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Comment by ChrisArgyle | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't disargee more about Microsoft's current place in tech markets. They've lost quite a lot of weight since their 800lb gorilla days in the 90s.

They used to exploit their dominant market position to replace de-facto standards with their own: kerberos "extensions", creating ActiveX instead of just implementing NPAPI, removing JNI from the MS JVM. But they can't do that any more. They lost too much ground under Ballmer.

Now they're nearly tripping over themselves promoting their cross-platform tolerance. Run Linux in our cloud! Run our apps on all the platforms! Sync/connect our apps/devices to any service!

Source: Age 34, started with Linux in '97 (Slackware 3.2)

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I couldn't disargee more about Microsoft's current place in tech markets. They've lost quite a lot of weight since their 800lb gorilla days in the 90s.

You are aware that the "World Domination" being referred to was talk of Linux's World Domination, right? So you're not disagreeing, you're supporting the observation that Linux eventually dethroned the 800 lb gorilla and that the 800 lb gorilla is a shadow of what it once was.

For all the Old People, replace Microsoft with IBM above and transpose this back into the 1990s.

IBM went from EBCDIC and Micro Channel Architecture and SNA to "Well, they'll never actually beat Compaq and Dell in the primary growth market, but they still own the tippy-top of the Enterprise world. That's something."

Oh, and about this time, IBM shifted focus from AIX to getting behind Linux in a big way. Remember the TV commercials?

37, started using Linux in '98 (what can I say, late bloomer), but ran OS/2 before that as "rebelling against the M$ hegemony" (plus OS/2 was technically superior). I still have some of the IBM Linux ads.

I still don't trust Microsoft and even if I did, I consider most of their offerings piss-poor and only "industry standard" because the "industry" is run by upper management idiots. (note that the "industry" I refer here to is most definitely not SV or startups; think old, entrenched organizations that have no impetus to change or improve. You know, like government orgs. Or Microsoft).

40, started using Linux in '93 or '94. You're probably old enough to realize that even though you're kind of in the same casino, those "upper management idiots" are playing a vastly different game than you or your startup. What portion of your work, for example, is spent figuring out whether the EU is going to give you a seven-figure fine for not localizing something, or whether a vendor from a non-NATO country can troubleshoot a server with a given client's PII on it, or whether the update you're pushing this week has been tested to make sure none of the 27 major products that take dependency on it are going to break? If your only metric is how much chrome the end user sees...

Yeah, it's so surprising that Microsoft didn't implement the "Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface" (which was just for web browses) or other interfaces that weren't build for Windows.

Not only was NPAPI developed by a rival company, it was specific to browsers. ActiveX allowed features from any (Windows) application to be embedded into any other (Windows) application, not just browsers. It was a strictly more general framework and thus a better option for Microsoft. What really screwed things up was, security was not one of the foremost considerations when designing ActiveX because it was conceived for the desktop world. So it was horribly insecure when applied to arbitrary content downloaded over the web.

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