Windows on the World

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Two software leaders give video screens a new look

Like women's fashions, computer buzz words change with the season and tend to hide more than they reveal. Last year's programs were all "user friendly," although many proved painfully difficult to master. This year, software is "integrated," which means that information from one program can sometimes be merged with data from another. Industry watchers are now getting a preview of the pet phrase for 1984. Two leading computer software companies, Microsoft and VisiCorp, are offering products with "windows," a system that lets users run several different programs at once, each displayed in a separate section of the video screen.

VisiCorp, the San Jose, Calif.-based publishers of the successful VisiCalc program for financial analysis, next month will begin shipping its VisiOn windowing package. Meanwhile, Microsoft, the leading personal computer software publisher (1983 sales: $100 million), has unveiled a competing product called Windows. Said Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates: "This is a milestone in software."

Each program uses a cigarette pack-size "mouse" as a control device; each allows users to split their screens into rectangular blocks, or windows, giving them the look of desktops littered with sheets of paper. Both systems attempt to address two fundamental challenges facing the personal computer industry: how to get the same program to run on machines put out by different manufacturers, and how to swap information smoothly between different programs. At present, for example, software for an IBM machine will not run on an Apple computer, and most users cannot easily take information from a financial analysis program and send it to a client via electronic mail.

The techniques used by the two firms are not new. In fact, the first electronic mouse was developed by a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute, in the mid-'60s. Xerox sold the first product with some of these features, the Star computer system, in 1981. Apple Computer further refined those ideas in its Lisa; that machine was hailed as a technological triumph when it was released last January, but has sold poorly because of its high price (originally $10,000) and poor marketing. Last month IBM introduced a $5,500 desktop machine that gives windowing capabilities to corporate clients with large mainframe computers.

Now a swarm of software firms are writing programs that give many brands of computers a window on the world. Quarterdeck Office Systems, a Santa Monica, Calif., company, has announced DesQ, a $395 window program that can run up to ten programs on the screen simultaneously. Several other products are scheduled to be introduced in the next few months. But the real battle is expected to be between the versions developed by VisiCorp and Microsoft, two of the oldest players in personal computer software.

Soon after microcomputers hit the market in 1975, Microsoft's Gates, then 19, took a leave of absence from Harvard to develop and sell the first program that allowed ordinary users to write software on a desktop computer. Today his Microsoft BASIC runs on nearly every brand of micro, from Apple to Radio Shack. When IBM began investigating the personal computer market three years ago, it asked Gates to build the control program for its new PC. As a result, Microsoft's disc operating system is the closest thing to a universal standard for the industry. Meanwhile, the company has branched out into games (Flight Simulator, Adventure) and business tools (Multiplan, Microsoft Word), and designed the software for the immensely successful Radio Shack Model 100 lap-size computer.

VisiCorp Chairman Dan Fylstra was a student at the Harvard Business School in 1978 when he heard about two MIT graduates with a new kind of program for business planning. He persuaded them to write it on one of the recently introduced Apple computers and took charge of the product's marketing campaign. The program, VisiCalc, turned out to be the single most popular piece of computer software ever written: more than 600,000 copies have been sold since 1979. Fylstra went on to publish a series of spinoffs (VisiFile, VisiPlot), building VisiCorp into a $45 million-a-year company. Lately, however, the firm has rapidly been losing market share to a host of competitors, including Microsoft.

Although the new products look remarkably similar, the companies have followed very different paths. VisiCorp spent three years and $12 million developing a complex window-display system (retail cost: $495) and the programs that run in it ($500 for the first two). Microsoft chose to build just the framework, which it will discount to manufacturers for about $200, and is relying on independent programmers to adjust their existing products to the new system.

VisiCorp has a head start, since its VisiOn will be on the market within weeks, while Microsoft's Windows will reach stores next spring. But Microsoft has more support from the computer manufacturers: some 23 firms, including Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment and Radio Shack, have agreed to offer Windows with their machines. Whichever product ultimately wins, Microsoft and VisiCorp are showing the direction software is likely to take.

--By Philip Elmer-DeWitt.

Reported by Michael Moritz/San Francisco

With reporting by Michael Moritz/San Francisco This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.