I think I finally understand why my mind so often wanders back to that picture-perfect day in Redmond, Washington, and the Windows 95 launch event on August 24, 1995.
Put simply, it’s a combination of the sensory overload of attending my first carnival-atmosphere-level tech launch event and the fact that I was 31 years old, and realizing that I’d found the career and lifestyle that would sustain me possibly for the rest of my life.
In a way, Microsoft and I had this in common: 1995 (and that August 24 launch) marked a turning point for Windows, which had, even with Windows 3.1, been a pale imitation of the Macintosh OS graphical user interface (GUI). Windows 95 put Microsoft’s Start button approach to desktop computing in the hands of millions, cementing its position as the PC platform leader just as Apple was sliding into temporary obscurity. In my life, I was a rising tech editor at the number one tech publication in the world, and at home, just months earlier welcomed my first child in our still relatively new home.
In a way, I think I’m nostalgic for that moment. Microsoft felt a little scrappy and a lot nerdy. I was a curly-headed, over-enthusiastic nerdy tech writer who was never quite sure how to climb the media ladder.
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Microsoft’s Windows 95 launch event was the culmination of a year-long marketing effort, but it also felt as if Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and company were reaching, without much success, for a little bit of the Apple cool. When Apple launched the iconic Macintosh more than a decade earlier, it did it with an extraordinary TV commercial, one that almost said, ‘We don’t need you, you need us.”
Microsoft hired Jay Leno, an amiable Tonight Show host who has never and will never be “cool,” as the master of ceremonies and paid The Rolling Stones a still unknown sum for the opening bars of its salacious Start Me Up (go read the lyrics, I’ll wait). Even that didn’t make Microsoft cool.
None of that mattered, though, because, at the time, Windows 95’s relevance quotient was through the roof.
While I was wandering around the Redmond campus carnival, pausing briefly to watch Jay Leno deliver a standup routine to a dozen or so people seated on the perfectly manicured green lawn and to share a couple of words with Bill Gates who stood behind all of them, watching, thousands of people around the world were lined up at retail stores to buy the first copies of the $99 Windows 95 operating systems (it went on sale at midnight that evening).
That’s right. They lined up. Long before Apple inspired consumers to queue up at Apple stores for the first iPhone, Bill Gates had marketed the heck out of Windows 95 and turned everyone into either Windows fans or at least software collectors.
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I remember lots of little bits about the day. It felt important, and I, by extension of my invite and ability to cover it, also felt like I mattered a little more.
In the ensuing decades, I’d visit Microsoft’s campus again (most recently the same spot for the company’s 50th anniversary), travel to Cupertino for Apple, South Korea for Samsung, Austin, TX, for Dell, and Las Vegas for almost two dozen CES events. But Microsoft’s Windows 95 launch was the first. It was the original tech spectacle and rewrote the script for where technology would live in consumers’ lives and how they would learn about it.
Within a few years, the Internet would be ubiquitous and Microsoft, which launched Windows 95 without a web browser, would race to catch up, belatedly delivering Internet Explorer.
The web splits our attention across an untold number of niche interests. Getting millions to focus on one singular event was becoming virtually impossible.
These days, we craft our own information channels.
Just this past week in Brooklyn, NY, Google launched its new Pixel line with Jimmy Fallon, the SNL comedian who took over for Leno, as host. It was a slightly strange and mildly amusing event that I attended and wrote about. But this isn’t 1995, and it wasn’t a circus, just another big tech company trying to garner attention. Instead of Ferris wheels, games, and songs about sex, we got the milqutoast Jonas Brothers and a legion of influencers who were either on stage or in the audience, all there to spread the word.
Most of them were either born years after the Windows 95 launch or are too young to remember it.
