Microsoft Windows debuted in 1985. And for the past two decades, it has been the dominant PC operating system worldwide. In 2020, Windows had almost 83% market share by unit shipments. While Google Chrome OS had 10%. And Apple's Mac OS had 7%.
Bill Gates, his vision was to put a PC on every desk, in every home. We've struck a chord with Windows where people feel like it's their product. It's their operating system. From Solitaire to its iconic Start button and startup sounds, productivity apps, gaming, and corporate computing. Windows changed the way we use computers. The legendary Windows 95 help propel the company to dominate the market in personal computing. Microsoft has introduced many versions of Windows since its inception, with some more memorable than others. Today, more than 1.3 billion devices are running Windows 10 worldwide every month and roughly 800 million users every day.
"Many of its deployments, if not most are within corporations. Where it gets becomes part of corporate ecosystems, corporations manage it and secure it and make it part of their own."
Windows only makeup 14% of Microsoft's business, but remains a critical part of it.
Windows has been a key piece of Microsoft's business almost from the beginning. It wasn't just critical because it sold PCs. Windows was critical because it sold the office the graphical user interface programs Word, Excel, PowerPoint, you know, that's why it's been critical to their business and remains critical today.
The company just announced the latest version of Windows 11, we take a look back over three decades of Windows and how it came to dominate. Today, lots of things have operating systems, computers, phones, TVs, even cars. An operating system or OS allows users and applications to work with hardware without the need to enter lines of code. Back in the 1980s, using a computer was very complex.
"The motivation for Windows from the very beginning was to improve it to remove those barriers to make it as effortless as possible to get the most out of the technology that you had available to you."
Windows was not the first OS Microsoft made. When it was first getting started. It developed MS-DOS 1.0., short for Microsoft disk operating system, for computer maker IBM. Microsoft specified that IBM would not have exclusive rights to the software, leaving open the opportunity for the company to supply other hardware and computer makers with the same OS.
"Microsoft started to understand that interface design was critical not just to Windows but to all of its applications."
Windows was not thought of as an operating system in the early days, but a graphical user interface or GUI that would run on top of MS-DOS. One of the first personal computers that used a GUI was the Xerox star, which would be very influential, according to Bill Gates, on both Microsoft and Apple's GUI designs,
"Bill really believed that this was the future for the company. So there was heavy pressure to get this thing to market."
Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in November 1985,
"it was a little bit clunky or quirky. Plus Windows had the challenge that Jobs and Apple didn't have. They just had to make it run on their hardware. We had to make it run on all those different MS-DOS machines that were in the market at the time."
