Windows XP’s retail release was October 25, 2001, ten years ago today. Though no longer readily available to buy, it continues to cast a long shadow over the PC industry: even now, a slim majority of desktop users are still using the operating system.
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Windows XP didn’t boast exciting new features or radical changes, but it was nonetheless a pivotal moment in Microsoft’s history. It was Microsoft’s first mass-market operating system in the Windows NT family. It was also Microsoft’s first consumer operating system that offered true protected memory, preemptive multitasking, multiprocessor support, and multiuser security.
The transition to pure 32-bit, modern operating systems was a slow and painful one. Though Windows NT 3.1 hit the market in 1993, its hardware demands and software incompatibility made it a niche operating system. Windows 3.1 and 3.11 both introduced small amounts of 32-bit code, and the Windows 95 family was a complex hybrid of 16-bit and 32-bit code. It wasn’t until Windows XP that Windows NT was both compatible enough—most applications having been updated to use Microsoft’s Win32 API—and sufficiently light on resources.
In the history of PC operating systems, Windows XP stands alone. Even Windows 95, though a landmark at its release, was a distant memory by 2005. No previous PC operating system has demonstrated such longevity, and it’s unlikely that any future operating system will. Nor is its market share dominance ever likely to be replicated; at its peak, Windows XP was used by more than 80 percent of desktop users.
The success was remarkable for an operating system whose reception was initially quite muted. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, the media blitz that Microsoft planned for the operating system was toned down; instead of arriving with great fanfare, it slouched onto the market. Retail sales, though never a major way of delivering operating systems to end users, were sluggish, with the operating system selling at a far slower rate than Windows 98 had done three years previously.
It faced tough competition from Microsoft’s other operating systems. Windows 2000, released less than two years prior, had won plaudits with its marriage of Windows NT’s traditional stability and security to creature comforts like USB support, reliable plug-and-play, and widespread driver support, and was widely adopted in businesses. For Windows 2000 users, Windows XP was only a minor update: it had a spruced up user interface with the brightly colored Luna theme, an updated Start menu, and lots of little bits and pieces like a firewall, UPnP, System Restore, and ClearType. Indeed, many professionals and, for want of a better term, nerds, were turned off by the Luna theme, with its detractors dismissing Windows XP as a Fisher-Price operating system.
The familiar Windows XP desktop with Luna theme
The familiar Windows XP desktop with Luna theme
For home users using Windows 95-family operating systems, Windows XP had much more to offer, thanks to its substantially greater stability and security, especially once Service Pack 2 was released. But even there, users didn’t leap immediately. Windows XP’s hardware demands, though modest by today’s standards, were steeper than those of the Windows 95 family, and in its early days at least, neither Windows XP’s driver support nor performance could match those of its technologically inferior sibling. Gamers, in particular, were vocal in their criticism of Windows XP, and many vowed to stick with Windows 98SE indefinitely.
In the first year of Windows XP’s availability, Microsoft had to work to persuade even enterprises to ditch Windows 95, in spite of its near complete unsuitability to enterprise computing.
In the end, none of the objections mattered. Time made Windows XP a success. Computers got faster, rendering its hardware demands first ubiquitous, and then later in its life, almost laughable. Driver support grew, and driver performance improved. Instead of being a heavyweight alternative to use if you had the resources and you could be sure that all your hardware and software would work with it, it became the obvious choice of system software. The explosion in Internet usage, and the focus on system security, made continued use of the Windows 95 family untenable. Windows XP was therefore the only choice for most desktop users, and within a few years of its release, most Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 4, and Windows 2000 users had made the switch.