My Website of wonder

Microsoft History

In the beginning, www.microsoft.com was just one computer tucked under a table at the end of a long hallway. It was designed to test Microsoft's first 32-bit Windows implementation of TCP/IP, the software plumbing in Windows that enables Internet communications. 

Microsoft legend says that this machine once lived under the desk of the site's first official administrator, Mark Ingalls, but like most legends that's only half true. A staging server for microsoft.com was actually housed beneath his desk, and it was relocated because too often Ingalls reached down and turned off the wrong machine by mistake. 

Today, microsoft.com is the fourth-largest Web site (per Media Metrix), powered by internal and external servers all over the world and visited by an average of 5 million customers a day. How the site got where it is now in just six high-velocity years is a story of smart decisions, some very public snafus, and all in all, a story we thought you might like to read as we close out 1999. 

Six years may not sound like a lot of time, but in "Internet time" that's almost half a lifetime. Internet time is sometimes likened to dog years - the first year is like 14, and every subsequent year is roughly equivalent to seven virtual years. By that reckoning, microsoft.com is pushing 50. 

As we prepare to enter the year 2000, it makes sense to reflect on all that has happened since 1994 - the year that microsoft.com launched its public Internet Web domain with a home page. This isn't meant to be an exhaustive account of the early days of Microsoft on the Web, just a short compilation of history and reminisces by some of the "old timers" who helped build the foundation for microsoft.com. 

Apologies in advance to all of those whose contributions are notcited. Enjoy! 

Humble beginnings
The first Microsoft Internet site was born in early 1993. Group Manager John Martin of Microsoft's Corporate Network Systems group sought and received the charter to post Microsoft support resources, previously available only on a CompuServe forum, to a public FTP server. The site was named gowinnt.microsoft.com in honor of the keyword used to access the forum on CompuServe. It was later changed to ftp.microsoft.com, to better map with Internet naming conventions. 

A year later, in 1994, the group sought to expand the support offerings to include gopher and Web servers. Emphasis was originally placed on the more mature gopher protocol, which offered limited text-only browsing with a menu-like interface and searching via WAIS gateway, a primitive predecessor to the modern search engine. 

Mark Ingalls recalls that when he first typed www.microsoft.com into a Web browser to ensure it hadn't already been claimed, he was surprised to find a site already there. He traced the site to pioneering Microsoft developer J Allard, who had claimed the server name to test out his new TCP/IP networking stack. The first recorded Microsoft Web server was situated at the end of a hallway in one of the older buildings on campus. Allard agreed to pass the server to the product support group, and it was eventually relocated to a lonely corner of the Microsoft corporate data center. 

The servers started delivering content on Windows NT 3.1 using the European Microsoft Windows Academic Consortium (EMWAC) WWW server software. Ingalls and his ragtag crew converted much of the patchwork content for the site themselves using an automated rich text-to-HTML process, and spent the balance of their time evangelizing the Web site's benefits throughout the company. 

"You had to convince people that HTML was worth their time," Ingalls noted. But in just more than a year, the group was fielding too many requests. Despite the primitive nature of the Internet site, it was wildly successful - to the point where Bill Gates himself commented in a May 1995 memo that "amazingly, it is easier to find information on the Web than it is to find information on the Microsoft Corporate Network." 

It was obvious that the Web was here to stay. 

Off-ramp ahead
The Microsoft Developer Network created one of the first fully fleshed out Web sites on microsoft.com: the MSDN OffRamp, so-named because it was expected that developers would appreciate the metaphor of easy-off, easy-on access to information. This was an important milestone: Prior to the site launch in 1994 - and for some time after - most content on the Microsoft Web site was disconnected clumps of promotional and support documents with no common navigation or branding. 

The site was based around MSDN News, a quarterly print and CD-ROM-based publication. The CD's content was authored in SGML, a formatting technology related to HTML. "HTML was like a subset of everything we'd been doing, and it was a natural next step," said Andy Himes, who drove the effort. 

The MSDN site was unusual because it had a business plan and a small budget for graphic design. The team spent the summer of 1994 developing a specification, coding the site, and testing it prior to launch. Despite all of the careful groundwork, "nothing worked out as well as planned," Himes noted. 

The problem? Within a few days of the launch, the MSDN team realized that updating the site quarterly wasn't nearly often enough to satisfy a hungry Internet audience. The plan was revised to update monthly, then weekly, and finally daily. 

"It took us about a year before we were updating content every day," Himes added. 

Whoops!
Toddlers inevitably suffer a few stumbles as they learn to walk and microsoft. com was no exception. Notes Kimberly Hope, one of the first Web builders hired by microsoft.com: "There's not some omniscient force behind the site, it's people in their offices doing this stuff." 

Consider, then, our blooper reel:

• Mark Ingalls recalls how he mistakenly deleted the live default.htm file that served as the microsoft.com home page, in the days before staging servers. While home page visitors were receiving File Not Found errors, Ingalls rooted around in his browser cache - where the cache filenames did NOT map to their real names - to find and restore the page to active duty. 
  
