Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

> May 26th, 1995: Bill Gates sends a memo, entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave,” to all executive staff within Microsoft.

Say what you want, but Bill Gates' vision of the internet was spot on.

The drawback is that Microsoft used illicit and mostly unethical tactics to fend off competition (Netscape, etc) and gain and retain a certain market dominance, and this was done under Bill's scrutiny.

It's really hard to find a saint, and Bill is not one.

Besides this, I find Letters of Note to be an invaluable treasure trove of forgotten gems like this letter.

View on HN

Gates was a relative latecomer to see the 'net as a factor of importance. He wrote a book called 'The Road Ahead' [1] which exists in two forms [2] of which the first portrayed the 'net as a precursor to the real network of the future which would be embodied in proprietary networks like Microsoft Network (MSN). It was only a few weeks before the book would hit the shelves that he changes his mind and wrote the above memo, focusing Microsoft on the internet while demoting Microsoft Network - which was launched as a separate dial-up network in the style of Compuserve - to an internet service.

[1] https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29

[2] https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29?la...

In a way, Gates was right. Social media sites are basically the AOLs and CompuServes of today with the only difference being the protocol (POTS/PTSN vs HTTP)

He was right in the centralisation of certain services but wrong in his assumption that those services would be the gatekeepers to their user's total online experience. No matter how centralised the likes of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and the rest of them are they can not keep their users from simply going to their competitor's site or app since they're all hanging off the internet instead of behind their own access networks. This is a very important distinction, had Gates' vision succeeded we'd still be paying by the minute and kilobyte and there'd be a price on everything.

What was unethical about how they beat Netscape? They were the first to realize that “browser technology” (as Gates repeatedly called it during his antitrust deposition) would be beneficial to consumers as part of the OS platform, and lo today you can’t find a consumer OS on any device that doesn’t embed its own web engine.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...

Search for "Netscape" if you're really interested.

That's not actually responsive to my question. If you read the FoF, it's very concerned with the fact that Microsoft passed up opportunities to charge for IE licenses in order to gain browser share at Netscape's expense. Yet barely a decade later, both Apple and Google took the same path. Again: What was unethical about giving away browser technology, inside Windows and outside of it? Or: When did giving away browser technology with your OS stop being unethical?

Enjoy your "browser-device". Some people prefer their computer to be separable from the applications it runs.

Bill Gates of today is a very different person from the one who ruled over Microsoft back then. See Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Source? Do you know him personally?

You don’t see news about him trying buy a well known social network to destroy it or trying to use fruit to cure cancer. For one.

Sure but you don’t see anyone trying to do the former.

Elon brings wrecking ball and mass layoffs causing mass exodus of social media site

nailer: doesn't look like anything to me

You seem to have forgotten what you wrote - here’s a link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755503

If he’s trying to destroy twitter per your conspiracy allegation (remember how you wrote that?) he’s doing a poor job: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755503

Read a recent news article about how many advertisers have already pulled out and get back to me on that.

Edit: here you go: https://www.mediamatters.org/elon-musk/less-month-elon-musk-...

You seem like a very confused individual.

Done! Before we even had the conversation. Except from a credible source, rather than media matters. Guess how many pulled out at the point zero changes had been made?

But obviously even some alternate timeline where they had, that wouldn’t really prove Elon is somehow secretly trying to destroy twitter, would it? Someone is indeed very confused here.

His PR is certainly a lot better, and there does exist a charitable foundation, sure, but a lot of foundations are just tax shelters, and just starting a charitable foundation doesn't absolve you of your sins or make you a good person, but it's great PR

Unless you know Bill personally you're just commenting on the quality of his public persona 's public messaging, or your parasocial relationship with that persona

Melinda Gates definitely still thinks Bill is worth divorcing, you know

That’s literally what everyone does every day with Musk. Not sure how Gates is any different here besides the fact that he is competent at said PR, as you say, and hasn’t done anything outright ridiculous to destroy his reputation.

His vision wasn't too different from a lot of other pundits', and it came a year or two too late.

Right. People are acting as though 1995 is early, but it's like figuring out there will be another major European war on Christmas Day 1939. No shit, the Nazis have already conquered Poland.

The Internet is the Third Network. Figuring this out in 1974/75 counts as clairvoyance since most of the technologies (e.g. TCP exists but IP takes until 1978) don't exist yet and nor does the terminology, although in hindsight things are coming together. Figuring it out in 1985 is still very impressive, by that point there's a significant TCP/IP network but it's unclear whether this North American idea triumphs - if you had confidence you could have made some smart investments and made yourself a lot of money. Figuring it out in 1995 is barely even noteworthy. "Eternal September" the point when there are constantly so many new people that it's always like the first weeks of a new year of university students on the Internet, began in 1993.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com