Bill Gates wanted to call Windows as Interface Manager know why?

The idea behind calling Windows was not from Bill Gates but from Rowland Hanson, vice president of Corporate Communications at Microsoft and who had joined the company without having a clue about computers In the year 1982.

There’s been a pattern to how Microsoft has called its products for decades taking advantage of a generic term that represents a product and planting the company name in front of it. The idea, which has as its objective that each reference to this type of product is indirectly promoting that of Microsoft, has been very effective over five decades (Microsoft Word, Microsoft Office, etc.). 

However, it encountered tremendous resistance within the company during the development of the first Windows. The operating system was called Interface Manager (Interface Manager) or Interface Office Manager(Office Interface Manager). 

Many developers, technocrats and Bill Gates also favored  Interface Manager Still, the newcomer Vice President of Corporate Communications, Rowland Hanson, managed to convince them otherwise. Not all of them, but the one he counted on.

Also Read: Microsoft to go passwordless, here is what you need to know

when Windows 1.0 released in the year 1985, but its development had begun in 1981 and the “operating environment”, as it was called then, had been announced to the world in 1983. 

A year earlier, the young Rowland Hanson had joined the company, who came from the world of cosmetics and had experience as Vice President of Marketing at Neutrogena. 

Hanson had no idea about computers, as he explained to Gates at the meeting they held to hire him, but Gates had convinced that the approach Hanson brought from the cosmetics industry was what his company needed from him.

“When I joined Microsoft as vice president of Corporate Communications, I came from the cosmetics industry, where (brand) perception was much more important than reality,” Hanson explains on The HMC Company blog. 

“Microsoft’s brand strategy and specific product names came from the original brand strategy developed and executed at Neutrogena. In addition to identifying and encouraging support from industry opinion leaders, concise and generic names were selected to force the use of the company name in editorials, etc.,” he adds.

Despite the enthusiasm with which Gates convinced him to accept the job, Hanson had to fight to get what he wanted to call Windows. In the early 1980s, the graphical user interface (GUI) operating system industry crowded. Companies such as Apple, IBM, Digital Research, and VisiCorp had followed in the footsteps of Xerox’s first computer with a mouse-controllable graphical interface from 1973, the Alto computer, with varying degrees of success.

On Windows, we were lucky enough to be late with the introduction of our GUI. Others were released, so we were able to review how thought-leading editors described them,” says Hanson. They were referred to generically as “window systems” or “window managers” by consumers and the media. Hence, the choice of name was obvious to him.

The developers, on the other hand, had a different opinion. Hanson tried to convince them without success and finally had to turn to Gates. ” Hanson tried to explain to everyone the logical reasons for this, and nobody accepts it. You have to make the decision. I can’t convince them,” Hanson argued. Gates agreed, which is why we are today using Windows 11 and not Office Interface Manager 11.