Happy birthday Chicago!

It was exactly ten years ago, right now, that store keepers flung open their doors to let eager Windows 95 buyers in. They had been lined up outside for hours so they could be the first to own Windows 95 at 12:01am August 24, 1995. Comp USA was feeding the eager Windows 95 customers free pizza while they waited. Microsoft had purchased the entire print run of the London Times and was distributing a free copy to everyone in London. The front page was, of course, a Windows 95 ad. Apple ran a two-page ad in papers across the country that said simply, “c:\ongratulations.w95.” The Empire State building was lit up in the colors of the Windows flag. AMD ran a “feel the need for speed” ad featuring their “lightening fast” 100mhz 486 chip, promoting it as the perfect CPU to run Windows 95 on. Jay Leno was on campus to MC the release party which had one media member in attendance for every four Microsoft employees. Microsoft had purchased the rights to Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones for an undisclosed sum of money, and played in constantly, and every computer store in the land was falling all over themselves to put on the best Windows 95 promotion.

I have a special place in my heart for Windows 95. Microsoft needed an army of people to support their new product and they were willing to spend months training anyone who had good customer service skills and an interest in learning the technical material necessary to effectively support it. I was a frustrated stock broker at the time so in the spting of 1995 I quit my job to go to work supporting Windows 95. After three months of training I was on the phone on launch day. It didn’t pay well; I didn’t care, I just wanted to do something totally different. Tonight my wife and I will pop the cork on a very special bottle of wine to celebrate this anniversary. Did I mention I met my wife doing Windows 95 support work?

Now, just for fun, here are some interesting numbers for you…

• Recommended minimum hardware for Windows 95: 386DX CPU; 4MB RAM; 50MB HDD.
• Recommended minimum hardware for Windows Vista Beta 1 (this is the recommendation given to Microsoft employees self-hosting): Pentium 4 Celeron, AMD Athlon XP/MP, Athlon 64, or Opteron CPU; 512MB RAM; 1GB HDD.

• A system from Dell that would have met the Windows 95 requirements would have cost $1,299 in August 1995.
• I can buy a system from Dell today that meets the Vista requirements for $549.

• Windows 95 reached 1 million copies sold in: 4 days.
• Windows 95 reached 7 million copies sold on October 17, 1995.
• Windows 95 reached 40 million copies sold on August 21, 1996.
• Windows XP reached 7 million copies sold in two weeks.
• Windows XP sold 67 million copies in its first year.

• MSRP for Windows 95: Upgrade = $109; Full = $209; Full version was available only on 3.5 inch floppy, Upgrade was also available on CD-ROM.
• Price of Windows XP on Amazon: Home upgrade = $94.99, Home = $187.99; Pro upgrade = $179.99; Pro = $245.98; Notice the prices for the Home SKU are actually less than 95!

• Microsoft revenue in 1995: $5.94 billion
• Projected Microsoft revenue in 2005: $39 billion

• Microsoft employees in 1995: 17,801
• Microsoft employees in 2005: about 57,000

• Companies advertising “Windows 95 ready PCs” that you won’t see advertising “Windows Vista ready PCs.”
  • IBM.
  • DEC.
  • Compaq.

Interesting stock market numbers: