Microsoft execs on Apple's music store (2003)
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>It takes apple to make a move for us to break through communication issues and get anything done
Imagine paying millions of dollars for "the best" developers, designers, managers, yet they can't even communicate with each other properly to align with common interests. FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective that I'm not surprised they are cutting tens of thousands of employees.
Where I'm from we have an expression - "many grandmas, lazy/spoiled child" - and it's especially rings true in creative work.
For something truly brilliant to be created, you need someone with a vision and freedom to implement it. It's extremely rare for something brilliant to come from committee or top-down designed by managers delegating work to a bunch of teams. It's one of the reasons even open-source struggles with design - you need one or a tiny team of aligned brilliant people to work together, and you need to give them freedom to do it. Not constrain them with meetings, micromanaging the product and letting everyone express their opinion. That's how you get a terrible, bland, uninspiring design.
Recently I had a chance to work at a theatre production that ended up suffering from the same issue - the director had no vision but only an idea, so he delegated different work to everyone, then micromanaged people and intersected into every attempt at collaboration with his own opinions and ideas. As new people were coming in, their ideas were added into the mix, creating a show that ended up being even worse than mediocre.
In my experience it wasn't the excess employees (everyone seemed to be busy) but that processes in the org didn't match the size and leadership from the top down couldn't see the problem. So no efforts were made to make teams work better together and align their incentives.
A great example was API teams would ship incomplete and untested work as "done" because they were overworked and on an insane timeline. My front-end team tested the APIs for implementation and discovered all the missing parts, and then we had to document all of it and ask the team to fix it. The API team would then push back claiming we were wrong. My devs would have to spend hours on calls with them going over each missing piece and the API devs played dumb every time.
I would have to escalate to my manager and he felt pushing back on the other leads would burn political capital he didn't have. This wasn't just one API team, it was seven. Somehow the culture of the org caused them all to follow the same strategy to push their QA to other teams and delay completion. It was so crazy that they would get defensive saying "we have the best developers in the world, that is not possible."
A true organizational illness.
In sensible work environments, that's solved by aligning incentives at project level. If your frontend team crucially needs something done, but the backend can't give a shit, the problems run deeper than area of responsibility IMHO. Either what the frontend works on doesn't matter, or the backend team wants to sink the ship, or there's way too many fires to put out and the ship is already sinking.
Having mega teams or filling them with jack-of-all-trades types also has critical downsides.
The simple result I get introducing the concept: https://medium.com/mobilepeople/backend-for-frontend-pattern...
If there is only one front end that talks to the back end, then yes I agree. If there are 20 different front ends from 20 different teams, some of them external, that are expected to talk to the same API, then it makes a lot more sense.
In other words, have a team with front and back-end devs working together, with a frontend acting as a sensible default interaction to an API. This can be something as simple as a widget or component.
This front end is expected to have a full suite of tests running through the API (or an api test device -- this test device can also be used to better communicate the requirements to backend devs), and be well documented in how and why it's doing something.
That acts as an example for any other frontends. When they have questions or issues with the api, it also provides an immediate source of truth to show how to properly do something. And it provides confidence that the API is behaving in the expected fashion for the user experience being provided for.
Just a thought.
In one project we were rebuilding an old outdated UI. We started with being very strict about literally only implementing what was needed for frontend, for example not even a GET /widgets/{id} until there was a UI that needed it. We also explicitly built new models for this, separate from our database models, so it wasn't just "return everything in the table": if the UI only displayed half the fields, that's what was returned. A big benefit of this mindset was when we needed a list of things from joining multiple tables, there was no thought of pushing this to the front-end; we just made a viewmodel, did the work server-side and returned it.
Also, pretty early on we implemented Swagger (OpenAPI) and built in docs to our code. This helped establish it as a part of dev and the coding style that any new devs quickly bought into, as opposed to an afterthought everyone sees as a chore.
