Of course, it’s more complicated than that. “If you have a car that’s already fast and solid, what more can you do? You can’t really transform it into a plane.” “There aren’t that many new features you can come up with that allow you to say: ‘Hey, this is a brand-new version of Windows!’” says Tyrsina. Any updates to operating systems now – ever since Windows 7 – have been window dressing or polishing the silver. “People don’t think about it.” It’s the reason why Microsoft has spent the last six years punctuating the Windows user’s experience with incremental, automatic updates every six months or so with little fanfare – rather than releasing a whole new version.
Windows 95 turned PCs from something nerds used after reading a manual into a product everyday users could try with success from the start. Compare the experience of using an iPhone or Android phone, for example, to using Windows 3.0.
Like many tech products of the time, it had its quirks, but in the intervening 30 years operating systems have ironed out almost all major issues so they just (in theory) work from the get-go. That wasn’t always the case: Windows 3.0, released in 1990, was very much an operating system for hobbyists who had the time and devotion to understand its intricacies.
