Microsoft Products Evolution

This post is a review of the recent evolution of the Windows operating system. The starting point is taken
as Windows NT 4.0 because that particular period represents a kind of turning point in the world of
software.

Windows NT 4.0

Windows NT 4.0 was a server operating system: it hosted an industrial grade database, an industrial grade
web server among many other server category products. It represents a response from Microsoft to the
opening up of the internet.

Microsoft's business strategy has been: if you control the operating system that almost all people use, then
you have a never ending opportunity to sell upgrades and other software. And how do you get most people
to run your operating system? Easy, people run your OS if it has a lot of applications for them.

And MS had managed this part of it very well. It has always provided the easiest to use development tools
with Visual Basic reaching a kind of pinnacle where almost any one with almost any background became a
developer. So, applications were no problem. And Windows was the most popular OS.

Then, along came the internet and changed the paradigm of programming. The programmer was no longer
concerned with a Visual Basic kind of environment. The game was to put the application on the web server
without any interface and the user used a web browser to supply the interface. This rendered VB
completely useless for the new kind of programs.

What people (developers) wanted at that time was a system where they could host a web server and write
the web applications that were in demand. So MS scrambled to get their act together by buying out many
different companies and coming out with their offering to these developers. This was Windows NT 4.0
with IIS, MSSQL, ASP, and a whole host of technologies. It was a great offering and it included some new
technology too: COM was the new technology that allowed applications to inter-operate with each other;
and there were many services that used COM in the operating system.

Windows 2000

By the turn of the century, Windows NT was doing very well; had a large following of developers for the
new web applications and there were large numbers of departmental level systems being developed as
intranet applications in many companies. Microsoft could see the next level of development becoming
mainstream: Enterprise Systems.

So, Windows 2000 enhanced COM into COM+ with services for distributed transaction control for
databases; security considerations and so on. There were other services also in Win2k like server clustering
which were all aimed at making Win2k a contender for an enterprise system OS.

Java
However, another threat was looming large: Java. Java had rendered C++ obsolete for building enterprise
class system because of its automatic garbage collection. And MS did not have a competing product. It
initially tried to provide its own version of Java which was destroyed by the antitrust case.

Java posed a problem that was similar to what the web based application had done, namely, it changed the
game. Where the web applications had rendered the likes of VB obsolete, Java was having a different
impact.

Developers liked Java and it had become a platform of choice. Enterprise systems were being developed in
Java and had the front end in a browser. As a result, the enterprise system could be run where neither the
front end (client) system nor the back end (server) system needed to have Windows. It was a big threat.

And all this while, MS needed more and more sales of their software to keep their massively staffed
company going.

Windows XP / Windows 2003
The stage was once again set for a response from MS. This time, MS looked to the future and said: the next
big thing is web services. And Java. From this was born the basis for the next Windows OS: dot net.

Dot net provided the programmability of Java with an unmatched ease for new developers, thanks to the
beautiful development tools that MS creates with a passion. And it provided, by far the simplest means of
creating and consuming web services.

Dot net went further than Java; it had to. Java was a general purpose programming language which when
used in combination with other components, made fantastic systems possible. One such component was a
web server: Java with a web server produced fantastic systems. But Java didnt go very far with thick clients
- it was always very clumsy about it because it had to work with any kind of operating system.

Not so dot net: dot net had to run only on Windows and do a great job with the UI. And it did. It
encapsulated the whole Win32 API (the base services offered by the OS) into object oriented classes and
reduced the tedious programming of Windows applications into something very simple indeed.

Windows Vista
The next thing that MS bet on was the integration of rich media in applications - animations, audio, video,
3D graphics and interactivity.

To this end, MS enhanced the dot net framework to provide three more classes of functionality
- windows presentation foundation (WPF)
- windows communication foundation
- windows workflow foundation

Of these, the WPF produced the most visually arresting change in the OS. This technology would allow
building very media rich applications for the Windows desktop (also for the web, with technology such as
sliverlight).