Back in 1994, World Wide Web was in the early stage supported by dial-up modems and there were only a few thousand websites and microsoft was among them. In the 20 years since it has been on the Web, Microsoft revealed that Microsoft.com has remained in the top 10 most-visited websites worldwide. Actually, Microsoft started the website to mainly put its growing Knowledge Base online.
"We had started to build up a community there; people would answer questions for each other,” recalls Mark Ingalls, a Microsoft engineer in 1994 who would become Microsoft.com’s first administrator. He was also the only website employee at that time, other than his boss. But the staff doubled early on, when Steve Heaney was hired to offer vacation relief, Ingalls says. In terms of “Web design,” the notion, much less the phrase, didn’t really exist.
"There wasn’t much for authoring tools,” Ingalls says. “There was this thing called HTML that almost nobody knew.” Information that was submitted for the new Microsoft.com website often came to Ingalls via 3-1/2-inch floppy disks.
Check out the first Microsoft.com home page in 1994 above. There are about 30 people who work on the Microsoft.com home page today.
The first Microsoft.com home page, in 1994: Mark Ingalls, the first administrator of Microsoft.com, says at that time, using the slow dial-up connections of the era, this page would have taken awhile to load. “For most folks at home in that day and age, you would have been able to count to three or five before that picture showed up on your screen,”
August to November 1995: Notice the “Cool Link of the Day,” a regular feature of websites to visit. That seems like an antiquated notion now, but 1995 was a time when many people were just starting to get familiar with the Web, and didn’t really know where to go. But they were eager to learn and to explore this new world that took them from their computer desktops into cyberspace.
November 1995 to June 1996: Dave Kramer, who also used to edit the site’s home page, wrote in a 1999 article for Microsoft that the style of this page was called “Cartoon.” The page was designed “with colorful icons for navigation.” However, he wrote, “the page was considered ‘heavy’ for the majority of website visitors, many of whom were still arriving on 9,600 bps connections.”
August to November 1996: When Internet Explorer 3.0 came out in August of 1996, Microsoft.com’s site was inundated by customers who went to it to download the new version of the Web browser.
Nov. 30, 1998: Users could find out about preview programs for Office 2000, and plans were underway to prepare for the “Y2K” – Year 2000 – bug, when it was feared some computers and computer systems around the world would crash because their internal clocks wouldn’t go past Dec. 31, 1999 and recognize the year 2000. Good preparations made the Y2K “bug” a gnat.
April 28, 1999: Microsoft.com daily traffic had gone from 35,000 in mid-1996 to 5.1 million in 1999, wrote Kramer.
Nov. 2, 2001: Windows XP launched the month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. A ribbon for the American Liberty Partnership is displayed, upper right, on the home page. The partnership was an early online relief effort, one by those in the Internet industry, to assist the organizations helping the victims and families affected by the attacks.
2003: “Microsoft is a unique and challenging company to try to sum up in a single page, and that’s really one of the jobs of the home page, to tell the world what Microsoft is all about,” says Chris Balt, who currently manages the Microsoft.com home page. “I get the sense that this has always been the challenge for the person in my role – and the team that I work with. It continues to be a great challenge today, of telling the Microsoft story to people who both know Microsoft very well, and to people who have no clue what to what all we do.”
2010: Mark Ingalls, who was the first Microsoft.com administrator, says he knew early on “that Microsoft.com was important, and that’s why I was excited to be a part of it – but I had no idea that it would grow to such complexity – with machines and servers and things talking to each other – or in the amount of traffic it gets.”
2012: Microsoft.com was redesigned to reflect the company’s new and unified approach to design, including the typography that was used, from the home page to the new Windows 8 operating system, released in the fall of that year.
2014: The elegant look of Microsoft.com renders beautifully, no matter what the device. “It used to be that we had a fairly simple task of designing a website for one, three, maybe five sizes of screens, and now … well, we don’t even talk about screen sizes now,” says Balt. “We talk about being cross-device accessible, making sure that whatever we design and build responds to and adjusts to the device that’s accessing it.”
Suzanne Choney
Microsoft News Center Staff
Microsoft News Center Staff
Source: Microsoft Blog
