Certainly we are at a moment when what was once down is now very much up. Thirty years ago, around the time a Seattle private-school student named Bill Gates was twiddling his first bits, the Rolling Stones emerged as the dark side of the British pop invasion–scruffy-looking London rats whose songs were too hot for Ed Sullivan to handle uncensored. One album title said it all: they were exiles on Main Street. Clear across the spectrum was the world of computers. Anyone who mastered them was considered an egghead or a twit-not the type of person you’d have a beer with, let alone feature in a beer commercial. Who would have thought that in 1995, both deviant forces-computers and rock-would meet smack in the middle of the mainstream?
Yet that’s what has happened. Indeed, there was hardly a whimper that the Stones were “selling out” by licensing their song to Microsoft. Everybody recognizes that Jagger & Co. are primarily a business (check out the Web site: http://www. stones.com), one whose primary asset is a body of 25-year-old songs and subsequent variations. (“Start Me Up” is a recycled “Brown Sugar”–much as Windows 95 is largely a recycled version of the Macintosh operating system.) A Stones association with Microsoft is a strategic alliance: Bill Gates, the multi billion-dollar Jesus of nerddom, is now as hip as Mick Jagger.
The rollout of Windows 95 was charged with the sort of excitement generated in the ’60s by a new Beatles release. The air crackled with broadcast reports of its arrival. Magazines–not just those dealing in the digital trade–stuffed their pages with special reports. At the stroke of midnight on Aug. 24, computer and office-supply stores threw open their doors to accommodate front runners who couldn’t wait until morning to begin the installation process. My favorite gimmick was the lottery run by office-superstore Staples: first prize, an all-expenses-paid trip to the Microsoft campus. Forget that there’s nothing there but a bunch of overworked hackers: as the Windows 95 spawning ground, Redmond, Wash., is the new Magic Kingdom.
All of this comes from the sudden ubiquity of computers in ourlives. In the ’60s, we never went near one of the beasts; now, a hundred million of us have gone digital. The jargon of RAM and point-and-click is our modern second tongue. And we share a common burden: the overly technical barriers that prevent us from smoothly accessing and manipulating our information. Too often, our love affair with computers is unrequited: the machines crash, or we can’t easily figure out how to do even seemingly simple tasks. The inability to drag a file to a trash bin or painlessly hook up a CD-ROM is not an isolated gripe: it’s a malady bemoaned by the masses of people saddled with Windows 3.1. Thus users are thrilled at the prospect of new software that vows, as Windows 95 does, to remove the concertina wire from their computing experience. But that’s not all Microsoft promises: its slick marketing portrays a feel-good atmosphere that will energize the user’s desktop and positively transform the person staring at the screen. This is software that feels hot, with its startup button and 3-D effects. The digital equivalent of Porsche sunglasses.
Only a cynic would note that the substance of Windows 95 compares unfavorably with “Abbey Road” or “Let It Bleed.” The most interesting components are not those that will make us more productive (these are mainly the ideas lifted from the Mac, like long file names or the ability to easily add peripherals like printers). There’s no real breakthrough on the order of hypertext or desktop publishing. The really hot stuff in Windows 95 is features concocted to make Microsoft more productive, like the single-click connection to the Microsoft Network. But most shoppers aren’t offended by Microsoft’s use of its dominance in operating systems to extend its power in other arenas; it only seems to enhance the company’s mystique. This is all in keeping with the way we consume culture these days – one eye to the product, the other to what the product grosses. Besides, the computer industry is so closely wed to Microsoft’s fortunes that rooting against Windows 95 is akin to wishing for a stock-market crash. Everybody’s in bed with Bill.
Unfortunately, something important is lost in all this hype. Now that personal computers are mass-market items, we should demand that they operate with the same elegance as our cars and television sets. Windows 95 is much improved over its befuddling predecessor Windows 3.1-but computers in general are still much too hard to learn. At the very least we deserve computer-operating systems that don’t create a huge market for books directed to those who suddenly feel like dummies. Creating such software would actually justify some of the impossible hype of Windows 95. And I know just the song to accompany the launch–a tune that no existing computer-operating system can reasonably lay claim to. “Satisfaction.”
