Email from Bill (1993)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
One of my all-time favorite bullshit claims is the "Gates always flies coach when he is traveling on business." and the hilariously ridiculous "Experienced fliers into and out of Seattle know to scan the cabin for a man with a blanket over his head—that’s Bill Gates, taking a nap."
Total bullshit; even then, no-airline would have Bill Gates check in as an economy passenger and not instantly upgrade him and move mere mortals well away from him. The article even talks about Gate's temper just before the coach claim - no-one would risk their career or livelihood by failing to treat him with super-special billionaire status.
> Even in the early '90s, Microsoft were operating at genius level for their control of public discussion about the company.
The company had been around what, 15 years, by then? They weren't newbies at business, and could afford the best PR people.
I also love how they spell it “E-mail” with a capital E no matter where it is in the sentence.
(I refuse to believe I read that 22 years ago!)
[0] https://www.wired.com/2000/10/readers-on-wired-news-style/
But I've seen less art of Zuckerberg drawn as a demon coming for your software - though that may just be a difference between the internet now and what I've seen of the internet in the past.
At 30, most people in the US still didn't know who Gates was (maybe they had heard his name once), much less know anything of consequence about him. Today, if Zuckerberg does or says anything embarrassing, tomorrow hundreds of millions of people will see the headlines and read about it on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc.
Gates and Microsoft got to ride rather quietly to the top of the tech universe until the mid 1990s. Tech just wasn't nearly so important circa 1980-1990 (vs comparing Microsoft or Apple to GM or McDonalds or Coca Cola today).
the 'dos isn't done until lotus won't run' rumor was 80s
The Halloween Documents were only the start of Microsoft's attacks on Open Source in general and Linux in specific; it arguably funded SCO during that company's lawsuit against Linux, IBM's support for Linux, and basic common sense, by buying Linux and Unix licenses from SCO and introducing SCO to BayStar Capital. That isn't so much at arm's length as at finger's length. Around the same time, Ballmer said the Linux kernel was Communism, said it infringed Microsoft's intellectual property, and a bit later called Linux cancer. He also used the "viral license" insult, proving that big companies are sufficiently stymied by the GPL to dislike it. You kinda lose plausible deniability when you call something cancer and then give money to the company trying to sue it out of existence.
But that's Ballmer. Gates all by himself was seen, at least by people who didn't just view him as a Funny Rich Nerd, as a sharp operator at the very least who did nasty things to competitors and had no scruples about doing questionably legal things to win. Jobs without the Cult Of Mac, in other words.
They could have dominated, but instead they all but gave away the personal computing space to Apple and Google, and had to pivot the company to cloud computing instead.
https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave...
Of course, it ultimately wouldn't matter that much, with IE6 destroying Netscape and what MSN eventually became turning into an important portal.
I'd love to have some tell-all book about what the heck was happening inside Microsoft which prevented them from doing a good phone OS.
Instead, I found this:
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsofts-terry-myerson-and-...
1. Bad base OS from Windows CE.
2. Industry moved too fast.
3. Damn Android treating carriers and hardware makers better than us.
It's a blatant Microsoft booster site, sure.
Another view is from here:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/10/16452162/windows-phone-h...
Which posits that Google did unto Microsoft what Microsoft did unto Digital Research: Locked it out of important apps, like a YouTube app. Plus, Android already had a more vibrant ecosystem in general. Again, Microsoft was a bit slow, but this time, it cost them.
Linux IS communism. Excellent developers are humans too, they want a beach mansion in Naples and West Palm Beach, with a 45ft boat and the whole 9.
Linux offers them a mod role in some obscure online forum and a pat on their back. That formula doesn't work regardless of what Ballmer said or the legal actions.
You make it sound like Linux failed to be on 95% of desktops because of what Ballmer said, which is the same as thinking that the USSR/DDR collapsed because Reagan said "Tear down this wall!"
