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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

Say what you will about MS (and I said a lot when I worked at Lotus on the mainframe port of Lotus 1-2-3) but they knew what was important for success.

A spreadsheet on it's own is a thing of technical beauty but for market domination you don't want to keep pouring resources into that one product, you want a suite of complimentary products.

You want to be able to embed your spreadsheet into a document, into a slide presentation. You want cutting and pasting to work sensibly between products. You want consistency in the menus and layouts.

Bill Gates understood all of this from the beginning, the same as he understood that the strength of a PC operating system is not how reliable, memory safe and performant it is, it's in how flashy it looks and how important the windows paradigm is.

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What you’re describing there better fits Microsoft’s competition than Windows itself. Microsoft don’t even follow their own UI guidelines with regards to toolbars and menus (how often have they built bespoke widgets for Office rather than using their public APIs?).

Bill Gates was a great businessman. Microsoft succeeded because Gates knew how to make deals with suppliers et al. Much has been written about the good (IBM bundling) and bad (threatening retailers who shipped PCs with alternative operating systems) already though.

However if you want to talk about the UI consistency or flashiness of computers in the 80s and 90s, then you’re better off looking at Apple Macs, Amiga, Acorn Electron, or even Atari before you look at Windows and DOS.

Microsoft success cannot be explained by the old story with IBM. Obviously Bill Gates has/had amazing skills, was lucky to born in a rich family, to be in the IBM deal, etc. All condiments that does not explain the Microsoft success until today. I think Microsoft has a record of unsuccessful projects while being successful as a business, as you say they don't use their own UI offerings and had zilliones but look at their balance sheet...

If it were by the original IBM tale, Xerox and others dead companies were thriving. I recommend to read "Idea Man", Paul Allen (Microsoft cofounder) autobiography. You will realize there was an incredible Bill Gates before the IBM deal. Also check the non-official chronicles of Bill Gates in "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire" [2] (1993).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_Man

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp...

Every successful company has had unsuccessful products and of course people born into money are more likely to be successful themselves.

You’re also focusing too much on IBM specifically. I didn’t say IBM made Microsoft successful, I said it was an example of a deal Gates successfully negotiated.

My main point is that Microsoft is a different company and probably people will understand Bill Gates genius^3 in hindsight. I think Bill Gates is in another league of intelligence. I also think that Steve Jobs was in another league, different than the Bill one, and with more detours.

I expected Google founders to lead Google but they quit. Jeff Bezos work was also amazing and he continued for long. We have Mark Zuckerberg in Meta, don't doubt he is really smart but the Oculus execution was completely wrong, it is in the business literature. I remember when Microsoft launched Xbox there were a lot of concerns about attracting AAA games like Sony or Nintendo. They did it. Mark launched and maintained the Oculus without a set of apps to play with. Basic mistake: you can show the device to your father and he will be amazed and forget about it next time.

I really don’t understand how your point relates to my original comment.

Also I’m old, so have far more experience with early Microsoft than most people. Some of the software I’ve written is probably older than a lot of people who chat on here.

Edit: you’ve added a whole bunch more to your post. It’s now sounding like you took issue that I said Gates was a a great businessman without acknowledging that there are other great business people. Weird thing correct someone on given the mere existence of other companies proves that there have been other great business people. But yeah, Gates isn’t the only one. However we were talking about Microsoft’s success not Facebook/Meta nor any other company.

I am following the thread that initiates with a parent comment. Please let me know where I am wrong or unfocused on the topic and we can continue from there.

"how often have they built bespoke widgets for Office rather than using their public APIs"

I don't know. How many?

UI/UX development is a two-way street. The OS includes a basic set of UI controls for common scenarios. But it can't anticipate every situation.

MS Office's Ribbon is designed to show only the actions available given the current selection and document. A toolbar would show available actions, but also have the invalid actions disabled, increasing required screen space. Is there some other standard Windows control that could have worked instead of the custom Ribbon?

I can think of 3 different occasions.

