But I guess it depends on what you mean by "respectable" or "decent". It may be helpful to remember that a lot of people hated Sun in the 1980s and 1990s too. DEC (Digital) was a particular rival in those times. Spurred by the successes of NFS and the Sun/AT&T Unix deal, DEC created the OSF to counter Sun. Later on, there was something similar with IBM and Sun over Java. IBM eventually did license Java, but there was a lot of conflict.
I think in both cases the issues were mostly about licensing and business terms. Maybe this was nothing more than corporate rivalry and competition, but it kind of felt more personal than that.
At a Sun reunion a few years ago, Scott McNealy said of Sun, "We kicked butt, had fun, and we didn't cheat." The "kick butt and have fun" had been McNealy's slogan for a long time, but the "didn't cheat" was relatively new. I believe it to be true. I don't think Sun ever defrauded anybody. (It made mistakes, and plenty of them, but didn't defraud anybody.) In a world that has Enron and Theranos and FTX, maybe this is an outlier. But there are probably also many other companies that don't make that news that are making an honest buck and aren't cheating.
For another decade after that, they (through acquihire or in house development) revolutionized office suites, online mapping, aerial imagery, email, photo search, Android, web browsers... seemingly all at once.
It wasn't until the last 8-10 years that they seeming stopped innovating and entered "hang on to our profits at any cost" mode and really increased the advertising spam everywhere.
imagine a company that purchases space shuttles and lights them on fire in a field because it's more profitable than launching them. as much as it makes sense using math it's heartbreaking to watch as an engineer
You mean like SLS throwing all of the remaining Shuttle engines into the ocean, and then making more of them for $100 million each, and then throwing THOSE into the ocean too?
I experienced something similar to this maybe two times interacting with Redhat but I had to skip their support chain to do it and kernel developers would be curious and fix some odd bug usually NetApp related but it was not like Sun where this was a regular part of the support process. In fairness we paid for the highest level of support Sun offered whereas we only had a handful of customers individually with Redhat support. Still, I had never seen anything like Sun Microsystems since. Not even close.
Those monster backplane slots were full of delicate little pins that were easy to bend, but the pins themselves were actually made tough and hard to break so a fine touch could have a hope of straightening them.
They made all their docs available, and kept them up for a very long time. The PDFs of the service manuals were immensely valuable.
It made it clear that someone had really cared about the user it when it was designed.
https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/
And you have a skin that has sold for over $1 million now.
https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-sells-for-o...
What difference does that make when the magnitude for one game was on the order of a billion cases?
Counterstrike doesn't define Valve. They do so much more than that, especially for those of us who don't even play CS. The lootboxes were something they added much later. It was originally just a Half-Life mod.
but the one mark against them is that by pushing Steam, they normalized DRM in the video game space and killed physical media on PCs.
Oh and did you forget about lootboxes? and their effects on children?
(Note I'm taking a somewhat exaggerated position here -- I don't think Valve is a terrible company as far as companies nowadays go. But the bar in this question seems intended to be absolute, not relative.)
GOG has been selling DRM free for a decade or so now, but I still choose Steam because their software is so much better (Galaxy is atrocious and has gotten worse recently).
And I don't really care about cosmetic lootboxes, I guess? I've bought some (too many) for Path of Exile. I'm glad they are a funding model that enables free to play. I find it less obnoxious than the paid DLC model, in-game advertising, etc. As for kids, well, shouldn't parents control their spending anyway?
Unplayable because you don't have the machines to execute them (or because you didn't take care to copy your media that got damaged), not unplayable because the companies subsequently revoked your access to them. Those are... pretty darn different things. It's like saying "my groceries spoiled" is the same as "the supermarket came back and seized my groceries" just because they have the same end result.
> I still choose Steam because their software is so much better
You're of course welcome to, but your question wasn't about product quality. Great product != great company.
> And I don't really care about cosmetic lootboxes, I guess?
Lots of countries did. If your bar for respectable is "I don't care about it"... that's not really a question to pose to the rest of the world.
> As for kids, well, shouldn't parents control their spending anyway?
This is a much bigger conversation than we can have in this box, but suffice it to say lots of people don't buy this kind of excuse.
I know HN skews wanting to "own" games, but that's just not a big deal to most gamers. Physical media and DRM-free have always competed with Steam and GamePass and uPlay etc, but the latter are increasingly popular.
