, from a technical point of view, the whole thing was completely pointless: why wait for a helicopter to bring a CD of the code when you can download it from a Microsoft server in a couple of minutes?
But it is not hard to reason why Microsoft felt it worth spending the money on an event big enough to be considered newsworthy by United States television networks. First, it sent a message to the politicians who still think they have two months to block XP’s launch: the bird has flown. Second, it started the build-up to what will be Microsoft’s biggest retail product launch since Windows 95.
In the run-up to Christmas, about $1-billion will be spent promoting XP, including about $200-million from Microsoft itself. This is twice what it spent launching Windows 95.
The problem is that, in a faltering global economy, the PC market has stalled. According to Gartner Data-quest research, worldwide PC sales in the second quarter of this year fell by 1,9% to 30 429 000 units, the first “negative growth rate” since 1986.
Gartner and IDC researchers blame the weakness of the consumer market, and this is what makes XP so important. The manufacturers don’t just want you to upgrade to Windows XP, they want you to buy a new PC to run it.
There are good reasons for taking the software upgrade. The home edition of XP is the first consumer version of Windows not based on the fragile foundations of the MS-DOS operating system that shipped with the first IBM Personal Computer 20 years ago last month. It is, basically, the robust and well-proven Windows 2000 business operating system with the option of a simplified new user interface. The Windows NT (New Technology) foundation of Windows XP means it works more efficiently than Windows 9x and rarely crashes.
Although there are other “new” features such as built-in messaging and multimedia, most are already familiar from Windows Me, the stop-gap version of Windows 9x.
The main drawback is that XP is less compatible with earlier versions of Windows. Although Microsoft has put much effort into making XP more compatible than Windows 2000, there is a limit to what can be done with what is, not to put too fine a point on it, rubbishy old software and hardware. Today’s more expert Windows 9x users may also find it hard to cope with a new system where most of their old tricks don’t work.
Microsoft has been trying to shift users off MS-DOS-based systems for most of the past two decades, without success. It tried launching Xenix, a version of Unix, in 1984, and then the “crashproof” OS/2 operating system, produced with IBM, in 1987. It launched the first version of Windows NT in 1993, and renamed NT version 5 as Windows 2000 in the expectation that it would be the natural successor to Windows 98.
It hasn’t happened. While business users have adopted the new system, albeit slowly, the mass market has resolutely chosen compatibility over reliability. Whether Microsoft can make the change stick this time remains to be seen. I suspect there will be a lot of hold-outs, and second-hand copies of Windows 98SE much the best DOS-based version will become prized possessions for a while. But if PC manufacturers concentrate on shipping XP pre-installed, it should eventually prevail.
While we don’t know how much PC manufacturers will pay for XP, its success could be good for Microsoft’s profits. While the new system could be said to offer a massive price cut compared with earlier versions of NT and similar operating systems, it will be about 10% more expensive than Windows 9x.
In the US, the upgrade version of XP Home Edition will cost $99, and the full version, $199. The Windows XP Professional upgrade will sell for $199 and the full version for $299.