And here we go.
For 2023, I decided to kick off a new website that would focus on the history of Microsoft and its related technologies, rivalries, and business practices, covering roughly a period of four decades. I have been thinking about it for a while but due to the nature of my job, I'm a flight attendant with 10 ++ years of experience, and I used to procrastinate each time in creating a weblog and more importantly, maintaining a regular basis.
Anyway, here we are.
As a fan of Microsoft products and service -- my first computer was a Fujitsu Siemens laptop with Windows 98 SE - I thought it would be a very good idea to chronicle the highs and lows of Bill Gates' empire, from its inception -- actually, I would start in 1985, with the release of Windows 1.0 all the way up to Satya Nadella's tenure as the CEO of Microsoft in 2014, and beyond (Windows 12). The site will feature not just articles about Windows and its companion. like Office, Visual Studio Xbox, and so on, I will also delve into the legacy programming languages that Microsoft created at the dawn of the new millennium, namely C# in an attempt to compete with Java, Zune, Microsoft in-house MP3 Player created in a hope de dethrone Apple, The Browser Wars, the End of Netscape and Antitrust Trial of 1998.
I almost forgot, there will be a section I use to love on SuperSite.com: "What I Use".
A little background about Nexus (dot) com.
I really needed to do something. I got an itch to write and Nexus came into my mind for a quite long while. This site is a homage to my favorite tech journalist Paul Thurrott, who has been covering Microsoft and the future of Windows for more than 25 years with his super-famous site called SuperSite for Windows -- it has been renamed back in the mid-2010s as Thurrott.com. My blog, on the other hand, is named Nexus (dot) net, a hint to Thurrott's old defunct weblog that he ran back-to-back with SuperSite and maintained through the Blogger service. The (.) net suffix is actually a nod to the .NET strategy that Microsoft embarked on back in the summer of 2000, in which the company embarrassed the internet in its business practice, the software it created -- moving away from a shrink-wrapped to subscription model as evidenced by The Microsoft Passport in MSN Messenger and Windows.NET which was later wrongly quipped by Gates during his keynote as Windows 2001 before settling it as Windows XP for its final name.
This year will mark the 20th anniversary as Paul Thurrott's longtime follower, way before Facebook and Instagram. I started reading and training my English language by following Paul's articles he published on SuperSite. Actually, I recall the first time I stumbled on his site was way back in late Summer 2003, while I was preparing for the final exams that would open the doors of the University, (and I succeeded), and Microsoft was gearing up for the colossal update to Windows XP, the (in)famous Windows code-name Longhorn build PDC 4051 which was seen by many a very disappointing release.
As you may expect for someone who has been following Windows since 2003, Nexus will feature articles about the ill-fated Windows Longhorn, it's a period of time I cherished the most. Paul Thurrott described it as "...the high watermark of the firm's power and influence".
And I'm still a big fan of Thurrott.com. It is the first site that pops up when I rev up my Chrome browser.
As far as the site is concerned, I opted for a very minimalist look and feel. Because Nexus will feature a sheer number of articles, I decided to create a link entitled Table of Contents (ToC) for the convenience of the reader. I will try to update Nexus more frequently.
Now enough talk, let's get started.
Sofiane M. MEROUANI
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