Countries are free to have their values, of course, but regardless, I don't think the presence of lootboxes in a couple games overrides all the other good Valve has done for the PC gaming community.
Other companies can (and do) implement loot boxes too. Fortnite's are much worse, being pay to win (in its original Save the World coop mode, not the more popular Battle Royale mode), but Epic's game store and exclusivity policies are much worse for the community. Activision, EA, Ubi, etc have similar lootboxes, often with similar DRM, but without any of the good of Steam and the customer focus of Valve.
Those are industry wide problems that probably should be resolved with regulation. But that doesn't make Valve a good or bad company, IMO. Of course others can disagree.
As for parents and kids, yeah, it's another discussion, but sounds like the same old thing about video games ruining kids. Whether it's Wolfenstein and violence or lootboxes or TikTok addiction or whatever, it still comes down to parental guidance. Its not an excuse, it's just a reality that kids grow up with way more technology and marketing than in the past, and that's a cultural issue way bigger than any one company (or government, for that matter). That's not on Valve.
> I don't think using DRM makes a company evil
I don't either, but this is neither pure DRM, nor was "evil" the bar to begin with. There's a lot of room in the middle for both. DRM technologies have existed that didn't prevent you from owning or transferring your own copy.
> I know HN skews wanting to "own" games, but that's just not a big deal to most gamers.
HN also "skews" toward caring about privacy, but billions of people use (say) Google and Microsoft etc. without minding what they do. If your bar is "it's not a big deal to most users" then wouldn't tons of companies easily pass it easily, especially the giants? They didn't become giants by being boycotted...
But I think that's kinda the overall discussion, isn't it? There are different facets to every company and people have different values. What bothers one person might not bother another.
I remember Sun, in its heyday, as being disliked as well because its workstations were so expensive and Java was terrible in its browser applet days (in the same way Microsoft would come to be disliked for ActiveX).
I tremendously respect Valve and am grateful that they've stayed privately owned and able to maintain their culture. At the same time, others may find fault in the way they do business. I don't expect all of us to agree on who the respectable companies are.
What I think they are doing is pushing toward what would be good, but doing that very slowly.
I wish gog worked well with the steam deck, and had all the cool steam stuff for controllers and linux support, but they aren't doing any of that.
Example: Team Fortress 2, the official servers for the game have been overrun by bots that aimbot, votekick, say slurs, spam illegal content, what are they doing about it? Nothing. https://save.tf
Example 2: CSGO/CS2, also full of cheaters and illegal gambling sites
I'd say that 1990s, 2000s google was pretty cool, but it turned evil quite quickly.
And a lot of Java stuff was sold to us for a very nominal sum (probably just the cost of production).
With the caveat that you had to buy Solaris.
Since Schmidt was the CTO of Sun Google inherited some of its culture. But that faded away.
? The big one I know about was OpenSolaris under CDDL; what non-OSS licenses did they use?
Sun's stuff was more beige-boxy (with a few lilac accents), but the hardware was damned solid.
Linux probably had more to do with them dying off than anything else. Once you could run a nix on commodity Intel boxes, the race was over.
Stripe for a good while was (at least at some point) very highly perceived, I think?
And just 9 days ago I saw people praising Logitech. [1] No idea what the broader sentiment is currently (no news is good news, maybe?), but it seemed to me people loved it for a long time at least in the past?
Mozilla for a long time seemed pretty respectable, regardless of how people feel about them now.
There are lots of small tech companies out there that simply have respectable businesses but that you don't know or immediately think of because you just don't use them.
Good tech companies are those that focus on their products or services, but almost inevitably they get taken over by 'business' people; private equity, MBAs, CFOs, etc, and then milked to death.
People are butthurt prices are creeping up in the post-Moores law price era, but that’s just kind of the economics of the product. Gpus are the most sensitive to silicon pricing, being the biggest piece of silicon consumers use on a daily basis and all. They’ve always been intimately tied to Moores law (which is in fact jensen’s original insight about the niche that led to the company in the first place).
A 4070 at $500 is actually less than an inflation-adjusted GTX 670 after all, $600 is barely an increase. If that’s your reason for hating probably the most innovative silicon company on the planet, well…
It’s also a situation like valve where they probably aren’t the most innovative they could possibly be under a more competitive market… but their competition is so bad they can’t help constantly shooting themselves in the head constantly. Like apple/metal is probably the only real serious alternative at this point.
Instead of building just the tools, these companies now have the means to pry into our data too, so that is what they do.