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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

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shmerl

> it seems like it could make it easy for people to do competitive operating systems.

Wow. Losing sleep becasue progress might actually happen in the operating systems space. How very '90s Microsoft.

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Wait until you see what Apple has been at for the last 15 years.

I'm well aware how extremely anti-competitive and anti-progress Apple is.

If your current OS is the market leader why wouldn't you lose sleep over it. They are running a business and have to worry about the competition. Progress on competing products might be good for consumers but not for the employees or shareholders of the company.

If you are afraid of progress then you aren't the market leader because you aren't leading. You just happen to be the biggest company currently on the market.

Why not expand on the things where portable software is weak, like making a well-integrated system? But they missed it and let Apple fill that space.

Why not accept the future you predicted and be the first to arrive there? But web development only considered Microsoft an annoyance for a long time due to Internet Explorer.

Fear is the first step in taking steps to compete. Its an acknowledgement of the threat from a better product. If any company doesn't have that they will fail. This can be seen during the ballmer era where he totally ignored the threat posed by iPhone and ended up conceding entire mobile os market share to Apple and Google.

Whenever questions like why are they afraid of progress, it's for common good etc come up (which I feel are based on morality) , it makes sense to imagine yourself in their shoes and see what you would do.

Also, "make the web totally OS agnostic"? Clutches pearls how will Microsoft control the web if any old operating system is allowed to access it!?

By making everyone install their own browser, including shipping applications with the whole browser alongside the application. /s

This did end up happening though (although not so much due to Java as to JavaScript etc.).

It was important for Microsoft to anticipate this and pivot from relying too much on Windows on the desktop. And they tried pivoting left and right with the Xbox, Azure, .NET, their early tablets (which Steve Jobs famously discounted because they needed a stylus) and so on.

In fact, one of the reasons Windows is getting so messed up is that everyone that cares about their career is now on those business units, with Azure playing the role of "Cloud OS".

Leaving Windows to younger generations without background on why things are the way they are, and feel like they need to rewrite everything to leave their mark.

> Wow. Losing sleep becasue progress might actually happen in the operating systems space

I mean, any business owner should be watching out for rising competitive threats and thinking about how to nullify them.

Unfortunately for us that means the big players are trying hard to stifle the innovators....

The point is that he is worrying here not about improving their own things to compete, but about barrier for entry being low which means fast progress. Gatekeeping is bad, business owners or not.

Strategy to nullify competition instead of competing is disgusting and damaging to progress and market itself.

Is there a strategy to nullify competition in the mails? They simply stated that they are worried about the coming competition, which is completely normal for any business.

Given how anti-competitive MS was in practice, I totally read it all in a negative way. Especially when they mention "embrace and extend" in the same discussion.

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