First was when the menu bar would show a bezel when you hovered over it, which didn't happen normally in Windows.

The second was when the menu bar became detachable like a tool bar. That also wasn't supported by public Windows APIs.

The third was Ribbon. That I can at least forgive a little more because it's a massive shift in UI/UX. But the first two instances were so subtle that most people wouldn't have noticed, which then begs the question, why even waste resources literally reinventing their own APIs?

Yes, however this story is from before that, the early DOS era. No standards for UI or drivers etc.

Please write a blog post about this - are you saying you had Lotus 1-2-3 working on a 3270 terminal and they sold it?

This product was publicly known; it was called Lotus "1-2-3/M" and you can find a little information (not a lot) by googling for that name. The Wikipedia article for 1-2-3 also cites a few scanned articles from the time, although sadly they also have some broken citations here.

No blog posts coming but yes, a port of lotus 123 that worked beautifully on terminals of the day particularly3279 colour terminal.

The premise was that people were already pushing the limits and building incredibly elaborate systems on spreadsheets, so why not go to the next level and leverage the huge processing power of big iron. Actually a very solid idea and I worked with a few progressive customers that bought into it.

My job was as a sales engineer, helping customers adopt it in Europe, particularly Scandanavia. It's Tuesday so it must be Copenhagen. What a great job and a super team in lotus at the time.

Now that is awesome. I worked at a place that had the sun version of 1-2-3 running for a guy who had blown the memory limit of the MS-DOS version during that awkward period where windows still wasn’t quite a thing. That spreadsheet gave us nightmares

a lot of good indian or indian-american programmers signed on at microsoft in the early 80s and didn't get whispering campaigns started about them in management and then didn't quit. retaining adept hackers (without strong morals, at least) was and is one of microsoft's strong points. imagine where visicorp could be if they'd been able to retain people like this

I remember being on a call, while at CSC, to discuss moving one of our projects to our team in our Indian subsidiary. One of the folks on the call, in his texan drawl cooly mentioned, "What next? Train dogs and cats on software development?".

Oh the joys of being brown in the Tech Industry.

ugh

not to limit this to texans (racism is pretty widespread, especially in the usa) but the especial intensity of racism was one of the things my mother called out as a primary reason she left texas as soon as she could

was this recently

do you suppose he'd heard of sanjay ghemawat or raj reddy

About 8 years ago. Doubt he would heard of both these gentlemen.

> the strength of a PC operating system is not how reliable, memory safe and performant it is

Didn't OS/2 fail because it wasn't performant enough, compared to Windows/DOS which could run on pretty shitty PCs ?

As I remember it, OS/2 failed mainly because IBM were a day late and a dollar short with presentation manager, the gui for OS/2. Customers unfavourably compared the dull character mode appearance of OS/2 to the flashiness of Windows.

OS/2 v2 and later versions had replaced Presentation Manager with Workplace Shell. It was great. Fully object-oriented. Very powerful.

OS/2 ran circles around Windows NT. It's API was one of the best defined that I had worked with. Certainly better than anything for Windows. I worked for an IBM subsidiary in the early 90s. IBM was just never sufficiently committed to OS/2 IMO. Hence it ultimately went away. But programming on Warp was a great experience. And for a while at least, OS/2 was very well established in the banking industry.

But wouldn't the banking industry have been able to afford the (relatively) powerful computers to run it well ?

We were running the same hardware as the rest of the world - nothing high end. OS/2 always outperformed NT regardless of the hardware. And it didn’t need to be rebooted everyday.

> You want to be able to embed your spreadsheet into a document, into a slide presentation.

I mean, MS made ActiveX and it was a security risk:

https://www.wired.com/1996/11/will-activex-threaten-national...

If I recall being able to embed an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document was OLE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding

It's still possible, even into places like WordPad. When it's rendered (i.e., when you're not currently editing the embedded item) it becomes a bitmap (at a usually not great resolution). So text in your spreadsheet isn't selectable

it got rebranded activex for browsers

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