Web page

[Billw]

This is a page page I captured many years ago advertising MS Windows XP. What do you see in the foreground? Many years ago it was rumored that MS used AS/400s for the core business applications. This was never confirmed.

MS Best for Business

I will leave it to your imagination.

[MichaelCatalani]

Re: Web page

This was never confirmed.

Oh, it was more than confirmed. The entire firestorm started when, backin the late 80's or very early 90's, Help Systems gave an award to their "1000th" customer. (Their product was Robot for the AS/400) The customer just happened to be Microsoft. Help Systems took out full page back side ad's in MidrangeComputing and Systems/3x magazine with an employee of Microsoft accepting the award, and that ad ran for months. (The woman who accepted the award looked very similar to the woman you see in the photo. )

At first, some of us were simply calling BS that Microsoft was customer #1000. We assumed they were somewhere between 900-1100, and Help Systems simply made them #1000 so that they could market the hell out of it. After a while, the focus changed from Microsoft being customer #1000 to "Why is Microsoft using an AS400?"

The fact that Microsot was running their own business on a 400 was used against them when Microsoft was pushing their "back office" product really hard. I mean, if Microsoft couldnt run their own business on their own product, why would it be any easier for another company to do the same. To add insult to injury, Microsoft announced they were moving off the platform, but couldnt pull it off. Then, they simply outsourced the 400's to another company so that they could announce that there were "no more as400's at microsoft." But their business ran on them for years after that, they were just technically being operated by an outsourcing company.

By the way, that picture is still on Windows XP PC's. I'mnot sure if its on Vista or Windows 7, but it was still there as of XP.