Microsoft Plus!

» see microsoft.com/plus as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

microsoft plus! launched on august 24, 1995, the same day as windows 95. it was a fifty-dollar add-on disc that carried what microsoft did not ship in the base operating system. inside the box you got high-resolution desktop themes for the windows shell, the drivespace 3 disk compressor, screen savers, the version of pinball that later showed up everywhere as 3d pinball space cadet, and the internet jumpstart kit. that last piece bundled internet explorer 1.0 and a setup wizard for a dial-up connection. for a lot of people in 1995, that wizard was the literal first time a pc got onto the internet.

the line continued through plus! 98 in 1998, a kids edition in 1997, plus! for windows me in 2000, plus! for xp in october 2001, the digital media edition in january 2003, and the superpack in october 2004. each release added more themes and more screensavers, with a few small mini-apps for whatever microsoft wanted to push that year. by the xp era it had drifted into a media-player skinning kit and a karaoke utility, and the question was already there: why are these things not in the operating system itself.

i remember plus! from the windows 98 window. our home pc ran ttnet dial-up, and i can no longer tell whether the cd that gave the desktop those better-looking themes was plus! 98 or something a friend had copied from a plus! disc onto a generic blank. it ran in the period when the line between paid microsoft sku and casually copied add-on was almost transparent in turkey. plus! never had its own moment in turkish forum culture. it was something on the disc, and then it was the screensaver running while you went to make tea. and then it was gone.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the original plus! 95 was the most useful version, because the internet jumpstart kit was the first time microsoft shipped a dialer that worked with the home isps that had just opened. it came on a single cd with a setup wizard that walked you through dialing tcp/ip and configuring internet explorer 1.0. the box also included msn 1.0, before msn was a brand. the rest of plus! 95 was cosmetic: themes for the desktop, screen savers, font smoothing, and the disk compressor.

~ what it became ~

by plus! xp in 2001 the product had become a curiosity disc. windows xp itself looked good out of the box, so themes were not really a selling point anymore. microsoft pushed plus! into "lifestyle" use cases instead. there was a karaoke utility, a remix-a-cd kit, a screensaver maker, and a dancer that lived on your desktop and danced to music files you played. plus! was no longer the disc that put internet explorer on your machine. it was the disc with the dancing cartoon.

~ the long tail ~

the formal end of the plus! brand was vista's ultimate extras in 2007. microsoft pitched it as the same idea: bonus content for the highest-tier sku. ultimate extras shipped late and shipped thin, and the project was effectively abandoned by 2010. windows 7 did not have an equivalent. by then the model had stopped making sense, because anything plus! used to do was already on the web for nothing, and the third-party utility ecosystem covered the rest. paying microsoft fifty dollars for a desktop wallpaper pack felt like it belonged to a different decade, because it did.

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