Windows Vista: The Inside Story

How an unexpected setback brought about a new era for your PC – and for Microsoft.

The road to the final release of Windows Vista has not always been a smooth one. The lowest point came when the head of Windows development, Jim Allchin – probably Bill Gates’ most trusted senior lieutenant at Microsoft – told him that development on the successor to Windows XP had effectively ground to a halt. Gates didn’t know whether to be furious or just traumatised. In a later interview published in the Wall Street Journal, Allchin says he told Gates, “It’s not going to work”. Even coming from the man who’s seen by many as the guiding father of Windows, Gates found the news hard to believe.

The weather matched the fevered behind-the-scenes activity. In Microsoft’s normally-temperate home city of Seattle, throughout July and August 2004 heatwaves followed muggy spells as Gates argued that the project just needed more time. Behind closed doors, he also held conversations with senior software architects, but in the end Gates agreed on the need to start building the new operating system from scratch. It was the most traumatic point in the development of Longhorn, the codename for the program that was eventually to become Windows Vista, and it changed the way that Microsoft operates. In short, software development became a team game rather than a somewhat chaotic competition between programmers.

Behind the scenes

Visitors to the company’s Redmond Campus generally come away with a feeling of almost unnatural order. Even the grass between the buildings seems controlled to the point where it maintains a uniform height without a lawnmower in sight. But underneath the apparently regimented academic exterior was often barely organised chaos. The celebration of this culture peaked in an internal Microsoft documentary, which portrayed software engineers as heroes as they battled to beat seemingly impossible odds to get Windows XP out on time.

By the time Windows XP did make it out of the door in October 2001, Allchin’s mind was on other things – in May of that year work had started on Longhorn. This was expected to follow the trajectory that had worked so successfully for Microsoft, to the point where its operating systems run well over 90 per cent of the world’s personal computers. The basis of Microsoft’s popularity is ‘bundling’. Without it an operating system is a vital, but not hugely interesting, piece of software, which manages the hardware and software resources of a computer, such as controlling input and output devices, allocating memory and managing files. There’s never been a firm definition that puts a boundary on what can be included, but before Windows came along you couldn’t have much fun with an operating system on its own. Now it’s taken for granted that the operating system will be bundled with a host of functions and programs, such as games, a web browser, a media player, security software and rudimentary word processing.