The groundswell of negative comments finally seeped into Microsoft's collective consciousness. Part of the problem was that it was so busy improving and releasing new versions of DirectX that neither developers nor users could keep up. So it stepped back, skipped DirectX 4.0, and worked on making DirectX both a better API for programmers and easier for users to understand and configure.

A funny thing happened on the way to DirectX 5.0, though. Microsoft caught the Internet bug. When the powers that be at Redmond shifted direction, they realized that the Internet required more than just browsers - multimedia was happening big time. Streaming audio, video, and VRML were taking hold. Authoring activities were increasing, as Microsoft-based platforms began moving into areas previously reserved for the Macintosh or UNIX workstations, such as digital video. Games were becoming increasingly important, both as a potential source of revenue for Microsoft, and as a large business in their own right.

The bottom line was that Microsoft needed a development platform for more than just gaming. After some soul-searching, Microsoft decided to merge ActiveX and DirectX. DirectX won the branding battle, and the whole underlying platform for multimedia at Microsoft is now known as the DirectX Foundation. Figure 1 shows the overall architecture for DirectX 5.0:

Figure 1

DirectX 5.0 is now a much broader and more closely integrated part of the Windows 95 operating system. The other good news is that DirectX 5.0 will be fully integrated into Windows NT 5.0. Today, only a part of DirectX runs on NT 4.0 and the majority of DirectX games don't run on NT.