  
• The predecessor to MSNBC, known then as MSN News, was first published prematurely when a member of the production team, sitting up on a desk to study a schematic, clicked a mouse button with his derriere. The team watched in horror as the content went live to a public server before it was ready. 
  
  
• For the Internet Explorer 3.0 launch, the product support team released a fully overhauled knowledge base. However, their production environment didn't mirror the Web server, and the site was published without running a vital script that adjusted the drive letter used for the access point on the live Web machines. When customers tried to search the knowledge base, they'd get errors instead of results. 
  
  
• A vendor who had only a passing knowledge of microsoft.com coding policies delivered the first Windows CE site. The first test on the site with Weblint, a tool used to check validity of HTML, returned 100 pages of errors. There was a harried pre-Comdex weekend in November 1996 where every link and quite a bit of other code on the several hundred page site was manually recoded by a handful of people so it could be published in time for Bill Gates' Sunday night keynote. 
  
  
• The first try at personalization on microsoft.com, with a home page that marked headlines as read once a user had clicked them, wasn't tested for scalability to a large Internet audience. The technology worked fine on an internal Microsoft intranet site, so it was simply ported to the live site. It wasn't long before the feature was removed due to its decimating impact on live Web servers.

Windows 95: A turning point
A year after the MSDN OffRamp launch, microsoft.com was ramping up for one of the most important launches in company history. Around this mid-1995 timeframe, the microsoft.com Web servers were migrated to a pre-release version of Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) because the EMWACS servers were straining to keep up with the burgeoning server loads. 

"Rolling out IIS to microsoft.com prior to releasing it to customers has always been an important requirement," noted developer John Ludeman. "There's no testing that can be done that's equivalent to the environment of live Internet traffic. That motto still exists - all of microsoft.com was running IIS 5.0 before Windows 2000 was released." 

A new home page design, dubbed "Collage," was developed to replace the Star Map imagery. As crowds massed for "Midnight Madness" outside computer retailers and talk show host Jay Leno arrived in Seattle to emcee the Windows 95 launch extravaganza, the Web site team was treated to a steak dinner in the midst of a harried, sleepless night preparing for the anticipated throngs of curious launch-day Web site visitors. 

The Web site initially had been launched on one server with no redundancy, but was soon upgraded to two servers to handle the traffic. "When we went from one to two servers, we thought we were done," said John Martin. "We had no idea what we were up against." 

For the Windows 95 launch, a third Web server was added in Redmond and complemented by some distributed vendor servers used to handle traffic for the launch. "The Windows 95 group didn't have much faith in us, probably rightly so - looking at it in retrospect, because that launch was a huge deal," Ingalls mused. "Tents are up all over the place, and Jay Leno is driving around campus in a golf cart!" 

Jay Goldstein remembers a less glamorous side to the launch: the 90-hour work weeks that he and Linda Leste put in during the months leading up to the launch of the first comprehensive product site on microsoft.com. "Nobody knew what it meant to do any of this stuff," Goldstein recalled. "I'm a product manager, and I was doing HTML. There wasn't anyone to go to."

Despite all of the preparations, the launch didn't come off as cleanly as planned. An interaction of third-party browser bugs and the pre-release version of Microsoft's Internet server software yielded a disastrous combination: a two-byte discrepancy in registration data started causing servers to crash. "John Ludeman and I are sitting in the corporate data center with debuggers attached to both registration Web servers, trying to keep them alive," said Ingalls. "I'm on no sleep at this point, standing there watching a developer debug source code." 

The team prevailed - eventually, and learned a valuable lesson about testing and capacity planning that helped shape the era to come. Afterwards, the proud Web operations staff wore T-shirts they had printed with the slogan, "Sleep make you weak." 

"Back then, we did everything. Now you have entire teams devoted to what we did," noted Steve Heaney, an Internet systems engineer for the early Web site. 
Building a better site
The launch of Windows 95 illustrated the need for a cohesive Web process, and led to the core Web team being spun off into its own group within Microsoft: the Customer Systems Group. It initially consisted of a handful of people, most of whom were on the operations team. Home page content was eventually transferred from developer hands to a program manager, and finally - after several prominent typographical and grammar errors - a full-time editor in May 1996. 

"At the time, the audience was about 35,000 a day," said then-editor Lyn Watts. "We once had a broken link on our page all day and if anyone noticed, no one mentioned it. Today we'd know in one minute and have it fixed the next." 

New services were rolled out in stages. First, a publishing tool was created to put control of the Web pages into the hands of the product groups and other Microsoft teams, freeing microsoft.com account managers to manage more high-level tasks, such as creating new databases to drive increasingly complex content requests. 

Next, a Web stats tool was created so publishers could quickly see daily page traffic. But this level of information didn't provide enough depth, so a comprehensive registration system was devised to replace hundreds of individual registration databases - each requiring customers to re-enter much of the same information, but in a manner that wasn't sharable. 

At the same time, Web site traffic was climbing at a rate of about 10 percent per month. To give you an idea of what that means, the daily site traffic of 35,000 in mid-1996 has grown to 5.1 million visitors today. 

