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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft didn’t miss out on the web. They won it so thoroughly that they assumed it was theirs to keep and stopped competing.

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They did fall behind initially, before "The Internet Tidal Wave" memo was written and Microsoft fully mobilized to fight Netscape. Bill Gates was convinced that proprietary networks like the original MSN were the future, but he changed his mind fairly quickly.

That sort of was the future, with Facebook reviving the proprietary network.

Huh. Exactly right.

We ended up with Xanadu's vision of walled gardens. Without all that pesky Xanadu technological innovation. Two-way links, OIDs & tumblers (zippers? Now I forget.), transclusion, micropayements, etc.

Another example of worst is better.

Parent is referring to the decade before that.

Berners-Lee created the WWW in 1991. Netscape 1.0 launched in December 1994. Bill Gates’s big Internet turnaround came in 1995. By 1999, IE was the dominant browser and Netscape was going broke.

Things moved so fast at the time, it left the impression that Microsoft was slow to react. But actually everything happened within just a few years.

Seems we collectively forgot about IE era.

Nightmares are best forgotten.

You still live on them but now it is called Safari

The IE era, a shoddy browser by a sleepy dormant pseudo-monopoly, is what allowed for Chrome to be so good.

Lots of low hanging fruit in optimizing browser rendering and JavaScript. Google engineers plucked these fruit. Pichai took all the credit.

In an alternate universe, some IE PM focused on making a great, fast browser, Chrome would’ve been killed by Google after not taking sufficient market share to deem worthwhile, and Pichai would be working at Oracle as an L5 TPM.

It was Firefox, and to a lesser extent Safari, that initially calved into IE. While Chrome did indeed strike the fatal blow, it came a little later into fight.

You also missed the GPs point, the reason Microsoft could be “sleepy dormant” on the web was because they had already won the browser wars and because the dominant platform for a decade. And that wasn’t by accident, it was very much a strategic move to conquer the browser market.

You're spot pn on both accounts. Firefox was the one that chipped at IE initially.. remember Firefox 3 campaign and how everyone put banners for/of it on their sites? good times

There are multiple eras here.

MS missed the tpc/ip train completely and ended up just copy pasting the stack from one of the BSDs in Windows 95 I think, or it wasn't a default install, I forget which.

They were late to the http train and had to give away explorer for free. You can tell how desperate they were since they didn't do the same thing with office.

Then between 1999 and 2012 they completely dominated.

Then they missed the mobile train completely and lost the browser wars. And here we are.

I blame IE being free for the state of the internet we have today. If people were trained to pay for it then we wouldn't have spyvertisment as the only model for it.

The death knell of MS's mobile ambitions came when the iPhone was released mid 2007. Windows Phone 7 launched end of 2010 as an unholy abomination based on Windows CE and a Zune-based interface, which created a whole generation of phones that would be unsupported by the NT-based Windows Phone 8 (released 2 years later), which is what they should've released in the first place.

I remember installing the TCP/IP stack from a treasured special floppy onto win 3.11 machines (giving them RIPE addresses and using NT4 as a router to expose the entire network onto the public internet - not a great idea in retrospect, but it was 1994 and everyone seemed so polite).

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