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Comment by magpi3 | Hacker News Reader

> I now think they did amazing work in the 1980s and 1990s which got later overshadowed by the ugly "browser wars" and antitrust lawsuit.

When Windows 95 first came out, it crashed daily on my computer and friends of mine had the same experience. Sometimes it crashed multiple times a day.

I was young then and thought nothing of it. I just rebooted and played whatever game had been interrupted. But now I wonder how they got away with it.

Microsoft was excellent at marketing and when they achieved their monopoly position, they did an excellent job of shutting out competitors. By the late nineties the phrase "No one has ever been fired for buying Microsoft products" was a very popular phrase. But I wouldn't say I was wowed by their work. Windows 95, COM, MFC, etc... I don't see (or read) anyone thinking back on those days fondly.

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> When Windows 95 first came out, it crashed daily on my computer and friends of mine had the same experience. Sometimes it crashed multiple times a day.

It was perfectly possible to run Windows 95 without it crashing. I ran it for around a year before the launch (the Chicago beta) and it was very stable by the end IF you had decent hardware and IF you set it up correctly.

But the PC hardware industry wasn't very well developed in 1995, and there was a huge variation in products that took a while to shake out.

Bear in mind that Windows 95 was running on tens of millions of PCs that had never been designed to run it, and that had never been tested with it. A lot of the ones in the field were almost unique (because of variations in processors, RAM, graphics cards etc), and Microsoft had never seen many of them.

And they got away with it because people could get a PC with a good GUI and masses of compatible software for a very low price.

> By the late nineties the phrase "No one has ever been fired for buying Microsoft products" was a very popular phrase.

This is the second time recently I've seen someone on HN refer to this expression with a Microsoft branding.

The late nineties are a little too early for me to have had any awareness of technology politics. I never heard the expression you describe.

I did hear, many times, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". It seems odd that that would have been a later form of the expression than "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft".

"No one ever got fired for buying IBM" probably pre-dates the creation of Microsoft.

The saying was based on the fact that IBM, like the 7th Cavalry, would ride in to rescue large accounts if they screwed up.

I never heard it said of Microsoft in the 90s because Microsoft was never a big proportion of anybody's spending. It sold to hundreds of millions of consumers and small companies, rather than Fortune 500 companies.

I did once discuss this with one of the Microsoft salesmen who handled giant corporations, and who had been hired from IBM. He said IBM tried to get 33% of a company's IT sending whereas Microsoft tried to get 3%.

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