Why I’ve covered Microsoft for 25 years
Iave always been fascinated by Microsoft, and itas led me on a somewhat surreal path to covering the company for most of my life. It all started in my teenage years, when my curiosity over the inner workings of Windows led to brief moments of fame and lots of moments of trouble with Microsoftas lawyers.
As a nerdy teenager in the early a00s I would spend hours building PCs to run prerelease versions of Windows, and I would regularly lug my custom machines and CRT monitors to house parties. I would DJ the latest MP3s I had downloaded from Napster and try to impress my friends with a secret new Windows feature they had never seen before.
While Windows rarely impressed my friends, my passion for unreleased Microsoft software really kicked up a gear with Windows XP. Codenamed Whistler, it was a big departure, visually, from Windows 2000 and Windows ME, and there was a lot to play around with during early beta builds.
Microsoft issued public builds of Windows XP in late 2000, but the really interesting parts were hidden away in the daily builds that Microsoftas Windows engineers were working on. I wanted to get access to as many of these as possible, so I started to downlo …