After we had a a dozen or so APIs done, we started opening it to customers. We'd add new things they'd request (but our UI didn't need), but strictly kept the use-case-first mindset, as well as continuing the UI port (page-by-page, effectively). Even a few years later, the feedback from our developer users was overwhelmingly positive, along the lines of "this is the best API I've ever used".
I work on a small team (2 backend devs, 2 frontend). The we are always arguing about the API. The frontend devs want the data for their components pre-formatted in 1 API call. The backend team wants to run a SQL query and return the entire record as JSON.
Likely scenario: backend formats data and moves on / gets busy elsewhere. Frontend changes, so that data is now required in a different format. Frontend decides to just reformat it at their side because of schedules. Now it’s a mess and nobody knows why.
The root of the problem is this stupid frontend/backend team division when it’s actually a single program. That’s where the idea of “let’s ask fullstack” comes from. But there’s no good answer this guy could give you, apart from “stop drawing stupid dividers across the whole”.
That was obviously a really general rule of thumb not intended to be an actual architecture guideline...
Or just use GraphQL-esque methods, but versioning will poke its head in somewhere eventually.
Don't get me wrong, I quite like Java and the good tooling, but I'm more exposed to C# these days and Java feels like 90% the same, so I'm never compelled to go back.
Or you are maybe sarcastic, impossible to tell in text...
Side-edit: from the very beginning, Java was simple, when it was released. But in 2010 it felt super confusing to me.
That coming from experience of managing various shit turborchargers like tomcat or jboss that just added tons of unnecesary complexity and zero benefits to 90% of apps that used them
LifeRay, not even once.
Is it? I come from a very different background and I'm trying to get a small Java back-end up and running (Quarkus) and wow, it's so painful! There's a huge amount of buy in, to me, in the framework. I found Node, Go and Python to be easier in simply delivering a HTTP(S) server. I've gotta do it in Java for reasons.
const app = express()
app.get("/user", (id) => { return db.user(id); })
app.run() or something like that.
Spring is just a few annotations away from creating an endpoint.
Of course with spring, there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t java that you have to know.
However, the Spring framework in the 2000s was a horrible mess of "aspect oriented programming" and obscure XML configuration files. Till this day I had no idea what it was trying to achieve with that architecture (except maybe trying to avoid writing code by writing lots of XML configuration files instead)
I think they learned their lesson.
There does need to be oversight over whole thing to avoid exactly what is described above.
Nope.
“We have to show progress!”
Other parts of the org like UX and product need to fulfill their obligations as well or it won't work. I've found a lot of teams deep into a death march who never bothered to push product on incomplete requirements.
Whenever United Airlines decides to do something about the pilot shortage by paying for flight school (not just 10% of it) I’m down…
I wrote them a cover letter that began:
- - -
When I design an API, I start with the apps. An API has no value on its own; its value comes from what you can build with it.
There may be an existing app that needs a new API feature, but I like to write a self-contained sample app for quick iteration on the API design and to include in the SDK.
An API also needs full test coverage, of course, but that comes after this initial step. Instead of test driven development, you might call it app driven development.
An SDK developer is also in a customer support role: they should write solid reference documentation and tutorials and sample apps, and interact directly with the users of the SDK. It’s not a job for someone who likes to just sit quietly and code.
One of my hobbies has always been to assist other developers in various online forums. Most recently this has been on Stack Overflow where I’ve posted over 600 quality answers. Previously I was known for my advice on the original jQuery mailing list and Windows programming forums.
- - -
I went on to list some of the APIs I've built.
The cover letter must have resonated with them, because they brought me in for interviews the next day, and made an offer the day after that.
This looked like my dream job! I love building APIs, working with the developers who use those APIs, and especially anything to do with geospatial data.
The team that hired me had been a startup that was acquired by a larger company in another state.
Things looked great at first. I was writing sample apps and imagining what APIs would make it easy to develop those apps.
And then a team of Architects from the larger company swooped in and decided that they should be the ones to design the new API.
They liked to design with UML charts of boxes and arrows, and thought the API should reflect the inner workings of their system.
