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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

If Microsoft added a feature to Windows that duplicated a popular application's functionality, developers would be screaming bloody murder and rioting in the, er, blogs and web forums

Utter rot.

This used to happen all the time in the 1980s and 1990s, before the DoJ anti trust lawsuit really got rolling.

It was most obvious in office apps (ever wonder where the third-party spelling checkers and grammar checkers went? Or the standalone mailmerge applications? Microsoft added their functionality to Word and killed an entire add-on market at a stroke each time they did so), but a load of that stuff happened in Windows too (the graphical shell that became an OS in its own right). The most flagrant late example was web browsing; the most recent one I can think of (not being a Windows user) was their antivirus/malware add-in.

(Honestly ... young 'uns these days ... wanders away mumbling into beard and waving walking stick in the air.)

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Back then every big company was doing this, or attempted to do this. The goal was to dominate the desktop and get as much grip on the end user as possible. Proprietary file formats for just about everything. Remember Desqview (by QuarterDeck)? DR DOS? GEM (also DR)? OS/2 (IBM)? NetWare (Novell)? All those companies did what Microsoft was doing with one small difference, they stopped at the OS or Desktop layer and never saw beyond that, to the applications. They saw the system as the ideal place to dominate and they set themselves up for being slaughtered.

The combination of dominating two or more levels is what made it lethal, OS/GUI/Application companies aplenty back then but only one company that did them all and that used its own internal knowledge in order to make life very hard for the competition. And the final key in the lock was the Application level and nobody that made it big in the systems sphere ever got there besides Microsoft.

Microsoft may have lost their anti-trust lawsuit but the damage was done and it won them the war until the web came along.

If Sir Tim should be remembered for anything at all it was for breaking the stranglehold Microsoft had on personal computing, freeing us from the Application level headlock.

Oh, and in my time we didn't have walking sticks.

But you did have conspiracy theories. Politics, idiocy, decisions from above, spec from contracts, engineering idealism, planning for things which didn't happen, technical limitations, stuck with previous design choices, inexperience...

Proprietary file formats - what happens when you don't set out to make a shared format, or an evil plot for lock-in and dominance? You decide.

>This used to happen all the time in the 1980s and 1990s, before the DoJ anti trust lawsuit really got rolling.

Yes, and the reason for the DOJ anti-trust lawsuit? Developers were screaming bloody murder.

Your parent's point is that the reason Microsoft doesn't do this as much now isn't because they are more benevolent, it's because they were so over the top tyrannical that they've been forced to stop.

Not really. Microsoft really is far less evil under Ballmer than Gates. It's also less effective, less farsighted, and slower, but it is less evil.

I think it is just as evil, just less successful at implementing the evil because Ballmer isn't half as smart as Gates was.

Even evil suffers from poor execution.

I dunno. They've (more or less) embraced web standards, made overtures to the OSS community with a bunch of commits to the linux kernel, and have generally been a whole lot less monopolistic. Granted, Ballmer may want to be Gates and lack the ability, but the end result is a far less scary beast.

     generally been a whole lot less monopolistic

What makes you say this is a result of Ballmer vs being told by the government to be less monopolistic?

The commits to the kernel were to make it run in their VM, even if you consider that a good thing (I'd say it's neither good nor bad) the patents they're claiming to hold on Linux, and the patronising language they use in connection with that, about people making use of their innovation is as evil as anything they used to get up to.

It's just more incompetent. That's what happens when evil genius moves aside, and the henchmen take over.

My sense is that that was definitely a factor, but it wasn't as much the ISVs screaming but the distributors like Dell. IIRC the things MS agreed to as part of the settlement had more to do with their "get a reasonable discount on Windows at the pleasure of the King" contracts. I.e., MS was insisting that a license be paid for every PC the vendor shipped, regardless of whether or not it was shipped with Windows.

No, the reason for the anti-trust suit was that it was impossible for the government to look past a monopoly provider of software every computer user needed using their market influence to (a) lock up the distribution channels for all personal computers and (b) use their market influence and their control of distribution channels to attempt to obtain a monopoly in the browser market.

"Angry developers" enter into this in no meaningful sense. To the players actually involved in that fight, on all sides, developers were simply cogs.

Apple doesn't hold a monopoly on mobile operating systems and, even if it did, it would take more than simply putting someone out of business with a new offering to put it on the wrong side of the law. It's easy to see that once a company gets as big as Apple, any new feature it builds is going to put someone out of business somewhere.

(Instapaper will be fine, by the way).

You’re using trivial examples from 20+ years back. Things have changed.

Microsoft has practically walked on egg shells when dealing with additional solutions/features since Windows 95 due to fears of anti-trust and also alienating developers.

How long did it take them to get a s/w firewall and anti-virus solution? 10+ years after the fact. It wasn't because they couldn't figure it out.

How about simple features to VS.NET that have current 3rd party add-ons? It just does not happen.

Microsoft Security Essentials basically kills an entire industry (antivirus), however you can't really claim that scalp as it's really patching a hole in their OS security, something they should be doing for a professional product.

Recently on HN there was a post saying that you shouldn't chase anything obvious and generic without expecting it to get 'filled in'. A cloud service for audio? Yep, when the big players get around to it, you're out. An imaging collation app for dentists? The big players are not going to do that.

Back in the 90's they also included a TCP/IP stack into Win95, which used to be a (horrible) 3rd party app on Win3.1.

