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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

This is precisely it, Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with ridiculous salaries, and then paying them to sit on their thumbs and do nothing [+], in order to give Microsoft's development tools time to catch up.

I'm not a huge fan of Google, but if you're a startup you don't fear Google the way you would have feared Microsoft in the 90's. And if you're afraid of Google, it's because of legitimate competition in the marketplace, not nefarious anti-competitive practices.

[+] Edit: As pointed out below, the "sitting on their thumbs" may just be local lore, and not true.

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Do you have a source for this story about paying Borland's engineers to sit on their thumbs? I knew a few ex-Borland engineers that came to Microsoft and they were all doing awesome things on Microsoft's (many) compiler projects. Most of them moved because they wanted to work on awesome stuff.

Which is not to say that Microsoft didn't abuse their monopoly, but this particular story.... I've never heard it and it doesn't sound right.

I doubt you'll find any authoritative sources on the full extent of the abuse, as the ensuing lawsuit was settled out of court under the typical terms that sequestered the evidence backing Borland's claims and gagged the truth. However, I agree that not every Borland engineer sat on his or her thumbs; many simply felt under-utilized in the wake of a Microsoft hiring spree that was obviously designed to kill a competitor as opposed to fill open positions. It's no secret that some of those hires were lured from Borland with signing bonuses that reached 7 figures... for compiler engineers.

Your meant Anders Hejlsberg from Borland who created C# in Microsoft? Those ridiculous salaries Microsoft paying him are peanuts compared to the huge value he created for Microsoft.

C# has yet to drive meaningful business value for Microsoft. It certainly didn't topple Java the way they hoped it would, and it didn't even manage to gain internal mindshare for Windows Vista and Windows 7 apps. There's XNA, but that's not for the big triple-A titles. Despite the best efforts of the Developer Division, Microsoft's cash cows are still powered by C++, C++, C++.

You have absolutely no idea just how many internal enterprise applications are developed in C#. You don't see them, being that they are internal enterprise applications, but they do exist. And it's a huge market.

It didn't topple java but it created a viable altenative. Think how many more MS shops would be looking at Java if C# didn't exist.

>C# has yet to drive meaningful business value for Microsoft.

ASP.NET on IIS on Windows Server.

> Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with ridiculous salaries

Read the stories from last summer about bonuses being paid to employees coming and going from Google, Facebook, Twitter?

>This is precisely it, Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with ridiculous salaries, and then paying them to sit on their thumbs and do nothing, in order to give Microsoft's development tools time to catch up.

Why not pay them to build better development tools rather than to sit on their thumbs?

Microsoft's development tools were lagging behind Borland's tools in the 90s, but those tools were top-notch nonetheless. Did you know that there are people still happily using Visual Studio 6.0 (1998)?

Also, if you're referring to Anders Hejlsberg, being the lead architect of C# doesn't qualify as "sit on their thumbs". Considering that .NET is one of the 2 competitive advantages that Windows still has in the corporate environment (the other being Exchange), I think it was a million dollars well spent.

Actually, I'd put excel (& the massive amount of custom code and extension to it, at least in financial services) way above both of those.

I was referring to servers, not desktops.

It pains me to admit it but the point still holds. I've lost count of how many places I've seen that have an excel farm cranking stuff out over the last 15 years. Even when they don't go down that path, microsoft technology works (quiet in the back) really well with the rest of the microsoft technology stack (in comparison to with anything else anyway, although it's better these days).

You know, this was local Santa Cruz lore I'd heard mentioned a couple times, and I couldn't remember the details, so perhaps they are embellished stories by the Borland employees that stayed. Here's an old CNET article about a related lawsuit:

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-279561.html

"Yocam maintains that Microsoft is luring personnel away with huge signing bonuses, some in excess of $1 million."

In that era we're talking about people like Hejlsberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg) -- architect of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and .NET. Almost certainly worth $1,000,000 -- I hope his signing bonus was a lot more than that. Clearly not paid to sit on his thumbs. Nothing monopolistic about paying top $ to hire people away from the competition.

It's hard to understand why you're going to such lengths to defend Microsoft in this case. Hejlsberg and a few other Borlanders received justifiably high bonuses, but the absurdly rich enticements were extended much further down the line. As an ex-Borlander at the time, I heard all kinds of inside stories about the Microsoft offers. For a compiler engineer, the bonus represented a life-altering financial event that Borland didn't have the resources to match. Many never had their heart in the move to Redmond and left Microsoft after a few years. If you understood how Borland's culture of software craftsmanship compared to the churn of second-rate engineering packaged and sold by Microsoft on a regular basis, it's no surprise that the flight of talent wasn't driven by the dream of working on Microsoft products or exposure to Microsoft's business culture.

On a brighter note, Borland may have lost but silicon valley ultimately won when Google's incredibly fast growth prevented Microsoft from pulling a Borland on Google's search engine team.

That's a really good question.

Microsoft Labs has been among the more phenomenally unproductive corporate R&D operations of all times. The amount of talent that was sucked in there ... never to be heard from again, boggles the mind.

I'm not convince that this was a deliberate strategy, but it seems reasonably plausible.

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