Comment by whoisthemachine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whoisthemachine | Hacker News Reader

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whoisthemachine

Netscape Navigator was also open sourced, so I am confused what a project being open source has to do with Microsoft's business strategy. We factually know that Netscape's downfall was a result of the EEE strategy [0]. Just because Netscape rushed to open source Netscape Navigator when they saw their market sharing falling doesn't mean that Microsoft didn't employ EEE. If Microsoft had bought Netscape once Netscape was losing money hand over fist, it still wouldn't mean that Microsoft hadn't used EEE to help bring Netscape to that point. Just because Microsoft no longer has the majority mindshare of the browser market, should we ignore that event, or say it was ineffective, when it was very effective and very profitable for many years?

It is just a business strategy, that's all. And it's one that Microsoft employed successfully, and which people who join likely learn of or know of, and some of whom try to emulate to be successful at Microsoft now. And many of us don't like the effect EEE has on our industry, when Microsoft or any other entity does it. And just because Atom may not fit the strategy exactly, doesn't mean the unmistakable parallels which I already mentioned should be ignored. I personally used Atom, but more than that, I liked the world more when there was more than just one Electron based editor competing out there in the world, and we are seeing the fruits of VSCode winning so completely (both good and bad), whether through aggressive corporate strategies or not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

> "Microsoft's strategy to "kill HTML by extending it""

I'm still using HTML today. It hasn't been extinguished because it still exists. It's like complaining that someone murdered your dog, and I point out that your dog is still alive and you say "I'm confused what that has to do with anything".

Extinguish: "To put an end to or make extinct; destroy: synonym: annihilate."

You can still use Atom, it isn't extinct, destroyed or annihilated, and that's related to it being Open Source because there is no way for anyone to annihilate it when you can have your own copy of the source.

Compare that to the proposed "kill HTML by extending it" where, if webservers only served compiled ActiveX and you could only view that on Windows with IE and IE wouldn't render HTML, no amount of 'having the source' would let you use HTML to make web pages your customers could view. You'd put HTML on your webserver and your customers couldn't view it. You'd look at the IE source code and you couldn't distribute it. HTML would be killed as an interoperable standard, It's a difference in kind.

> "It is just a business strategy, that's all."

> "We factually know that Netscape's downfall was a result of the EEE strategy [0]"

We know that Microsoft made a product good enough that nobody bothered to install Netscape. If that's all EEE means it wouldn't have been an attempt to kill HTML. From your link "Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions." - is anyone seriously saying it was ActiveX which people loved and that's why they dropped Netscape? I don't remember ActiveX playing much of a part in the internet.

It played a pretty large part in corporate intranets, which certainly controlled a lot of users. Most people weren't using more than one browser.

> I don't remember ActiveX playing much of a part in the internet.

The large company I work for still mandates IE11. Why do you think that is? If your corporate strategy gets you 20-30 years of vendor lock-in, then I would say it was a successful strategy.

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