I thought the API should be simple and easy to use for outside Python developers, and I tried to put myself in the shoes of those developers to understand what would make their jobs easier.
At one point my manager asked, "can't you just implement what the Architects have specified?"
I gave it my best, but by that time I was demoralized and unproductive. The company wanted me to do the exact opposite of what I was good at and what they hired me for.
I was fired after three months.
I've had to create and consume these type of APIs. Demoralized and unproductive has always be the result I've gotten.
What strikes me as interesting here is the interference levels. The big question I have here is my initial thought upon reading this is: When the parent corps software architects came in to lay claim to the new frontiers of their acquisition, a few common scenarios come to mind [0][1]:
The first is that its entirely possible that the architects saw a greenfield way to grow their career by treating the acquisition as a chance to grow their stature. Therefore, its important for them to have their names all over things and for some understandable version of what gets done to mirror things others will understand, presumably so they have the easiest path to explain their OKRs (or similar). If this was the case, then the best thing you could have done in my view was to express early about collaborating and learning their process, and try to insert yourself into the discussions and appeal to them as an authority, while selling your idea as if it was their idea[2]. The metric for them is visibility, familiarity and career ascension, and thats the hidden goal in this scenario you have to play into.
Another scenario is that the team had already largely sold this upstairs (or it came as a top down directive) and they were simply under the thumb of need to make this follow the same uniform structure that the team had been following without any real room to make exceptions. It'd help if people just said this, but I have found often they don't, it comes out in other ways. A key thing I like to do when I interact with a team and they present me with something before I'ved asked for it in detail is ask if they already started or got some kind of sign off on it. If they did, you can appeal for changes, accept the design as is, or appeal to the higher stakeholder involved. In these situations, I've had the best luck drilling down into the surrounding circumstances and figuring out who it is that I need to build a relationship with to change the circumstances for the better, whenver possible. These are more political in nature and really will reveal alot about culture, so its important to use a deft hand. I've been in situations like this, and I've usually pitched something to the effect of you don't want this acquired tech to go south, perhaps we should re think this before it becomes a larger problem (though decidedly not worded in this direct manner, again, use a deft hand)
Lastly, the last scenario that comes to mind for me is that its entirely possible that the team was generically tasked with taking on architectural responsibilities post acquisition and they simply had different culture / methodology for handling this, and only an appeal to a higher authority or diving into their existing process would help at all. I find generally its best to see if you can get into their process and start to form things around how they're already working that move the needle rather than trying to wholesale push back against whatever it is they're trying to achieve, that usually ends up being a losing proposition unless you have higher authorities vested in your success and outcomes over theirs, basically.
[0]: They're hypothetical and based on what I've seen and learned from others, but not representative of every situation, and may not be related at all to yours.
[1]: The advice I may lay out here, is hypothetical in that I can't speak to any specific situation, only pattern match. Sometimes, politics kills any good intent and attempts at proper compromise. That's when it becomes a red flag, depending on how, what, why, who and how often. can't win them all, unfortunately
[2]: I realize this is one of the tenants from books like How To make Friends And Influence People but its easier than you might think, if you haven't done it repeatedly it might sound sneaky but it boils down to agreeableness to a big degree.
Very difficult in practice, does anyone have stories on accomplishing this in a developer job?
If I need to insert myself into a discussion I play dumb by asking a lot of questions even if I have knowledge/experience with the subject. To present alternative ideas I'll ask things like "Why wouldn't X work here?" or "What are the benefits of doing {current thing} instead of {what I want}?". Since I'll already have knowledge of the subject I can mostly tell when their responses don't make sense and I'll continue asking to follow-up questions trying to get them to see things from my perspective. I've done this a lot and it seems like it's a 50/50 shot that they'll be open to trying your ideas.
Find people who can do both, or create cross-functional teams that can ship things somewhat independently
Wasn't there some design document which had some of the acceptance criteria or the requirements?
