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Comment by abraxas | Hacker News Reader

I always assumed that Bill was not a good person at his core or at least was steered into shady shit by Ballmer but it was Melinda that brought out the best in him and hence his metamorphosis later in his career. Who knows though. The fact is however, that during much of the nineties Microsoft was engaged in some really awful stuff and Bill was incredibly glib about it.

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In retrospect, was it really "terrible person" level?

I mean, I recall a lot of stories about throwing their weight around that were playing kind of dirty/hardball. But from the vantage point of 2020, with Theranos, Uber, Fyre, Dieselgate, Wirecard, the NSA and so on, I start to think, while they were ruthless competitors, were they particularly evil?

I’m not sure if you’re too young or just don’t remember anymore but in the late nineties Microsoft literally tried to coopt the entire web. The embrace, extend and extinguish strategy wasn’t going to end with their domination of operating systems or office suites. The unholy combo of Internet Explorer and ActiveX were designed to ensure that the web would only properly function on a Microsoft platform. We literally squeaked through by the skin of our teeth thanks to the fiasco of ActiveX due to its myriad of security holes and a meteoric rise of Google who were strongly opposed to the shit Microsoft was trying to pull off. That said, in the 1997-2000 time frame things were looking incredibly bleak for the future of open web protocols. So much so that most companies were abandoning official support for any browser that wasn’t IE. We really got within a millimeter of a global, proprietary MSInternet. Count your lucky stars they failed in their most ambitious embrace and extend project.

Yeah, I know, and I'm certainly happy for the open-ish web.

It just strikes me as pretty low on the "evil" scale compared to everything else that's been going on.

Do you remember the kids-for-cash scandal?

The only things more evil than destroying a nascent open worldwide communication platform that I can think of are some of the shit pulled by big tobacco or big oil. The examples you listed don’t come close IMO. Never heard of kids-for-cash though.

Ask the Netscape people how evil they think it was...

Early nineties and the Microsoft of eighties was no better. Lots of highly problematic actions with respect to DOS and DOS clones, it’s part in blindsiding IBM on OS/2, etc.

I was there, writing software, and... it wasn't like that?

This is much easier to say in retrospect, of course, but it's truth nevertheless: ActiveX was never going to "win" the web because it was fundamentally tied to one CPU architecture. It wasn't close at all, for all the same reasons that MS never made a successful mobile device. Or that Flash failed. Some technologies are just dead ends, even if they seem popular for a while.

You’re exhibiting a serious hindsight bias. The monopoly of Wintel (remember how they were often viewed as inseparable) was full and complete. The only thing that made a dent was a rise in mobile that made the desktop less relevant and the incredible success of Google. All through the nineties though Microsoft’s monopoly on consumer level computing was complete and unshakable. A couple of major slip ups with the ActiveX rollout and their fumbling with mobile is a happy accident of history as we were very close to having a Standard Oil of computing which the feds would very likely do nothing about as the twenty first century robber barons got much wiser about playing the feds to their advantage. Microsoft’s Antitrust trial being the prime example.

We still see the echos of it to this day as PC based gaming is confined to the closed platform of Microsoft DirectX as they managed to squeeze out and nearly kill off OpenGL. To this day no alternative has threatened this monopoly as Linux and OSX gaming has been utterly subdued by Windows and never took a foothold.

>We still see the echos of it to this day as PC based gaming is confined to the closed platform of Microsoft DirectX as they managed to squeeze out and nearly kill off OpenGL. To this day no alternative has threatened this monopoly as Linux and OSX gaming has been utterly subdued by Windows and never took a foothold.

There's lots of 3D graphics in the majority of my Steam library that I can play on my MacBook.

I agree it "felt" like wintel was unstoppable in the 90s. But (as we know from hindsight) it was in fact an illusion. In retrospect it's totally obvious why. It wasn't an accident of history that virutal machines (especially Javascript) won.

There was no "slipup with ActiveX rollout" - it worked fine on a single CPU architecture and did what it was supposed to do. But it was never going to have adequate security to be widely used on the low-trust web, and i86 was never going to take over mobile. It was a technology dead end.

So you'd be fair to talk about how things felt in the 90s, but the current state of the world is not an "accident of history".

The web has pretty much been coopted anyway. Just by a company with better PR.

This is no way gives a pass but...

I’m a founder of a business. We’re of a reasonable size now and growing. The memory of fighting for every $1 early on really feels like yesterday. I doubt I’ll ever lose that feeling.

I’m not surprised at times when founder-led businesses go too far when they become extreme outliers (like Microsoft or Amazon). Even when I was in my teens and reading about Microsoft, the message was consistent: the fundamental problem was this guy didn’t appreciate he’d won. But now had the extreme resources to fight with the biggest “army” available. He ran Microsoft like he was going to fail and it was a scrappy startup just ripe to be crushed. The numbers get bigger and change, the fundamental drive, personality and (frankly) fear of failing, do not.

As I mentioned, I’m not condoning things, just sharing an observation.

I think your observation is a good one. But yes, it doesn't give him a pass and personally, I'll never forgive Gates & Microsoft for their strangulation of the computing world (and its creativity) through the 80s & 90s. I find Bill Gates a particularly uninspiring & unimaginative individual who has only made the world greyer, not brighter.

I would argue that if he had stepped down from MS in the early 90's, that some other company with a ruthless CEO would take its place. I mean, remember Apple's superbowl ad? Look at what is is today. Remember "Don't be evil"? Ruthless search for power is the history of humankind, and I agree that the actors shouldn't be given a pass. However, what Gates is doing with his foundation is to be admired, as I don't see much of that done, not at this scale. His foundation has never done any good to the world? (sorry, but that's what you mean when you say he has /never/ made the world brighter.) I never worked in tech, so to me I couldn't care much about the state of software in the 90's. I used whatever word processor was available, and whatever browser, and it didn't make a difference to me. I'm sorry, but this is how /most/ people who weren't in tech felt about it. Ask a mother of a hungry child with no access to clean water if she prefers Netscape or IE. (I know this is harsh and completely ignores the repercussions of Microsoft's actions and stances in the 90's, and that an opinion like mine will irritate a lot of people who were in tech in that era, but I doubt without MS it would have been too much different. Maybe it would have been old IBM, maybe DELL, who knows. If not, why are we complaining so much about Facebook's practices, about data privacy, etc. Isn't Microsoft gone from that role? Shouldn't it have been solved then?

I don't remember things being so grim in the 90s. It's true that MS was pushing its proprietary technologies and (ab)used the popularity of Windows and IE, but the web was a wild west back then and everyone was pushing in their own direction.

Thankfully open standards like ECMAScript were adopted, but I never saw what MS was doing as being so sinister.

I would also argue that today we're much closer to a "GoogleInternet" than we ever were to a "MSInternet" in the 90s, yet we don't hear near as much uproar about that. (And we definitely should...)

Yeah, I got the same impression.

Maybe I was too young at the time or not so much involved in Tech to really pay attention, but I think what happens today is worse.

I never saw that as Bill Gates being evil and more a very competitive and ruthless person, which is an important distinction to make.

He still has some questionable values. Most notably, he seems to oppose E2EE being legal. It demonstrates a certain ruthlessness in achieving his social agenda, in that it disregards other people's rights.

The story I heard was that Buffet convinced him to get into philantropy. Its kind of interesting as well to think had he never gone that route what Microsoft would look like today.

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