Microsoft was very "Darwinian" at the time, and had measures in place to keep managers from shuffling underperformers from team to team, preferring to make sure they simply got cut. Others at Microsoft didn't think too much of these multimedia efforts: Managers on the Windows 95 development team would threaten to transfer weak programmers to work on Microsoft Dogs.īut Corddry says that this was an empty threat, and no Windows programmers were forcibly relocated to Microsoft Dogs. And in so doing, Microsoft created demand for multimedia PCs, forcing manufacturers to make more. These discs, which included Julia Child-branded cookbooks and NBA basketball guides, were basically websites minus the web.Ĭheck out this video on basketball from Encarta 95, the version for Windows 95:īy releasing CD-ROM titles that were basically reference libraries on a disc with sound, picture, video and interactive games, Microsoft convinced the world that computers were a viable way to educate and inform. Microsoft solved two birds with one stone and launched its own in-house multimedia efforts. Second, because computers were still thought of as workplace devices, they very rarely had sound or video capabilities. There were just two problems, Corddry says:įirst, since this was before the Internet became popular, Microsoft was having a hard time convincing book publishers, video studios, or really anyone with skin in the game that people would ever want to access information on a computer. They weren't exactly sure how people would access this information - the web was just being invented and the broader Internet wasn't popular yet - but they were sure it would happen, somehow. In the early 1990s, Microsoft saw the way the world was going and knew that the PC had tremendous potential for multimedia and access to information in classrooms, offices, and homes. "We knew from the beginning that we were a temporary business, eventually to be overtaken by the internet," Corddry says.
In hindsight, they seem like oddities: Why would Microsoft, a company best known for making word processors, spreadsheets, and operating systems, make what was basically a reference library for the PC?īut according to Tom Corddry, who was in charge of Microsoft's multimedia projects from 1989 to 1996, the company had a clever master plan to push computers forward in the time before they were taken for granted. Those Microsoft Multimedia offerings included "Magic School Bus," "Microsoft Dogs," and the "Microsoft Encarta" encyclopedia.
If you went to grade school in the nineties like I did, you might remember Microsoft's educational software titles published on CD-ROM.
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