Comment by ploxiln | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ploxiln | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, it was just smart business plays in the tech industry, not really "evil" like physically harming people or stealing stuff from them.

But as an engineer (well, at that time, a tinkerer in high school), it was very frustrating how they had their own flawed formats and protocols. They made it as difficult as possible to interoperate in order to entrench their dominant position. I guess it's what all the biggest tech businesses did in their day.

Networking sucked, filesystems sucked, windows updates sucked. There were arbitrary limitations on "home" and "pro" versions (like number of concurrent connections). And it was all closed, so third party fixes were brittle binary patches.

And then there was OOXML, microsoft's "hey, we have an open XML format too! we named it so common people would confuse it with openoffice, and we had to whip it up quick so we just gave the ambiguous binary bit flags names and put them in xml tags!"

Surely you recall this memo about ACPI, and how unfortunate it would be if linux worked great with it: http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000...

So yeah, Microsoft wasn't an african warlord conscripting children or anything like that. They weren't dumping toxic chemicals into the environment. They were just offering software, and people more or less did fine with it. And these days they're doing practically everything differently than they used to. But a software engineer hating microsoft in the early 2000s was completely justified. It wasn't personal, just business, but they went out of their way to make my life worse, over and over again.

I switched from Netscape to Explorer because the latter crashed about half as often. It was as simple as that.

And back in the early 80's, MS-DOS sold for $40. Digital Research's CPM/86 sold for $186. They were on the shelf at Egghead next to each other. There's no surprise that people bought MS-DOS. Wouldn't you? I did. Kildall thought people would pay a large premium for CPM/86. He made a huge mistake (especially since nobody at the time could explain to me why CPM/86 was better, and after later trying it out, I couldn't see anything better about it, either).

As for incompatible file formats, just about every last software company tried that. Read about the legendary battles over the zip file format. WordStar didn't use a standard file format. Neither did Wordperfect. Every printer had a different, proprietary command language. Every graphics card had a different interface. I once was paid to spend a lovely 3 weeks in Japan getting some graphics software to work with the various Japanese graphics cards. I could go on for hours :-)

You might think the technology sucked, but all the competition sucked worse, much worse. Nobody else could be bothered maintaining so much backward compatibility. Apple kept changing their CPU architecture and resetting the clock on developing apps. Other platforms like Amiga also pursued their own platform blind to the fact that their products couldn't interoperate with the most popular and cheap software and hardware. There was OS/2 Warp which for some reason failed in the market. Probably more of the same incompatibility problems.

It's hard to see that the world would have been better without MS. It could very well have been more fractured with people having to buy two computers because they would never know which one would run the software or hardware they might want to use. Or it could have been like the disaster we have today with native mobile development - you have to program everything twice, for two different platforms! What a waste of developer time.

The gist of what you say about MS now applies to Apple today. It keeps a similar grip over iPhones, and people love them for it. It's that grip that makes Apple successful, just as Microsoft's grip over PCs made them successful. The smartphone world would surely be worse off today without Apple too.

I bought an early Amiga in order to port the compiler to it. It irritated me that they used standard connectors, but changed one pin in order to force people to buy peripherals from them. I thought that strategy would doom Amiga, and decided not to expend my dev time on it.

DEC did the same stupid move with their Rainbow PC (in this case requiring special floppy disks), with the same results.

> They made it as difficult as possible to interoperate in order to entrench their dominant position.

That reminds me of governments too. Administration is .. well, known synonym for latency, resistance etc etc, yet when it's in the interest of the government/state (finding bad taxpayers) all of a sudden everything is lean, fast, beautifully smart.[1]

It's a survival effect crossing through the layers.

[1] A friend told me how he received a letter explaining the state found his job and relationship status through cross relating pieces of data between two families that indicates the 'couple' shouldn't benefit some 'student loans' anymore.

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