Windows 95 and the iPhone

Michael Gartenberg | June 21, 2007, 03:29 PM

So after getting (what little) hair I have cut and having the barber ask me about the iPhone I started thinking about the last time a technology product had so much mainstream consumer interest and I'm hard pressed to think of one. While folks make comparisons to the PS3, Wii or Xbox launches, those were different. For the most part, those folks stood on line because they were gamers not mainstream consumers. It's easy to get the tech enthusisats to line up but the mass market consumer, that's another story.

The last time I can recall mainstream consumers standing in line all night to purchase technology was the Windows 95 launch. I remember it well, as I was in Seattle at the time and was with some folks from Microsoft when we heard that people were lining up that evening to buy Windows 95 upgrades. I found that hard to believe. My reasoning was simple.

1. People only stand in line for things that are hard to get (World Series tickets or hot concert tickets or the like) and no one was forecasting a shortage of Windows 95 CDs.

2. Enthusiasts (of the sort who install an operating system on a Saturday afternoon as a form of social entertainment) might stand online for a copy of an OS but back then, pretty much anyone in that category already had a copy of Windows 95 by launch.

3. In general, normal people don't wait on line over night to buy operating systems without strong marketing incentive to do so.

To my amusement, there was indeed a huge line around the Egghead Software store and most of the folks were indeed mainstream consumers waiting to purchase Windows 95 (and most of those I spoke to told me they planned to bring it into their offices and install it on their work PCs as well). More amazingly, we had reports of folks who bought Windows 95 upgrades that did not own PCs. I've always felt that if you could sell an operating system to someone who doesn't own a CPU to run it on, you have a pretty compelling story (perhaps even better than selling ice in the arctic).

Windows 95 was a sea-change, it performed the same functions for the most part as Windows 3.1 but did them far more elegantly (and on par with many of the features that had formerly differentiated Mac OS of that era). We're seeing some of that here with the iPhone as well.

I've said this before but worth repeating again as I've gotten a lot of questions that all essentially ask, "Aren't there other devices on the market that can do essentially what an iPhone can do and doesn't that put Apple at risk?" My response is that there are many music players on the market that can do essentially what an iPod can do and yet, people don't buy them for the most part. That's what Apple is trying to accomplish here. We'll see just how well they've done come June 29th.

Update - as i hit post, Joe Wilcox IM'd me with the same observation regarding Windows 95.