Microsoft signed off incredible amounts of quality of life for the consumer and minted many thoudands of millionaires among its employees, whereas they destroyed the ambitions of many other paper millionaires who should have known better, they should have understood that software is a winner take all business and should have cashed out when they could. Unless you are one of them, then I cannot possibly see how people can see Microsoft and claim that it's cancerous.
Microsoft is the most consumer friendly company ever. They know billions of people are pirating their OS+Office and let them rob them blind while they recoup such lost revenues by increasing the bill on sales to Fortune500 companies and governments. Which is something extremely elegant that goes to mimic the organization of society in the West : free market Capitalism with redistributive features.
Zuck tried to create the Metaverse out of whole cloth. The thesis is just keep doing what we're already doing, wasting time online, but let's add in some augmented reality and VR headsets!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(programming_language)
The 1990s had two big things: The Web and cable TV. The smart money was on convergence, which meant that the Web would merge with cable TV and create something entirely new. This happened, kinda, but not in the way people back then imagined; as it turns out, "Cable TV" + "The Internet" = "The Internet" so "Convergence" is just doing everything over an Internet connection.
nor, obviously, 'html', 'web', 'www', 'gopher', or 'ftp'
These days people think MSN is a content network, but it started out as a physical, dialup network, a competitor with AOL or CompuServe. Gates didn’t talk about internet technology not because he was clueless, but because he was trying to compete with it.
maybe msn was in development but this was years before bill's famous fire alarm 'internet tidal wave' email about how the company was totally fucking up by missing out on the internet
like a year and a half before
https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave...
it has a paragraph about msn that kind of supports your point that it was intended to be a compuserve-like thing at the time
> MSN. The merger of the On-line business and Internet business creates a major challenge for MSN. It can’t just be the place to find Microsoft information on the Internet. It has to have scale and reputation that it is the best way to take advantage of the Internet because of the value added. A lot of the content we have been attracting to MSN will be available in equal or better form on the Internet so we need to consider focusing on areas where we can provide something that will go beyond what the Internet will offer over the next few years. Our plan to promote Blackbird broadly takes away one element that would have been unique to MSN. We need to strengthen the relationship between MSN and Exchange/Cairo for mail, security and directory. We need to determine a set of services that MSN leads in – money transfer, directory, and search engines. Our high-end server offerings may require a specific relationship with MSN.
If your goal is to aggravate readers, then mission accomplished.
you haven't contributed anything of value that i can see: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dkjaudyeqooe
all you do is discourage the people whose comments are worth reading
Personally I'm just glad you confirmed that you read my comment and that it upset you.
Maybe think before you reply next time.
My recollection from the time was that (a) it was clear that this was intended to be an “embrace and extend” play by MS, against the whole internet (!!) and (b) the tidal wave memo was taken to be acceptance that this previously successful strategy was too late. So MS shut down MSN and repurposed the name.
Gates seemed to believe that he could beat the WWW and he set out to do so. He considered it competition, so he didn’t mention it in interviews.
in the 'server' category the competitors they were talking about for http servers were bsd (which i think means bsd/os from bsdi, because they're talking about it as if it were a company), sun, netscape, lotus, novell, and at&t
linux, freebsd, and ncsa httpd were not even on their radar, even though yahoo was, and yahoo was mostly running on freebsd at that point iirc
let me remind you that we're talking about may 01995, not 01992. in the first netcraft server survey that july https://news.netcraft.com/archives/1996/08/01/the_first_year... they found 57% of the 18957 web servers were running ncsa httpd and 20% were running cern httpd. apache had started a few months ago and was only running on 658 servers at that point so it's not surprising it wasn't on their radar
i had friends and family who'd been running linux since 01992 and who had used it to set up isps and email setups and stuff, its capabilities were leaps and bounds ahead of microsoft's products at the time if you could get it working
1993+15 = 2008.
He was correct but I think he was off by at least 7-8 years..
It's very interesting looking back at historical software/communication, and realizing how wrong we have been about so many things, and realizing how wrong we likely are about many others.