Ah, good old Trumpet Winsock. :)

Well, Microsoft never set itself up as the gateway to install third-party software, or as the authority on taste and acceptable content, or on taking a cut on commercial activity taking place on its platform.

Yeah, they did not do that. But that's not the only way to be responsible (consciously or not) for killing smaller developers.

> authority on taste and acceptable content

I don't know about that. If I want something that Apple doesn't approve for their store - say Grooveshark, for plausible legal complications in the future - I get the Grooveshark app anyway, from some other store that's legal (hint: jailbreak).

Personally speaking: I would rather have someone make sure (for free) that the app that I download isn't buggy, or crash-y, or other stuff. In practice, I've never missed something on the App Store (iPad 2 that I bought a few months ago) although I miss a lot of stuff on the Android Market (Nexus One that I own since a few years now). I got an Android before I got an iOS device going by such arguments from the couch. But I'm glad I can choose my phone, and it's going to be iPhone 4S when it launches here. I'm glad you can choose your phone, I presume that'll be an Android. That way, both of us can be happy.

> I would rather have someone make sure (for free) that the app that I download isn't buggy, or crash-y, or other stuff.

Hello, apt-get and yum.

Curated software doesn't have to lead to locked-down systems you can only use at the sufferance of the curators. For example, look at the processes behind Linux distros.

The people who put Linux distros together have been doing this for nigh on twenty years now, with the big caveat that you don't need to 'jailbreak' a Linux machine to install your own software under /usr/local or on your home directory. Even Slackware has packages; the main thing it lacks is dependency-tracking package management.

And, yes, there are filtering processes and even bug-fixing processes in place; Debian, for example, has a lot of people who more-or-less 'own' certain packages to the extent they get the source distributions from the original developers, test them, and modify them to fix bugs and bring them in line with the Debian World Order. All or practically all Debian-derived distros leverage this, Ubuntu foremost among them.

First off, excellent post. Honestly, I find it quite baffling that people think (or imply) that you need some commercially backed, locked down system to assure software quality. It's simply not true, it's quite the opposite actually. The open alternatives are infinitely superior.

Furthermore, many packet managers (Arch's pacman, for example) offer the ability to rather easily create and install your own packages and manage them with the same system, allowing you to benefit from the advantages of a packet managing system without having to rely only on the curated repositories.

Lock-down? Open?

If by open you mean extensible, that's what all those APIs are for. If by open you mean open source, that's a different debate all together - an easy argument against it would be Linux. If by open you mean where you can take the battery out and put in SD cards - I have a Nexus One and I've never done those things on it, although I could, but never had to take the battery out (and do what?). And no I don't have an iPhone or any other phone that I use. If by open you mean access to Apple's repo (App Store) against Apple's will, then well, that's not what I can say much about. (Jailbreak. If you say not many people do that and it shrinks your market, probably many people don't feel the need to do it. I don't think they don't know about it because it's been in the news so much.) If by open your mean something else, I would genuinely like to know.

> Lock-down? Open?

Linux doesn't have the concept of 'jailbreak'. That's what I mean.

To be fair though, the quality of almost all of the end-user software available via apt-get is far below that of the iOS or Mac app store. Developers and users have voted with their wallets for Apple's model. Ideologically I'd prefer that this were not the case but it's hard to argue with the numbers.

As a Linux end-user installing most of my software through apt-get, I think it is your opinion and there is nothing fair about it.

Apple didn't invent this model, they put stricter control, nicely marketed and then monetized on something that's been the primary model of software distribution in Unix for quite a few years now.

Regardless of how nice the app store is, the argument remains that the process doesn't need to be so dictatorial to be successful.

Most Linux distros have their own repositories of software they've reviewed and approved. They each have their own requirements for apps submitted to them, most of the software is free (as in beer and freedom), but I'm willing to bet that if they started pushing for an app marketplace, the element of fairness would not be lost in the process.

One thing that bemuses me about Apple and the trick for which I really raise my hat to them, is how they manage to screw people and still have them rationalize and even advocate for the scam.

I've been as outraged as anyone about Apple's excesses and I don't think it's necessary to be as controlling as they are to facilitate a successful app economy. However, they're currently the only really successful example of this model so the burden of proof is on their critics to show that other approaches can work too.

Focusing on the mechanics of distribution is missing the forest for the trees here. It's about money and what kind of software economy it takes to bring high-quality applications to users. OSS has failed here.

  > they're currently the only really successful example
  > of this model

1. Is OS X more successful due to the Mac AppStore, or is the Mac AppStore just riding on the coattails of OS X's popularity?

2. You can't really compare Linux distributions and apt-get to iOS and its AppStore. People are buying iOS devices for different reasons than they would run Linux. You could probably only make the comparison if iOS and Linux were able to run on the same hardware (and if it came with either OS from the retailer).

jailbreaking is indeed a way to get around the apple store, but how many people do this? Must be a tiny fraction of the market. I would like to know of a company that has made serious money targeting it.

there are a whole bunch of apps that you are either not seeing at all (eg, anything that involves shopping), or are seriously crippled through removal of the subscription / buy button: think kindle, netflix, etc. these guys are ok, because they are already established, but what happens if you are just starting up? what happens if/when the web has become a backwater that people just don't want to use anymore, and there's no easy way to make them subscribe to your service?

note also how the 30% cut that apple takes from transactions gives their own alternatives a huge advantage to provide the same service.

Never? I would argue that Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft actually made that model popular - on their consoles. They just never managed to push it into the rest of the consumer space.

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