One important aspect to the reviews was that they were pretty important. there was a significant business in upgrading users from one release to the next as upgrades cost money. windows was not yet a managed enterprise product so individuals made the choice to upgrade or not. blah reviews really stung. upgrades were strategically important because the software process for upgrading was quite fragile and a customer that skipped a release would get an even more flakey experience. the internal debate over supporting in place upgrades versus clean installs raged on forever. it also gave birth to the malware hell of registry scrubbers, settings migration tools, and the like.
I did not realize that there were those within Microsoft who were against the idea of supporting upgrades. That's fascinating. I can imagine that it would have been a heavy lift on the customer support side of things, and therefore costly. I suppose this is where things like the modern automatic updating came into play. Thank you for the additional information! I appreciate it.
the dev team. because they knew it just didn’t work well. too many variables plus DLL hell. marketing of course said it had to work. NT had done a better job at the OS level but the existing 16 bit apps and apps in general were a challenge because the old ways of doing things remained.
I know that some of the early Windows releases were strongly influenced/run via marketing folks. Was that a pervasive thing or did I misread history a bit there?
i think one way to read the accounts from the time, especially trade press and launch stories, is that you’re reading the account as told by marketing. other than PDC coverage there was little visibility to the product team or even execs (like paul, jim, etc).
this was not just a software thing. it very much pervades the business coverage especially around innovation throughout the 90s. like the famous 5 blade story or all the nokia design stories.
One important aspect to the reviews was that they were pretty important. there was a significant business in upgrading users from one release to the next as upgrades cost money. windows was not yet a managed enterprise product so individuals made the choice to upgrade or not. blah reviews really stung. upgrades were strategically important because the software process for upgrading was quite fragile and a customer that skipped a release would get an even more flakey experience. the internal debate over supporting in place upgrades versus clean installs raged on forever. it also gave birth to the malware hell of registry scrubbers, settings migration tools, and the like.
I did not realize that there were those within Microsoft who were against the idea of supporting upgrades. That's fascinating. I can imagine that it would have been a heavy lift on the customer support side of things, and therefore costly. I suppose this is where things like the modern automatic updating came into play. Thank you for the additional information! I appreciate it.
the dev team. because they knew it just didn’t work well. too many variables plus DLL hell. marketing of course said it had to work. NT had done a better job at the OS level but the existing 16 bit apps and apps in general were a challenge because the old ways of doing things remained.
I know that some of the early Windows releases were strongly influenced/run via marketing folks. Was that a pervasive thing or did I misread history a bit there?
i think one way to read the accounts from the time, especially trade press and launch stories, is that you’re reading the account as told by marketing. other than PDC coverage there was little visibility to the product team or even execs (like paul, jim, etc).
this was not just a software thing. it very much pervades the business coverage especially around innovation throughout the 90s. like the famous 5 blade story or all the nokia design stories.