Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…Okay. Some of the Windows 95 team in late 94 led by Thomas Reardon, is pulled off before it ships to start thinking about what should we do after Windows 95 ships? What would the next marquee investments be for what at the time they’re calling Windows 97, which of course there was never a Windows 97. The group’s opinion is all internet all the time. How could the next iteration of Windows be extremely internet-native in a very embedded way? There are tons of proposals in this little group. There’s virtual meeting software, think Zoom-type things. There’s an email client specifically built for the Internet rather than for your company’s corporate network, which at the time was novel. Then there’s of course a browser. But the big vision was what if the whole Windows Shell is a browser? Every visual thing that you interact with in Windows, what if that actually was an HTML-rendered server communicating online thing? The team technically looked at it this way. We should build HTTP directly into the operating system since it was just another protocol on top of the TCP/IP protocol that the Internet is based on. We should provide reusable UI component to any application that wants to display HTML. That’s a good engineering building block to build, is this HTML renderer that any application can frame in and use. Of course, Microsoft, the strategy here is we will develop a browser application that used the building block that others could also use to render HTML. They actually go to Netscape and say, hey, we have this great HTTP stack, we have the HTML engine, we have these wrappers to go around it. Instead of rewriting all of it, just use our off-the-shelf code that we intend to ship with Windows. Famously, Netscape did not do that. IE (Internet Explorer) actually ends up being the only application that used all these Windows components. Once they got going on the browser, they convinced the Windows leadership that actually we can do this fast, we should get this done as a part of Windows 95, not wait for the next big release. We’re going to get to this in a minute, but when Windows 95 launched, it had either at launch or very shortly thereafter, what was called the plus pack. Internet Explorer was available as part of the plus pack.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.