Timeline for What key factor led to the sudden commercial success of MS Windows with v3.0?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
28 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 11, 2023 at 14:37 | comment | added | mschaef | @MarkWilliams They were likely more surprised by the success of Windows in general than the specific success of Windows 3.0. Larry Osterman tells a story that implies they knew exactly what they had in 3.0 and what it was likely to do in the market. landley.net/history/mirror/ms/davidweise.html | |
| Jun 18, 2020 at 8:29 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
Commonmark migration
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| Apr 28, 2019 at 7:01 | comment | added | Mark Williams | I worked on parts of Microsoft OS/2 when Windows 3 came out. My impression was that MS were taken by surprise by the success of Windows, which had previously been seen as a stop gap, and that OS/2's lack of support for a 386 mode began to be seen as a limitation. | |
| Apr 25, 2019 at 19:22 | comment | added | Maury Markowitz | "Most users still had DOS applications they needed" - we still do, Sopwith! | |
| Apr 25, 2019 at 12:03 | history | edited | Stephen Kitt | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Add PC Magazine links.
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| Jan 3, 2018 at 9:16 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | @Jules you missed this part about Write and Cardfile: “both of these were available in previous versions of Windows” ;-) | |
| Jan 3, 2018 at 6:19 | comment | added | Jules | "Write in version 3.0 was a passable word processor" -- Write was around before 3.0. A copy of it was bundled along with Windows 1.04 with my 286, which was manufactured in 87. It may not have been part of Windows per se, but it was widely distributed anyway. | |
| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:52 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/ with https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/
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| Mar 13, 2017 at 17:06 | vote | accept | Brian H | ||
| Jun 21, 2018 at 0:19 | |||||
| Mar 9, 2017 at 18:54 | comment | added | Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight | @Snowman There was a several year gap between win95 and when win9x displaced DOS as the primary gaming platform and dual boot for gaming faded away to a niche activity. Part was development lead times and DOS having a bigger potential market. But Windows overhead was perceived as a performance penalty while gaming (not sure how big an issue it was in reality) and not all DOS games played nicely with it so some times you had to boot to dos even if you didn't want to. (There wsa another round of this going from Win9x to Win 2k/XP because NT farther limited DOS hardware access.) | |
| Mar 6, 2017 at 7:26 | comment | added | Todd Wilcox | I recall Word being a driver since it was mostly WYSIWYG, unlike Word Perfect. The later improvements in Windows 3.11 for workgroups let businesses more easily share files and still use a terminal emulator to connect to the old mainframe(s). Everyone besides gamers wanted a GUI and OS/2 and OS/2 Warp just didn't feel right. As nerdy as I was and am, I wasn't conscious of using protected mode on my 386sx. It was all about Word and Excel and a DOS boot disk for games. | |
| Mar 5, 2017 at 9:10 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | Come to think of it there was a "run-time" version of Windows 3.0 too; Microsoft used it for their "working model" demos of Excel and Word. | |
| Mar 5, 2017 at 8:38 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | @MichaelKjörling I'm not sure about "many"; Excel 2.0 included a run-time version of Windows 2.0 which it would use if you didn't have the full Windows 2.0. I'm not aware of any other application which did this, although I dare say there were some... I do know people who configured Windows 3.0 (and 3.1) so that it ran a single application (instead of Program Manager), and exited when that application exited, achieving the same effect. | |
| Mar 4, 2017 at 22:46 | comment | added | user | Though, wasn't the use case for running many Windows applications prior to Windows 3.0 the application including a pretty heavily restricted Windows runtime, which basically was a part of the application? So you'd start the application, which loaded its Windows runtime; when you were done, you exited the application and that caused the Windows runtime to unload and bring you back to DOS (or whatever other environment you normally ran; I recall various more or less simple menu programs being very much in the vogue, if you didn't use an all-out solution like Norton Commander or PC Tools). | |
| Mar 4, 2017 at 22:43 | comment | added | user | I think that Byte quote at the end of this answer goes to illustrate the point made in the comments to the question: the PC landscape was very much more geared toward enthusiasts back then. Besides the specific points, which are obviously going to change with time, just look at the kind of terminology used and compare that with computer magazines of today. | |
| Mar 4, 2017 at 17:46 | history | edited | Stephen Kitt | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Point to mschaef's answer too.
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| Mar 4, 2017 at 16:23 | comment | added | Robert Columbia | Wow, OS/2! I haven't thought about it in a while. Back in the day, many people called it "Half an OS". :) | |
| Mar 3, 2017 at 21:39 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | @MarkRansom that would likely have been Windows 3.0; by the time 3.1 came out, the current version of Word was 2.0. | |
| Mar 3, 2017 at 21:31 | comment | added | Mark Ransom | I got my first version of Windows as a bundle with Word 1.1, can't remember if it was 3.0 or 3.1 though. I had definitely been interested previously but never enough to purchase it. | |
| Mar 3, 2017 at 15:47 | comment | added | user530 | While not a factor right at the release of 3.0, the Windows Game Extensions (precursor to DirectX) came out for Windows 3.1 and was eventually a core part of Windows 95. DOS was still king for gaming prior to this because it gave programs full hardware access: Windows was king for gaming after this because it abstracted the hardware while still giving great performance, so games no longer needed support for specific graphics and sound cards. | |
| Mar 3, 2017 at 11:26 | history | edited | Stephen Kitt | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Merge john_e's answer.
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| Mar 3, 2017 at 11:13 | history | edited | Stephen Kitt | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Editing...
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| Mar 3, 2017 at 8:43 | history | edited | Stephen Kitt | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
CivII wasn't a factor, it's "Truetype".
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| Mar 3, 2017 at 0:00 | history | edited | Stephen Kitt | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Tie things together.
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| Mar 2, 2017 at 22:40 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | I agree (and see my first point for OS/2). I put that point last though because the others explain why Windows was finally an attractive proposition for manufacturers to bundle... | |
| Mar 2, 2017 at 22:36 | comment | added | RichF | IMO the biggest factor was your last ("but not least"). Having a new machine boot up into Win 3.0 on its first power-up was a game change. If OS/2 had managed that there would be few who remembered Microsoft Windows as anything more than an also-ran, like Microsoft Bob. (Remember, when Win 3 came out, Microsoft was still telling people that OS/2 was the future.) | |
| Mar 2, 2017 at 22:26 | history | edited | Stephen Kitt | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Add quote and productivity apps.
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| Mar 2, 2017 at 22:21 | history | answered | Stephen Kitt | CC BY-SA 3.0 |