Comment by greatquux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greatquux | Hacker News Reader

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Spot on man. I think we've all learned that the best tech stack will not win without also having a good sales, marketing, and management team to support it. And if you are completely incompetent at those things it doesn't matter how good your tech is, you will turn into a hilarious failure we'll all be laughing at later. (Though we'll have a lot of fun making YouTube videos where we run all your shit through emulation.) I know people always shat on Microsoft's engineering, though the truth is I think they tried to do the best they could with what they had and they also understood how important backwards compatibility was, and they had to work within that limitation. But I think that maybe they were just a bit jealous that their management was so far ahead of everyone else (really only Apple after Jobs came back could rival them)!

I'm not sure that attributing the successes to "sales or marketing" had as much to do with it as timing and position. Management _failures_ certainly dominated the era, there were vast numbers of unforced errors due largely to managerial empire building, feature creep/novelty seeking, and ambition exceeding the scale of tractable development practices. The note up-thread about "What was important was new people in charge, who unlike the previous Apple management, could actually make decisions. The decisions were often bad, but they were decisions!" is, IMO, a great read on the situation. I've posted in earlier HN threads about my belief in the "Next bought Apple with Apple's money" idea, and the replacement (or reversion since a lot of them were Apple folks to start with) of Apple's management with Next folks in short order. They were making largely the same kinds of decisions that almost bankrupted Next, but under more favorable circumstances.

Even as someone who has run Linux most of the time for like 15 years, the underlying tech in NT is in many ways by far the best design of the OSes that survived to modern maturity. I just hate almost everything they've done with the upper layers of the stack since 7.

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