There is no one harder to sell to than a burned consumer.

With the exception of political elections, most people will go elsewhere if a company promises one thing and delivers something entirely different. Remember the Pontiac Fiero? Built from the Pontiac "Standard Parts" bin, it was supposed to be the sporty commuter-economical fun car-road handling mid-engine dream toy-all for the cost of an econo-box. What was delivered was a car that rode like jeep, handled like go-cart, and spontaneously combusted—Pontiac had never done a mid-engine car before. The Fiero died with a whimper in 1988 after only a 4 year production run, and Pontiac has never tried to make another mid-engine car since.

In a similar manner, Microsoft spent a small fortune to market the praises of Windows 95 as the Operating System (OS) savior of the IBM architecture: "We’ll rescue you from the headache of configuration and from driver issues! We’ll make your OS run better-smarter-faster." To which I say, "Yada, yada, yada." They pitched this to a hungry (though novice) market who bought it, and now feels burned because Windows 95 wasn’t the Cornucopia it was promised to be. Some have given up on Graphical Interfaces and decided that good old Command Line UNIX is their thing. Just what we need, more zealots.

Nevertheless, I am still a big fan of this OS. Windows 95 has gone further than any of its competitors (notably OS/2) in bringing straightforward computer operation to the average user. But Microsoft, in typical "Get it out the door, fix the bugs as we go," manner shoved out a product that wasn’t quite ready for prime time. (As a former Microsoft Support Engineer, I discovered that subsystems without internal documentation are known as "smoking craters." The specifications should be there, but they aren’t. Windows 95 was pockmarked by smoking craters.)

The polls are in: Windows 98 will be what Windows 95 should have been.

This updated Operating System (code named Memphis) is, at its core, unchanged. Modifications have made only to the body lines and the upholstery, but the core architecture is still there. How the interface (the part you use to tell the computer what you want) hides the messy tubes and cables has been greatly improved, especially when it comes to hardware integration (remember train wrecks like Plug and Pray?) and dial-up networking (AKA, connecting to the Internet.)

At this early point, Windows 98 is in Beta, a development stage where most of the components are present, but have not been smoothed over; a prototype that hasn’t reached production yet. Because Windows 98 hasn’t been scheduled for release until the second quarter of 1998, the features that will be discussed here aren’t promised, they are just "planned." I would hazard a guess and say that most of these good ideas will appear in the final version, but there are no guarantees.

Web View, or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Network

The most significant change to the User Interface will be the integration of the Internet browser right into the Operating System. Called the "Web View" setting, it lets you treat your whole computer like a web site. In other words, the distinction between your current Netscape or Internet Explorer (stand-alone applications) and the User Interface (used to navigate within your own computer) will blur to such an extent that you can’t tell which "world" you are in. And that is the point: The information is what is important: not where, but what.

As you can imagine, this is going to give the control and privacy freaks something to go ape feces about. In the bad old days, you loaded your application first, then you loaded the document or drawing you wanted to edit. This is called "application-centric" or what I call the "typewriter mentality." Then Object Linking & Embedding (OLE) and file associations took us to the next level: You went looking for the document itself (not the program) and when you decided to view or edit the document, the Operating System opened the associated program to do the work (Document-centric).

The new paradigm, to use a cliché, is "data-centric." If you want a certain type of data, you tell your computer to get it. All the rest (including file type checking, viewer, or editor start up) happens automatically. You say, "fetch" and the OS handles the rest as you ask for it. There is no need to open a fat, memory hungry editor until you have looked the file over first in a lower calorie viewer, so you get the viewer first, unless you specifically ask to edit the file. Cool.

The web view option makes the distinction between "local" and "remote" data less obvious. It also standardizes some User Interface behaviors. When you want a program or document in Windows 95, you must click twice on your target icon. Many people, (especially the elderly) have spent years trying to get the physical coordination down to "double-click." But on the web, one click on a hyperlink will suffice to send you on your way. Confusing? To some people, yes, which is why Windows 98 makes everything single click. This should double the mean time between failure (MTBF) of most mice!

System Configuration

System configuration is considered the bane of a user’s existence. By making everything customizable, Microsoft leaves most users feeling buried in a deluge of options that they don’t understand. Do you know how to install a driver? Great. How about your Grandma Matilda?

The best way to address this inequity of knowledge between users is to automate everything and then let the experienced types turn off the automatic functions, not unlike your 1997 Minolta camera that has more buttons than an Automat, but can be stripped back to work like a Kodak Brownie if that is the way you want to use it. This is exactly the tack that Microsoft has taken. Unless you want to do something very out of the ordinary in Windows 98, the automation should keep you running fine.

Its a great relief, too. The automated System Configuration under Windows 95 consisted of a Plug and Play specification that no two vendors could agree on. Microsoft set and published the standard, but hardware vendors (and motherboard makers) implemented it haphazardly and inconsistently. Thus, Plug and Play became Plug and Pray. If it worked, great. Your installation of new hardware just took about 90 seconds. If it didn’t, you were stuck on the phone to tech support for days, trying to convince the PnP hardware to behave as designed. Legacy (outdated) hardware? Don’t even ask—You may as well be running Windows 3.1 or DOS.

Windows 98 improves on this comedy of (system) errors by adding several new diagnostic and support programs to ease the installation and maintenance of your computer. None of these ideas are new, but it looks like they will be integrated into the OS, instead of being hung off it like fuzzy dice.

Unified Driver Architecture

Drivers are those troublesome little pieces of software that act as the liaison between your hardware peripherals and the OS. They can frequently cause problems because they are too old, poorly written, corrupted, or all three. To address these headaches (and others), Microsoft is making changes to the way drivers do what they do. Called the Win32 Driver Model (WDM), it is change in programming specifications that simplifies the way a vendor must customize their drivers to the OS it will be running on. Presently the hardware vendor must write two drivers for a given piece of hardware, one for Windows 95, one for Windows NT. The WDM initiative allows the vendor to write one driver and have it work on both systems. This is not rocket science, but it should help. Don’t worry about your existing legacy drivers; They’ll still work in Windows 98.

Windows Update Manager (WUM)

This is the great experiment in Microsoft’s push to make it easier to keep your computer running smoothly. The WUM is a program, that connects to an Internet site at microsoft.com. If you install a new piece of hardware and it needs drivers that you don’t have (or you want to check for the most current ones, just run WUM. Not unlike taking the car to the dealer to have the timing belt adjusted and the plugs changed. When you arrive at the site, an Active X control (remember them?) polls your computer, determines what needs to be updated or repaired and then pushes the files down to you. Presumably, the site will also offer third-party drivers (like ones for soundcards, or non-Microsoft hardware).

This sounds great, but the issues that concern me are:

• Microsoft will be looking under the hood of your computer. You’ve given it permission to look. Are you willing to let them know about everything on you machine?
• Occasionally, a newer driver is inferior to the one it is replacing. The more recent driver may have a glitch or a flaw that will cause tremendous headaches later. Microsoft can’t be sure they aren’t shipping a buggy driver, so unless I see a fail-safe (like a back up of your previous drivers that will be automatically restored if a problem is encountered) I don’t think I’d recommend this for prime time.