By the summer of 1995, Microsoft had a problem most companies would kill for: everyone already knew the product was coming. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 had put a graphical face on the PC, but they still rode on top of MS-DOS like a coat of paint over an old house. The next release was different. Code-named "Chicago" and released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, Windows 95 folded MS-DOS and Windows into a single product and swapped the old 16-bit, cooperatively multitasked plumbing for a 32-bit, preemptively multitasked core. It shipped with a new file manager called Windows Explorer, a taskbar, Plug and Play so hardware could mostly configure itself, and filenames that could finally run past the ancient eight-character limit to 255.
But the feature people would remember wasn't under the hood. It was a small gray rectangle in the bottom-left corner of the screen, and it said one word: Start. Click it and the whole machine unfolded — programs, documents, settings, the way out. For a company about to spend a fortune telling the world that computing had just become easy, that button was the entire pitch in a single pixel-lit word.
The Button Worth an Anthem
If the Start button was the message, Microsoft needed a hook to carry it. It found one in a fourteen-year-old rock song. The launch commercial was built around The Rolling Stones' 1981 single "Start Me Up" — the title a wink at the new button, the chorus a permission slip to feel excited about an operating system. It was widely reported at the time that Microsoft had paid the band somewhere between $8 million and $14 million for the rights, a figure the Stones did little to correct. The truth, later accounts settled on, was more modest: around $3 million. The rumor, it seems, was worth more to the band's mystique than the correction.
The song was just the melody line of a far larger score. The U.S. advertising campaign alone ran to roughly $200 million, and when you counted the co-marketing dollars spent by hardware makers, retailers, and software partners riding Microsoft's wave, some estimates put the industry-wide push near a billion dollars. No piece of software had ever been sold like this. Microsoft wasn't launching a program; it was staging an event.
August 24, 1995
The event landed on August 24, 1995. On a 12-acre field on Microsoft's Redmond campus — a spread that reportedly took some 200 people and the better part of a month to build — the company threw a carnival for its operating system. The master of ceremonies was Jay Leno, then the reigning king of American late night. Bill Gates walked out to "Start Me Up" and booted the software on a giant screen. Gates got the best line of the day at Leno's expense: Windows 95, he said, was "so easy even a talk-show host can figure it out."
The spectacle didn't stay in Redmond. Gates was beamed by satellite to dozens of cities around the world, and tens of thousands watched the launch live. In New York, the Empire State Building was lit in the red, green, blue, and yellow of the Windows logo. In Toronto, a 100-metre banner unfurled down the side of the CN Tower. In London, Microsoft bought roughly 1.5 million copies of The Times — about twice its daily circulation — and handed the paper out free. Britain's largest computer chain, PC World, threw open its doors at midnight so customers could buy a box the instant it was legal to. People stood in line at midnight. For software.
One Million in Four Days
The hype could have collapsed under its own weight. It didn't. Windows 95 shipped a million copies worldwide in its first four days, and the momentum never really let up — by the end of 1998, according to International Data Corporation, it was the most-used desktop operating system on Earth, with 57.4% of the market. The launch even came with a bundled sense of fun: the CD tucked away "Fun Stuff," including music videos for Weezer's "Buddy Holly" and Edie Brickell's "Good Times." Microsoft also produced a 30-minute promotional "cyber sitcom" starring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry, fresh off the first season of Friends, gamely explaining folders and the Recycle Bin to a mass audience that had never met either.
What made the day historic wasn't the code, impressive as it was. It was that a piece of infrastructure — the layer between a person and their machine — had become a cultural event, complete with a rock anthem, a talk-show host, and a skyscraper dressed in its colors. For one August night, the most exciting thing in the world was a computer you could actually figure out.
And yet, buried in the same launch, was a blind spot. Windows 95's "native Internet integration" was real but thin, and the browser that would come to define the coming decade wasn't Microsoft's — it belonged to a startup in Mountain View. Gates had already sent his people a memo. Its title should worry anyone who has just thrown the party of the year.
Next in the series — Part 11: "The Internet Tidal Wave," and the memo that turned the whole company on a dime.
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