I work in a small company, 3 or 4 devs, couple business ops guys, sales guy and head of company.
Even I decide sometimes "naw I'm just making the call on this so it is consistent and works" and don't bring anyone else in on things because it is time to just make a call.
At a big company, I can't imagine the scale of human involvement in every decision... just takes one idiot to gum up the works too.
We're working with one company now who is paying through the nose because we keep having meeting after meeting about the same things over and over and this company has a "meeting terrorist" (my term) who is absolutely determined to bring up the decisions from last meeting to start every meeting and re-debate everything for no reason at all. It's madness.
That's an actual sabotage technique advocated by the OSS:
"Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual/...
He even raises the prospect that there are other people (never mentioned) who has concerns about his own idea ... and he's the only one to bring those issues up, and argues against his own ideas.
Dude is either incompetent to an insane degree or straight up sabotaging the company.
I met a project manager like this on a client implementation a few years ago.
The client felt they needed 7 phases (requirements gathering, analysis, design etc. etc.) - this is for a SaaS product but whatever!
They also felt there were 8 business areas that each needed to be treated separately (support staff, retail, warehouse, etc. etc.).
So the day after we signed the contract I came in to find my inbox bulging with 56 (i.e. 7 x 8) two-hour meeting invites from the meeting terrorist. There was one for each combo of phase and business area - e.g. a two hour meeting for requirements gathering for the support staff area, another for design for the warehouse area, and so on. There were no delays between phases.
Untangling that shitfest did not start the project out on a good footing.
It’s somewhat intentional. They want the manpower to make big moves, but don’t actually want to shake things up.
So you put red tape all over the place and start games of phone tag with a dozen teams.
And god help you when people establish polices just because they imagine something might happen.
In these emails it looks like managers/execs are trying to figure out how they could/can beat apple. My answer: get out of the way of the highly talented people you've hired. The business aspect is only possible with a technical solution people like (not zune!). MS has many products like that that feel like a committee of managers designed them and really smart engineers did their best to overcome those decisions (until the last few years at least).
Making the guy who wrote sysinternals (got shit done despite MS) as head of Azure is one if their best decisions. Not that Azure is the best but it is definetly very usable and very popular with enterprise customers.
2. One who are good at maintaining the existing product and are so scared of breaking the boundaries that they often add roadblocks to first category people.
3. People who don’t know jack, and are effective at management, politics and rest and vest.
Often at FAANG, being the beast that they are, the leadership is filled 2nd and 3rd category people. Perhaps that is why you find them good at keeping the lights on, and they satisfy the 1st by buying out the competition.
I, not hyping myself consider to be of first category, but I found going down this path of carving out your ideas is extremely hard. The people at leadership, management are extremely good at politics and portraying themselves bigger than they are. As a result, you need either lot of eng and support team to build anything, or find your way out to develop things on your own and get bought back into FAANG.
1. During the time in question , Microsoft was by far the dominant tech company, Apple was just coming out of being “beleaguered” and the iPod was just becoming popular. Facebook didn’t exist, Amazon was thought to be a money losing company months away from bankruptcy, Netflix (which shouldn’t have ever been considered BigTech) was worried about being crushed by Blockbuster, and Google was far from dominant.
2. The original acronym coined by Cramer was “FANG” and left out Apple completely
3. By todays standards, when people talk about FAANG they mean BigTech - Microsoft has been one of the top 5 most valuable companies since 2000. As of right now, Netflix ranks 115 in the F500.
It's MAMAA now
Then, they themselves became the big bloated companies they once beat.
This article is 20 years old.
The same could be said for Steve Jobs. Since he has passed, the company seems to be losing its focus (It was sometimes focused on the wrong things, though, when he was at the helm). I think that a certain other, tyrannical CEO may be a good/awful example...
Not to overly critique but the iPhone and iPod were 'top down' and Zune, etc were the way you're describing. So Apple pulled it off
Wild oversimplification, but I always felt that MS suffered from their monopoly during the 90s in that simply never had to make products people really cared about. Apple did. And when the consumer market exploded — especially after touchscreen phones hit — MS just didn’t have any good muscles to use in the fight. They’d been sort of cheating it for so long that the stuff they kept bringing to market was just a total mess.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/itunes-10t...
Can't comment on the ecosystem since back then my only option was piracy, but the second and third generation players were very good. The HD is still one of the sleekest pieces of hardware that I used. But Apple couldn't be beat at that point.
By then all their partners had abandoned them and developers were annoyed by multiple total SDK changes.
But it really didn’t matter. Because Android and iOS were so entrenched I can’t imagine they would have ever succeeded.
I don't think Windows Phone was necessarily going to get beyond a strong third place, but WP 8.1 on a low end phone was a lot more usable than Android on similar specs, and Apple had/has no desire to touch that part of the market. Continuum on the high end, if the desktop side included win32, could have anchored the other end of the market.
Would have been nice if they hadn't told Firefox they couldn't build for WP though. Mobile IE was garbage, and Mobile Edge for WM10 managed to be worse.
Oh I can guess what happened. Management and the talkers in general lost interest so some programmers could finally do what they wanted without anyone removing the start button or putting it in the middle of the task bar.
The keyboard felt incredibly fast and the entire UX felt "slippery" in a good way. Things just seemed to move and slide under your fingers. I thought I'd get back to that feeling with an Android 120hz display, but it still doesn't feel the same.
Of course, the browser sucked, and it didn't have many apps. It also took forever for Samsung (and I think Nokia) to add a front-facing camera.
MS has had one successful consumer product: the Xbox. That seems to have been given total autonomy. And they have still screwed up a few times (Xbox One launch) by falling into old patterns.
Apple was a user company under Jobs. Is still kind of is (they clearly don’t care about businesses), but not as much, and I’m getting a bit worried.
The Surface models with an ARM (can’t remember the name) were clearly more consumer aimed, but those flopped.
Really I meant more non-computer.
WebTV never set the world on fire (though it seems to have been more popular than most people realize). Zune was supposed to be pretty good, but initial marketing kind of killed it. And WMP wasn’t exactly loved software the way iTunes was. Remember when iTunes was great?
The Active Mates toys didn’t take off, though that’s not a surprise. Spot watches! And shoving Windows CE in the Dreamcast didn’t help.
I’m struggling to think of things MS has done outside of computers, peripherals, and the Xbox. There are probably tons, they’d try anything in the 90s.
What does Edge do? It shows you a unskippable, un-closable "how-to" (as if I've never used a browser), and a make-an-account-and-sync nag. It takes a minute to click though, what a turn off!
It hasn't popped up for me in a while, but it definitively happens sometimes.
Edge as a Chrome reskin is better than that at least. But then again, so was IE.
Rhapsody was one company that hosted a certified marketplace and sold the iRiver line of devices that worked reasonably well. They went on to buy the Napster brand eventually.
They (Rhapsody) even had a MUSIC SUBSCRIPTION service many years before anyone else did and it worked well. Everybody trashed it though saying nobody wanted to rent music.
Then of course Microsoft Zune didn't use the platform and developed their own thing. I think PlaysForSure is dead, but maybe some stub lives on.
EDIT: clarified subscription service was Rhapsody, not Microsoft
> Windows 11
These two things are ~20 years apart. I don't think Microsoft in 2000 could have made iPod, but Apple also these days commonly fault on software experience.
> the Microsoft Zune was definitely a dud
I'm not too sure. There's a directly line from the Microsoft Zune to Window's modern design language. I don't think that's too much of a dud.
It was followed far too closely by iPhone / iPod touch. Gates was at the debut of the product though.
I had an original Zune in Brown and helped organize the first pre-release public zune ~fan demo (that I know of.)
It was held at my buddy’s tea shop on green lake.
It was a fine music player, with a ton of wasted potential as a general purpose computer during a time before everyone had smartphones.
I think they’re quite content with that now though. They’re firmly developer, enterprise and gaming focused these days.
I think a lot of Xbox Series X/S buyers wish they had a PS5 or buy a PS5 as well to play Sony first party titles. And come next generation, if Xbox doesn't have anything to compete with the quality of Sony's games, then I think they're dead. We're 2.5 years into the current generation and Microsoft has almost nothing to show for it except Forza and Halo, which was a delayed mess of a game. Add in to that the fact that most third party games perform better on PS5.
They've been on a downward trajectory after Xbox One, where they refuse to state how successful it is, with analysts predicting the PS4 outsold them 2-1. Xbox One was a terrible announcement and launch.
Xbox Series X/S are great pieces of hardware but they just can't compete with PlayStation in every other aspect. They've let down developers with the Series S since developers have to target 2 separate SKUs for Xbox, increasing developer effort. And in some cases developers are withholding their games from Xbox if they can't run on the weaker Series S, as you are not allowed to launch on Series X only (see Baldur's Gate 3). If Microsoft changes the rules around this it will benefit developers but it will let down consumers. PS5 is predicted to be outselling the Xbox even more so this generation. There's practically no reason for a consumer to buy an Xbox unless you're a fan of their exclusives, which they have done an excellent job of killing interest in.
I think next generation will be when Microsoft taps out and leaves the gaming hardware market, except for maybe their controllers. They will pivot to software only and focus on selling Game Pass for PC players and game streaming for the remaining consumers. Personally, I don't think that will have a good outcome.
I think Microsoft has put Sony in an impossible spot and, with the Activision merger about to go through, Sony is going to have an even harder time. The pandemic, I believe, has masked that people are migrating more and more to PC. Migrating to PC is a win for Microsoft. Kids play Switch and then are jumping right to PC. I don’t hear about a lot of Gen Z kids talk about PlayStation and have even heard it referred to as a boomer console and anecdotally the PlayStation crowd seems to be predominately 30+.
PC gaming is predicted to grow by 1.2% a year
https://www.vantagemarketresearch.com/industry-report/pc-gam...
Currently, the console market share is dominated by Sony
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1044925/market-share-of-...
MS is being accused that they cant innovate themselves and have to buy other companies for their innovative product. This acquisition is just supporting that claim.
Consoles are still dominant. I’d like to see statistics back up what you’re saying though.
PC gaming being a win for Microsoft doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. On console, they get a cut of every game sold. On PC they only get to profit of game pass games.
The only major win I see is preventing users from moving away from their OS.
Has "boomer" slipped into meaning "people older than me" now? There are no boomer consoles.
Yes.
But a lot of their product line remains a mess. (Although the Xbox shouldn’t be discounted — that was a consumer success.)
Some of them recognize it, but not everyone. The company also seems to be pretty heavily invested into monetizing users to the hilt with telemetry and advertising. This is the sort of approach that will slowly drive people away from the platform, as users gradually tire of the ever-increasing intrusiveness of the ads.
Someone forgot to tell the Teams team.
I login to windows and everything feels like they're coding / designing AT ME. It's like nobody making decisions is thinking about me accomplishing anything, more how they can make me do whatever it is they want.
Don't get me started with the dozen (ok maybe not exactly a dozen) or so design languages inside Windows and how unfriendly some are.
I've been at companies with innovative people, who just get stifled by higher ups, get bored, then leave. Most big companies have too many layers of power in place to keep anyone from shaking things up.
I guess that's to say, I wouldn't single out MSFT. It's a disease of every large company.
Back in the iPod’s heyday, Apple was selling 20 million iPods during the Christmas quarter.
Apple now sells from 40-65 million iPhones per quarter according to third party estimates.
And even if we're talking about PC gaming, Xbox wouldn't be the word you'd be thinking of.
C# / .NET (Core) / Typescript?
Teams are... "OK" at best. For school they're decent, for work their video-co is good I'd say, but chat is bad.
now they're a poor imitation of Jetbrains'
(wordperfect, 123, ...)
Yep. They know what they want to build and make fewer compromises than Microsoft. If Microsoft had developed the iPhone, it would have launched on every carrier possible and to do that, they would have had to allow the carriers to junk up the phone and restrict all kinds of user features. Remember the days of $3 ringtones and carrier run app stores?
For all the problems we have with Apple and their products today, they did move us forward.
For those not familiar, the ZuneHD was an incredible device. I still miss mine and wish someone would build a phone that felt as good.
To buy music, you had to buy Microsoft points(1). Points had to be purchased in a minimum of $5 increments, and I think you got more points depending on how much you spent. Then your songs would be 87 points, or some ridiculous number. It was basically hostile to the user experience. Nobody wanted Microsoft points, and they were discontinued in 2013.
I remember one issue here was trying to demo Microsoft's DRM to music execs. At the time Microsoft's software was unusable on Mac, but the music industry was Mac all the way through. Microsoft was first through the door, through outside agencies, they would do the grunt work of turning the labels on to selling their music, then Apple would turn up, sometimes literally the next day, with a much slicker promotion and win the deal.
Microsoft's biggest problem through all of this was its absolute certainty that it should only provide the pick axes and not build this thing itself. It was certain the end user wanted a choice of 50 weak music players and a dozen different badly-developed music stores.
If you want a job done properly do it yourself. Apple won because they did that and owned the whole vertical.
The startup that I was working for was OD2, half-owned by Peter Gabriel, who is a very nice guy. He got us meetings with every label guy we needed to speak to. He gave me his iBook, bless him. OD2 eventually got swallowed by Nokia which of course got swallowed by Microsoft. The snake ate its tail.
Was it CD Baby? Definitely not CDNow.
I remember the controversy - it was CD Baby for sure.
This time, I see my focus mostly going towards Steve's personality traits. His weird diets, his abrasiveness, his rudeness, his stare, him walking barefoot everywhere, his charisma, his directness. Him just going up to people and bending their wills in his "reality distortion field".
It's really powerful stuff.
>Erlich: You say that like it's a bad thing. Richard, if you're not an asshole, it creates this kind of asshole vacuum and that void is filled by other assholes, like Jared.
(Note: I don't necessarily entirely agree with all of it.)
In one case the business failed and most people went off into new roles which were exactly what they should have been doing before.
FS: What was Microsoft's philosophy or attitude regarding games when you began?
Alex St John: Oh, it was completely nonexistent! During that time, their entire focus was on multimedia video, the primary mission of DirectX wasn't to benefit and push gaming, but simply to drive Apple and Quicktime into the ground.
https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...
"David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million."
"Microsoft and Intel had been shocked to find that Apple's QuickTime product made digital video on Windows seem like continuous motion, and was far in advance of anything that either of them had, even in a planning stage. The speed was achieved by bypassing Windows' Graphics Display Interface and enabling the application to write directly to the video card. The result was a significant improvement over the choppy, 'slide-show' quality of Microsoft's own efforts. Apple's intention was to establish the driver as a standard for multimedia video imaging, so that Mac developers could sell their applications on the Windows and Mac platforms. Microsoft requested a free licence from Apple for QuickTime for Windows in June 1993, and was refused. In July 1993, the San Francisco Canyon Company entered into an agreement with Intel to deliver a program (codenamed Mario) that would enable Intel to accelerate Video for Windows' processing of video images. However, although Intel certainly knew that Canyon had developed key parts of the code for Apple, it did not specify that this must be undertaken in a clean room,"
"Intel gave this code to Microsoft as part of a joint development program called Display Control Interface."
"Canyon admitted that it had copied to Intel code developed for and assigned to Apple. In September 1994, Apple's software was distributed by Microsoft in its developer kits, and in Microsoft's Video for Windows version 1.1d."
Come on, let's not act like Windows, in its 11th iteration, is not a steaming pile of shit. I don't know how so many of you defend such a garbage company.