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Comment by eurleif | 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.

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

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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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