"That's just incredible growth," said Tim Sinclair, then lead producer and now general manager for microsoft.com. "To manage it, you have to be operationally, developmentally, and organizationally sound or it will overwhelm you. And it almost did on several occasions." 

Inspiration and salsa
In the year that followed the Windows 95 launch, the home page weathered a quick succession of home page refreshes. The "Collage" home page was replaced with "Cartoon," a professionally designed page with colorful icons for navigation. However, the page was considered "heavy" for the majority of Web site visitors, many of whom were still arriving on 9600 bps connections. So in mid-1996, microsoft.com launched a spare design called "Minimalistic" to make the home page load much more quickly. 

This page design lasted only three months, due to the launch of Internet Explorer 3.0 in August. To show off some of the fancy new features of the browser, and because the minimalist approach wasn't showy enough to satisfy customers' expectations, a page called "Recycle Can" was introduced featuring a more sophisticated layout and interactive effects such as links that lit up when moused over. 

It was around this time that Group Program Manager Steve Bush and producers Kari Richardson and Lisa Post attended an unproductive conference in San Francisco. Seeking refuge from panels and sessions that had little or nothing to do with the problems they were facing on the Web site, they escaped for an early dinner at a Mexican restaurant and began talking about creating useful, consistent navigation on the Microsoft Web site. 

The idea emerged: They should build an icon-based toolbar, similar to the button bars found in products like Microsoft Office - the product team where Bush worked before he moved to microsoft.com. "Steve actually had his laptop under the table, and he pulled it out and started drawing icons, and pulling icons out of system files." It wasn't long before they had a prototype button bar to show people. 

But there was a problem: The fancy icons (a magnifying glass for "search," a pencil for "write us") looked too similar to the buttons used for Web browser navigation. "We decided that while the concept was great, the implementation wasn't," Richardson reports. The buttons were re-tooled into small, rectangular black buttons with only a small icon of a house for the "home" page, and then - to yield a consistent site appearance and easy navigation to core site features from anywhere on microsoft.com - deployed site-wide. 

A new beginning
Much of the more recent development of microsoft.com is faithfully chronicled in the pages of Microsoft Backstage. Many of the problems of the frontier days of the Web are gone, replaced by well-crafted planning and build processes and careful release management. 

"It was fun building infrastructure, although I'm sure we didn't know that's what we were doing at the time it was happening," said Stephanie Weeks, one of the first microsoft.com account managers who now manages development projects for microsoft.com. "I remember the camaraderie and sweat equity, watching Ingalls and Heaney fighting to keep the handful of Web server boxes up and running." 

A pivotal date is August 14, 1996: The day that hordes of Web users came to microsoft.com looking for Internet Explorer 3.0. The systems team had their own version of "Midnight Madness," a term they adopted to describe the mayhem that ensued when demand for the Web browser greatly exceeded expectations. 

"Steve Heaney and Mark Ingalls were literally in front of the FTP and download servers for an entire day rebooting them to keep them up because there were too many users for what the boxes could handle," said Todd Weeks, now microsoft.com's systems operations manager. "Two weeks later, they hired a capacity planner for the download program so we wouldn't have the same fiasco for Internet Explorer 4.0." 

Throughout 1997 and 1998, the site "grew up" and went from being the Web equivalent of a start-up company to a world-class organization. "Could we make the transition? There was a big question mark," notes Sanjay Parthasarathy, who took over as general manager of the group that runs microsoft.com in late 1997. Parthasarathy introduced the concept of Internet dial-tone to the site, the idea that a simple, effective site that runs quickly and predictably is better than a fancy one that crashes frequently or angers customers. 

"I say this all of the time: Your site is only as good as the processes behind it," he said, noting that running a world-class Web site is an artful combination of great technology and excellent processes. "The second part of the transition was just an attitude change - that we're no longer in our private sandbox, that we're mission critical." 

During this period, the home page became leaner and servers were clustered and load balanced for redundancy. Each group created a set of core processes to be implemented for, say, developing a new home page design, localizing site content for more than 30 international subsidiary sites around the world, or responding to a data center problem. Single points of failure and bottlenecks were hunted down and eliminated. 

"Now there's a controlled atmosphere," added Stephanie Weeks. "We know where we're going. We know what we're doing. It's still exciting, it's still cutting edge. It's just a different flavor." 

Pages are now backed up on testing and staging servers as well as the 35 live servers that make up www.microsoft.com. Weblint was long ago retired in favor of a handcrafted rules-checking process in PubWiz, the internal publication tool that replicates content to the live site. And a scalable form of personalization has weathered successful pilot programs on MSDN, TechNet, and several other internal sites and seems destined for the home page in early 2000. 

What will the future of Microsoft on the Web look like? We have a few ideas on the subject. Check back in about 50, er, six years for a full report. 

Dave Kramer edits the microsoft.com home page and Microsoft Backstage. He was part of the Microsoft Windows CE Web site launch in November 1996 and is now part of the team working on the next version of the microsoft.com home page.