WinFiles.com

» see winfiles.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

A card in the machine that Windows would not talk to. No disk in the box, or a disk that had gone missing two moves ago, and a device manager entry with a yellow mark on it. That was the problem WinFiles existed to answer, and answering it meant somebody had sat down and filed thousands of driver packages under the name of the thing they drove.

Steve Jenkins started it at windows95.com in 1994, while he was still a student, under a company called Jenesys LLC. The title tag on the front page for years read: the best 32-bit shareware, drivers, tips, and information on the internet. The description under it claimed to be the internet's largest source of those things for every version of Windows, and for a stretch in the late nineties that was close enough to true that nobody argued.

The name changed to WinFiles.com sometime in the first half of 1998. The archive puts the old name on the page in February of that year and the new one by July, with the sentence otherwise identical and only the domain swapped inside it. The footer always carried a line saying Microsoft in no way endorsed or was affiliated with the site, which is the sort of disclaimer a person writes before anyone has asked them to.

CNET bought it on 24 February 1999 for $11.5 million, structured as half at closing and half eighteen months later. Two years after that the front page was a single sentence saying WinFiles was no longer being updated, with a link for details underneath it, sitting under a logo that by then read CNET WinFiles.com.

~ the case file ~

~ the driver problem ~

Driver hunting was a specific era of computing and it does not exist any more. A modem and a sound card were separate purchases from separate companies, each shipping a floppy or a CD that stopped mattering the moment you reinstalled Windows. The manufacturer's own website was frequently worse than useless, either gone or reorganized into a support portal that had dropped anything older than eighteen months.

So the value was in the filing. A directory that could tell you which of eleven similarly named files matched your particular revision of a card was doing work that nobody has to do now, because the operating system fetches its own drivers and the hardware is soldered down. WinFiles was a card catalog for a category of object that has since disappeared into the motherboard.

~ the name on the door ~

Windows95.com was a good domain and a bad long-term bet, and the timing of the rename says why. Windows 98 shipped in June 1998, the site had already been covering NT and the rest, and the front page was claiming coverage of all versions of Windows while the address in the bar named exactly one of them.

Whether Microsoft applied any pressure is not something any source reached will confirm, and the grave does not claim it. What the archive does show is a rename done cleanly and cheaply, with the same layout and the same imagemap navigation running across apps and drivers, and only the word in the middle of the title changed.

~ what eleven and a half million bought ~

CNET in 1999 was buying traffic, and it bought a lot of it in a short window. Eleven and a half million dollars for a directory run by one person out of a small company is a dot-com number, and Jenkins took it in cash across two payments. From CNET's side it was one more property in a portfolio that already contained Download.com, Shareware.com and the rest of the network.

Which is where the logic breaks. CNET did not need two software download destinations and had no obvious plan for what made the second one different. The 1999 acquisition put the WinFiles brand under the CNET header and folded the search and category pages onto winfiles.cnet.com, and after that the site's identity was a colored bar at the top of a page belonging to somebody else.

~ the redirect ~

The archive dates the end more precisely than any article does. The last capture of the working front page is 2 March 2001. The next capture, on 2 April, is the farewell notice, and the page's own generator stamp puts its build at 19 March 2001. So the site stopped somewhere in that fortnight and nobody wrote it up.

The notice held for nearly two years. From February 2003 the address stopped displaying anything and began redirecting to download.com, which is where seven years of hand-sorted driver packages went to be a search result. winfiles.com does not answer today at all: it times out on a 502 and has no owner worth speaking of, which is a quieter ending than the payday-loan pages and gambling affiliates that took over most of its contemporaries.

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