Microsoft Home

~ the obit ~

I knew the products and never once registered the brand. Encarta was a name. Bob was a name people used as an insult for a decade afterward. Microsoft Home was the word printed above all of them, and it is the only part of that shelf nobody remembers, which is a strange fate for something Bill Gates stood up and announced in person.

He did that on 4 october 1993. The argument was that the personal computer was about to stop being an office machine, and Microsoft wanted a consumer catalog already sitting in the store when it happened. Within a year more than sixty titles carried the label, priced from about fifteen dollars for Money up past ninety for Encarta.

The shelf itself was the design. Every box was color coded by what was inside it, so a purple spine meant reference and a yellow one meant kids. You were supposed to be able to stand in a store aisle and read the category off the packaging without picking anything up.

I came online in 1998 on a 14.4k modem in Turkey, which is the same year this line was being wound down, and for a while both things were true at once. A disc in the drive answered immediately. The same encyclopedia over a dial-up connection was a progress bar with a phone bill attached. The reference shelf did not lose on quality. It lost on the year the connection got fast enough that nobody had to think about it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ sixty products and a color code ~

The catalog reads strangely now because of how wide it goes. Encarta and Bookshelf sat on the same rack as Dangerous Creatures and a Julia Child cooking disc. There was an Isaac Asimov robot encyclopedia. There was also a haunted house for children drawn by Gahan Wilson, which means a horror cartoonist was making a point-and-click for eight year olds and getting shelf space for it.

Two of these outlived the brand by more than ten years. Encarta ran until 2009 and Publisher is still shipping. Everything else was a disc with a shelf life measured against how quickly the same information turned up on a server somewhere for free.

~ the shelf it sat on ~

Microsoft was not alone in this business. The mid nineties consumer CD-ROM trade was a real industry with its own bargain bins and its own crash. What made Microsoft's version different was distribution: a company that already owned the operating system could put its catalog into the same stores that sold the machines, and could bundle titles with hardware nobody was going to unbundle.

That advantage is also what made the collapse invisible. There was never a press release for Microsoft Home. Prices dropped after Windows 95, the boxes thinned out, and at some point around 1998 the brand simply stopped being printed. The individual products carried on under their own names or died on their own schedules.

~ what the web took ~

The disc lost on updating. An encyclopedia pressed in 1996 is wrong about 1997 and there is nothing anybody can do about that except sell you another one next year, which Microsoft did, and which people paid for exactly as long as there was no alternative.

By 1998 there was. Not a good one yet, not a fast one, but the direction was obvious to anyone watching. A reference product that has to be re-manufactured and re-bought every year cannot compete with one that is simply always the current version. Encarta held on another eleven years on brand strength and school procurement, and then Wikipedia finished it.

~ what the box promised ~

The thing worth keeping from Microsoft Home is the promise on the packaging, which was that a household computer would be a place you went to look things up and make things rather than a terminal for somebody else's service. That is what the color coding was for. Reference here and kids there, none of it needing a connection at all.

That version of the personal computer lost. What replaced it is better in every measurable way and it is not the same object. The boxes are what is left, and they are the reason you can still date a family's first PC by which purple spine is on the shelf behind it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »