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Comment by jonhohle | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure if you lived it, but Microsoft was actively targeting companies to destroy, and destroying companies because they could. Read about Mosaic, Be, their role in the SCO case, the Halloween documents, the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy.

Their monopoly case wasn’t about draconian terms. They were savagely destroying competition as a company culture.

Edit to add: bad terms on a vertically integrated platform is cute compared to Microsoft dictating what the entire PC industry was allowed to sell. It’s not that Windows was the best game in town, it was that vendors couldn’t sell Windows pre-installed if they sold anything else.

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> Be

example https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

msft forced PC makers to ship bootloaders that would lockup on sight of Be's boot chain

They literally left comments in their code saying, "we should crash here if using DR-DOS". Digital Research had a compatible but different DOS implementation at the time.

I do remember Steve Jobs wanted "to go thermonuclear" on Android (mostly Samsung and Google), saying "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product."

Other motives, same behavior.

No, different behaviour. If Apple had announced its own Android derivative called Apple Android++, somehow forced all major OEMs to pre-install it, designed it such that 'Android' apps written for it wouldn't work on real Android, then killed it, that might be the sort of behaviour that would be closer to the mark.

Like, Steve Jobs making vague threats isn't really in the same league as what MS was getting up to in the 90s.

Different results. MS was pretty effective at destroying the competition.

Similar behavior would have been to go to all of the retailers and say they couldn’t sell iPhones if they sold Android phones.

Apple sued for patent infringement and that was about the extent of it.

Suggesting that their behavior is at Microsoft’s level is naive.

> Apple sued for patent infringement and that was about the extent of it.

You're massively understating the scope and scale of Apple's war on Android. Apple transfered patents to a NPE that sued Android vendors - possibly Google itself. Apple also spent billions on this war - Apple et al spent over $4B to outbid Google on Nortel patents, Google spent even more billions to buy Motorola and its patents, prior to that, Google had virtually no defensive parents.

I said Apple sued over patents, you said Apple sued over patents. I think we’re agreeing.

I'm quibbling with the phrasing of the last half of your sentence, as it's a bit of an understatement, no?

> that was about the extent of it

Apple didn't only sue over patents they already owned: they went out of their way and bought billions worth of more patents to sue with, partnered with patent-trolls who also sued OEMs on their behalf. So we agree, but the breadth and depth of Apple's actions was remarkable - they didn't just sue, they went to great lengths to do so.

> Other motives, same behavior.

If you are absolutely committed to doing zero further analysis, then sure I can see why you would think that.

To be fair, Apple today is more about going thermonuclear on apps inside its own ecosystem, as compared to Android or Android apps. (I don't mean just the commission rate, but the blatant copying of successful app concepts).

EEE is still very much alive nowadays, especially how they got into Linux spaces with WSL(2) and into the wider FLOSS community with the GitHub acquisition. We're just in the Extend phase at the moment.

> For nearly 10 years now Microsoft's VS Code has been the dominant text editor among the soydev community. I use it on my Microsoft Windows machine to write Microsoft Typescript code with help from the latest AI models in Microsoft Copilot, it installs my Microsoft npm packages, pushes my code to Microsoft Github and automatically deploys to Microsoft Azure which I then admire from the Microsoft Edge browser.[1]

For real it's scary how much developer experience is controlled by Microsoft.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGz7Ou0Nwo8

It is possible (and is) for both things to be true.

Both Apple and Microsoft were/are abusive of their market position.

It’s about the difference between someone saying something mean to people and someone killing people. Sure, they are both socially unacceptable, but we typically don’t equate those.

At the time Microsoft was caught logging all communication in computers was new and business leaders hadn't adapted to it, but today you want catch them with their pants down like that, so today we wouldn't know if Apple or Microsoft were deliberately targeting and killing companies since they know to say "We are doing this to serve the customer, killing that company was just an unfortunate side effect" and they know the US court wont go after them.

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